musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

The difference between the almost right word and the right word, is like a lightning bug and the lightning


 

It’s rather easy for those of us who share a culture and language (such as English) to forget that the meanings of some of the expressions we use do not follow from their lexical makeup: the idioms. They can play unique havoc in translations: foreign poetry, for example. Metaphors may or may not cross cultural lines, and there are the obvious problems with trying to match things like meter, cadence and rhyming schemes in attempting to recreate the allure the poem had in its native language.

When I was in university in the 60ies, Haiku poetry was popular (maybe it still is) and it was a fashion to write your own to demonstrate being au fait with the prevailing Zeitgeist. The 17th century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho and his Haiku -short, pithy poems about Nature- were all the rage, I remember. Of course although none of my friends either spoke or wrote Japanese and depended on English translations to give us a sense of what the poems actually said, we nonetheless attempted to write Haiku.

All that most of us knew about the poems, was that they were short, often about Nature, and unrhymed; the more knowledgeable amongst us knew that (at least in Japanese) a Haiku poem consisted of descriptive words arranged in 3 lines. And except for the intellectual purists, there was little awareness that the form apparently demanded they consist of 17 syllables arranged in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively. I’m not sure whether that just meant a Haiku in Japanese, and whether any translations into English were also expected to conform to the same rules. It didn’t matter to my crowd at any rate. Haiku was, well, Haiku; only academics counted syllables.

And if the poems contained culturally significant Japanese phrases, or words that had a special meaning to their Japanese audience of the time, it was lost on us… okay, me. It was the spirit of creation that spurred most of us to write them. After all, that’s what poetry is all about: the expression of wonder, feeling, and appreciation in ways and metaphors that convey it to others.

Poetry is a universal way of expressing these feelings, but perhaps a poem is most effective in its language of origin and amongst those of its original culture. I imagine it is sometimes difficult for translations to recapture the Gestalt without rearranging or changing both the words and their order in the thought which is being offered. Or, although I enjoyed the translated Haiku, maybe I never really understood it in the way it was originally intended.

Perhaps I’m stretching things, but idioms seem to share a similar translational problem. Even if you have learned the vocabulary, but don’t share the culture, then it is difficult to know if your translation is appropriate for what is actually being conveyed. After all, an idiom is a word or phrase that has a meaning different from the sum of its parts: a synergism perhaps. It’s a piece of cake, for example. The words are likely understandable even for a non-English speaker, but with an idiom, the words, even looked up in a dictionary, don’t mean it’s a dessert, or even a tasty treat; similarly pulling someone’s leg doesn’t necessarily mean risking violent retaliation. With an idiom -much like with real-estate- it’s context, context, context…

Unlike Haiku, I think most of us use idioms without even being aware of them; I do, anyway. I’m not sure when it all started, but likely the garden was planted when I first started school in post-war Winnipeg. My father had just been transferred to the prairies, and World War ll had only ended a few years previously. It was quite a different world from what we know nowadays. Expressions like ‘Gung ho’ and ‘Taking flak’ were common transfers from war-speak to home and then to classrooms; once explained to a child in a school corridor, their usage became a treasured badge of maturity.

And as we grew, graduated, and found jobs in the wider world, new idioms multiplied and supplanted older ones, to mark the entry into our new fields of endeavour. Some were job-specific –‘plug and play’ or ‘cutting edge’; some were more interests-oriented, like a sports team operating like ‘a well-oiled machine’; or the dangers of naïve usage of social media platforms and leaving a ‘digital footprint’.

All of these idioms were self-descriptive and easily understandable in conversational patter, although they proved exhaustively mutable as time and circumstance rolled on… Unless, of course, you were talking to someone who grew up in a culture that used different and, to us, mysterious and confusing expressions to explain themselves; meaningless words thrown in like extra appendages to anyone trying to follow their train of thought.

I remember a brief friendship with a very attractive girl whose family had escaped from the USSR in the early 60ies when I was still in university; we’d met at a busy campus restaurant when she couldn’t find an empty table on which to rest her too full tray. I was sitting with a friend who had to rush off to a class just as she happened by. I smiled and pointed to the now empty seat with my index finger, and although she eventually accepted, she seemed troubled by the way I’d invited her to join me.

I sensed her confusion and asked her if I’d done something wrong.

She blushed and shook her head. “It’s just that in my country, pointing like that used to mean something other than a welcome.” When I looked confused, she explained that I’d used an gesture that implied a command rather than an invitation; a gesture that suggested I had a gun.

I was quite naïve in those days, and it seemed so foreign to mistake my innocent gesture as a threat that I felt I needed to explain myself. “I’m sorry…” I sputtered, “I guess I have egg on my face now, eh?” I was mortified that, as usual, I may have squandered a chance to befriend a beautiful young woman.

She tilted her head as if to get a better view of my face and then shook her head, when she understood that I was joking. “No, you’re okay…” Then, feeling embarrassed at her mistake, added “There is no famine!” And when I still looked confused, she explained that in Moscow it was a joke about Stalin’s propaganda -after he died, of course…” and started to giggle. “I learned English in school back home, but in our language we used different…” She shook her head again, but this time in exasperation. “…Different expressions,” she eventually decided was the English word that she had been looking for. “They’re sometimes embarrassing without the context…”

Idioms have remained special to me ever since. Maybe I should try Haiku again too, eh…?

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gozzter

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