Good writing: transparency is the new objectivity

I care deeply about good writing, which I believe to be indistinguishable from good thinking.  As an undergraduate, I was lucky enough to get and read two texts that turned into life-long influences:

• C. S. Lewis, "At the Fringe of Language", in Studies in Words
• George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," in Collected Essays.

As a student, I internalized Orwell's six rules:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do (see Short words).
3. If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out (see Unnecessary words).
4. Never use the Passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a Jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous (see Iconoclasm).

My professor, Richard Gombrich, also cares about good writing, and impressed that belief upon us students.  Some of his remarks on this topic appear in his lecture "On Being Sanskritic" (p.27).  For example, his ringing indictment,

The so-called `literal translation' -- an intellectual fallacy and an aesthetic monstrosity -- is still widespread;

As a result of my interest in the forms and sins of self-expression, I have developed a kind of radar, pinging for materials that support this interest and take it further.  The Economist Style Guide is one such resource that showed up on the screen long ago. (The full Economist Style Guide seems to have vanished from their website, but the 11th edition (2015) is at archive.org)

Today, I was reading the WikiPedia article about Timothy Leary, and I saw that an unsubstantiated claim ("Others have said") was tagged as a "weasel word".  I didn't know this expression.

Weasel words are described under "unsupported attributions" and are amongst several strategies that I see regrettably often in academic prose.  As WikiPedia says:

Weasel words are words and phrases aimed at creating an impression that something specific and meaningful has been said, when in fact only a vague or ambiguous claim has been communicated. A common form of weasel wording is through vague attribution, where a statement is dressed with authority, yet has no substantial basis. Phrases such as those above present the appearance of support for statements but can deny the reader the opportunity to assess the source of the viewpoint.

Another major technique for avoiding attribution is to use the passive grammatical voice.  To the WikiPedia "weasel words" examples, I could add (and probably will) a category of what might be called "cooercives," words and phrases designed to prevent the reader from thinking too much, by suggesting that thinking isn't going to be worthwhile in this particular case.  Thus, "clearly," "of course," "naturally," "it goes without saying." (Several of these are referenced in WikiPedia's "Editorializing" section, see below.) 

Following the WP link, I stumbled into a wonderful collection of notes about how to write better and avoid writing (and thinking) badly.  "Words to Watch" has the following headings (mid-2014):

• 1 Words that may introduce bias
  • 1.1 Puffery
  • 1.2 Contentious labels
  • 1.3 Unsupported attributions
  • 1.4 Expressions of doubt
  • 1.5 Editorializing
  • 1.6 Synonyms for said
• 2 Expressions that lack precision
  • 2.1 Euphemisms
  • 2.2 Clichés and idioms
  • 2.3 Relative time references
  • 2.4 Unspecified places or events
  • 2.5 Person or office?
  • 2.6 Neologisms and new compounds
• 3 Vulgarities, obscenities, and profanities

 WikiPedia's Manual of Style is excellent, as a whole.  But this section "Words to Watch" is a treasure chest.

A classic work in this area is

• Hinkel, E. (2005) “Hedging, Inflating and Persuading in L2 Academic Writing,” Applied Language Learning 15: 29–53. Available at: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/ prokofieva/CandidacyPapers/Hinkel_Hedging.pdf.

 

On the use of parentheses in translation

This deserves a fuller discussion; I'm just doing a quick note here, arising out of a conversation with Dagmar and Jason Birch.;

My thinking is influenced by my teachers Gombrich and Matilal, both of whom had a lot to say about translation, and by reading materials on translation by Lawrence Venuti and Umberto Eco (Mouse or Rat?).  There's a huge literature on translation, including specific materials on Skt like Garzilli, E. (Ed.) Translating, Translations, Translators from India to the West.  Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univ., 1996.

I wonder about the heavy use of parentheses by Indologists.  One does not see this in English translations from French, say, or German.  Or even Latin or Greek.  What are we up to?  I can distinguish several reasons for parentheses in English trs. from Skt. 

• Fear.  We are asserting to the reader that we know what we're doing, and making our word-choices explicit.  This is a defence against the small voice in our brains that says "professor so-and-so won't accept a fluent, uninterrupted translation from me, seeing it as bad.  I'll get criticised in public."

• Habit.  We see others doing it and absorb the habit.

• Germanism.  Venuti has shown compellingly, in The Translator's Invisibility, how different linguistic audiences receive translations differently.  English readers and reviewers approve strongly of translations of which they can say, "it reads as naturally as if the author had written in English."  German readers are different, and want to experience a sense of foreignness in their translations; if a translation reads fluently in German, they feel there is some deception being carried out. Since so many translations from Sanskrit were done by Germans, English readers like us get used to the "German" presuppositions of the nature of translation, and simply carry on in that idiom.  See the attached Kielhorn example.  

The Kielhorn exemplifies another major problem, that Matilal used to talk about passionately.  If you read Kielhorn's tr. leaving out the parentheses, it's gobbledegook. Matilal said that if one has to use parentheses, then the text not in parentheses should read as a semantically coherent narrative.  This is because the Sanskrit is a semantically coherent narrative.  To present an incoherent English text is a tacit assertion that the Sanskrit is incoherent.  In which case, we should see parentheses in Sanskrit too.  Sometimes we do, as in Panini's mechanism of anuvṛtti, when parts of previous sutras are tacitly read into subsequent ones.  Anuvṛtti is doing similar work to that done by parentheses.  So Vasu's translation of Panini uses parentheses in a valid way, I would argue.
What are valid reasons for parentheses?  I would say that very, very rarely it is justified to put a Skt word in brackets when not to do so would be seriously confusing or misleading for the typical reader, or when the Skt author is making a tacit point.  "He incurred a demerit (karma) by failing to do the ritual (karma)."   Or, in the RV, "The lord (asura) of settlements has readied for me two oxen ."(Scharfe 2016: 48).

Then there's the psychology of reading. For me, this is one of the important reasons for not using parentheses or asides of any kind.  I've never articulated this before, so what follows may be a bit incoherent.​  When I watch my mind during reading, I absorb sentences and they create a sense of understanding.  It's quite fast, and it's a flow.  As I go along, the combination of this flow of sentences and the accumulation of a page or two of it in memory produces the effect of having a new meaning in my mind, of having understood a semantic journey shared with me by the author.  But when there are many parentheses, that flow is broken.  The reading becomes much slower, and I often have to read things several times, including a once-over skipping the parentheses.  This slow, assembly-style reading is not impossible, and one may gain something.  But one loses a lot.  What's lost is the larger-scale comprehension, and the sense of a flow of ideas.
What I find works for me as a reader and writer is to avoid the branching of the flow of attention while reading.  Branching is often done through parenthetical statements, -- and through dashed asides -- (and through discursive footnotes), but not citation footnotes.  In my mind, it's like travelling in a car and taking every side road, driving down it for two hundred metres and then coming back to the main road, and continuing just until the next side road, etc.  As a writer, I find it quite easy to avoid branching.  I do it by thinking in advance about the things I want to say, and then working out a sequence in which I want to present them so that the reader gets the sense of connection.  Cut-n-paste is very helpful.
I'm not sure whether the above is totally personal to me, or a widely-shared phenomenon.  I've never read anything about this topic.  I have read about eye-movements during reading, and the relationship of this to line-length and typeface design.  I should look around for material on the psychology of comprehension during reading.  There must be something out there.

Wendy Doniger, who writes well, said last year:

I sound out every line I write, imagining the reader reading it, and never imagining as the reader certain scholars, who shall remain nameless, who might be watching with an eagle eye, poised to pounce on any mistake I might make; no, I always imagine the reader as my father, on my side. I try to be that person to my students, who are otherwise vulnerable to an imaginaire of hostile reception that can block their writing, as it keeps some of my most brilliant colleagues from publishing. My father saved me from that.
-- Scroll.in "A Life of Learning"

References

• Eco, U. Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation.  Phoenix Press, 2004
• Garzilli, E. (Ed.) Translating, Translations, Translators from India to the West.  Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univ., 1996.
• Scharfe, H. "Ṛgveda, Avesta, and Beyond—ex occidente lux?"  Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2016, 136, 47-67.
• Venuti, L. The Translator's Invisibility: A History Of Translation.  London, New York, Routledge, 1995

Reflections on translation from Sanskrit

The following was written by me in another context, as part of a conversation.  I'm reproducing it here in case it is of general interest:

Sanskrit aṅga अङ्ग not a "limb"

Monier-Williams' dictionary, p.7

 In most of our dictionaries, we find that the Sanskrit word aṅga अङ्ग means "limb, member."  "A limb of the body" says MW, following his teacher Wilson.
As a result, when we have expressions like aṣṭāṅgayoga अष्टाङ्गयोग or aṣṭāṅgavidyā अष्टाङ्गविद्या, we commonly get translations like, "yoga of eight limbs" or "the science with eight limbs (medicine)."
If you open the bonnet (US hood) of your car, you see an engine with ... what?  Limbs?  I don't think so.  I think you see components, or parts.  A textbook is divided into, what, limbs?  No, sections, or parts. 

H. H. Wilson's dictionary, p.9

I'd love to see translators of the word aṅga  अङ्ग try harder, and offer some inner resistance to the dead hand of our nineteenth-century dictionaries.  It's as if a mass of [dictionary] words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details (with sincerest apologies to Orwell.)
Next time you see aṣṭāṅgayoga अष्टाङ्गयोग, allow yourself to think instead, "the yoga with eight components." Or when you see aṣṭāṅgavidyā अष्टाङ्गविद्या, think, perhaps, "the science with eight parts."  If you see vedāṅga  वेदाङ्ग translated as "limb of the Veda," you can be sure that the translator isn't seeing the metaphors s/he's using.  What on earth would a "limb of the Veda" possibly be?  All the original author is saying is that the Veda has components or adjunct parts.  And don't let yourself use "ancilliary" either.  When did you last see that in a contemporary English novel?  In my dictionary, it's flagged as "very rare."
Too often, we indologists write and translate in mental companionship with our predecessors from the nineteenth century, and we write for colleagues who too often do the same. 
If you find yourself writing "limb" for aṅga अङ्ग, snap out of it.
Here I am, with Orwell, jeering loudly at worn-out and useless dictionary-bound translations.

Update 

For an argument in favour of "auxiliary" or "subsidiary" see S. Vasudeva (2004) The Yoga of the Mālinīvijayottaratantra (Pondicherry), p. 367, n. 1: