4 February 2022. Drugs | Translation
The case for medical cannabis. Translation, syntax, meaning—and the role of the human.
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1: The case for medical cannabis
The scientist David Nutt appeared this week at a conversation hosted by the British magazine The Idler to mark the publication of his latest book, called Cannabis. Nutt is one of the leading experts on drugs and their effects – he was responsible, way back, for a famous chart that showed actual risks of harm compared to the British legal classification system for drugs.
He was, for a while, the British "drug czar"—more formally, the Chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs—but was was fired towards the end of the ‘00s during one of those frequent moral panics about ecstasy. He had observed that statistically it was ‘no more dangerous’ to let your teenage daughter ride a pony than take ecstasy at a music festival. (He wrote a paper on this subject.)
It wasn’t the easiest conversation to follow—The Idler’s founder, Tom Hodgkinson, isn’t the most fluent interviewer—but I’ll try to pull out some themes from his talk.
Nutt started with some history. Cannabis used to be legal, of course. It was used by the Victorians, including Queen Victoria, for pain relief. Indeed, one of the many sources of the East India Company’s revenues was selling cannabis (along with opium). The use of naturally occurring drugs was slowly squeezed out of everyday life with the rise of the pharma companies, from around the turn of the 20th century, although cannabis was impossible to adapt for industrial use, so avoided this fate.
But as Prohibition ended in the US, the so-called ‘Untouchables’, who had enforced the alcohol ban, ensured they stayed in work by reframing cannabis as ‘marijuana’, and from Mexico, and the US was persuaded to make it illegal—a prohibition they exported to most parts of the world.
Strangely, the UK declined to make the medical use of cannabis illegal until 1971, until it was included in the Misuse of Drugs Act. That’s been reversed in the last three years—but there have been only a handful of NHS prescriptions. Nutt thought that this was partly because doctors didn’t want to admit that they had been wrong. Drug Science, which Nutt set up after being dismissed to pursue research into the medical use of various types of drugs, is working with younger doctors to educate them in the medical applications of cannabis.
And medical cannabis is probably the safest drug in Britain. As he joked, the only way you’d die from it is if someone dropped a bale of the stuff on your head.
Medicine
Drug Science has done quite a lot of work on the medical effects of cannabis as well as other drugs. It is almost universally benign. They have been doing research trials with epileptic children with that he described as “remarkable effects”. (Anecdotal, I know, but he told a story about a child who had been having 10,000 epileptic fits a month until they were treated with medical cannabis. The fits have stopped as a result.) He also suggested, in response to a question, that it was likely to help with Crohn’s disease and colitis. The reasons for this: effectively cannabis is replacing or bolstering a depleted chemical in the brain. As a treatment, it’s similar to using insulin to treat diabetes.
And we know now enough about legalising medical cannabis—in places such as Canada and the multiple states in the US that have taken this step—to know that it has benign effects. Two-thirds of Americans now have access to medical cannabis. One of the outcomes in the US is that in states where it is legal opiate use has fallen. Cannabis is better for you and isn’t addictive
Harm
Most of the harms come from the legal regime, which seems to be held in place by over-excited conservative newspapers and politicians parading their toughness on crime. There’s no logic to proscribing magic mushrooms, which are right at the bottom of the harm scale, but Tony Blair nonetheless felt the need to do it. They are now a Class A drug, comparable with heroin.
One of the effects of drugs laws, for example, is to encourage the growing of cannabis in the UK, rather than run the risks of importing it—hence the dominant strand is ‘skunk’, which is much stronger and induces paranoia, than (say) Lebanese hash. Dealers will try to sell cannabis buyers others drugs, because they are more profitable both short-term and long term. 50 to 100 people a year die from the synthetic drug ‘spice’, but the reason they take it is it doesn’t show up in drugs tests.
He suggested that this was why the Netherlands—where drugs policy is more rational—legalised the use of cannabis in public places. The authorities wanted to separate out the use of cannabis from the market for harder drugs.
Finally, it is probably worth saying something about the ‘drugs harm’ chart produce by Drug Science. Alcohol comes top, magic mushrooms at the bottom. It’s calculated by assessing nine individual harms and seven social harms, and scoring these qualitatively on a 0-3 scale. Alcohol comes top because it is so widely available that it scores high on all of the social harms. All the same: the level of harm still bears no relationship, of any kind, to the legal Classification system that the UK uses for drugs. It is one of our least rational areas of public policy.
2: Translation, syntax, meaning—and the role of the human
I think it’s a commonplace by now that when a book is translated, the translator is effectively re-inventing it in the new language. At least, that’s what I took away from fighting my way through Umberto Eco’s Mouse or Rat about 10 years ago.
Jennifer Croft, who translated Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob into English, has a fascinating close reading of some of the issues involved at Literary Hub. It’s a long and detailed article, which is also rich and reflexive, and I’m only going to be able to convey a flavour here.
The novel
kicks off in 1752 in Rohatyn, in what is now western Ukraine, and winds up in a cave near Korolówka, now eastern Poland, where a family of local Jews has hidden from the Holocaust.
It is made up of seven ‘books’, rather than chapters, and Croft focuses on the second book.
This section of the book—the novel doesn’t have chapters in a traditional sense—is titled “O tym, jak ze zmęczenia Boga powstaje świat,” which, taking a certain poetic license—a license it is imperative I take, lest I fall prey to Robert Frost’s 1959 definition of translation as “that which is lost out of both prose and verse”—means something along the lines of “Of how it was the world was born of God’s exhaustion.”
And then she continues, exploring the first line of this second book, comparing a literal translation, with Google’s translation, and the one that appears in the English translation.
“Bywa, że Bóg męczy się swoją światłością i ciszą, mdli go od nieskończoności,” that first paragraph starts. “It happens, that God tires of his brightness and quiet, he sickens of infinity.” That is as close to a literal, word-for-word translation as I can muster without breaking all the rules of English grammar. For now, I have left the original Polish punctuation, even though the Polish conventions surrounding punctuation differ significantly from the ones we have in English. The Google version of this opening is: “It happens that God is tired of his light and silence, fainting him from infinity.” My own first sentence: “Every now and then, God wearies of his own luminous silence, and infinity starts to make him a little bit sick.”
It turns out that this version is quite a bit longer than the original English syntax is quite a lot flabbier than Polish syntax:
Because English does not have grammatical case, we need prepositions like “with”; because English can’t abide a run-on sentence, we need to add an “and”; to mark an infinitive, we require a “to.” Translations of Slavic languages into English are generally about thirty percent longer than their originals. But it’s mostly my decision to start with “every now and then” that tips the scales, and I will have to see if I can compensate for that with something pithier over the course of the next few lines.
—
There’s an extended discussion about the relationship between word order and syntax that is fascinating, partly prompted by Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that that translation should be done word for word, “for keeping the syntax of the original intact in the translation, even at ‘the risk of madness.’”
Croft suggests that in the case of Polish and English this would be readable if less fluid. But there are many languages that have no syntactical similarities with English:
Many of the world’s languages bear no known relation to ours. What happens, then, in a translation that’s determined to preserve the syntax of a language such as Amdolese or Aymara, Japanese or Javanese, Wolof or Zuni?
But even in translating Polish to English, there are problems. Croft translates a sentence that she’s discussed earlier in the piece in the way that Benjamin proposed, and it is comprehensible, but a lot has been lost. And it isn’t just meaning that has been lost:
What has been removed are the people: Olga and myself. All that’s left is bare language—yet language is a human innovation, the thing that humans made that made us human... Language can’t be separated from the people who create and connect with one another through it. I don’t share Benjamin’s faith in a pure language to come. But I do think he’s right that it is syntax that ushers the original work into its “afterlife,” as he calls it.
Towards the end of the piece, she quotes another translator, Susan Bernofsky, who has also wrestled with this question of syntax and meaning. This is Bernofsky’s account:
Sometimes the best translation is one whose syntactical structure bears little resemblance to that of the original. At the same time, it is important to be conscious of the order in which information arrives. Every sentence is a journey that begins with a particular phrase or image and takes the reader somewhere.
“Every sentence is a journey that... takes the reader somewhere.” That’s not just advise for translators. It’s advice for anyone who’s writing anything.
Update
I wrote a couple of pieces a few months ago on David Graeber and David Wengrow’s book The Dawn of Everything. (Here, then here.) This is just a pointer towards Pat Kane’s newsletter, E2, where his most recent post is an enthusiastic discussion of the book. Here’s an extended extract:
Graeber and Wengrow obviously want to engage with the political present. Their history shows a human species that was, according to the material record, constantly and consciously experimenting—with groups, technologies, art, productive methods of all kinds.
We modern people like to think of ourselves as the acme of self-awareness and reflexivity. We are elective, metacognitive; we know what we’re up to. D&D urge us to think of this reflexivity as part of our human nature from our beginnings (or at least, the beginnings of us leaving artefacts to be discovered). And that this human nature manifested itself in the bewildering diversity of collective existences that Wengrow and Graeber have collated here.
j2t#256
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