Hobbes demonstrates his methodologies and understanding of reading throughout the pages of Leviathan but principally in the second half of the book, in Parts III and IV. To begin this argument, let me lay out Hobbes’ own methodologies as a reader. By appreciating texts qua texts, Fitzpatrick manages to read a text like Leviathan as if anew, despite the centuries of interpretive baggage that it has accrued. By reading Hobbes according to the same methodologies that Hobbes himself both calls for and demonstrates in his texts, Fitzpatrick is able to recast Hobbes as speaking against the sort of positivist orthodoxies that are usually attributed to him. And, like Hobbes, Fitzpatrick sees reading as reflecting and responding to the rhetorical and grammatical architecture of the text itself. Like Hobbes himself, Fitzpatrick is above all interested in what reading does to a text, how the act of reading is not a neutral unfurling of meaning but a part of how meaning is produced. His style is ‘gentle’ because he has an almost Talmudic reverence for texts: Fitzpatrick appreciates and follows rules of grammar and syntax he seeks meaning and connection and even logic in the linguistic constructions he engages with. In Fitzpatrick’s own case, such a particular interest in language leads to what I call his gentle deconstructionist style of reading, entailing a deeply careful attention to the rhetorical ‘bones’ of texts as well as the mechanics of interpretation. In this essay I will argue that Fitzpatrick himself shares this ‘metalinguistic’ dimension with Hobbes. She tells us that Hobbes is deeply aware not only of how powerful language is in structuring political life but also of how language is itself the basis for politics, the building block of our collective lives. In her book Wayward Contracts, Victoria Kahn calls Hobbes ‘metalinguistic’ in his approach to reading and interpretation (2004: 135). This chapter will focus on Peter Fitzpatrick as a reader, and particularly as a reader of Hobbes, a canonical figure who is himself deeply concerned with language and the act of reading. The italics indicate words that are not explicitly in the text but are implied, and are added to make the translation flow.Peter Fitzpatrick’s Gentle Deconstructionist Style Here’s an example comparing Psalm 23:4 in the New International VersionĮven in the unending shadows of death’s darkness,īecause You are with me in those dark moments, More recent translations have aimed to sound contemporary but not necessarily to sound beautiful. The KJV remains popular four centuries later, in part because it simply sounds good. In some ways The Voice is reminiscent of the King James translation. In particular, their goal was to translate poetic passages so that they sounded like poetry. In addition to the usual team of Greek and Hebrew language scholars, this translation project invited poets to pay attention to the sound of the English text. The BibleĪnother translation I find interesting is a translation of the Bible called The Voice. Seligman gives the following example, comparing a few lines Nabokov’s more literal translationīut you’ll tune in if I but scuttle. Hoffstadter preserves these patterns in his English translation, at the expense of a lot of paraphrasing.

The poem is written in iambic tetrrameter, with 8 syllables in the lines with masculine rhymes and 9 in the feminine.stress on the ultimate or penultimate syllable. There’s also a FMFM FFMM FMMFMM pattern of “masculine” and “feminine” rhymes, i.e.The ends of the lines rhyme in a pattern of ABAB CCDD EFFE GG.Erik Seligman recently described the poem and Hoffstadter’s translation on his podcast. The poem has intricate patterns that one could imagine would be of interest to the author of Gödel Escher Bach. The first is Douglas Hoffstadter’s translation of the Russian epic Eugene Onegin. Here are a couple poetry translations I find interesting. Translations might choose to preserve the meter but not the rhyme scheme, or vice versa.

Translating poetry is particularly hard because you want to preserve the meaning and the sound at the same time. See, for example, the new Equal Earth projection. There have been countless ways to map a round Earth onto a flat piece of paper, each preserving one aspect of the globe at the expense of others. An idea-for-idea translation is more readable, but still may not convey the style of the original.

A strict word-for-word translation attempts to be faithful to the words but may be ungrammatical in the target language. You can’t preserve every aspect of a text when translating.

Gentle reader meaning