The other day I was having a drink with some friends and one of them happened to be someone I haven’t seen since my undergraduate days. I was happy to find out that he is now studying Digital Humanities at UCL.
After explaining (vaguely) what his degree means, he told me he has just completed a project in which he coded a programme that compares the two versions of Wordsworth’s famous The Prelude and notes all the differences–i.e. what Wordsworth edited out in the 1850 version.
What he discovered was earth-shattering: whereas “men” was the most-used word in the 1805 version of The Prelude, “man” was the most popular word in the 1850 version.
Revolutionary.
Anyways, he told me that for his final project he was going to incorporate coding into literary analysis, just like he had done so with Wordsworth. He said he was thinking of indexing all of Walt Whitman’s poems, so that every word of every Whitman poem would be hyperlinked with facts and stats and…more links.
Seized by inspiration, I suddenly suggested that he could instead look at translations. I recently finished reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina as well as Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and with both I had the uncertainty of choosing which translation to read. Obviously, not knowing the original language, I would have nothing to base my conviction of the translation’s authenticity on, but what if he could code a programme which would compare all the translations and identify the most popular choice of translation for certain distinctly complex vocabulary?
He thought that was a very good idea, and to be honest I think it will serve the public much better than indexing Walt Whitman’s poems. After all, aren’t computers built to serve the public?
I know my idea will not necessarily produce the most poetic translation, but at least it can arrive at a more objectively authentic translation, or in the very least provide a reference point when we are reading a certain translation and find a certain passage, well, strange. All philosophical arguments surrounding translation set aside, I think it’s a pretty damn fine idea.
I’m not trying to pull a “let the record show…” thing and try to patent my own spur-of-the-moment thought here, in case this goes on to become an actual success. I am simply saying that alcohol can sometimes set one on a shortcut to inspiration.
Literally Left-handed 
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