Transcription vs. Translation: Writing about Ideas

The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style. — Walter Benjamin

Transcription is a major impediment to most of us ever becoming great writers. The creative freedom of a day-dreamer is denied anyone who would codify the dream: not only mechanical difficulties, slow pens or typing skills, but the barrier of language itself holds us back. Straining within its idioms to express the newness of uncodified thought, one can easily fall upon a dangerous solution. This solution is dangerous because it is beautiful and productive, because we have probably discovered it in the guise of an end.

I mean the solution of allowing ourselves to be guided by the inner law of language itself. This occurs when we allow the physical act of writing to carry us forward—something wisely prescribed in freshman writing classes, to help fill up the dry wells of undergraduate writer’s block. We can follow a sentence down streets our minds would not have gone. This is a playful, artistic technique—utilized by some of the best writers I know, for example my own greatest writing teacher James Schaap. Unfortunately, our minds sometimes go down streets our sentences refuse to follow. Those of us who have experienced the rush of abundant ideas, but found ourselves constipated or distracted at our writing desks, will fully agree with Nietszche on the following effect of language:

Where there is affinity of language, it cannot fail, owing to the common philosophy of grammar—I mean, owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical functions—that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems; just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation.

I contend that we think, however, in ways that wriggle past these lingual shackles. We think in strange hybrids of imaginary sensation, language, and intuition. To write, then, what we think, inevitably stretches language. But language is stiff, almost intractible, seemingly resentful of stretching. It will catch us, divest us of our dreams, and involve us in its own circular games.

A number of devices reoccur to those who desire to write what they think. None of them are fully satisfactory. For example, many people carefully compose an outline before they will write anything. At its best, an outline is a slightly speedier vehicle for following thinking with a pen, a vehicle that serves later as a tether for the self-law of language to keep one’s writing confined to certain general regions marked out by the mind. The outline is a recording of the thinker; the writer is a transcriber of the outline. Such is the theory at any rate. But this theory fails to take into full account what we have already described as the self-law of language. That is to say, once the act of writing is begun, we tend to become engrossed in that act, divorced from the act of thinking which drove us to write.

But I believe I have a bead on the problem: our problem arises from viewing writing as an act of transcription when it should be an act of translation.

We are trying to transcribe thought when we either try to think usefully while we write or when we try to think usefully before we write, using some medium (perhaps an outline) as a less obtrusive recording of our actual thinking to be expanded into our actual writing. I have nothing universally against either of these methods. But our problem comes from a specific situation—we have some complex thought that we want to express in writing. We are not setting out simply to write what may come, nor are we prepared to leave the purity of our thought in the frail hands of an outline.

What must happen is that our thought, itself, must become something we can safely carry over into the act of writing. That is the difference between transcription and translation: a transcriber works from a fleeting communication, taking down as much as possible, fleshing out and editing later when the heat of the transcribed has cooled; but a translator works from a permanent text, returning from every perplexity to re-examine the tangible, remaining form of the original communication.

My “solution” to the problem of writing about ideas, writing about something that we have thought and need to express, turns out to be advice about thinking itself. In short, this is my solution: do not write about something that you have thought, until you have thought about it long enough that you know what you will write. Some concluding validation of my point, from an eminently clear and orderly writer of her thoughts, Hannah Arendt:

I know exactly what I want to write. I do not write until I do. Usually I write it all down only once.