Mistaken memories, 1: a machine for generating crystals
(The Surrealist power of guesswork: Once, inspired by the example of Thorstein Veblen, I tried to teach myself to read French by translating Raymond Radiguet’s Le bal du Comte d’Orgel — a book chosen because Radiguet had been Cocteau’s lover, and this, his second and last novel, was famously cold, deceptive, anti-sentimental. I had a grammar and a dictionary, and long afternoons in a tiny hotel room in Perpignan, and the notion that I’d recursively look up unknown words in the definitions of unknown words until I had a command of the language. The low point, or high point, of the translation came just before I gave up, having spent multiple afternoons trying to get through Cocteau’s introduction to the book, and translating his famous description of it, “a perfectly cut diamond,” as “a machine for generating crystals.” I would love to read books translated in this way — not just with the chatbot clumsiness of machine translation, but the peculiar human groping after meaning with massively inadequate tools.)