A Superabundance of Meaning

Tim Parks, writing about translation in the New York Review of Books, with this wonderful passage:

Translating literature is not always more difficult than translating other texts—tourist brochures, technical manuals, art catalogues, sales contracts, and the like. But it does have this distinguishing characteristic: its sense is not limited to a simple function of informing or persuading, but rather thrives on a superabundance of possible meanings, an openness to interpretation, an invitation to measure what is described against our experience. This is stimulating. The more we bring to it, the more it offers, with the result that later readings will be different from the first in a way that is hardly true of a product description or city guide.

A reminder about an ethic of opening up meanings (in teaching and writing both). Shared via the Sociology of Islam listserv on December 10, 2017.

(And if memory and meaning are both acts of connection -- to locate a thing, a time, a place, and draw it into relation with us -- reminds me about a conversation about teaching writing to undergraduates: The challenge but opportunity of helping them see their own agency in interpretation.)