Multitudes

Earlier this year, the scholar Doug Robinson reached out to us with a text on the paradoxes and strange loops in translation work. His text also serves as a deep dive into Douglas Hofstadter’s work on translation. Given that recursion is our thing, and Hofstadter is essentially the living godfather of it, I was eager to read Robinson’s work. But when I sat down with the original draft he sent me, I found I had trouble reading it. The material is complex, to be sure, but what was tripping me up was something much simpler and more embarrassing: throughout the text, he used only the genderless pronouns ze/zir.

It was the first time I’d worked with a such a text, and it surprised me to hear myself essentially translating the pronouns “back” into he/him in my mind’s ear. As I got deeper into it and the looped aspect of the argument grew more involved, the cognitive load started feeling unwieldy. 

By the end, I had to admit I was annoyed. The pronouns seemed unnecessary: Hofstadter doesn’t go by ze/zir, nor does anyone else in the text—so why did the author declare everyone to be ze/zir?  But I was also annoyed that I was annoyed. Is it really that hard to read? A lifetime thinking I'm a gender abolitionist, and now here I am realizing I'm some bigoted asshole?

I knew that Robinson was educated in Finland, and that the Finnish language does not have gendered pronouns. In Finland, the equivalent of ze/zir is standard to the ear. Fittingly, perhaps, in Robinson’s text about the loopy imperfections of translation, ze/zir is an exact translation that doesn’t exactly translate. In Finnish, the lack of gendered singular pronouns is a given, while in English it’s relatively new. To an ear not used to hearing it, it stands out, and to a mouth not used to speaking it, it is easy to trip on.

When I got back to Robinson, I made no mentions of the pronouns. I figured I should just be happy to work with a text like this, one that’s natively genderless, if only because it is so rare. If I leave well enough alone, I could avoid potentially offending the esteemed professor, and just pass off the pronouns as the new normal—not such a bad deal. 

A few weeks later, I picked up the text again and doubled down, consciously reading it as it was written without erasing or altering. It was a fascinating argument, one that deserves to be read widely. And it was easy enough to read the second time around. But I also knew that a casual reader might have given up sooner than I did.

It occurred to me there was something I could do. I could create, with some simple code, a way for readers to switch the pronouns if they choose. It would remove the cognitive load of translating in place. It could also be a fun gimmick that might draw more eyeballs to the piece—not such a bad deal. 

Before I got a chance to reach out to Robinson with my idea, he sent me another draft. This kind of exploded my plan. The new draft also used genderless pronouns throughout, but instead of the singular ze/zir, he went with the plural they/them—and then added a new layer of complexity by pluralizing the very notion of the individual and even created a new lexical structure to convey it (yes, pluralizing the word “I”).

This version was without question harder to read. But it also achieved something beyond its original aims: it didn’t just argue from the position that the self is a multiplicity—it exercised that in the language itself. The Walt Whitman quote, “I am large; I contain multitudes” still manages to twice use the singular word “I.” What if the “I,” that letter that looks (and sounds) like a solitary, ossified statue, were to be shattered into multiple pieces—how would we think of ourselves and others then? With the contemporary addition of fluid pronouns, is there room for the first pronoun, “I,” to be made fluid? Or is this too complex to even think about, let alone read?

The final outcome, for Robinson’s “The Strange Loops of Translation,” was that we worked together to create a switch whereby the reader can choose to toggle the pronouns. The plural ones (including his version of a plural “I”) are given primacy because they appear in the original text, which we elected to call “Original.” The option to toggle them to their traditional (and genderized) form, we elected to call “Simplified.” In pedagogy, scaffolding is the means by which tools and aids are used to accommodate students where they’re at so that they can engage meaningfully in lessons that would otherwise be beyond their understanding. Consider this a scaffold to help aid the uninitiated (such as myself) in navigating a dense text that gets at the heart of how meaning is made, and lost, in translation. It’s also a scaffold to help aid the dense ear to listen for complexity, regardless of how it is translated.

Read it here, “The Strange Loops of Translation,” an introduction to a future monograph by Douglas Robinson.