Funky Formatting
Dear Reader,
One of my favorite texts to teach over the years has been Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Now, it isn’t simply because of its content, though the arguments Aristotle makes are certainly worth their pondering. It is rather the translation that I’ve employed in teaching that has made it a particular favorite. You see, the second edition of Terence Irwin’s translation of the Nicomachean Ethics possesses funky formatting.
You might wonder why funky formatting would delight me so. Isn’t funky formatting hard to read? Indeed.
But funky formatting occurs in other places. So while Aristotle is a beast to read with or without funky formatting, adding that bit of funk to reading him isn’t really adding any layers of off-putting-ness. Aristotle is already a tough read to get into. So what Irwin’s translation allowed me to do was work in two things at once—familiarity with Aristotle’s trenchant arguments and familiarity with funky formatting.
A thing that most people don’t realize about reading when they talk about “background knowledge” and “technique” is that getting one’s bearings with funky formatting operates as a weird hybrid of both those things. There is a certain background knowledge to readying oneself for a work that has funky formatting, especially since many of those works that seem funky are simply old. Their formatting seems strange primarily because people don’t format things so today.
And there’s a technique to floundering around in the text enough until you gain an understanding of its funk. You gain this technique primarily by floundering around in your first such text.
Of course, I must note that even my own background knowledge and technique didn’t quite prepare me for floundering around in the same Gothic language textbook that J.R.R. Tolkien had studied from. Yet in my defense, I hadn’t planned on my first deep dive into philology to include two alphabets and two pronunciations—I bested Tolkien with that latter fright, as he endured only a single pronunciation.
Tolkien’s old textbook, however, exhibits all the oddities I’d been training my own students on with Terence Irwin’s Nicomachean Ethics translation—strange symbols, odd frames of reference, insider language that a newbie wouldn’t find friendly. And as much as I groaned under my labors—I still have little clue on the correct pronunciation of Gothic—I had a quiet confidence that eventually this funkily-formatted book would reveal its logic to me. I’ve yet to make full use of the book, but I have indeed learned to grok it.
This is the nature of funky formatting: the eye is challenged and the brain has to prepare itself for a period of full-scale floundering. Once you’ve done it a first time, successive endeavors prove a little easier.
Happy floundering,
Kreigh
P.S. Speaking of philology, enjoy this burner from celebrated author Elena Ferrante:
Evidently, in a world where philological education has almost completely disappeared, where critics are no longer attentive to style, the decision not to be present as an author generates ill will and this type of fantasy. The experts stare at the empty frame where the image of the author is supposed to be and they don’t have the technical tools, or, more simply, the true passion and sensitivity as readers, to fill that space with the works. So they forget that every individual work has its own story. Only the label of the name or a rigorous philological examination allows us to take for granted that the author of Dubliners is the same person who wrote Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The cultural education of any high school student should include the idea that a writer adapts depending on what he or she needs to express. Instead, most people think anyone literate can write a story. They don’t understand that a writer works hard to be flexible, to face many different trials, and without ever knowing what the outcome will be.