Hats, Rabbits, and Jurists’ Magic (Or Jurists’ Bright and Dark Magic)

I am grateful to Prof. Christine Corcos for inspiring to write an essay for her forthcoming second volume of Law and Magic which will be published by Carolina Academic Press. Here is a preview of the essay:

Abstract

This essay explores two senses of “magic” as they apply to the practice of law: magic as “the art of producing illusions by sleight of hand” and magic as “an extraordinary power or influence seemingly from a supernatural source.” 

Magic in the initial or “sleight of hand” sense overlaps with jurists’ emphasizing certain traits of a classification while hiding other nonconforming traits. For example, if the Great Blackstone classifies the Little Prince’s drawing of a boa eating an elephant as a drawing of a hat, the Great Blackstone must draw attention away from other contrary evidence such as the Little Prince’s asserted intent. Similarly, if he would classify Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit as a rabbit, the Great Blackstone must also draw attention away from contrary evidence. (Thus, the use of “Hats” and “Rabbits” in this essay’s title.) 

Magic in the second or “supernatural” overlaps with jurists’ creation, modification, and rejection of categories and concepts (including conceptual metaphors). Categories and concepts (including conceptual metaphors) are creatures of language and not nature. Thus, jurists’ creation, modification, and rejection of categories and concepts (including categories and concepts about nature itself) are beyond nature and thus powerfully overlap with magic in the second, “supernatural” sense.  

To the extent jurists perform magic in either or both senses, such magic can be divided into either bright or dark magic. Jurists’ “bright magic” illuminates in ways that better and better organize experience (including moral experience). Lacking such light, jurists’ “dark magic” does the opposite. For example, stressing the role of commitment to and partnership with a loved one as essential to marriage while downplaying past opposite sex requirements would be bright magic to the extent such emphasis advances moral and social progress. Stressing past opposite sex requirements while ignoring core roles of love, commitment, and partnership would be dark magic to the extent inconsistent with advancing moral and social progress. Good jurists’ “magic” thus organizes experience (including moral experience) in better and better ways. Good jurist magicians are therefore good pragmatists: their bright magic organizes experience (including moral experience) in better and better ways. 

In examining such juristic magic, this essay also explores among other topics: (i) magic in legal imagination and in legal framing (foreground, background, and otherwise); (ii) magical insights for jurists from the art of translation and other humanities including the dark magic of using wrong or questionable translations of ancient texts such as the Bible when making tradition or other arguments (such as using wrong or questionable translations of "arsenokoitai" or "malakoi" or incomplete contexts for "para physin" when exploring same-sex rights and privileges) ; (iii) the dark magic of legal formalism; and (iv) dangers of juristic and political dark magic to democracy and rule of law.

Langdell and the Eclipse of Character

                                                                     Abstract

Christopher Columbus Langdell has not only damaged the study of law with his three follies: his legal formalism, his redacted appellate case method, and his notion that legal practice taints the professor of law. His three follies have also impaired character development critical for legal actors. This Article focuses on four such critical character traits and virtues impaired by Langdell: (i) imagination, (ii) empathy, (ii) balance, and (iv) integrity. Readers wishing to explore virtues beyond those addressed in this Article might note my earlier examination of the role of virtue in good legal analysis found here.

This Article also calls out potential character issues with two professor types inspired by Langdell: (v) the hazing professor who confuses intellectual rigor with intense discomfort and who uses the redacted appellate case method to inflict such discomfort at the expense of better pedagogy, and (vi) the professor without substantial practice experience who is substantially paid to teach what she has never practiced.

Agreeing with C.S. Pierce that the best argument is a cable rather than a chain, I end by weaving in a Langdell villanelle (from my Apology Box also shared on this Blog) to supplement the prose. I hope such a cable can help lift Langdell and his follies from legal education and the world.

This Article can be downloaded here.

Keywords: Langdell, law school reform, legal education reform, virtue, imagination, empathy, balance, integrity, hazing, experience, translation, formalism, character, concept, category, metaphor

Therapeutics of Powerful Verse in Powerful Translation

The therapeutic powers of poetry can be unparalleled. To cross languages, such powerful verse requires translation of no less merit.

Translators who achieve this feat should be lauded on their own accord. For example, those suffering from extreme anxiety or from painful inability to live in the moment might well experience a life-changing epiphany in these magnificent lines by Stuart Atkins translating Care's claims in Goethe's Faust:

Care: Once I make a man my own, 
nothing in this world can help him; 
everlasting darkness falls, 

suns no longer rise or set--
though no outward sense has failed, 
all is darkness in his heart, 
and however great his treasures, 
there's no joy in their possession. 
Good and bad luck both depress him, 
he is starving though there's plenty; 
source of joy or spot of trouble, 
it's postponed until the morrow--
caring only for the future, 

he gets nothing done at all . . . .

Whether he should go or come
is something he cannot decide; 
in the middle of a street 

his stride will break, he'll grope his way; 
more and more he is bogged down, 
everything seems more distorted; 
to himself, to all, a burden, 
when he breathes he feels he's choking, 
neither stifled nor yet living, 
tom between despair and hoping. 
All is one unceasing round 
of things not done, of odious duties . . . .

Akins deserves his owns spotlight alongside that of Goethe. To underscore the genius of Atkins here, compare this "classic" translation by Bayard Taylor:

Whom I once possess, shall never 
Find the world worth his endeavor: 
Endless gloom around him folding, 
Rise nor set of sun beholding, 
Perfect in external senses,
Inwardly his darkness dense is;
And he knows not how to measure 
True possession of his treasure.
Luck and Ill become caprices; 
Still he starves in all increases; 
Be it happiness or sorrow,
He postpones it till the morrow; 
To the Future only cleaveth: 
Nothing, therefore, he achieveth. . . .

Compared to Atkins' work, how many lives might these lines change? 

Translators carry a heavy burden. I am grateful to those who carry it well. I am dismayed by the rubble of those who fail. 

Translators also illustrate a further passion of mine: exploring the power of framing. If one doubts such power, one need only compare the frames of Atkins and Taylor here.

Those wishing to buy a copy of Atkins' translation can find it here or here.

Miscellaneous French Verse Translations

When translating verse, I think one should try to capture both the form (meter, line positions, rhyme scheme, etc.) and substance to the extent possible and to the extent not cumbersome* in the new language.  "To the extent possible" can require much work that I think is often missing from much translation.  I also think the original should be printed on the opposing page so the reader can judge the success for herself. 

 

*Where end stopping or alexandrines, for example, seem cumbersome in English, I would think the original poet would want substitutes that distract less in English. Thus I've often used iambic pentameter in lieu of hexameter.  I've also often avoided end stopping where that seemed a distraction (my translation of Phaedre for example).

Here are the English pages of some of my dabblings along these lines.  I think the Veraline & Du Bellay present especially hard challenges and I keep tweaking......

 

I.  Verlaine: MacIntyre claimed: “No one has ever translated, or can or will translate [Chanson d'automne]; yet it offers the supreme challenge, the shifting lure of the bright impossible.” Maybe MacIntyre didn’t try hard enough?

Ekphrasis & Prose: Sonnet Translations of Poe & Hawthorne

I sometimes wonder whether a prose piece should have been verse from the outset.  Could the deep meaning have been more effectively captured and conveyed by poetic form than by prose?  I've wondered that, for example, in the case of Poe's "The Mask of the Red Death."  With no illusions that Poe's sonnet wouldn't have been much better, here's a concrete example of what I mean: 

Shadow After Poe 

We noticed there was pestilence about.

We played instead of passive victim an
Aggressive agent capable of plan
And execution.  In, we locked it out,

A simple action, really, which we sealed
With weighty velvet curtains drawn across
An iron door bolted tight.  “Our gain, Hell’s loss!”
We toasted with good bourbon and were steeled.

“God helps who helps himself,” we boasted till
We saw a shadow by a comrade still
And cold throughout the reverie.  It hid

As quick within the heavy draperies.  Did
Drink fool?  No.  Oh, no fancy has composed
Such vast lost voices in a single ghost.

I've also wondered the same about individual passages in longer works.  Here, for example, is a bit of Hawthorne's The House of The Seven Gables set to sonnet form:

Daniel: Nighttime Hieroglyphics in the Head (Addition to "The Apology Box")

        Daniel’s Sonnet

   (A Jew “exiled” in Babylon)

Through deepest faith, I tapped night's lexicon

That Nimrod changed. Confusion fell upon

More than the day when Babel’s Tower fell.

The language of the night collapsed as well,

And dreams took dialects they’d lacked before.

New gibberish infected night.  Therefore,

Men needed me to translate dreams that hid

Night's messages to them.  Of course, I did.

And when God wrote upon the wall instead

Of nighttime hieroglyphics in the head,

I was the only person who could read

The markings and convey what he had said.

I revel and reveal with words.  They are
Mind's whiskey, its key, and its reservoir.

© Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016

The current contents of "The Apology Box" can be found here.

How the "Ten" Commandments Refute Originalism & Fundamentalism (With Some Help From Herod, Caiaphas & Ahab's Additions to "The Apology Box")

Conservatives often like to claim that texts speak for themselves.  A review of the Ten  Commandments is an easy way to see how such claims are false.  First, such a review nicely shows that we must interject our own judgment even before we start reading a text because we first have to decide what the text is.  When we look for "Ten" Commandments in the Bible, we won't find such a neat list.  Instead, we'll find two places in the Bible (Exodus 20:1–17 and Deuteronomy 5:4–21) which support such a list though we could come up with a different number depending on what we expressly include (for example is not bowing down to other gods included in not putting other gods first or is it a separate command?) and depending upon how we group what we find.  The number 10 is thus in that sense arbitrary.  

Second, once we've used our judgment as to the content and number of the list, reading the commandments still requires much interpretation.  For example, read literally they say that we cannot kill.  That would mean we could not cut down a tree much less kill a wild beast attacking us.  Of course, no reasonable person would take these words that literally and thus no honest person who is reasonable would claim we don't have to use our minds and hearts when we read a text.  Instead, what we generally want to do when reading the words of others is to figure out what the speaker meant by those words.  This involves engaging in what philosophers of language call pragmatics, a topic that I have written about elsewhere.  Have Ahab, Herod, and Caiaphas really tried to understand and follow speaker meaning in the poems that follow? 

Third, the Ten Commandments also remind us of another wrinkle in cross-language cases.  The Commandments are in an ancient language that most of us cannot read.  We must thus rely on translations, and translations also involve judgment and often are erroneous or questionable at best. Anyone who tells us that we can and should take a translation literally and without question is thus wrong on multiple levels.

Rhetoric to Lettie (A Book of Original Verse)

                                        Lettie 6/12/2001 to 6/2/2013

                                        © Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016

            

Preface for Lettie

A household lacking animals

            Is like a Cyclops who

Half-brained has lost an ear, a hand,

            A leg, a nostril, too.

The Complete Palladas from the Palatine Anthology

 Translated By Harold Anthony Lloyd  © 2016

Translator’s Notes:

I have compiled a complete verse collection of Palladas in English for several reasons.  First, of course, the merits of the best lines speak for themselves and much of this is lost in prose translation.  Second, almost all that is known of Palladas comes from his verse.  Much like the historical search for the identities of Shakespeare’s young man and dark lady in his sonnets, Palladas’s epigrams provide most of the fodder for speculation about the poet himself.  This of course cannot be done as fully in the absence of every available epigram and therefore requires inclusion of his lesser lines.  Third, this sort of inquiry applies to characters in the epigrams themselves such as Hypatia and the wife of Palladas.  Fourth, the epigrams show the fascinating state of the world as the Greek gods gave way to the god of Christianity.  Finally, the epigrams show the fate of a grammarian who would have lived solely by his art but had to abandon that art in the face of starvation.  This perhaps gives some comfort to other poets who have chosen a trade as well as a poet’s life.

Snow In August (A Book of Original Verse)

 

       Snow In August

She had enjoyed sweet certain knowledge that,
however hot the summer, August brought

its welcome snows upon a boundary fence
that she had kept to please her neighbors, too.

Razing Babel: Two Sonnets For Too Xenophobic Times

In these Xenophobic times, we should recognize that Razing Babel was a blessing not a curse.   The punishment of imprisonment within a single, narrow tongue proves much, much worse than the inconvenience of dealing with others who don’t speak our native language.  Here’s why:

Kennings: I've Made a Little List

Archive of Blog Originally Posted 2/9/2016 in The Huffinton Post

Poets and Lawyers: Birds of a Feather

Archive of Blog Originally Posted 12/15/2015 in The Huffinton Post

Letter to the Class of 2014

Archive of Blog Originally Posted 4/29/14 in The Huffinton Post

Three Sonnets in Paint

Of course pigment and its forms cannot translate to word.  Paintings must be seen not heard.  Though we cannot speak paintings, we can, speak about paintings.  Thus, I share three sonnets where I try to speak about three paintings.  I picked these three paintings because they themselves seemed to try the reverse impossibility I note.  They try to be sonnets in paint.

Verse Translation: A Call for Harder Work and Greater Care

Too much verse translation is too free and loose.  We must take the time and effort to preserve both meaning AND form (including meter and rhyme where they exist) without sacrificing one for the other.  Though we can never fully translate verse from one language to another, we can come close if we’re willing to work hard enough.  To illustrate this, I want to give some French to English examples of my own.  I don’t claim they are perfect by any means but I think they make my point.  I ask the reader to pull the original French texts and compare them with what I have done.  I break my examples into seven parts (I-VII).