MY DISMANTLING TEXT IS FULL OF 
SINGULAR THOUGHT

by Liam Durcan

Introductory Comments on the occasion of the Festschrift for Marcus Epsum
Delivered by
Aurora Hearne
Convocation Hall
West Rye, New York
July 21

Madame Chancellor and Mr. Symes, honored members of the faculty, 

invited guests, and finally, Nathalie, David and Patricia.

I would first of all like to thank the organizing committee for their efforts in organizing this conference in Marcus’ honor and for inviting me to present a paper as well as give this opening address. I stand before you today as a person deeply affected by my relationship with Marcus Epsum. I am only one of many so influenced, many of whom are renowned, others you will never know. It is a privilege, sad and special, to be called upon  to gather my recollections into this talk, to try and achieve something befitting the man. I suspect I will fail but am consoled that it may be more a measure of the man’s accomplishments than my lack of eloquence.

Marcus began his career as a linguist, with an interest in algorithmic formations of language, specifically macro-syntactitcal structures, that eventually led him into the emerging field of machine translation. With full bloom of the digital age, unprecedented reductions in communication time were still largely negated by translation problems, as though one enzyme step, one synapse, was fouling the potential of this wonderful system. Marcus wanted to bridge that gap. He spent three years in Strasbourg as a consultant to the European Parliament, trying to develop fully automated high quality translation, which, after years of stuttering starts and diplomatic crises (an untranslated ‘put a’ became ‘puta’ with alarming frequency) was dubbed by its acronym FAHQT.  He would joke that although their system was FAHQT, it was never nearly as FAHQT as it needed to be. He laughed at his own jokes and made many enemies and friends among the French. 

During his time in Strasbourg, Marcus was a solitary figure, using whatever time he had to spare to travel across the border into Luxemburg or into southern Germany. He kept in touch with friends back home, became a fan of what is known here as soccer, and wrote poetry, something he had done since he was a young man and which, as young men tend to do, he kept this to himself. Over the course of  his first year abroad he had fallen in love with a computer engineer named  Nathalie Sussard, whom he met at a conference on Idiomatic Mistextualization. Nathalie did not speak English, and at that time Marcus spoke only a rudimentary and poorly pronounced French, and so when Marcus wanted to share his feelings with Nathalie, he turned to the machine that he believed would more accurately deliver his most deeply held thoughts. Legend has it that he translated a sonnet he wrote for Nathalie from English into French using machine translation. He checked the phrasing closely, going back and forth between the English and French versions and when he was satisfied he printed his copy and delivered it to his girlfriend. Nathalie was deeply moved and Marcus understood her pleasure to be simply her pleasure with him, for being a man sensitive enough to try to express his love for her, however modestly. He was very much surprised then, when Nathalie submitted his poem to a literary journal and it was accepted for publication.

One night, shortly after the poem had been published, Nathalie was getting ready for bed and took the opportunity to leaf through the journal that held his poem. She marveled at the beauty of the poem, especially coming from a man who (and she said this with as much diplomacy as one would expect from an EU consultant) lacked such poetry in his spoken French. She asked Marcus how he came up with such imagery, reading out the lines that had so captivated her, and he admitted (secure in the knowledge that they were safely married and beyond the teeth of certain forms of critical discourse) that he could not remember having written that line, at least not in English, and that particular poetic effect, while admittedly admirable, was not deliberate. But it was written in French, Nathalie said, it had meaning in French. This moment, with the two of them looking at each other in their Strasbourg bedroom, considering what the poem meant and what it had become, is a moment of revelation in narrative, the next in that long line of innovations, technical and textual, from Gutenburg to Joyce.

Marcus and Nathalie realized that what he had done when checking the poem was to inadvertently subject it to repeated English-to-French and French-to-English translations. The first translation had two semantic mistranslations (fairly normal for machine translation), by the third, by the seventh, there were numerous syntactic and semantic mistranslations, cryptic and haunting. She read the poem again to him and he was amazed and embarrassed; he had created something quite beautiful. They spent that night at the computer, subjecting simple phrases to repeated circular translations.

Marcus typed the phrase, “ My head is full of unusual ideas” into the program and translated it into the German and back to English. He repeated the iteration four times until the phrase read “My dismantling text is full of singular thought.”

They could not sleep the rest of the night, putting phrase after phrase through the same process until they came up with altered translations, with new meanings. It was not long before Marcus began experimenting with different iterative schema, three iterations of French, then one each to German and Portuguese and back, alternating iterations from Spanish to Italian, three times before bringing it back to English. Marcus found this was the best for approximating verse (an iteration through German near the end produced a nearly-irreparable alteration of meter).  He would indicate the number of repeated translations using multiplication signs until it dawned on him that the semantic alterations produced geometrically disparate meanings, and it was at this point he decided on using  mathematical phrasings and superscripts in his recipes, and an algebra was born. He tested algorithms on others, asking them to rate his work for comprehensibility and aesthetic pleasure evoked. A prose algorithm was devised:

( [English-French] ³ English Italian [Estonian Spanish]² ([German French] English) [Italian German] English²), 

A Haiku algorithm followed:

([English-Sanskrit-Serbo-Coratian]² English).

Certain forms of communication— screenplay, automated/ menu-formatted telephone message —could not be made to yield alternate connotative meaning despite rigorous application of all available algorithms. Marcus surmised that these forms of expression had already been passed through the extensive parsing processes of Hollywood and Madison Avenue that rendered them immune to further textual manipulation.

Marcus never returned to work at the European Parliament, a decision as easily understood and forgiven as Gregor Mendel’s absence at vespers. There was work to do, new work, with results, species of things never before seen that needed descriptions and classification. Let it not be said that he toiled in isolation; throughout all of this Nathalie was a guiding force, and indispensable partner, programming algorithms for rapid application and prose generation.

How Nathalie and Marcus transformed the literary world, how they maintained an output unmatched in the history of modern composition and how they polarized the world of letters, will not be discussed in this forum. Let us just say that we are heirs to that legacy.

And while Marcus’ stochastic poetry and prose was finding an increasingly wider audience— something he regarded as victories in the skirmishes of a guerilla war, an insurgency of narrative— his presentation of this linguistic and narrative theory was initially met with skepticism and indifference. His impromptu Habilitationsschrift, ‘Idiomatic Translation and the Genesis of Narrative Meaning’, (including examples run through a devilish algorithm of High German, Yiddish and Estonian) was summarily (and ironically) rejected by the University of Frankfurt as ‘not only meaningless but infuriatingly frivolous.’ In a gesture of typical Epsum creativity, he took the text of this rejection notice sent to him by the rectors of the university and, after subjecting it to iterative retranslation, published it as perhaps his most famous prose poem, Teutonic Penumbra.

When Marcus returned to the United States, accepting a position at the DuPont Institute of Advanced Study as the first Chair in the Department of Stochastic Linguistics, he arrived with a singular purpose in mind: to apply his program to all existing text. It was an ambitious project, one that required a parsing system until then not yet imagined but one that he and Nathalie were successful in developing, a new narrative engine that they christened the Stochastic Iterative Narrative Generator or SING. He knew that the power of the process lay in the limitations of Machine Translation: that the errors of semantics and syntax, the stochastics of the process, would amplify into new meaning, something we had not seen before. When asked if this was Benjamin’s concept of a meta-language coming to fruition, he only smiled and said that where Benjamin wanted to find the language between the language, he wanted to find the language outside of the language.

It was when he was in the midst of the initial application of the SING that I met him. As I have admitted in my own work, I was initially contemptuous of everything  SING stood for and felt that Marcus and Nathalie’s work was an affront to narrative, to the process of creation that we as living, sentient beings, hold dear as our gift, our responsibility. My view was of the process, and by extension, the man, was dim, if not damning, as he was taking a complicated, nuanced cerebral process and had superficially succeeded in having it reduced to the equivalent of an ATM transaction.

It was in my months of working under Marcus’ tutelage that this animosity dissipated. I was overcome, in increments, by the unending stream of beautiful words that emerged from the process. Whereas I had always thought  that the development of each algorithm was simply a matter of Marcus’ caprice, I discovered that it involved an ‘evaluative process’ in which volunteer readers scored random passages in terms of lyric beauty. Can you imagine that? I thought, taste testing words as if they were tooth-picked Vienna sausages. But that is what Marcus said validated the process. Like the rest of the world I was left speechless by the groundbreaking Argot Project, to which I am proud to say I made a significant contribution .

(Pause for applause.) 

Anyone who viewed the output of the man, including me, was eventually left without counterargument. I have had a difficult time coming to terms with it, as I have detailed in my own writings. My conversion to an advocate of SINGing was met with consternation and, later, repudiation in other critical theory circles. I was seen as a betrayer of my cause, and, in what is the worst criticism that can be leveled against an academic, as a person easily swayed. Arguments raged: Jauss and Barthe, in their seminal papers on Epsum’s work, betrayed their modernist biases in saying that the changes in the readers expectations were the true value of the process and proposed that such texts were invalid if unaccompanied by all the translations. What they misunderstood, of course, was that the algorithms that generated the words had been vetted by reader, by thousands of readers who had validated them.

And that is perhaps the highest compliment that can be paid to Marcus. The reader was central.

Of course I don’t want to discuss recent events. They are a wound which must be given time to heal. It is no secret that Marcus inspired an unprecedented depth of emotion. Many were devoted to him, others to the dream of destroying him. I understood that well. That’s why when I heard the news of this madman, this disgruntled fan, I was not surprised. I could almost hear the gunshots ring out across the country, as I could nearly feel the impact. At one time, forgive me, I understood how someone could have reveled in the imagined kick of that pistol. We have no words for such things, no iterations suffice.

Marcus Epsum wanted technology to generate beauty, and if it created a different meaning, even a lesser meaning, it could still be valued by someone who took the time to read it, to instill it into the next, necessary act of generation. As Marcus said, with a little help, ‘My dismantling text is full of singular thought.’

          Thank you.