What’s left? The feeling of humane coarseness, the range of relatable imperfections that hopefully will still make translation work.
So, at seventy, I find myself revising the assumptions of a lifetime. However humbling this may be, you have to admire the creativity of the scientists who have produced a machine that demonstrates how little of what you do is creative. At the same time an uneasy inkling tells me deep down we always knew this, or feared it. What were Jonathan Swift’s parodies of mindless, jargon-spouting hacks, or, in Laputa, his vision of a machine thanks to which “the most ignorant person … might write books in philosophy”, but the betrayal of an anxiety that mechanically produced language could prove indistinguishable from our own? Doesn’t Barbara Pym, in A Few Green Leaves, have a protagonist who delights in predicting how others are going to finish their sentences? Wasn’t Samuel Beckett obsessed with the concern that everything said is perfunctory and compulsive. “The word is not out”, he wrote in 1936, “before I am blushing for my automatism.” ©
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