And lastly, as for that soul-searching dialogue in which the Author and
God are summoned up by Achilles and company to face the accusation of
sexism, well, that was somehow transformed, in a series of many, many small
changes, into the dialogue with which GEE concludes: "Six-part Ricercar".
If you read it with its genesis in mind, you may find an extra level of interest.
Mr. Tortoise, Meet Madame Tortue
A few years later, a wholly unexpected chance came along to make amends,
at least in part, for my sexist sin. That opportunity was afforded me by the
challenge of translating GEB into various foreign languages.
When I was writing the book, the idea that it might someday appear in
other languages never crossed my mind. I don't know why, since I loved
languages and loved translation, but somehow it just never occurred to me.
However, as soon as the idea was proposed to me by my publisher, I was very
excited about seeing my book in other languages, especially ones that I
spoke to some extent - most of all French, since that was a language that I
spoke fluently and loved very deeply.
There were a million issues to consider in any potential translation,
since the book is rife not only with explicit wordplay but also with what Scott
Kim dubbed "structural puns" - passages where form and content echo or
reinforce each other in some unexpected manner, and very often thanks to
happy coincidences involving specific English words. Because of these
intricate medium-message tangles, I painstakingly went through every last
sentence of GEB, annotating a copy for translators into any language that
might be targeted. This took me about a year of on-again, off-again toil, but
finally it was done, and just in the nick of time, because contracts with
foreign publishers started flowing thick and fast around 1982. I could write
a short book - a pamphlet? - on the crazy, delightful, knotty puzzles and
dilemmas that arose in translating GEE, but here I will mention just one-
how to render the simple-seeming phrase "Mr. Tortoise" in French.
When in the spring of 1983, Jacqueline Henry and Bob French, the
book's excellent translators into French, began to tackle the dialogues, they
instantly ran headlong into the conflict between the feminine gender of the
French noun tortue and the masculinity of my character, the Tortoise. By
the way, I must ruefully mention that in the malVelous but little-known
Lewis Carroll dialogue from which I borrowed these delightful characters
(reprinted in GEB as 'Two-part Invention"), the Tortoise turns out, if you
look carefully, never to have been attributed either gender. But when I first
read it, the question never entered my mind. This was clearly a he-tortoise.
Otherwise, I would have known not only that it was female but also why it was
female. Mter all, an author only introduces a female character for some
special reason, right? Whereas a male character in a "neutral" context (e.g.,
philosophy) needs no raison d'etre, a female does. And so, given no clue as
to the Tortoise's sex, I unthinkingly and uncritically envisaged it as a male.
Thus does sexism silently pervade well-meaning but susceptible brains.
P-16 Twentieth-anniversary Preface