But let's not forget Jacqueline and Bob! Although they could simply
have bludgeoned their way through the problem by inventing a "Monsieur
Tortue" character, that route felt distinctly unnatural in French, to their
taste, and so, in one of our many exchanges of letters, they rather gingerly
asked me if I would ever consider letting them switch the Tortoise's sex to
female. To them, of course, it probably seemed pretty far-fetched to
imagine that the author would even give such a proposal the time of day,
but as a matter of fact, the moment I read their idea, I seized upon it with
great enthusiasm. And as a result, the French GEB's pages are graced
throughout with the fresh, fantastic figure of Madame Tortue, who runs
perverse intellectual circles around her male companion Achilles, erstwhile
Greek warrior and amateur philosopher.
There was something so delightful and gratifying to me about this new
vision of "the Tortoise" that I was ecstatic with her. What particularly
amused me were a few bilingual conversations that I had about the Tortoise,
in which I would start out in English using the pronoun "he", then switch to
French and to elle as well. Either pronoun felt perfectly natural, and I even
felt I was referring to the selfsame "person" in both languages. In its own
funny way, this seemed faithful to Carroll's tortoise's sexual neutrality.
And then, redoubling my pleasure, the translators into Italian, another
language that I adored and spoke quite well, chose to follow suit and to
convert my "Mr. Tortoise" into "signorina Tartaruga". Of course these
radical switches in no way affect the perceptions of GEB's purely anglophone
readers, but in some small way, I feel, they help to make up for the
lamentable outcome of my internal battle of a few years earlier.
Zen Buddhism, John Cage, and My VogUish Irrationality
The French translation was greeted, overall, very favorably. One specially
gratifying moment for Bob, Jacqueline, and myself was when a truly glowing
full-page review by Jacques Attali appeared in the most prestigious French
newspaper, Le Monde, not just praising the book for its ideas and style, but
also making a particular point of praising its translation.
A few months later, I received a pair of reviews published in successive
issues of Humanisme, an obscure journal put out by the Society of French
Freemasons. Both had issued from the pen of one author, Alain Houlou,
and I tackled them with interest. The first one was quite lengthy and, like
that in Le Monde, glowed with praise; I was gratified and grateful.
I then went on to the second review, which started out with the poetic
phrase Apres les roses, les epines ... ("Mter roses, thorns ... "), and which then
proceeded for several pages, to my amazement, to rip GEB apart as un pwge
tres grave ("a very dangerous trap") in which the mindless bandwagon of Zen
Buddhism was eagerly jumped on, and in which a rabidly antiscientific,
beatnik-influenced, hippie-like irrationality typical of American physicists
was embraced as the supreme path to enlightenment, with the iconoclastic
Zen-influenced American composer John Cage as the patron saint of it all.
Twentieth-anniversary Preface P-17