Once Upon a Time

A long time ago, there were "an A number one cook and no mistake" . . ."a baronesse, ryght and hyghe and noble lady of lynage" . . . "an eunuch of great authority" - though much later, in a 19th Century book for children, "A [Apple Pie] et it." In the beginning, some say, there was the first letter of the alphabet, which was capable of blossoming: A, the ALPHA of all things. This A, perhaps because of its initial importance, came, in the English language at least, a very long time ago to stand in for the word ONE [ANE], undeclinable since 1120 as the OED from which these examples were culled informs us. It still survives in romance languages, where "a single bird" is "UN uccello solo". Dubbed "article" from the Latin word for joint, it both points and joins though its nature is by definition indefinite. We say, vaguely, "I saw a bird in a tree." "A bank was robbed." The article we have employed is purpously doomed to imprecision, though it does have the advantage of remaining singular and therefore unusual. It also retains the quality of abstraction, even of ordinariness in its unswervingly anonymous thrust. Perversely, one might almost say, the word A indicates an identity, but refuses to specify which.

A's alternate - the sun to A's moon - is THE, which is nevertheless a shadow of its former inflexioned self when it was one of the phases of the demonstrative pronoun THAT whose origins are as old as language - at least as it is recorded in the most ancient Sanskrit texts. Formerly, THE was deemed so essential when a demonstration was intended, it even preceded the relative pronoun - as in the familiar Shakespearean courtesy: "For the which much thanks." - as well as the absolute (the one), not to mention the indicative (the other), but in current speech, it seems to serve more often merely as embroidery:

Night and Day

You are the one.

Only you beneath the Moon

And under the Sun . . .

Walter Savage Landor, sonorous, arch-Victorian poet that he was, appears to have considered the article as belittling and relied on it only once in his famous quatrain:

Past ruin'd Ilion, Helen lives.

Alcestis rises from the shades.

Verse calls them forth. 'Tis verse

That gives immortal life to mortal maids.

The grandiosity of tone is here achieved not only in the spondaic opening, but also in the noble generalizations: PAST, VERSE, LIFE, MAIDS - each is given equal resonance by virtue of the absence of an article. This device is invoked to impress us with the absolute importance of the unexplicit nouns. Vagueness has reached Olympian heights, exsufflicated dimensions . . . Is it any wonder in this context that the indeterminate word SHADES is the only noun to be identified with an article?

Snobbery is not a new phenomenon when it comes to language. A flower girl may become a princess if her inflections are right, for we know that her heart, along with her "haitches", can be pure. I remember my mother's referring to a notorious woman of whom she did not approve with the emphatic addition of the article: "The Simpson" certainly put bonny Prince Charlie's choice in her place! Nevertheless, "The Walewska" - (at least in the glamorous person of Greta Garbo) conferred on the tragedy of Mayerling a kind of knowing cosmopolitanism that lifted that sad but ordinary love affair into the realm of unworldliness and therefore of beauty.

The modern newspaper has changed the role of the article, and has served even to cloud it in new ambiguities:

STUDENT DEMANDS CHANGE

How easily when nouns and verbs exchange roles we read the headline as it was intended, yet how ambiguous on second inspection. Have the demands of students changed, or is a particular student demanding a revolutionary event? The absence of the article has set the forces of ambiguity into motion and we find ourselves in a verbal morass where the clarity for which syntax was designed has been traduced in the interests of expedience, of the abbreviated line whose function is to attract attention rather than to inform.

Fortunately, the article was designed to save the ship thus caught in a verbal quagmire. The headline PLAN MOVES SLOWLY, as Roberts has pointed out, is subject to more than one reading where insertion of an article or two would lay questions to rest: "Plan the moves slowly" is as clear an injunction as "The plan moves slowly" is a statement of fact. Too often neglected, maligned, abused, the article here comes into its own when it is given its proper place.

"Once upon a time," a prince set forth to seek his fortune. The situation is classic, precise in its insistence on the word ONCE, generalizing in its indication of generalized time: A TIME. We all know that what is intended is a variant on an absolute theme: In this case, a specific prince dressed in blue velvet set off to seek the only maiden who could fit into the classic slipper. All princes and all beautiful maidens are saluted, but we are told that the case in question is specific, happened ONCE in A time recognizable, ambiguous, lost in the world of dream but nevertheless belonging to the realm of the possible.

Folk speech, indeed, for all its claim to generalization, leans heavily on the specifics of life as it is known to the speakers:

This is the house that Jack built.

This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

The narrative continues on its effortless way until the d­noument, so full of specifics, so evocative of the milieu which produced it:

This is the priest all shaven and shorn that married the man all tattered and torn that kissed the maiden all forlorn that milked the cow with the crumpled horn that tossed the dog that worried the cat that chased the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

The fascination lies in the dialectical pull between the absolutely specific article THE, its specificity compounded by the phrase THIS IS, and the ambiguities which suggest that the situation is classic, formal, unspecific, a commentary on peasant life which bears within it the seeds of sedition, an outcry against poverty which, indeed, led to the peasants' revolts that accompanied most European social upheavals and that still reverberate in folklore. What could be more specific? What could be more vague, more full of innuendo? Surely the article has been given one of its severest tests in this rhyme, which, by the way, began its life as aural expression.

It is important, as we ponder the implications of these musings, that as translators we understand the special qualities of the article in English. Its function is to designate, to indicate, to point out, to specify. Its omission can contribute to a climate of generalization, its inclusion can lend to an otherwise abstract statement an air of immediacy and authority which can be mustered to prove a point. In the beginning, says the Evangelist, was THE word; not A word, but THE word. In the difference lies a world of meaning which our language has evolved to convey.

Interestingly, the function of the article varies from language to language and indicates subtle philosophical or cultural differences. In English, we prefer to consider life as all-encompassing; in Romance languages, it represents instead a precise element within a chaotic universe - LA vita, LA vie urge a certain understanding among interlocutors that the speaker is referring to a specific gift from the Creator, not an abstraction which can ultimately lead to iconoclasm. "My aunt's pen", that well-known classroom phrase - becomes far more specific in Romance utterance: "La plume de ma tante" - the pen of my aunt, and suggests a more precise and classical approach to materiality. On the other hand, an Italian tells us vaguely he is staying in albergo, while the English speaker insists on specificity: he is staying in A (or THE) hotel. Indeed, the English often tends to differentiate more carefully between abstraction and actuality. "Earth and field lift up their voices" becomes in Italian (et al.) THE earth and THE fields which "alzano LE loro voci."

It is not in the province of this reflection to explore the differences more carefully. Perhaps our readers would care to pick up these musings where we have left off and elaborate. Our intention here is merely to alert the translator into English to the highly idiosyncratic nature of the article, whose purpose is clear and whose usefulness relies on a delicacy of perception to which we all aspire.

ADDENDUM: FOOD FOR THOUGHT

(Note the scarcity of articles in the following: "the Ontopsychological school, availing itself of new research criteria and of a new telematic epistemology, maintains that social modes do not spring from dialectics of territory or of class, or of consumer goods, or of means of power, but rather from dynamic latencies capillarized in millions of individuals in system functions which, once they have reached the event maturation, burst forth in catastrophic phenomenology engaging a suitable stereotype protagonist or duty marionette (general, president, political party, etc.) to consummate the act of social schizophrenia in mass genocide."

[Cited a decade ago in the NEW YORKER from an announcement of a congress of the International Ontopsychology Association in Rome - Pity the hapless translator foolhardy enough to make the attempt to turn this into, say, Italian . . . or Czech, or what you will!]