Posts tagged babel

I remember back in the mid–'90s when the first major online translater, Babelfish, came online, promising to take submitted texts into and out of a handful of major European languages. Soon everyone and their roommate was coming up with hilarious round-trip translations, cycling a phrase through two or three languages and then back to English to see what gibberish resulted. Fast-forward to today: the translation engines have expanded and matured. Yesterday I noticed that Google Translate had added a number of minor European and not-so-minor Asian languages to their arsenal. So I did the obvious thing: cycled the story of the Tower of Babel through all 41 available languages (and 8 distinct alphabets). Most of the final story was, indeed, barely recognizable, but the end, Genesis 11:8–9, impressively survived—diminished, rounded, and worn smooth like a river stone.

re: babel, bible, horizons of the possible, language, technology and change

Nate:

So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel —because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

English–Albanian–Arabic–Bulgarian–Catalan–Chinese–Croatian–Czech–Danish–Dutch–Estonian–Filipino–Finnish–French–Galician–German–Greek–Hebrew–Hindi–Hungarian–Indonesian–Italian–Japanese–Korean–Latvian–Lithuanian–Maltese–Norwegian–Polish–Portuguese–Romanian–Russian–Serbian–Slovak–Slovenian–Spanish–Swedish–Thai–Turkish–Ukrainian–Vietnamese–English

Then stop developing city and region. Yes, more than one world language. Reverse direction in this area.

Artistic echoes of a primordial cultural project gone awry, but to this day remembered, resonant, and perhaps—in the beauty both of our varied tongues and non-disastrous buildings—redeemed.

re: architecture, art, babel, europe, museums, painting, primordial stories

Nate:

The Tower of Babel is a vision of architecture as anthill madness. As the British Museum’s exhibition Babylon: Myth and Reality reveals, Brueghel is not the only artist driven to imagine this fabulous building. Towers of Babel proliferate in this show, be they painted with miniaturist precision or exploding in apocalyptic doom; there’s even one made of shoes, in a 2001 painting by Michael Lassel. Martin van Heemskerk’s, however, is square, in keeping with old sources he studied, but his attempt to visualise what the tower was “really” like does not stop him showing its top smashed apart by divine lightning. In an anonymous Dutch painting—one of a series that riff on Brueghel—the city that surrounds the tower is on fire, the summit of the hubristic edifice menaced by an eerie light coming through the storm clouds. Perhaps the strangest is by Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century scholar whose light, airy spiral looks prophetically modern, like a blueprint for a skyscraper.