Perception

        Right now a fairy tale kingdom of clouds is parading over the inverted bowl¹of early evening. A broad irregular band curves midway across the sky like a giant’s dragon-belt, two ends meeting with mouth swallowing tail. Fading sunlight shines through a hole in the reptilian skull allowing the dragon to see. A line of lighter purple-gray outlines the sharpness of its jaw, and the tail and pink spiked horns peak and retract like warm marshmallow. Above the tail, white popcorn clouds scatter backward toward the horizon, picking up the last bright rays. A broad granular darkness hangs in front: a wisped evil haunting the outskirts of my neighborhood.

         The shades of light wreak havoc with my depth perception cues. The tiny clouds are rightly in the distant layer, but their brightness shoots them forward. The gargantuan dragon assumes the foreground, but his darkness forces him to recede. I once read about an isolated people who, having had no access to photographs, at first could not interpret a picture as representing any object at all. Early experience is everything. When I was young I had only a black and white television. I watched The Wizard of Oz when it was broadcast once a year, but until I was an adult I never knew of the iconic change to color when Dorothy first steps into Munchkin Land. What I gained, however, was the ability to forget that a screen was showing what we now call grayscale; in my mind, the color was there. Even now, when my children stumble across an old black-and-white movie, they’ll start to groan a few minutes before I begin to notice there’s no color. My kids are perception-impaired: they never learned to interpret the varying lights and darks and so feel cheated.

          Have you ever been told that the eye is like a camera? I’ve just learned that my pocket-sized Nikon is a little like an untrained eye, unable to pick up the nuances of depth and clarity in black and white. Film, properly exposed, can do this. Think of Ansel Adams:

But not my camera. While walking along the central California coast with my daughter, I accidentally changed my camera setting to grayscale. The camera recorded details of the real world poorly because it couldn’t differentiate between similarly intense wavelengths of light. For it, a certain level of blue and green might look the same. That’s probably why the picture of this deer:

is distinct from its background while a picture of the same animal taken before I discovered my camera-setting error somewhat disappears.

Perhaps it’s just poor photography. Either way, as a human with an adequate range of color perception, I am a master hunter.

         Mastery drives us humans: the Nobel prize for literature was announced today. I’m always excited for the result – it seems an awfully strong book recommendation – but this year more than ever since the Pulitzer jurors awarded their 2012 prize to no one. The Nobel honoree was Chinese author Mo Yan, who has written such intriguing titles as The Garlic Ballads and Big Breasts and Wide Hips. I’d like to read his Frogs, but it hasn’t been translated yet. I always wonder, with a translation, if I’ll miss something important that the author has to say. When I was in high school I loved The Rubáyát of Omar Khayyám. We all quote from it: “The moving finger writes . . . ” or rather we quote from Edward Fitzgerald’s creative translation. Compare one Fitzgerald stanza:

                  For I remember stopping by the way

                  To watch a Potter thumping his wet Clay:

                  And with its all-obliterated Tongue

                  It murmur’d – “Gently, Brother, gently, pray!”

to an accurate translation by Juan Cole, of the University of Michigan:

        

                  The other day I passed a potter at his wheel, displaying every

                  moment a new skill; and it occurred to me, though one less

                  clear-eyed wouldn’t see it: It is our ancestors’ clay in a potter’s

                  hands!

       It’s not just the inexactness of translation, or the necessary adaptions for readers of a different culture. Writers chose each word not only for literal meaning but also for the connotation of its sound and the implication of its meaning in popular reference. Curled at the cellar door is a tired child or a pair of kittens, while passed out on the basement steps is your slob of an uncle after Aunt Mildred finally locked him out at 3 a.m.

        I’ll read an English version of Mo Yan’s work, and keep my fingers crossed that I can perceive the author’s color inside the translator’s black and white. In the meantime, here’s a little guy who lives near the Monterey Bay Aquarium, whose features translate in either color scheme and whose name, the Snowy Plover, is a poem onto itself:

¹The Rubáyát of Omar Khayyám, stanza 52