The world’s come a long way in the ten years since The Most Narcotic Period of Anniversary. Now we’ve got Google. And now we have many more languages. So, read that link for the methodology; basically, it’s playing “Chinese Whispers” (“Telephone”) with Google Translate. Here it is, flip-flopping with English all the way, alphabetically by language (i.e., English→Afrikaans→English→Albanian→English→…)
I’ve chosen a strong pair of sentences, very recognizable (I promise), each containing what I thought was one universally immutable noun. But that wasn’t the case.
Sweet voice and Amazing life experience! But I mention it Clearly. Now I know.
And here it is chained (i.e., English→Afrikaans→Albanian→Arabic→…, starting and stopping with English but skipping it in the “E”s section.)
Only on the life of a line, said the widow; The good Intention, but I understand now that loss.
What this suggests to me is that Google is not using — at least universally — some kind of internal hyper-Esperanto; if the sentences were being abstracted to a(n ultra-cool) meta-language, these two modes would yield similar results, and they are not even close. But they’re doing something else, apparently, which seems to involve remembering the outbound translation for the inbound return. But I’m not willing to wager anything on that hypothesis.
So the battle of wits has begun. What was the original text? It ends when we discover who is right, and what quote he will secretly submit to me for the next round. Post answers below. Also, for bonus points (the normal mcgees.org prize is a banana through the mail), I want critical interpretation of those lines — the author was cryptic, but what was he trying to say?
(I thought about “Google Torture Porn” for a title, but thought that was in rather poor taste.)
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Only on the life of a line, said the widow; The good Intention, but I understand now that loss.
The widow, at the end of her life, looks back and realizes that everything she has lived has been one-dimensional. She kept to the straight and narrow, walked the line with respect to her life and her husband. But now her husband is gone, and what is there to show for it? A life she believed was premised on good intentions. But she never succeeded in the life she imagined. She married, developed a routine — her “linear life”. In the midst of life happening, she never realized that she had abandoned her hope for doing good in addition to doing well. But now her husband is gone, her life is almost over, and from her new perspective, she feels — acutely — the pang of the loss of her aspirations.