What lies within

or, The body as the antithesis of narrative

I dislike it when people refer to science writing as a form of translation because it suggests to me that these people think you can just interpret each bit of scientific jargon into an understandable phrase, string them all together and get a readable output. But this may be doing them a disservice if they are, in fact, considering a notion of translation I learned about at the Narrative Medicine conference today, called Skopos theory.

In this, the translator takes into account the purpose of the original text as well as the literal meaning of the text. For science writing, there may not be an original text to translate, but the purpose is to communicate certain concepts and facts. With this in mind, the finished article could be considered a translation of some kind of (perhaps hidden) scientific text. This is closer to my view that what I do is communicate scientific concepts using a different set of constraints to those of a scientist, for a different audience.

Opportunities to reflect on my writing, both professional (sciencey) and non (fictiony, formerly theatry), constitute a truly exciting benefit of attending this conference. The highlight today was perhaps Peter Carey’s talk. He described for us the moment during the long genesis of Oscar and Lucinda when “I knew I had a novel”. This was before the characters were conceived: in order to find them, he had to ask, “Who would really do that, and with what consequences, and with what meaning?”

Some other quotes (direct and indirect) from his talk that I liked: