Testing Game
A LOVE2D game for quickly writing climbing beta
By Harrison Waddell
On a recent trip to Versailles, I found myself staying with a very kind but very French family. It was an amazing opportunity to brush up on my otherwise diminishing French. In what is best described as an abundance of overconfidence, after a few days of brushing up, I took on the project of translating a French novel to English. A quick trip to a bouquiniste provided three novels for a single Euro.
Armed with a 33 cent novel and three days of relearned French, I set off with a pace that can only be explained by the abundance of French coffee I'd begun drinking to look the part.
In this project I found a deep reflection on the value of human art, the importance of literary translation, and flexing linguistic, creative, artistic muscles. In climbing literature, media, and circles, the sport is often described as an exercise in futility.
"Because it is there," the oft-cited answer of George Mallory when asked why he was attempting to climb Everest.
As I progressed with the translation, I became curious how my translation compared to modern translation tools. At first I used google translate, mostly out of habit, but my travel partner Estelle, who had become my analog translation tool, reccomended DeepL.
So after completing a section, I let DeepL translate the same section, and compared our renditions. In it's presented form , you can read the original french, next to my english, next to DeepL's english. I found that with each section, the DeepL translation influenced me more, to take further creative liberties, to expand the prose and make literary decisions. After all the DeepL was better than me at direct translations.
It occured to me that today's generation of AI could today or very soon create a better literary translation, than I was capable. Yet, I found myself enjoying the process, having fun, engaging with the text in a new way.
This inspired both the name of the project and the project as a whole. That creation in general may begin to be an excercise in futility, is all the reason for a more active role in creation.
I'll finish by coming back to Mallory:
The first question which you will ask, and which I must try to answer, is the following:
'What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?'
and my answer must at once be, It is no use.
[...] So it is no use, and you have to live with that.
Nevertheless, if you cannot understand that there is something in man
which responds to the challenge of this mountain, longs for it, and goes out to meet it,
that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward,
then you won't see why it is so compelling for us to go.
What we get from this adventure is just sheer happiness.
And happiness, after all, is the end of life.
