A brief introduction to timeless ideas

How to Innovate: An Ancient Guide to Creative Thinking by Aristotle and selected, translated, and introduced by Armand D’Angour would make a lovely gift for anyone in product development, new product design, or who simply wants to think more creatively about a service or a product.

Armand D’Angour is professor of classics and a fellow of Jesus College at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Socrates in Love: The Making of a Philosopher and The Greeks and the New: Novelty in Ancient Greek Imagination and Experience. He has lectured on innovation at business schools and he managed a family manufacturing business before becoming a classics professor. He lives in London. 

He makes the point in his Introduction that “Despite largely conducting their lives within the bounds of a traditional agrarian society, the classical Greeks were responsible for creating a series of world-changing innovations.”

These innovations included democracy, the alphabet, philosophy, logic, rhetoric, mathematical proof, rational medicine, coins, architectural canons, drama, lifelike sculpture, and competitive athletics. How did they do it? 

It was a question Aristotle (384-322 BCE) wondered about and analyzed the logic of change on different levels: natural, metaphysical, and political. D’Angour sketches the ideas of earlier thinkers—Parmenides, Thales of Miletus, Heraclitus, Anaximander, Empedocles, and Democritus, who “proposed that the universe is made from tiny particles that he called atoms (from atoma, ‘indivisibles’).”

Because nothing can arise from nothing, the first principle is that “change cannot take place without the existence of some underlying thing that will be the subject of that change.” 

The second principle is “to allow creative connections to emerge successfully,” often “by stepping back and shifting perspective.” The classic example of this is Archimedes’s “Eureka!” moment when he realized how to measures whether a finely wrought crown was pure gold or adulterated by lead.

The third principle is to do the unexpected, to be a contrarian. “In creating change,” D’Angour writes, “there is value in thinking and acting in a way that does not follow the common trend, but opposes it.” Or as the Theban general Epaminondas won a spectacular (and unexpected) victory over a Spartan army in the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE. 

The fourth principle is to stimulate competition, “whether public or personal, contemporary or transgenerational.” Athletic, artistic, and political competition “was recognized and utilized in Greek antiquity as a mechanism for creating change,” says D’Angour. “Commercial and technical competition remain the key drivers of innovation in the modern world.”

A final chapter discusses the uses and abuses of innovation. A number of ancient Greek thinkers described ideal political arrangements, most famously Plato’s Republic and his legalistic blueprint in the Laws. 

“Although Aristotle takes a somewhat scattergun approach to Plato’s carefully worked-out theoretical proposals,” says D’Angour, “his recognition that no innovative constitution can succeed that does not accord to human desire for property ownership is psychologically astute and has stood the test of time.”

How to Innovate is a small book physically (no bigger than a paperback and only 138 pages) made thinner for those of us who do not read Greek (all the translations, about half the text, include the original on facing pages). Its size, however, is deceptive because while it is possible to read in an hour the influence of its ideas can—should—influence readers for years.

A well-translated, if empty, meta-fiction

I picked Revenge of the Translator out of short list of novels about translation and translators. (I think there’s a much bigger literature about translation as an art and a craft.) The book, published in France in 2009, is an interesting artifact. At one point it made me laugh out loud, but I am afraid it requires a special taste.

Start with the format. The first 205 pages (of 331) purport to be footnotes addressed by the translator to the reader: “*I reside here below this thin black bar . . . Welcome to you, dear reader, who has crossed the threshold of my lair.” 

The translator, who has a lot to say about literature, translation, the book he’s translating into French (in French it should be Vengeance du Traducteru, but of course the publisher will have to agree) is by one “Abel Prote” and the protagonist of the book is “David Grey, American translator of French novels.” Another key character is “the beautiful Doris,” who may be a character in the book or a lover of the author or neither or both.

Early on, the translator discusses his impatience with the book he’s translating. To improve it, he begins “trimming the fat,” first by eliminating all adjectives. “His prose has become almost good, the bastard. And since he barely speaks French, he won’t suspect as thing.”

That improves the text so much, he cuts all the adverbs. That works so well, he deletes all the tags that follow dialogue, such as: “‘_______!’ hurled Doris in a defiant voice as she walked toward him.” 

Or: “‘_______,’Grey replied coldly.” 

And: “‘_______,’ Grey cut her off, drawing right up close to her beautiful face with its slightly hooked nose.” It was at this point I laughed aloud.

Ten pages later, a chapter begins, “The character of Doris, the ‘servant with a big heart’ and personal secretary to Abel Prote, seems insufficiently developed to me.” First, I thought Abel Prote was the author of the novel, and second, what’s the translator doing “fleshing out” the author’s characters?

The book becomes even more meta. On page 73 we read, “Seized by a sudden idea, Prote envisages writing a novel entirely composed of footnotes. . . He gets up from his bed and sits in front of his computer. . . and he begins: ‘I reside here below this thin black bar. . . .” 

But there’s more: “Then the telephone rings. I pick up. A guy, a French guy, tells me in French that (N.d.T) is actually part of an American novel, called Translator’s Revenge which is in the process of being translated for a Parisian publisher. He adds that I, David Grey, am a character in this novel. Same for Abel, the author of (N.d.T), and for you, Doris. Can you imagine? If we were all characters of a novel being translated into French! He wants to see me . . . .” (p.195).

I cannot imagine the effort to translate and so my enthusiasm is unlimited for Emma Ramadan, a real person, who has translated this farrago from French into English. Revenge of the Translator has some lovely writing, and some interesting thoughts about translation. (What do you do if you hate the original? When, if ever, do you cut? Improve? If, as I’ve read, Martin Heidegger is more accessible in English than in the original German, has the translator done him a service or a misrepresentation?)

I think Brice Matthieusssent wants it both ways; to write a traditional realistic novel and to write something entirely original. He studied engineering and as a graduate student obtained a doctorate in philosophy. He has taught the philosophy of aesthetics and the history of contemporary art in Marseille, as well as translation courses in a Parisian university. He’s written seven novels and translated the fiction of Jim Harrison, Jack Kerouac, Henri Miller, Charles Bukowski, Bret Easton Ellis, Gore Vidal, Larry Kramer, Annie Dillard, Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, and many more into French.

Revenge of the Translator is clever, but I find it empty. That, however, may well be my failure rather than Matthieussent’s or Emma Ramadan’s, his virtuoso translator who turns up on the last page of the book: “Someone’s just rung the doorbell. I have a meeting with my American translator, who’s visiting Paris. A certain Emma Ramadan . . . We’re supposed to work the entire afternoon on the most difficult passages of my novel . . . .”  Clever.