Tant qu'il restera dans nos champs Quelque laboureur centenaire Qui de l'adisias ordinaire Salûra de loin les passants, [Gabriel Tarde « Les deux langues mourantes », in Contes et poèmes, Paris, Calmann Lévy, 1879, p. 242-246] These are 'our fields', in French (nos champs): fields of la patrie. And the 'poetic idiom' of the Muses is also French. The poet was initiated into it by the rebarbative toil of learning French: "Plus tard, quand je sus le français, / (Et j'eus de la peine à l'apprendre) / J'étais grand ; survint l'âge tendre, / Je fis des vers, j'en pâlissais !" He blanches at the memory. Yet he implies the idiom of the Muses survives only in the memory (in memoriam itself) and only in so far as an old peasant, who implicitly can't speak French, lives on in the French fields to say not au revoir, not adieu, but the Occitan adisias, both adieu and au revoir to those who pass by on their verges: a clear antinomy in French, but in both Occitan and the Tennysonian memory, it is the only way for the present, focused on the past, to address the future.

How might such a problematic subject of French culture mark out a new 'field' of enquiry?:

cherchons avec toute la précision désirable, mais sans prétendre pour la science qui nous est chère à une autonomie absolue, les limites du champ qu'elle est appelée à défricher.

[Gabriel Tarde Les deux éléments de la sociologie 1897]

We might well remark on the similarities between such a carefully pruned statement of intent and the problematic demarcations of translation studies. The same pastoral metaphors apply. Michel Ballard, for example, introducing Guy Bocquet's essay revisiting this recent history, in the collection Qu'est ce que la traductologie, says: 'il esquisse, entre autres, les débats autour de la It's a word that would've come as no surprise to contemporary readers. In particular, those who'd been schooled (as Tarde had) in French grammaire in the provinces during the nineteenth century, would naturally accept that clearing and cultivating a neglected field, however thorny a task, was a worthy vocation, even a patriotic duty. Generations of them, for example, would have practised weeding errors out of their formations and pronunciations of plural nouns, in what was often their second language, by multiplying the grammatical fruits of the following vignette: LE CHAMP Mettez au pluriel les noms entre parenthèses.

La cabane du pauvre Nicolas était batie sur un terrain couvert de (bruyère), de (genêt), d'(ajonc), de (coudrier), de (ronce), d'(épine) et de (buisson) de toute (sorte). Il semblait que ce terrain ne dût jamais produire ni (légume), ni (fruit).

[One day a superior farmer comes along with a cart bursting with an impressive harvest. He advises Nicolas to clear all the brush and to plough the earth then...].

"ensemence-la en (céréale), en (graine) fourragères, en (légume) ; plante des (pomme) de terre, des (carotte), des (navet), des (haricot), des (fève), des (artichaut) ; puis attends le résultat de ton travail ; […] Larive et Fleury, La Première Année de Grammaire, Paris, A. Colin, 1871. p. 11 (229 reprints between 1871and 1953), The benefits to be reaped from this toil were abundant. The élèves paysans would glean not only the rules of the regular plural -s, a simple difference between written and spoken language, a clear Lockean sense of property and territory, a moral lesson about the value of an honest day's work, a reminder of the economic importance of agricultural industry, and so on, but crucially they would also learn to uproot whatever hardy remnants of their local baragouin were still entrenched in the semantic field of (indigenous) flora and replace them with a rich crop of French vocabulary: a real lexical cornucopia harvested from the more cultivated and productive language of the urban bourgeoisie. And there's something incorrigibly prolific about its metaphors : 'Le cultivateur … entama sur-le-champ une conversation', 'Nicolas goûta ces conseils'. This is, to take a clipping from Deleuze, a vivacious rhizome.

It goes almost without saying, then, that Nicolas's work is analogous to the pupil's, and the cultivateur's words to the teacher's. (Notice that Nicolas is not allowed to speak and the cultivateur addresses him as tu). Just as the pupils of the écoles rurales were brought up to value literal défrichement, they also had implanted in them a recognition of the value of a metaphorical intellectual défrichement. It was a cliché, and one they were repeatedly called upon to copy down: l'oisiveté est tellement contre nature, que partout où elle règne, elle nuit. Les champs, pas plus que l'homme, ne sont faits pour elle. Dans l'homme, elle produit les pensées stériles, dans la terre, les plantes sauvages ou malsaines. Rien n'est plus agité qu'un homme oisif, et la terre livrée à elle-même se couvre d'une végétation désordonnée, plus fatigante à enfanter que des moissons bienfaisantes. The linguistic analogy is blatant and perennial. The idea of the dictée is to sow the seeds of standard French in the arable land of a newly marked out ésprit national which struggling pupils would probably have been baffled to learn was more fatigued by indolently generating the vivacious wildflowers of its local dialects than industriously cultivating the national staples and delicacies of an alien French grammar. And we should note the verb that's used: enfanter. The earth (la terre) is the mother of the plants, and she's tired of giving birth to weeds; she can be reenergised only by being cultivated at the behest of the cultivated French landowner, aware, from his reading in French, of modern crop-rotation techniques. How in the école maternelle would the painful labour of reproducing this kind of thing have related to a pupil's idea of what he would have learned to call his langue maternelle? More to the point, how would such a conception have affected his sociolinguistic relationship with his own mother? For the budding psycho-sociologist from the provinces, these would have been salient questions. And they were questions linked to key sociological changes in late nineteenth century France. Time permitting, one might embark here upon an exploration of the reification of 'Culture' and Matthew Arnold's importation of this French idea into Britain following his tour of French schools in 1859. However, that will have to be for another time.

Déchiffrement

What does all this have to do with translation?

Well the first thing to say is that the French language taught in the école nationale was implicitly the result of a standardization project that had Latin version as its foundation stone... think, for example, of the role of the belles infideles in the creation of the Academy. In a broad theoretical sense, standard literary French was considered to be the universal language of translation. It had replaced Latin precisely because it had assimilated into itself, by translation, everything that Latin could say. It was this process that had made French what it was... a language that rendered clear and broadly accessible to a modern rationalist society what had previously been obscure and inpenetrable to all but an elite. Julie Candler Hayes provides us with Claude-Pierre Goujet as an example of a proponent of this metanarrative: Goujet takes for granted that "content" can be extracted and transferred from one language to another without significant loss […] The reflection on the advantages of reading in translation leads Goujet to announce the second motivation for offering his project: "To honor our nation by displaying its literary riches; by demonstrating that there is no aspect of literature, science, history or the arts that has not only been carefully cultivated in France, but treated in our language". Looking back to French literary glories of the previous century, Goujet proclaims that French has taken the place of Latin as "the universal language of Europe". French has incorporated the riches of other languages into itself, both through translation and through creative emulation […] Goujet's historical consciousness is intimately linked to his desire to set forth rules and systems, […] The gradual articulation of such rules indicates the arrival of French as an international language, as a machine through which everything may be translated But it was not just a matter of theory. The grammar exercises in the provincial primary schools were the practical offshoots of the version exercises in the lycée. Renée Balibar tells us :

Lorsque les textes des lectures, exercices, exemples de grammaire et de rhétorique, étaient enseignés dans les petites classes des lycées, c'était comme préparation à des études franco-latines. Leur caractère artificel était ouvertement rapporté à l'apprentissage de la traduction. […] Les mêmes textes une fois transférés dans l'enseignement monolingue ont changé d'aspect. […] Leur apparition semblait inconditionnelle, leur pouvoir d'expression absolu, leur logique indiscutable. L'immense majorité des Français qui ne pouvait penser ni au latin ni aux langages maternels pour faire ses devoirs, recevait le français des manuels comme une seconde nature, ou plutôt comme le seul langage naturel, le premier naturel, de la communauté française.

[Renée Balibard « le français enseigné » in Histoire de la langue française 1880-1914 sous la diréction de Gérald Antoine et Robert Martin, (CNRS Editions 1999) (vol. 24) p. 284] Even more than this, as strange as it might sound, the version exercise -the translation of a text into prescriptive standard French prose -had actually been maintained in the monolingual primary school and had retained some of the pre-eminence it enjoyed in the Latin-centred lycée as a mechanism and a trope of cognitive transformation. Balibar continues:

Parmi les devoirs rassemblés à l'Exposition [universelle de Paris] de 1878, beaucoup s'intitulent bizarrement pour un Français d'aujourd'hui, « traduction », « traduction en prose » : ce sont des transformations d'énoncés pris dans Boileau, La Fontaine, Rabelais, et récrit dans « l'ordre direct », c'est à dire dans l'ordre requis par la théorie grammaticale : sujet -verbe -complément d'objetcomplément circonstanciel. Balibar (1999 : 280) With the advent of the Third Republic, however, this thinking was overturned by a new generation of comparative linguists. Chief amongst them was Michel Bréal, translator of Franz Bopp and the pioneer of French semantics. Bréal presented an explicit vision of 'l'école qui tienne au sol', and debunked the widespread notion that local dialects were debased versions of French. As Sonia Branca explains: Branca (1979 : 61) Lhermite, going by his nom de plume, Savinian, became identified as the leading light in the movement. la méthode dite « savinienne » : il s'agissait de remplacer l'enseignement en français, inaccessible aux petits élèves dont le français n'était pas la langue maternelle, par un enseignement qui utilise celle-ci comme intermédiaire.

Histoire de la langue française 1880-1914 (1985 : 342) It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the project of nationalist défrichement had been abandoned by this switch to pedagogic déchiffrement. On the contrary, the idea was to render the process more effective. Even in the most sentimentally pro-dialect statements, the goal of making the French territory more productive is implicit. Maurice Barres, in his prefatory letter to Savinian in the bilingual edition of La Lionide, says: Sous le prétexte de faire des citoyens français, chaque jour on détruit ce qu'il y a sans doute de meilleur chez nous, nos petits paysans. On entend partout se plaindre que nos campagnes sont délaissées. Peut-il en être autrement ? On s'attache comme à plaisir, à relâcher, à briser tous les liens qui rattachent aujourd'hui l'enfant -et, demain, l'homme à sa terre.

[Maurice Barrès in Savinian [J. Lhermite] La Lionide, poème d'éducation, Préface de Frédéric Mistral, Lettre de Maurice Barrès, de l'Académie française. (Avignon, Aubanel Frères ;Paris, Honoré Champion, 1911)

p. xi]

What's more, the reason for the increased efficacy of this method for disseminating a pure form of standard French was conceived in terms that were specifically linked to a new interest in translation theory. Specifically, the desire was to reduce linguistic 'interference'. les deux systèmes doivent coexister parallèlement et intégralement sans interférer. D'un côté on corrige les gasconismes pour faire plus français, de l'autre on vitupère contre les francismes pour conserver plus purs gascon ou provençal. L'hostilité à l'égard du français régional est explicite chez Charles Brun qui écrit qu'en dehors de la méthode savinienne, l'enfant « n'arrivera à posséder qu'un « français régional », c'est à dire, en somme un patois » Histoire de la langue française 1880-1914 (1985 : 342) In fact, even Bréal hints that the whole point of the version exercise is to extract the pupil from his local culture. A kind of cultural translation of the individual which seems benign when referring to the study of Latin... but when transferred to the study of French by patoisant students, it carries serious colonial implications Le profit inestimable qui réside dans l'étude d'une langue […], c'est qu'elle dépayse l'esprit et l'oblige à entrer dans une autre manière de penser et de parler. Chaque construction, chaque règle grammaticale qui s'éloigne de l'usage de notre langue doit être pour l'élève une occasion de réfléchir The dépaysement that Bréal refers to, however, is implicitly supposed to pre-empt a repaysement, if you like, a synthetic reconstruction of a new mental pays -on the same lexical terrain as the old one -in the act of recreating a text. These kinds of statements hint at the influence of an embryonic translation theory with both cultural and epistemological elements. One might even be tempted to suggest that there is an anological link being made here between an implicit deverbalisation (for the sake of reverbalisation) and an implicit défrichement (clearing terrain for the sake of cultivation).

Finally, the late nineteenth century saw the innovation of at least five new academic subjects in France, all of which were reliant on a marked increase in translation activity between European modern languages, namely Comparative linguistics, semantics, stylistics, anthropology and sociology. I would argue that these are the direct antecedents of contemporary translation studies. There is an almost circular line of causality involved: increased intertranslation of European scientific discourses leads to an increased interest in metacultural and metalinguistic fields of study which in turn leads to European translation studies.

Aftermath

Some questions need to be asked. Why has European translation studies had so little to say about the internal delimitations of linguistic territorial boundaries? By which I mean to say, why does it pay relatively so little attention to 'translations' between so-called 'variations'? How, in turn, does this relate to the subject's own conceptions of the internal and external limits of its own research field? Why, for example, did Antoine Berman never explore the question of the internal étranger in any detail, despite the fact that at the same time as writing l'épreuve de l'étranger he was translating Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen : the modernization of rural France -a text which focuses very heavily on the project of territorial transformation pre-empted by aggressive linguistic standardization policies in rural schools, and even employs arguments related to cultural translation theory. Here is one telling extract from that text:

A word calls up an image, or a whole covey of images, and there can be serious problems of adjustment when a word familiar in one's own speech carries quite different connotations in another-as was the case, among others, with the word rentier, which in the south denoted not a man who drew a rent and lived on it, but a man who paid it. Even on the level of sheer practicality, difficulties of mental adjustment may arise when an object endowed with a particular gender or personality in one frame of mind has to be given another in translation. Gaston Bonheur cites a striking illustration of this problem involving the river Aude. In the local patois the river was treated, not as an object, but as a person. The article was accordingly never employed in referring to it: one went to Aude, or said that Aude was high, that Aude growls, and so forth. A whole mentality had to be bent for a small article to be added. Small wonder children and adults both had difficulty in coping with a language that was not only alien in itself but also represented an alien vision.

Eugene Weber Peasants into Frenchmen : the modernization of rural France 1870-1914(Stanford University Press 1976) p. 93 Seen in the context of an implicit desire to encourage a new unifying, transformative, technological and capitalist vision of expansionist land-use, this deliberate dépaysant 'bending' of a mentality can, I think, be called territorial translation. To understand the psycho-social mechanisms via which such a 'translation' might be propagated, we would be well advised to look back at the work of Gabriel Tarde: a man who, after all, had first-hand experience of its mind-bending effects.

[

  Périgourdin Occitan translations from: Emil Colas, Voyage en linguistique […] dictionnaire des mots patois périgourdins […] (Paris : Vic et Amat 1905)]

[

  Le Comte de Falloux (Académie française), "Le paysan d'autrefois et d'aujourd'hui" in Gustave Heuzé, Lectures et dictées d'agriculture, pour l'enseignement primaire dans les écoles rurales. (Paris, Lib. Agricole de la Maison Rustique, 1867) p. 93 -94]

[

  Julie Candler Hayes Translation, Subjectivity and Culture in France and England, 1600-1800 (Stanford University Press, 2009) p. 238 -239]

  Bréal, comparatiste, professeur au Collège de France et membre du Grand Conseil de l'Instruction Publique, publie en 1872 Quelques mots sur l'Instruction publique en France : dans cet ouvrage […] il revient sur les patois. […] Bréal y voit « des dialectes non moins anciens, non moins réguliers que le français proprement dit, lequel, pour avoir été le dialecte de l'Ile-de-France, est devenu la langue littéraire de notre pays. » [Sonia Branca « Patois, jargons, dialectes et institution scolaire dans la France du XIXe siècle » in Recherches sur le français parlé (G. A. R. S. no. 2, 1979) p. 22] Such a vision led to the introduction of a teaching practice in provincial primary schools which replaced the latent influence of Latin and the strange monolingual translation exercises with actual bilingual translations from local dialects into French, which were explicity modeled on Latin version. Branca tells us: [Les provençalistes] vont alors tenter d'orienter dans un sens nouveau cet enseignement comparé. […] Il faut […] trouver un exercice qui fournisse un modèle, un appui aux élèves et une norme de correction au maître. Un exercice surtout où les élèves soient obligés de mener une recherche active. Aurouze songe à la version, qui permet de comparer deux langues et de regrouper tous les exercices autour d'un texte. […] Le plus célèbre de ces provençalistes fut Joseph Lhermite, […] Il avait publié en 1876 une anthologie des poètes provençaux qui devait servir de recueil de versions pour l'enseignement du français en Provence. En 1911 parut La Lionide, poème en langue provençale, préfacé par Mistral et Barrès et destiné à servir d'épopée à usage scolaire.

Michel

  Bréal Quelque mots sur l'instruction publique en France (Paris : Hachette 1872) p. 164 [my emphasis]


P.-H Conze

F Tilquin

V Noblet

F Rousseau

F Heitz

P Pessaux

HIERARCHICAL MULTI-SCALE SUPERVOXEL MATCHING USING RANDOM FORESTS FOR AUTOMATIC SEMI-DENSE ABDOMINAL IMAGE REGISTRATION

Keywords: semi-dense image registration, supervoxel matching, random forests, hierarchical multi-scale

This paper addresses the estimation of pairwise supervoxel correspondences toward automatic semi-dense medical image registration. Supervoxel matching is performed through random forests (RF) with supervoxel indexes as label entities to predict matching areas in another target image. Ensuring accurate supervoxel boundary adherence requires a fine supervoxel decomposition which highly increases learning complexity. To alleviate this issue, we extend RF based supervoxel matching from single to multi-scale using a recursive hierarchical supervoxel representation. Output RF matching probabilities obtained for the last scale are gathered with ancestor matching probabilities which acts as a coarse-to-fine matching guidance. The effectiveness of our method is highlighted for semi-dense abdominal image registration relying on liver label propagation and consistency assessment.

INTRODUCTION

Estimating an accurate matching between consistent entities such as voxels, supervoxels or patches is a fundamental task in image processing with applications to medical image analysis. In particular, non-rigid image registration is required for a wide range of medical contexts including organ motion compensation, longitudinal tumor follow-up, pre-and postoperative image matching or cohort analysis [START_REF] Schnabel | Advances and challenges in deformable image registration: From image fusion to complex motion modelling[END_REF].

These applications require an initial alignment used as an initialization toward a more complex deformation model estimation. Such complex geometric transformations can be then derived either from physical models (fluid flow or diffusion models, flow of diffeomorphisms...) or interpolation theory (radial basis functions, free-form deformations...) [START_REF] Sotiras | Deformable medical image registration: A survey[END_REF]. For accurate initialization matching, spatial prior is usually considered based on anatomy recognition or landmark matching [START_REF] Glocker | Robust registration of longitudinal spine CT[END_REF]. It requires expert annotations which are time-consuming and prone to misinterpretation and human error.

To avoid this interaction, random forests (RF) [START_REF] Breiman | Random Forests[END_REF] have been recently proposed to establish supervoxel correspondences in a unsupervised fashion [START_REF] Kanavati | Supervoxel classification forests for estimating pairwise image correspondences[END_REF]. Similarly to [START_REF] Zikic | Encoding atlases by randomized classification forests for efficient multi-atlas label propagation[END_REF] which encodes a single labeled image as a forest for multi-atlas label propagation, [START_REF] Kanavati | Supervoxel classification forests for estimating pairwise image correspondences[END_REF] describes a single source image as a collection of supervoxels whose indexes are used via RF to predict matching areas in another target image, leading to semi-dense correspondences. For the purpose of supervoxel matching, the selection of the supervoxel resolution is key to ensure accurate boundary adherence of supervoxels. The underlying issue is how to find a good trade-off between large supervoxels which may overlap different tissue types or organs and small supervoxels without enough discriminative power [START_REF] Conze | Scale-adaptive supervoxelbased random forests for liver tumor segmentation in dynamic contrast-enhanced CT scans[END_REF], leading to highly complex learning. Merging information from multiple supervoxel layers may achieve a more flexible representation [START_REF] Heinrich | Deformable image registration by combining uncertainty estimates from supervoxel belief propagation[END_REF] but does not carry a hierarchical scheme allowing coarse-to-fine matching guidance.

In this perspective, we extend automatic semi-dense medical image registration through RF from single [START_REF] Kanavati | Supervoxel classification forests for estimating pairwise image correspondences[END_REF] to multi-scale supervoxel matching. Relying on a hierarchical multi-scale supervoxel representation successfully applied to multi-class tissue classification [START_REF] Geremia | Spatially adaptive random forests[END_REF][START_REF] Conze | Scale-adaptive supervoxelbased random forests for liver tumor segmentation in dynamic contrast-enhanced CT scans[END_REF], our framework implicitly constrains the matching search space in a coarse-to-fine strategy. We demonstrate its effectiveness in the field of CT abdominal image registration which remains an open issue due to wide organ size, shape and appearance heterogeneity.

SUPERVOXEL MATCHING USING RF

Automatic semi-dense image registration is considered between two 3D abdominal images I f and I s where each image I p : Ω p ⊂ N 3 → N associates a greyscale value I p (x) to each voxel v p located at x p ∈ Ω p with p ∈ {f, s}. Toward this goal, we aim at establishing correspondences between supervoxels over-segmenting I f and I s following [START_REF] Kanavati | Supervoxel classification forests for estimating pairwise image correspondences[END_REF]. Let F = {f i } i∈{1,...,|F |} and S = {s j } j∈{1,...,|S|} be respectively the sef of |F| and |S| connected supervoxels partitioning I f and I s . The supervoxel decomposition is performed using a 3D extension of the Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) superpixel algorithm [START_REF] Achanta | SLIC superpixels compared to state-of-the-art superpixel methods[END_REF] which aggregates neighboring voxels v p based on spatial and intensity proximity criteria. Fig. 1. Single-scale supervoxel matching [START_REF] Kanavati | Supervoxel classification forests for estimating pairwise image correspondences[END_REF] between I f and I s using random forest [START_REF] Breiman | Random Forests[END_REF] applied with SLIC [START_REF] Achanta | SLIC superpixels compared to state-of-the-art superpixel methods[END_REF] supervoxel indexes as label entities followed by majority voting.

Semi-dense image registration translates in automatically learning a mapping function h that maps each supervoxel s j ∈ S of I s to a given supervoxel f i ∈ F of I f [START_REF] Kanavati | Supervoxel classification forests for estimating pairwise image correspondences[END_REF] such that ∀j ∈ {1, . . . , |S|}, ∃i ∈ {1, . . . , |F|} | h(s j ) = f i .

Single-scale supervoxel matching

Single-scale supervoxel matching (Fig. 1) is carried out via random forest (RF) [START_REF] Breiman | Random Forests[END_REF]. RF builds a voxel/supervoxel index mapping model aiming at assigning a supervoxel f i ∈ F to each voxel v s ∈ Ω s . Thus, a training set is built by considering all voxels v f of Ω f with associated supervoxel index, i.e. the index of the supervoxel f i they belong to. Once trained, RF is applied to I s to predict for each v s the index of a supervoxel of F. Majority voting is performed within each supervoxel of S among all voxel-wise predictions to return for each s j of I s the best match h(s j ) among supervoxels of F.

RF consists of T uncorrelated trees made of both internal nodes splitting data according to binary tests Ψ and leaf nodes which reach all together a final data partition. At each internal node, the split sends voxels v p to left and right children nodes. The associated binary test Ψ focuses on a random subset θ(v p ) (p ∈ {f, s}) of visual features θ(v p ) assigned to v p (Sect.2.2) and divides the input voxel set based on the following rule:

Ψ(v p , θ(v p )) = true, if θ(v p ) > τ false, otherwise (1)
where θ(v p ) is compared to a threshold τ . Internal node parameters ({τ, θ(v p )}) are optimized via information gain maximization with respect to L = {v f , c(f i )} combining voxels v f belonging to f i with their associated supervoxel index c(f i ) = i with i ∈ {1, . . . , |F|}. After optimization, each leaf node l t of the t th tree receives a partition L lt of L and produces an entire class probability distribution: p lt (c(f i )|L) ∀i ∈ {1, . . . , |F|}.

To predict the corresponding supervoxel index c(f i ) of a given voxel v s ∈ Ω s with associated visual features θ(v s ) during testing, v s is injected into each optimized tree and finally reaches a leaf node l t per tree following successive split rules (Eq.1). Let us define p(h(v s ) = f n ) as the probability that f n is assigned to voxel v s . For each supervoxel f n ∈ F, we get:

p(h(v s ) = f n ) = 1 T T t=1 p lt (c(f n )|L) = 1 T T t=1 |{v f , c(f l )} ∈ L lt | l = n | |L lt | (2)
The final voxel (v s ) to supervoxel (f i ) mapping is obtained by maximizing p(h

(v s ) = f n ). h(v s ) = f i = arg max fn∈F p(h(v s ) = f n ) (3)
The last step deals with majority voting among all the voxels of a given supervoxel s j ∈ S. The most represented supervoxel index is thus selected as follows:

h(s j ) = f i | c(f i ) = arg max hist({c(h(v s )) | v s ∈ s j }) (4) 2.

Voxel-wise context appearance features

Denoting Īw p (v p ) the mean intensity on a local box of size w centered on v p , context appearance features [START_REF] Zikic | Encoding atlases by randomized classification forests for efficient multi-atlas label propagation[END_REF][START_REF] Glocker | Robust registration of longitudinal spine CT[END_REF][START_REF] Kanavati | Supervoxel classification forests for estimating pairwise image correspondences[END_REF] θ(v p ) = {θ m (v p )} m∈{0,...,Ka-1} assigned to voxels v p following are:

θ m (v p ) = Īw p (v p + ∆ r ) -b × Īw p (v p + ∆ r ) (5)
where ∆ {r,r } ∈ B(0, Φ), Φ is the maximal offset and b ∈ {0, 1}. By randomly generating many different box sizes w and offsets ∆ r , we obtain a large set of K a features describing the extended spatial context. {w, w , ∆ r , ∆ r , b} are generated once and remain similar for each voxel of I f and I s .

EXTENSION TO A HIERARCHICAL MULTI-SCALE REPRESENTATION

Using single-scale supervoxel decomposition for semi-dense registration is prone to errors. Supervoxel resolutions must be carefully selected since large supervoxels may overlap different tissues or organs contrary to small ones which lead to computationally intensive learning while being not enough representative (huge number of classes with few samples) [START_REF] Conze | Scale-adaptive supervoxelbased random forests for liver tumor segmentation in dynamic contrast-enhanced CT scans[END_REF].

Manually setting the scale is cumbersome since it requires exhaustive trials. Even the best compromise may not provide optimal results without relying on multi-scale guidance to accurately match consistent anatomies. We now describe how [START_REF] Kanavati | Supervoxel classification forests for estimating pairwise image correspondences[END_REF] can be extended in a hierarchical multi-scale fashion.

Hierarchical multi-scale supervoxel representation

The proposed original extension (Fig. 2) is based on a hierarchical multi-scale supervoxel representation [START_REF] Geremia | Spatially adaptive random forests[END_REF][START_REF] Conze | Scale-adaptive supervoxelbased random forests for liver tumor segmentation in dynamic contrast-enhanced CT scans[END_REF]. For I f , it requires a decomposition of Ω f into a set of K + 1 partitions source I f hierarchical multi-scale SLIC [START_REF] Conze | Scale-adaptive supervoxelbased random forests for liver tumor segmentation in dynamic contrast-enhanced CT scans[END_REF] training random forest [START_REF] Breiman | Random Forests[END_REF] source Is hierarchical multi-scale SLIC [START_REF] Conze | Scale-adaptive supervoxelbased random forests for liver tumor segmentation in dynamic contrast-enhanced CT scans[END_REF] single-scale pred. [START_REF] Kanavati | Supervoxel classification forests for estimating pairwise image correspondences[END_REF] proposed prediction Fig. 2. Proposed extension of automatic semi-dense registration via random forest [START_REF] Breiman | Random Forests[END_REF] from single [START_REF] Kanavati | Supervoxel classification forests for estimating pairwise image correspondences[END_REF] to multi-scale supervoxel matching based on a hierarchical supervoxel representation [START_REF] Conze | Scale-adaptive supervoxelbased random forests for liver tumor segmentation in dynamic contrast-enhanced CT scans[END_REF]. Colors for training and prediction illustrate supervoxel indexes.

P k f = {f k i } defined at scales k ∈ {0, . . . , K} where 0 and K denote resp. coarsest and finest scales. Each partition

{P k f } is a collection of connected 3D supervoxels {f k i } built at scale k such that f k i ∩ f k j =i = ∅ and i f k i = Ω f . The sequence of partitions {P k f } is encoded in the layers of a multi-resolution tree M f = {M k f } where the layer M k f maps each super- voxel f k i ∈ P k f to a set of child supervoxels {f k+1 j } ⊂ P k+1 f such that f k i = j f k+1 j
. This multi-scale decomposition is similarly applied to I s leading to K +1 partitions P k s = {s k i }. This representation is obtained through a recursive coarseto-fine process. We consider an initial partition P 0 f (resp. P 0 s ) of only one supervoxel. This supervoxel is then split into K s children supervoxels {f 1 j } ⊂ P 1 f ({s 1 j } ⊂ P 1 s ) using SLIC applied on the region formed by its voxels 1 . Once built, each f 1 j (s 1 j ) is split into K s children and this procedure is repeated iteratively down to the K th layer of M f (M s ) [START_REF] Conze | Scale-adaptive supervoxelbased random forests for liver tumor segmentation in dynamic contrast-enhanced CT scans[END_REF].

Hierarchical multi-scale supervoxel matching

The first step consists in performing a single-scale supervoxel matching [START_REF] Kanavati | Supervoxel classification forests for estimating pairwise image correspondences[END_REF] for each scale k independently using context features θ(v p ). Each supervoxel s k j belonging to partition P k s is thus matched to a given supervoxel h(s k j ) = f k i ∈ P k f . Then, the hierarchical matching occurs. Let A(f k i , d) ∈ P k-d f be the ancestor of f k i of degree d defined at scale k -d. The intuition behind our contribution is that the matching probability obtained via RF at scale k should be affected by the matching probabilities arising from the previous scales. We rely in practice on a multi-scale probability aggregation strategy starting from supervoxels of scale K. Their output RF matching probabilities are updated as follows:

p h(s K j ) = f K i = p h(s K j ) = f K i × K d=1 p h(A(s K j , d)) = A(f K i , d) (6)
1 implementation of B. Irving, http://maskslic.birving.com.

The supervoxel (s K j ) to supervoxel (f K i ) mapping at scale K is finally obtained by maximizing p(h(s

K j ) = f K n ). h(s K j ) = f K i = arg max f K n ∈P K f p(h(s K j ) = f K n ) (7)
By focusing on finest supervoxels, we get a fine representation not prone to overlap issues. Single-scale matching [START_REF] Kanavati | Supervoxel classification forests for estimating pairwise image correspondences[END_REF] applied on these supervoxels results in many bad matches (Fig. 2) due to too many small-size, non-discriminative classes. Our coarse-to-fine hierarchical guidance alleviates ambiguities by implicitly reducing the matching search space.

SEMI-DENSE REGISTRATION RESULTS

Experiments focus on data collected from 25 examination pairs stemming from 6 patients with hepato-cellular carcinoma (HCC). Each pair brings together two CT scans acquired for the same patient at different time points varying from 41 to 407 days. Image pairs are processed both in forward (FW) and backward (BW) which translates in performing learning on I f (resp. I s ) and prediction on I s (I f ) to get mapping functions h FW (s k j ) = f k i and h BW (f k i ) = s k j ∀k. To compare the single (sgl-) [START_REF] Kanavati | Supervoxel classification forests for estimating pairwise image correspondences[END_REF] and proposed multiscale (mlt-) supervoxel matching (SM) methods, we rely on a hierarchical supervoxel decomposition with K = 12 scales, empirically set to get an accurate description of each scan. sgl-SM is directly applied on the finest scale K whereas mlt-SM applies sgl-SM at each scale independently before gathering ancestor probabilities (Eq.6). Each supervoxel at scale k is split into K s = 2 children defined at scale k + 1 allowing a progressive multi-scale guidance. A SLIC compactness [START_REF] Achanta | SLIC superpixels compared to state-of-the-art superpixel methods[END_REF] of 0.25 with CT intensities rescaled to [0, 1] reaches a good trade-off between compactness and boundary adherence. K a = 400 features are generated for each v p with a maximal offset of Φ = 50 voxels and box sizes w ∈ {3, 5, 7}.

Supervoxel matching allows a straightforward propagation of anatomical labels. To evaluate {sgl, mlt}-SM quantitatively, we provide liver label propagation results through 1. Quantitative comparisons of RF-based single-scale (sgl-) [START_REF] Kanavati | Supervoxel classification forests for estimating pairwise image correspondences[END_REF] and hierarchical multi-scale (mlt-) supervoxel matching (SM) via liver label propagation and inconsistency averaged over the database (FW and BW). Best results in bold.

DICE, sensitivity and specificity scores comparing liver propagation and ground-truth 2 (GT) masks. Supervoxel correspondences are also assessed through FW/BW inconsistency scores defined for each supervoxel f K i and s K j similarly to:

χ(f K i ) = C f K i -C h BW (h FW (f K i )) 2 (8)
with C(.) the supervoxel centroid. Global inconsistency scores χ(h FW ) (resp. χ(h BW )) for {I f , I s } are then computed via a normalized sum of all χ(f K i ) (resp. χ(s K j )) weighted by their belonging voxels number, |f K i | (|s K j |). {sgl, mlt}-SM are applied with two different SLIC decompositions: without and with a-priori liver segmentation awareness to evaluate supervoxels matchings without being disturbed by boundary adherence issues. In this latter case, the first scale is used to separate the liver from other abdominal structures. Multi-scale decompositions are then performed independently for both areas and finally merged.

We present a comparative assessment of {sgl, mlt}-SM in Tab.1. Without a-priori, it reveals better results using mlt-SM which achieves highest DICE (82.3 against 72.2), sens and spec combined with lowest inconsistency (from 22.1 to 10.1 voxels). More significant gains arise with liver segmentation a-priori, especially for DICE whose improvement is ≈27.4%. DICE for sgl is worse with than without apriori since liver-awarness decomposition generates more supervoxels by construction. Despite additional computational cost, results confirm the significant impact of our multi-scale matching probability aggregation scheme, as highlighted by the accuracy of prediction and liver propagation shown Fig. 3.

CONCLUSION

Our work focuses on automatic semi-dense image registration using maching learning. We extended random forest (RF) based supervoxel matching from single to multi-scale using a recursive hierarchical supervoxel representation. RF matching probabilities are gathered together with ancestor probabilities acting as a coarse-to-fine guidance. We demonstrate its effectiveness on challenging abdominal CT scans and will further explore this scheme using forward-backward consistency for multi-phases and multi-modal registration.

  source I f single-scale SLIC vx-wise training random forest (RF) source Is single-scale SLIC vx-wise prediction majority voting

2

  provided by Visible Patient, www.visiblepatient.com --FW ---BW I f Is training sgl-SM pred. mlt-SM pred. --FW --BW source GT liver sgl-SM propag. mlt-SM propag.

Fig. 3 .

 3 Fig. 3. Assessment of {sgl, mlt}-SM with training, prediction (no a-priori), GT and propagated liver (a-priori) masks.

  DICE 72.21 ± 9.72 82.27 ± 5.00 67.82 ± 13.8 95.21 ± 6.64 sens 72.60 ± 12.7 83.54 ± 7.84 62.56 ± 17.8 93.27 ± 10.1 spec 92.91 ± 5.23 95.28 ± 3.08 95.23 ± 3.81 99.55 ± 0.91 χ(h) 21.10 ± 7.03 10.07 ± 4.49 24.33 ± 6.91 10.27 ± 4.46

		sgl-SM	mlt-SM	sgl-SM	mlt-SM
	SLIC	without a-priori	with a-priori
	Table

This work received the financial support of BPI France, www. bpifrance.fr


Retracing Samuel Trainor

Retracing transparency: calques and creativity in modernist translation

That last parenthesis is a nod to Paul Scheerbart's strange utopian Glasarchitektur (1914), notable as much for its influence on the 'panopticon' dystopia of Yevgeny Zamyatin, as for the uncanny prescience Benjamin recognises in its modernist redefinition of the architectural interior. Again, this comes from the Arcades Project

The twentieth century, with its porosity and transparency [Transparenz], its tendency toward the well-lit and airy, has put an end to dwelling in the old sense. [p. 104 ([14,4]) Arcades Project] But the built environment is not the only aspect of modern technological society for which transparency is a ubiquitous, radical feature. The proliferation of transparent plastics means that virtually nobody in the developed world now leaves home without something transparent about their person: the dial of a watch, contact lenses, the screen of a smartphone, sleeves for credit cards, the cling-film around their sandwiches, a bottle of water.... in fact, the late capitalist phenomenon of bottled water as a staple commodity depends entirely on the possibility of manufacturing cheap transparent plastic bottles.

Karl Marx suggested that the late stages of commodity fetishism would be characterised by a kind of paradoxical transparency -the fetishism becoming easy to 'see through ' [durchschauen], and yet all the more pervasive. André Gide once described the desire (la convoitise) for the commodified object as a spiritual loss of 'transparency' -j'éprouve que chaque objet de cette terre, que je convoite, se fait opaque, par cela même que je le convoite, et que le monde entier perd aussitôt sa transparence. But our society tends to figure the process of commodification as the presentation of an object in some kind of see-through plastic packaging.

One can't help feeling that the political and corporate tropes of 'transparency' might be related to this point-of-sale packaging industry. Almost every recently elected representative in the so-called 'Western World' has claimed at some point to uphold 'transparency'. For example, the first memorandum written by Barack Obama after his inauguration in 2009, begins:

A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency. As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, "sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants."

Moreover, transparency is a heavily exploited quality, and a recurring theme, in literature and art, particularly since the 'age of mechanical reproduction'. Think of Art nouveau glasswork, Mallarmé's obsession with windows and venetian glass; Van Gogh's 'glass of absinthe', Manet's repetitive paintings of flowers in glass vases, the decanters and carafes in cubist still lives, Stephen Dedalus on Sandymount Strand -'Limit of the diaphine in, why in?... diaphane, adiaphane' -Marcel Duchamp' 'La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même', John Cage's 'plexigrams'... and a thousand other things.

So transparency pervades modernity. But what exactly is 'transparency'? Tropes of transparency abound in philosophical and critical discourses across language cultures. They form fundamental cognitive metaphors, but, especially in translation, they seem troublingly nebulous. And, crucially, within discourses that discuss the problems and possibilities of translation, they seem not merely 'troubling' but genuinely troubles... as clear as mud.

I'm going to take a few minutes to trace one or two of the highlights from some of the best known core texts of Translation Studies to demonstrate what I mean. I'll begin with one of the foundational texts in the French tradition, Georges Mounin's Les belles infidèles.

Mounin's book concludes with a typology of translation strategies -pre-empting Ladmiral's cibliste and sourcière -under the self-consciously poetic headings Les verres transparents and Les verres colorés. Les verres transparents are figured as translations that are functionally indistinguishable from contemporary writing emergent from the literary tradition of the target language. They aspire to an ideal attributed to Gogol, which Mounin (unfortunately) gives only in French as: devenir un verre si transparent qu'on croie qu'il n'y a pas de verre. On the other hand, les verres colorés are translations that carry various perceptible tints of the language, culture and literary tradition of the source text. The analysis is canonical and lucid, but the metaphor is problematic.

The first thing to say, is that this trope (seemingly unconsciously) reproduces Mallarmé's fondness for the pun on verre (glass) and vers (verse). Slight cracks seem already to be forming in the surfaces of our supposedly perspicuous signifiers, muddying the waters ... The second thing to note is how deeply problematic it is to figure the ideal 'invisibility' of glass as a material -quite apart from colourlessness, this also implies the disappearance of any of the reflections, distortions, magnifications, depths, dust, cracks and blemishes that render a pane of glass perceptible. And to refer to this illusion of metaphysical absence as 'transparency' is semantically dubious for two reasons. The first resides in the perfectly obvious redundancy of the term transparent if it is totally synonymous with invisible. The second is to be found in the stranger, but just as crucial, possibility of the polar opposite. That is to say the pane of glass that goes unseen -and is thus functionally invisible -because it is entirely and convincingly reflective, like an illusionist's mirror: "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane." Nabokov's waxwing -the Russian migrant redolant of Icarus -is killed not by absolute transparency but by a perfect reflection of the blue sky... later called the "feigned remoteness" (the illusion of the beyond). This too is invisibility. So when Mounin congratulates Nazim Hikmet [p. 78] for producing a couplet in impeccable French (as impeccable as Nabokov's in English) by saying: on ne distingue plus quand la vitre du traducteur s'interpose entre le poète et nous, how can we distinguish between perfect 'transparency' and perfect 'reflection' (and thus a total absence of transparency) in this trompe l'oeil of invisibility that slays the critical waxwing?

It is in precisely the same nullifying terms that Lawrence Venuti employs 'transparency' in The Translator's Invisibility. He doesn't quote Gogol directly, but through the lens of Norman Shapiro: "I see translation (says Shapiro) as the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does not seem to be translated. A good translation is like a pane of glass. You only notice that it's there when there are little imperfections -scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn't be any." (Venuti: 1995, 1) [The actual source is Kratz, D. (1986) 'An Interview with Norman Shapiro', Translation Review 19, 27-8. But Venuti does not provide this attribution.] I certainly do not intend to counter Venuti's cogent argument that such domestication poses serious ethical concerns, However, the trope of transparency is clearly ('opaquely') auto-deconstructive in Venuti's explanation:

A translation is judged acceptable by most publishers, reviewers, and readers [...] when the absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem transparent, giving the appearance that it reflects [...] the essential meaning of the foreign text -the appearance, in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation" (My emphases.) Is this hypothetical (non-)translation 'transparent' or does it 'reflect'? For which reason does it go unnoticed? Were it to do both (as transparent media nearly always do) it would be invisible in neither of the senses mentioned above (it would neither dematerialize nor trick the viewer with a perfect reflection). Under such circumstances might these self-revealing reflections not have a foreignizing effect, drawing as much attention to what Mounin calls la vitre... qui s'interpose as his couleurs, or as Shaprio's 'scratches' and 'bubbles'? Of course, there is an assumption here. Can we really say that Mounin's transparent is exactly synonymous with the cognate 'transparent' in Venuti's English? The shared etymology is certainly suggestive, but might transparent be a faux ami? There is a danger, here, of ignoring an alternative translation of the French transparent into English: namely 'see-through'. It would take a good deal of time -time I don't have -to explore all the semantic and socio-linguistic alterations caused by such a translation. However, this is quibbling. By comparison, translation from German into both French and English, throws up some genuinely troubling opacities. The first point to make is that the cognate term Transparenz holds a rather more doubtful position in German philosophical discourses precisely, one suspects, because it is etymologically French. For example, when Heidegger talks about the experience of transparency in creative work characterized by Zuhandenheit rather than Vorhandenheit, he always employs the more commonplace term durchsichtig (see-through). As an English reader, I can't help feeling that this is because the frenchified Transparenz (with its connotations of the abstract and aristocratic) feels too close to Vorhandenheit. However, one German Translation theorist does use the term Transparenz in an approving way. Elmar Tophoven employs it to refer to a methodology of procedural openness in a form of translation that seeks to grant the reader access to the processes of translation and thus to allow translators to question their methods and their cultural influences as they work.

However, the most troubling usage of a transparency trope is to be found in Walter Benjamin's The Task of the Translator. The infamous statement introducing the concept of 'pure language' -a worryingly Platonic metaphysical metaphor -is couched in the following terms: [in Steven Rendell's translation] "True translation is transparent*, it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original. This is made possible above all by conveying the syntax word-forword, and this demonstrates that the word, not the sentence, is the original element of translation. For the sentence is the wall in front of the language of the original, and word-for-word rendering is the arcade.

Read in this English translation, or the French translation by Gondillac and Rochlitz, the first thing that stands out is the apparently paradoxical use of 'transparent' transparent. Where Mounin and Venuti use it to name the cibliste ideal, Benjamin employs it to precisely the opposite effect. His 'transparent' translation is radically, extremely sourcière. The original syntax is an opaque 'wall' that is not to be rearranged but rendered a luminous arcade by word-for-word translation. But the point, of course, is that he doesn't use the German word transparent but durchscheinend... literally through-shine-ly. If durchsichtig is equivalent to the English 'see-through' then durchscheinend is 'shine-through', that is 'translucent' translucide. Except, not quite. In German there is also the word: lichtdurchlässig for translucent, which is less likely to be confused with 'transparent' in this way. Durchscheinend appears to occupy a slightly more ambiguous semantic field like 'diaphanous', which might refer to something that is either properly transparent or merely translucent... or both, depending on where it is placed in relation to an object or a source of light... like a piece of tracing paper... un morceau de papier calque.

So durchscheinend translation is... Wörtlichkeit is... the arcade. Think back to the Passagen-Werk. In fact, if you go back and look at Eiland and McLaughlin's canonical English translation of the Arcades Project, you'll see no less than 6 different German terms all translated with the totalizing signifiers 'transparent ' and 'transparency'. They are : Transparenz, durchsichtig, durchscheinend, Durchschaubarkeit, lichtdurchlässig and Farblosigkeit. It appears that the totalizing and semantically neutralizing signified of the philosophical 'transparent', from the French transparent, has leaked into a totalizing and semantically neutralizing use of the signifier 'transparent' in translation.

It would be hard to imagine Benjamin accepting this kind of thing as 'true' durchscheinend translation. This is not Wörtlichkeit. But what actually is Wörtlichkeit? There is a thin line, a hair's breadth, between Benjamin's Wörtlichkeit-Arkade and the calque.

Section 2. Calques and Creativity in Modernist Translation

The book I'm working on proposes a new theory and praxis of 'creative transparency' in literary translation. One of its key features is the concept of the 'creative calque'.

What follows is one, very small, example of what I believe to be the creative critical value of the calque:

The Joycean epigraph to this presentation is also the epigraph to Jacques Derrida's essay on Foucault, "Cogito et histoire de la folie" collected in Écriture et différence: N'importe, c'était terriblement risqué, ce livre. Une feuille transparente le sépare de la folie.

(J. JOYCE, à propos d'Ulysse)

I know of two published translations into English. The more recent is by Alan Bass in his translation of Writing and Difference.

In any event this book was terribly daring. A transparent sheet separates it from madness.

On the face of it, this seems quite a good translation, at least as far as one is able to discern in this abstract context. In particular, Bass's handling of the potential pitfall une feuille transparente as 'a transparent sheet' appears lucid. However, the immediate context renders the translation dubious. It's an English translation of a French quotation from a native English speaker; and it follows a (mis)quotation of Kierkegaard, originally given in an unsubtly foreignized form of French, employing the Germanic capitalization of nouns:

… L'Instant de la Décision est une Folie... (KIERKEGAARD)

Elsewhere in the collection, there is evidence that Bass, whenever possible, uses existing English translations of secondary texts. When handling Derrida's quotation of Freud's note on the 'Mystic Writing Pad', in the essay "Freud et la scène de l'écriture", for example, Bass uses the canonical James Strachey translation. It is worth quoting some of the Strachey (alongside terms employed in the Laplanche and Pontalis translation used by Derrida):

The Mystic Pad is a slab of dark brown resin or wax with a paper edging; over the slab is laid a thin transparent sheet [durchscheinendes Blatt ; 'feuille transparente'] […] This transparent sheet [feuille transparente] is the more interesting part of the little device. It itself consists of two layers, which can be detached from each other except at their two ends.

The upper layer is a transparent [durchsichtige ; 'transparent'] piece of celluloid; the lower layer is made of thin translucent [durchscheindes ; 'transparent'] waxed paper.

Again we see the totalizing, nullifying use of the French signifier : transparent to render the nuanced German terms durchsichtig and durchscheinend.

Derrida perfectly exemplifies the symbolic neutralization effected by this concept of transparency:

Le langage étant la rupture même avec la folie, [… il n'est] plus séparé que par la « feuille transparente » dont parle Joyce, par soi-même, car cette diaphanéité n'est rien d'autre que le langage, le sens, la possibilité, et la discrétion élémentaire d'un rien qui neutralise tout. [Derrida 1967:85] What we also see, of course, is an intertextual justification for Bass's translation of Joyce's feuille transparente as 'transparent sheet'. In fact, the effect on the reader, when encountering this correspondence, is perhaps to experience a sense of retrospective illumination of the Joyce epigraph... of course: Freud... madness... the transparent sheet. It's all becoming clear. Joyce is thinking of Freud's Wunderblock.

However, the reader with a sensitivity to the ethics of translation might also think: but where did that Joyce quotation come from? Was it originally French? Is there an existing translation by someone who read it in context? Is this appropriation to the terms of the collection really justified?

In fact, it was indeed originally in French. It comes from Jacques Mercanton's Les heures de James Joyce, a mémoire of the Swiss writer's meetings with Joyce during the period of composition of what was to become Finnegans Wake. During one of their meetings, Mercanton describes the two men discussing his belief in the fundamental importance of 'transposition' in art -by which he means something very similar to Jakobson's 'intersemiotic translation' -and how this justified Joyce's own 'translation' of the visual content of dreams into the auditory and linguistic:

Une foyll transpaREnte le say-par de la folly With an English accent, only a transparent leaf separates feuille from folie... and, indeed, séparer from c'est pareil But don't take my word for it. Here's that pun from the horse's mouth. This is from the first part of Finnegans Wake :

Hence when the clouds roll by, jamey, a proudseye view is enjoyable of our mounding's mass, now Wallinstone national museum, with, in some greenish distance, the charmful waterloose country and the two quitewhite villagettes who hear show of themselves so gigglesomes minxt the follyages, the prettilees! Penetrators are permitted into the museomound free.

That 'follyages' is at once 'foliage' (the greenwood... a focal area of both concealment and revelation in a highly sexualised landscape... the site of the sight and sound of frisky 'gigglesome' frolicking), and it's the folly of the ages... the polar opposite of the wisdom of the ages that one expects to find in the actual museum here, the 'museomound' to which penetrators are permitted free. Running quickly through the three existing French translations. We see that Du Bouchet's 1962, feuillée etymologically digs up [fouiller] the architectural folly. Lavergne's canonical translation has folliages which seems a neat equivalent with a partially comparable double sense, and the latest (ongoing) translation by Hervé Michel, gives fouillages, which is my favourite, for its triple overlay of fou … fouiller … and feuillage especially coming after his folâterleau for 'waterloose'.

So this extract reveals something of the subtextual fetishistic, sexualised quality of this pun on feuille and folie. Not just the terms and their cultural associations... think feuille de vigne think folies bergère -but also of the fetishistic nature of the pun itself for Joyce.

This then leads me to my concluding example of creative transparency in translation of the Joycean epigraph. It consists of two 'creative calques', which when metaphorically 'overlaid' give a third 'creative metacalque'.

The first is rather camp, in keeping with the echoes of Finnegans Wake :

Anyway, it was frightfully risqué, that book. A transparent figleaf separates it from sheer folly.

The figleaf, of course, is what would separate 'penetrators into the museomound' from the sexual organs on the statues and paintings....

The second of my 'creative calques' focuses on the concrete reality of the book... what, it asks, is a feuille transparente in an actual book? Here's the translation:

In any case that book was terribly audacious. A see-through folio, a tissue paper insert, separates it from insanity.

This 'see-through folio' is what in French is called une serpente (a 'tissue guard' une feuille intercalaire en papier de soie) in fact, French bibliophiles will refer to the hors-texte sous serpente (the plate covered with a tissue guard). In a material sense, this is what might separate Joyce's book from its hors-textual insanity. But, of course, this doesn't lose its fetishistic nature. The tissue guard is one of the most important fetishized features of high quality books from this period for contemporary bibliophiles who have been known to sniff and stroke the objects of their chronic diachronic desire.... or for Gide convoitise.

So, my final synthetic metacalque, my overlaid multifocal transparency, which will have to stand as the implicitly synoptic conclusion to my paper, is this:

In

  Section 1. Tracing Transparency Transparency pervades modernity. Walter Benjamin predicted it would become a ubiquitous and revolutionary feature of the modern technological and social environment. As he notes in the Passagen-Werk : "It is the peculiarity of technological forms of production, that their progress and their success are proportionate to the transparency [Durchsichtigkeit] of their social content. (Hence glass architecture.)" [Passagen-Werk N4,6, P.465 The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Havard University Press 1999].

any case, that book was frightfully [f]risky. / A see-through folio separates it from [sheer] folly.

Samuel Trainor, Retracing transparency: calques and creativity in modernist translation. Journée d'études Traductologie, traduction : travail et création (Université Lille 3, 14 février 2014) 9

Samuel Trainor, Retracing transparency: calques and creativity in modernist translation. Journée d'études Traductologie, traduction : travail et création (Université Lille 3, 14 février 2014)

Si j'avais mûri, je n'aurais pas fait cette folie d'écrire Work in Progress. [dit Joyce] […] Il se préoccupe de l'objection capitale qu'on peut lui faire : avoir traduit en impressions auditives les images du rêve […] Ce genre de transposition, dis-je, est l'essence même de l'art.

Joyce confirms that his technique of interior monologue, used in Ulysses, was just such a 'transposition'. But then he issues an irascible, bellicose dismissal of interior monologue as a technique he has outgrown: Je m'en moque aujourd'hui, maintenant que je m'en suis servi. Que le pont saute, pourvue que j'aie fait passé mes régiments.

Then he says... N'importe, c'était terriblement risqué, ce livre. Une feuille transparente le sépare de la folie.

Unlike Alan Bass, Mercanton's translator, Lloyd C. Parks, had access to this (and far more) contextual information. Here's his translation: Nonetheless, that book was a terrible risk. A transparent leaf separates it from madness.

On the face of it, this seems a pretty bad translation. 'Nonetheless' is excessively cohesive and formal ; 'that book was a terrible risk' is a rather po-faced transposition ; and 'transparent leaf' is a glaring calque.

It's not exactly the kind of 'creative calque' that I've been hinting at. But it points us in the right direction. If creative transparency, like Benjamin's Wörtlichkeit, is supposed to open up the text to a kind of multifocal illumination, then this leafy oddity does seem to have a certain translucency.

Looking back through it at Joyce's original pairing of feuille and folie reveals a typically Joycean play on words. The formal similarity of the signifiers -especially with this particular group of letters -should immediately draw the attention of anybody who has ever read even a few pages of Finnegans Wake (the text Mercanton was working on with Joyce). Part 2, in particular, is full of folio after folio, of f/l words that foil and fold back the fallow semantic fields; those fool enough to follow their flow, their floods, their flight might well fall foul of folly. A folly, of course, une foliean extravagant maison de plaisance in the parkland of a rich estate -is supposedly initially derived not from fou but from feuillée, as in abri de feuillage. Folie (not madness, but extravagance) has influenced the word by false etymology. This architectural 'folly' is a loanword in English, and its unlikely that an English speaker as sensitive to lexical slippages as Joyce would use the French folie in such close proximity to feuille without bringing this to mind.

At the beginning of his book, Mercanton notes that Joyce had a 'marked English accent'. So let's read that sentence again:


King Lear

Samuel Trainor

He that has F and F a tiny little wit, With a heigh-ho, the wind and the rain, Must make content with his fortunes fit, The rain it raineth every day. I'm going to argue, in this paper, that there is at least justification for experimenting with King Lear and going beyond the rather sombre and ultimately po-faced performances and readings we've got used to.

Central to my argument will be the crucial role of the Fool in the implosive relationship of Lear, Fool and Cordelia. And of course, therefore, the doubling of the roles of the Fool and Cordelia. But I want to move away from the modern model of the two parts played by a woman (first suggested, though not carried through, by Macready's casting of a woman as the Fool in his 1838 revival of the Shakespearean text and the primary thrust of the doubling argument) 1 in favour of the rather more Jacobean perversion of casting Robert Armin as Cordelia: two parts in one; a less than pretty, dirty-minded little comedian as the beautiful and upstanding Queen of France. I want to champion this theory -and more importantly to call for similar casting in future performances -for precisely the same reasons that most critics reject it: because it ironises the drama of many of the pivotal scenes, because it creates all kinds of confusions of gender and sexuality, because it tends to allow the often childish bawdy puns to 'drowned the cocks' of the tragedy, because it's wilful bad casting, and because (ultimately) it makes the tragic ending (not just 'feminine,' as Philippa Berry suggests 2 but) laughable… poor, infirm, weak and despicable.

The theory of the doubling of the roles of Cordelia and Fool 3 in the King's Company is often rejected specifically because of the assertion that Robert Armin must have played the Fool. The notion that Armin could play Cordelia is dismissed out of hand. He was too old and too comically conspicuous. 4 Even the most ardent supporters of the doubling tend towards the notion that The Fool should be played by Cordelia rather than Cordelia by The Fool. 5 This means that you either propose the post-Restoration practice of casting a woman in both roles, and/or you support the theory that the Globe saw a boy actor take both parts (the persistent use of 'boy' by Lear to refer to the Fool being fuel to this 1 Before Macready, Nahum Tate's Fool-less Tragi-comedy version of King Lear had held the stage. 2

argument). 6

All of this rests, though, upon retaining the dignity and integrity of Cordelia in performance as visibly and audibly a noble woman, rather than a midget clown (who necessarily absents himself from simple notions of dignity and integrity). Casting is seen, in this light, as a matching of like for like: a perfect 'fit'. The idea is to mask mimesis; to create an equivalence of actor and role.

I don't mean to assert that Shakespeare necessarily intends the opposite, merely that the evidence both for doubling and for the casting of Robert Armin as the Fool is strong enough for us to imaginatively experiment with the destabilising interpretations that this poor 'fit' could prompt. We don't need to justify experimental interpretations of Shakespeare on grounds of intention. And playing with gender roles in performances of King Lear is nothing new. Lesley Ferris points out that there have been two recent productions which have cast a woman as Lear. In Frankfurt in 1990, Robert Wilson cast Marianne Hoppe in the role and refused to disguise her as a man; and Lee Breuer's production in 1987 'update [d] the script to Georgia in the 1950s with Lear as a Southern matriarchal figure with three sons.' 7 Compared to this kind of thing, a little male comedian playing Cordelia is small beer.

Let me take you back to the epigraph. This snatch of the wind and rain song is the most powerful suggestion in the text that Armin played the Fool. The part is in some global theatrical sense a reprise of his role of Feste in Twelfth Night. Richard Abrams notes the spectral effect:

[it] suggests that Lear's Fool is not specific to this time and place but floats through the King's Men's repertory -an impression heightened by Shakespeare's failure to provide a history for the Fool who mysteriously originates in Cordelia, so that her act 1 departure robs him of vital substance, causing him to pine away. (1985,359) Well, it all depends what you mean by 'this time and place'. Chronology and the Fool exist in an unstable relationship; the prophecy of Merlin which ensues is proof enough of that. 'This time and place' is just as likely to be the Globe in 1608 (or, say, Frankfurt in 1990) as a blasted heath in pre-Roman Middle England. Hence Armin can parody George Puttenham 8 emulating Chaucer, and the Fool can simultaneously make an anachronistic prophecy of a prophecy.

It's the uneasy marriage of performer and role which fuels this kind of metatheatrical gag. The performer 'fits' the role and 'fits' with it. We'll need to take a closer look at that word later.

6 Huntington Brown, in an entertainingly eccentric essay, (1963) supports the casting of a boy as the Fool. And it is this essay which leads to a similarly diverting little spat between Fleissener and Gard as to the denotation of 'fool' in the line 'And my poor fool is hanged'. gives us 'must make his happiness conform to his fortunes '. And Hunter (1972) says that the song 'enshrines the lesson that our wits must be adapted to our fortunes', which is both po-faced and about as clear as mud.

But both of these readings ignore the fundamental importance of the word 'fit'. In fact the collocation of 'wit'(s) and 'fit'(s) is a Jacobean cliché. 9 It appears, in fact, in King Leir and his Three Daughters (1605), which is routinely cited as a source text for Shakespeare's version. In a speech of pastoral condescension, Cordella (herself disguised as one) says of the 'country folk' that they 'take on them with such antike fits, / That one would think they were beside their wits!' This is perhaps itself a self-referential comment about the performances of stage-clowns, as we shall see.

But the common idiomatic collocation of 'wits' and 'fits' is first suggested to late Elizabethan London dialect by the title of Copley's Wits, Fits, and Fancies (1595). Here, 'wit' and 'fit' are metonymically linked terms for funny stories, rhymes or jokes. This rather collapses the distinction of the words into a rough self-referential synonymy when end-rhymed together. This gives us our first alternative gloss on the epigraph:

1. 'He that has only a funny little ditty, must make content with the rhyme he's given'

This reading is implosively reflexive. The line endings virtually negate one another and the two lines seem to say almost the same thing. (I'm reminded of the war song 'We're here because we're here because…' and 'My name is Jon Jonson'). The Fool, like Cordelia, is saying nothing in this reading.

And we all know what becomes of nothing.

But the self-referentiality is not limited to the text. In more theatrical terms, we could gloss this as:

2. 'He who is stupid must make content with the costume and the role of the Fool.'

If, however, we take 'wit' to mean 'a witty person', then we could also see Robert Armin, the professional wee comedian, as 'the tiny little wit'. This gives us another alternative gloss:

2b. 'He who has a midget fool (i.e. both Lear and Shakespeare), must make content with what he gets.'

The Fool and Armin are perhaps self-mockingly casting themselves as the physical embodiment of stupidity. But if they are, it's not without ironic complexity. It's not Armin or the Fool who have a tiny little wit now, but their owners: Shakespeare and Lear. The Fool actually turns out to be 'a wit', whereas his King is stupid. And this brings us to the problematic nature of the performer/role distinction, and the difficulty in attributing authorship. Perhaps a contemporary audience could have heard the jingle as:

2c. 'He who is stupid but has a witty little clown in his company, must make content with the rhyme(s) he gets.'

It's almost as if the Fool is making joking reference to the collaborative authorship of his words.

Mary Bly says this on the subject:

Fools did their fooling with an eye to the dramatists' script, but also with a sense of personal license.

Jonson's Gossip Tattle describes the Fool as a character independent of the script: "I would faine see the foole, gossip, the foole is the finest man in the company, and has all the wit: Hee is the very Iustice Meanings 'fit' with and against one another.

Feste, the most infernal quibbler on 'fool' and 'wit', says this:

[aside] Wit, an't be thy will, put me into good fooling! Those wits that think they have thee do very oft prove fools , and I that am sure that I lack thee may pass for a wise man. For what says Quinapalus? -'Better a witty fool than a foolish wit. ' [I.v.29] Wit and folly are collapsed into a 'fit', here. But the interesting thing is Feste's apostrophisation of the wit he is so sure he hasn't got, in a ventriloquising performance with his Jester's marotte. This is either wittily ironic, or foolishly deluded. But the point of the quoted dualism is that it means nothing if its parts are integrally obversive: only because 'fool' is more polysemously expandable is it superior to 'wit' (a fool -artificial -can be witty, but a wit cannot be foolish and still a wit). So Shakespeare and Armin's apostrophic irony -an irony that dances on their own internal dialectic -can be the natural and the artificial fool's at once.

Here we stumble upon the central dichotomy of the Elizabethan fool. As William Empson points out, the distinction between artificial and natural fools stems, linguistically, from the ''de idio querenda' new legal procedure under Henry VIII by which one could petition the court of wards for custody of an idiot. ' (1951, 117) Basically this refers to the 'right of attorney', in cases of mental handicap. But the point is immediately worried by the fact that many professional Tudor jesters -artificials, supposedlywere actually legal naturals, and it is precisely this which gives the role of fool the licence that characterises it. Paradox upon paradox. What is the difference between the mysteriously wise imbecile and the dissembling wit 'playing the fool'? Essentially, Armin's fool is always -even Feste -balanced between the two. Or is he?

This might be a sticking point for a portrayal of Armin. He seems to have been the perfect artificial:

a scholar of the trade, a paid professional, an intellectual, and so on. For him to be the perfect fool, we need to be uncertain about this. David Wiles comes to the rescue. He suggests that Armin was a midget, and that he was therefore genuinely a natural fool. 12

Armin also had a counter-tenor singing voice. Wiles says: 'The high singing voice adds… to the sense of Armin's multiple personae, at once elegant and ugly, at once boy and man. [1987: 159] (We should remember that Armin's mature appearance in the boys' company production of his own play, 12 Intriguingly, Wiles suggests that references to characters being 'dogs' can be understood as indications that the diminutive Armin played the part. A fact which I think might be seen to reach its symbolic peak when Thersites nips at Ajax's heels after being beaten by him like a dog, revealing his own master's vulnerability. As Robert Weimann shows though, [1991,108] the doggiest of fool's parts was probably Kemp's: Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona: 'I am the dog. No, the dog is himself, and I am the dog. O, the dog is me, and I am myself. Ay, so, so. ' [II.iii.19] This follows the typical iterative pattern of Kemp's parts: No, A, apposition / opposition. O, A*, opposition / apposition. Ay, so, so. ('So, so' turns up a lot in foolspeak). The difference here though, is that Kemp may well have been performing with a dog and claiming interidentification (Tom Stoppard wittily has Kemp tangled up by his own dog with the leash, ruining his performance, but getting laughs from Queen Elizabeth, in Shakespeare in Love), whereas Armin was the dog.

The History of the two maids of More-clack was unprecedented.) 13 This natural grotesqueness -as well as contextualising his parodistic bravado, suggesting a genuine seam of humour -was just enough perhaps to put the seed of doubt into the minds of contemporary spectators as to whether a fool like Touchstone in As You Like It was 'a very natural' or whether he 'uses his folly like a stalking horse.'

Armin himself was wonderfully equivocal on the subject. As Wiles says:

[Fool upon Fool] has as its running theme the distinction between a fool 'artificial' and a fool 'natural'.

Armin declares that his book is 'written by one, seeming to have his mother wit, when some say he is filled with his father's foppery', and the phrasing suggests the delicate line that Armin followed in his own fooling. He always leaves the ambiguity open, whether he is a congenital moron, like the subjects of his six sketches, or whether he is merely the artful jester. His skill lay in suggesting that his lunatic foppery might be innate. (1987,140) In fact, if there is a line -an Aristotelian golden mean -then Armin stood with one foot either side of it.

His use of the mother / father distinction here is revealing. He is, I think, making a play with Aristotle's generative matter / form dichotomy: matter (of the child) being mother's and form being father's, hence he could be both at once. But, subversively, 'mother wit' recalls Erasmus's 'mother folly'. Armin was ever the fool.

Or was he a 'clown'? 'Fool' and 'clown' fit together like 'fool' and 'wit'. Consider Touchstone's encounter with William; he says:

… you clown, abandon -which is in the vulgar, leave -the society of this female -which in the common is woman; which together is, abandon the society of this female, or, clown, thou perishest;

or, to thy better understanding, diest; or, to wit, I kill thee, make thee away, translate thy life into death, thy liberty into bondage. I will deal in poison with thee, or in bastinado… This use of the word 'clown', as a clear differentiation of the courtly speaker from his rustic foe, is iterated in the persistent dichotomies of the frenchified courtly language and the colloquial anglo-saxon.

(One is reminded of the verbal ear-boxing that Terry Eagleton gives to Empson's condescending theories of the pastoral in 'The Critic as Clown'). But this is undermined by the fact that -as a performer -the speaker is designated clown himself. This is an irony which focuses upon the performer / role distinction as its source, and it keys into the differences between the dialects of the audience in the 3. 'He that has a tiny little Dick, must make content with his small endowment.'

The overtones of 'property' in my choice of 'endowment' are important, as we will see. Otherwise this is the simplest of the penile glosses. A much more bawdy reading, given the proximity of the hovel and the puns on 'housing', might be the following:

4. 'He that has a tiny little Dick, must make content with an orifice which it fits (i.e. the anus)

Obviously, the fact that I'm suggesting the casting of Armin as Cordelia has a lot to do with the undertones of anal sex which I'm finding here. The casting of boys as women on the Jacobean stage has always suggested homoeroticism, 15 and in this case it is a mature man in the particularly sexualised role and profession of the Fool.

But Philippa [START_REF] Berry | PHILIPPA: Shakespeare's Feminine Endings[END_REF] manages, mercurially, to sniff out the scatological implications of the 'missing middle' of Lear's Britain without the help of this doubling. Her virtuoso argument likens this 'nothing', between the two disjointed thirds of Britain, to the anus, and to the female. England is Cordelia is the muddy arse which unmans the failing King of Britain. She doesn't examine the wind and rain song (strange when you consider the scatological possibilities), but she does suggest the same pun on 'wit' in her discussion of the Fool's egg riddle (1.4.148-52 and 177-9):

The kingdom-as-egg subsequently mutates into a lost 'wit' that is now 'nothing' (or mad?), with a possible quibble on the white of the egg as well as on 'wit' as bawdy slang for the genitals -hinting thereby at the eclipse of both Lear's manhood and intelligence in relation to a feminine 'nothing'. (1999,153) But Armin as Cordelia suggests to me that, just as useful as opening up the anal readings of Cordelia, is to read her as standing, rather more simply, for the King's lost phallus. A penis, as the Fool has already said, is also capable of 'fitting' into a (phallic) codpiece.

But there's a part of the epigraph that we're yet to unpack. In general terms, the phrasal verb 'to IV .v.22-31] This bawdiness is sticky. Apart from the obvious duplicity of 'service' (sex or employment), there is also the added transitivity ambiguity. Does he mean 'serve for' or 'serve as' a woman or a man?

Precisely what kind of sexual roles are being played by the fool (or the knave)? Is he actor or goal? By giving 'his wife my bauble' is he masculating or emasculating her, or himself? And considering that the bauble is also his alter ego, which one of them is he and which one she? Is it this simple?

Only the last question here can be answered easily: no, this simpleton's duplicities are not that simple. Lavatch is being deliberately duplicitous, but in a way that blurs the most fundamental of duplicities: gender. Lavatch, like the FoolCordelia is at once asexual and bisexual.

These foolish 'wits' often have a 'fitting' effect on the sexual dichotomy. Mary Bly (2000) refers to: The yoking of this notion to the difficulties of the transitivity relationship (in Lavatch's 'serve' and the Fool's 'make content') casts another linguistic dimension to the double-trouble of the fool. Transitivity itself has sexual connotations in a simplistic gender schema (male=active, female=passive; male=subject, female=object etc.), and it is precisely this which, again, is being simultaneously invoked and dissembled by the actor / role of fool.

There are two more things to clear up. Firstly, we must insist again on 'fortunes' as a plural. The OED has as its seventh denotation of the noun 'fortune': 'a woman in receipt of a fortune', 'an heiress'.

So, reverting the first line to the original, we can gloss the epigraph as this:

6. 'He that has and a tiny little wit, must suffer the slings and arrows of his outrageous heiresses'

Lear has, remember, just claimed that the rain and wind are working in allegiance with his daughters.

Finally, if we add the contemporary denotation of 'make content' as 'settle an account' or 'pay off a debt', we can add a seventh gloss:

7. 'He that has and a tiny little wit, must settle his account with the division (fit) of his estate (fortunes)' 16

So, to recap. The Fool's little ditty can be glossed as:

1. 'He that has only a funny little ditty, must make content with the rhyme he's given'

  make content' would seem in Early Modern English to denote three different things: a. 'To make do', b. 'To satisfy', and c. 'To fill'. The three denotations are etymologically cognate, of course. But the conflation of the two transitive meanings, with the further conflation of transitive and intransitive into a single signifier, would seem to offer to our fourth version of the epigraph a near definitive expression of misogynistic sexual gratification: 4b. 'He who has a tiny little Dick, must 'make content' (both himself and the sexual object) by penetrating the anus'But we get the impression that Lear is penetrating nothing, not even the arse of England. If we recall the 'paroxysm' or 'collapse' version of 'fit', then we can perhaps offer this reading:5. 'He that has an impotent Dick, must put up with its vagaries'Crucial to this reading is the fact that it couples the words 'wit' and 'fortune' as signifiers of the penis. (If we assume the elision of a genitive apostrophe in fortune(')s.) Paradoxically this seems to ally the impotent Dick with the capricious goddess Fortune, hence suggesting a feminisation of the flaccid penis. Which perhaps, in part, might provide back-up to Stephen Greenblatt's denial of the binary sexual model in a Renaissance which saw the female as an incomplete or debased version of the male. (1988 p.88) But it's not as simple as that. Armin's and Shakespeare's fools seem at once to assert and to undermine the binary distinction. Both versions of gender seem possible:LAFEU:Whether dost thou profess thyself, a knave or a fool?LAVATCH: A fool, sir, at a woman's service, and a knave at a man's… I would cozen the man of his wife and do his service… And I would give his wife my bauble, sir, to do her service. [AWEW:

  It's a commentator's commonplace to mention the link between Feste and the Fool in this ditty, and to go on to gloss the meaning-carrying lines as something like: 'He that is not very clever must make do with what he's given.' Foakes, in the Arden third edition, ignores line 74 (as if self-evident) and for 76

Empson had already picked at this ambiguity, of course, but the point to note is how a casting decision affects textual interpretation. 7 Lesley Ferris (1993) 3. 8 George Puttenham The Art of English Poesie (1598) 'an argument for [Shakespeare's] use of Puttenham is developed by Gary Taylor in 'Date', 382-5. The lines there run: "When faith failes in Priestes sawes, […] Then shall the realm of Albion / Be brought to great confusion."' Foakes (1997) p.268-9 n.79-96

  little version of the 'wit', a figure which stands in the same relationship with the midget fool as the midget fool does with King and playwright). By extension, of course, this could mean penis. (Let's call this conflation of marotte and penis, Dick.) This gives us another alternative gloss:

13 These kind of details lead Doris Adler (see The Shakespeare Newsletter vol.27 no.4, p.30) to make the most direct (if a little humourless) argument for The King's Men casting Armin as Cordelia. She pays particular attention to Armin's feminising diminutive nicknames: Snuff, Pink and Robin.

tiny

  Annual British Graduate Shakespeare Conference, Shakespeare Institute, Stratford upon Avon, June 2002 instability of language.' Whichever binary gender identity one might want to impose, one cannot do it through these puns, as they produce meaning precisely by transgression.(2000, 79)

the uneasy feeling that any bawdy pun can mutate between female and male bodies. In essence, bawdy puns are curiously simple substantiations of what Jonathan Culler calls 'the inherent Samuel Trainor 4 th

  2. 'He who is stupid must make content with the costume and the role of the Fool.' 2b. 'He who has a midget fool (i.e. both Lear and Shakespeare), must make content with what he gets.' 2c. 'He who is stupid but has a witty little clown in his company, must make content with the rhyme(s) he's given.' 3. 'He that has a tiny little Dick, must make content with his small endowment.' 4. 'He that has a tiny little Dick, must make content with an orifice which it fits (i.e. the anus) What we're left with is the tableau of a foolish King mourning over his dead daughter's body like the broken marotte of the professional clown. A dummy that cannot be ventriloquised. A Dick that won't stand up. Or will it? 'Look, her lips'… Robert Armin had a beard, of course, and doubtless found it difficult to play dead with Richard Burbage fondling him and trying to take his clothes off. The tragic climax could easily descend into a farce. The point of this essay is to suggest that perhaps it should. Lear's death, whilst tickling his dead, transvestite, fool phallus is capable of being the most movingly absurd and absurdly moving of theatrical events.

A particularly fitting example, given the subject, is to be found in The Scourge of Folly by John Davies of Hereford: 'To our English Terence, Mr Will Shakespeare / Thou hadst been a companion for a king, / And, been a king among the meaner sort. / Some others rail; but, rail as they think fit, / Thou hast no railing, but a reigning wit' cit. Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare GaminiSalgado (Sussex, 1975) p.30

Bly (2000) p.122 (and p.181 note cit.) Notice the use of the word 'toy' punning on the ideas of whim and the Fool's 'bauble' here. The two notions are conflated as if the bauble were an embodiment of his mercurial character (see below). 'Toy' also carried, in contemporary usage, the meaning 'throwaway witticism' -like 'wit'.

th Annual British Graduate Shakespeare Conference, Shakespeare Institute, Stratford upon Avon, June 2002

In Shakespeare from the margins(Chicago 1996: p144), Patricia Parker provides a fascinating, if slightly tenuous, reading of the words 'ingle' (meaning 'catamite') 'angle' and 'English' in and around Shakespeare which focuses on the notion of a National homosexual guilt linked to the suspicion of sex between adult actors and the boys hired to play women.

Here's a similar foolish yoking of the languages of accountancy and sex: 'I will content you, if what pleases you contents you.' As You LikeIt (5.2.126)

Samuel Trainor 4 th Annual British Graduate Shakespeare Conference, Shakespeare Institute, Stratford upon Avon, June 2002

balcony and the pit. In the figure of the fool -the irony comes naturally: clown is a non-colloquial pejorative (suggesting low rank) but it also has (as Wiles says) 'a technical value-neutral usage' which its owner would know better than anyone. The fool is showing himself up as a fool, here; but, as such, he has the last satirical laugh: clown he says, is mine to say after all.

The point is, of course, that the clown / fool dichotomy, dramatised here, is itself ironised. It wittily 'fits'. Touchstone is talking to himself, and the audience, as much as to William. This fact is highlighted by the use of the word 'bastinado', I think. Wiles writes:

Armin prefaces his work (Quips upon Questions) with an address to 'Sir Timothy Truncheon alias Bastinado, ever my part-taking friend'. Armin personalises his slapstick, and we must imagine that in performance he used it like a jester's marotte, endowing it with the voice of his altar ego. Quips upon Questions makes it clear that the projection of multiple identities is the staple of Armin's clowning. (1987, 139) So, it's the Arminian fool who posits the dichotomy himself: but it's an easily collapsible one. His foil is a mirror, of a sort. 14

The fact that this is a speech which makes one of the clearest statements in the play of the distinctions between high and low class, court and forest, suggests that its self-deconstruction under the pressure of the tenuous fool / clown divide is being used by Shakespeare to pre-empt the final atonement. This is characteristic of Touchstone's totemic centrality in the play, like the Fool's and Cordelia's in King Lear. The bastinado is a phallus, obviously, and its salience as a copulative instrument in Armin's arsenal resonates in the context of a sexual struggle for Audrey. The fact that it is therefore both a conjugal and an antagonistic instrument (a cleaver, if you like) which finds its way into Touchstone's mouth, is only fitting if we consider his comment: 'I press in here, sir, amongst the rest of the country copulatives, to swear, and to forswear, according as marriage binds and blood breaks' which is, as Empson says, '(dropped coolly into the middle of his account of his duelling experience.)'

The bastinado is: a marotte is: a miniature version of the Fool is: a phallus. This all seems to 'fit'.

And the phallus is itself the organ which 'fits'.

Lear's Fool probably uses his marotte or his bastinado in between his legs when he delivers his 'witty' lines about heads and codpieces (3.2.25-35). This 'fit' of the Fool's throws into a bawdy light all of the references to heads and shelter in the heath and hovel scenes, and therefore, by extension, offers these ironically phallocentric deconstructions of the play to global interpretation.

Let's apply this to the epigraph again. Suddenly, a 'tiny little wit' could refer to the fool's marotte (a 14 Allan R Shickman actually suggests that Shakespeare intends the Fool to carry a mirror rather than a marotte. 'The Fool's

Mirror in King Lear' (English Literary Renaissance, 21. 1991) It's doubtful how convincing this is as an assertion, butregardless of intention -it's at least worth trying in performance.

4b. 'He who has a tiny little Dick, must 'make content' (both himself and the sexual object) by penetrating the anus' 5. 'He that has an impotent Dick, must put up with its vagaries' 6. 'He that has and a tiny little wit, must suffer the slings and arrows of his outrageous heiresses' 7. 'He that has and a tiny little wit, must settle his account with the division (fit) of his estate

(fortunes)

What this little jingle manages to achieve then, in its 'fitting' little way, is a super-condensed commentary on Lear's absurd tragic predicament. Lear is a King for whom the loss of power, the loss of his favourite daughter, the disjuncture of his kingdom, the loss of his mind, his fool and his nobility are all equivalent to the loss of his erection.

Where Berry reads the threatening presence of the anus in Lear, I read the paradoxically absurd and tragic absence of the phallus. Our readings fit together. Cordelia, with Armin in her costume, is not the anus between the buttocks of Goneril and Regan, but the (standing) Dick between their (kneeling) balls.

The fact that Lear cannot get her to respond is the source of his collapse. But, as A C Bradley would never have put it, can there be any redemption for the old sod? Not, I'd suggest, without his suffering at the hands of a hostile audience. If and when Richard Burbage staggered onto stage carrying the not-so-pretty little Robert Armin in his arms as the body of the (drag) Queen of France, could we blame the youngbloods in the pit for howling not with sympathy but with derision? But I read this 'Howl' as the moment of Lear's anagnorisis. If Lear is redeemed it is in his metatheatrical revelation. This is always the redemption with which a Tragic hero likes to congratulate himself: he recognises the generic pattern of the Tragedy and therefore transcends to the deified level of the audience. But there's no comfort in it if the Tragedy is so absurd. Lear recognises, perhaps, the implosive hermeneutics of his own play as it implodes. Lear's tragically posthumous copulation, in the word 'fool', of the daughter and the Fool (the inherently copular figure, the one who can bridge the gap 'between cosmos and chaos') might therefore be understood as the moment of reincorporation… too late. The daughter and the Fool are dead, and Lear's cosmic impotence remains.

King Lear is a tragedy of the absurd. It is a play which seeks both the mockery and the empathy of the audience for a spectacle of universal decrepitude and impotence; it is absolutely a play about sex, sexuality and power which seeks to assert the shame of Lear's loss of tenuous phallic potency (embodied in Robert Armin's FoolCordelia) in order to broaden the scope of his shame to encompass those who pillory him. 17