‘Think of the Iliad’: mid-century language research (inc.)

This article recovers a neglected intellectual lineage connecting interwar literary criticism to mid-twentieth-century developments in machine translation and new media theory. I.A. Richards's lectures are known to have shaped the thinking of Marshall McLuhan but Richards's 1930s work on Coleridge's ‘semasiology’ also had a less well-known line of influence: on the philosophy and practice of Margaret Masterman, founder of the Cambridge Language Research Unit, a seed bed for much early work in computational linguistics, cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Masterman carried forward from her reading of Richards and Empson, alongside her work with Wittgenstein, an understanding of language as irreducibly poetic, ideographic, combinatorial, and unamenable to disambiguation. It was this conception of language she sought to actualise in her pioneering work in machine translation during the 1950s. In parallel with Masterman's ‘Mechanical Pidgin Translation' experiments with Virgil's Aeneid, Richards was also experimenting with multiform remediations of Homer's Iliad: their experimental translations of classical epic poems probed what it meant to encounter, judge and compute language in the mid-century. While Richards's noisy remediations and Masterman's abandoned pidgin programs were perhaps generative failures, they offer salient reminders that language cannot be adequately computed without strenuously imaginative experiments at the intersection of philosophy, criticism and literature.