Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Approaching Annihilation” examines desire, love, and lack in translation and in religious mystical experience, dramatizing this study through the production of two new translations of the Middle English version of Marguerite Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls (original 1296-1310). The first translation of The Mirror of Simple Souls produced for this thesis aimed to get as close to the “original” presentation as possible in order to give readers a glimpse of the complexity and cumbersomeness of its Middle English presentation. The second translation, “Forgetting is Her Name,” renders the Mirror without that same cumbersomeness in an attempt to get closer to the bliss which is its subject. Included with the two translations is a long introduction. In the first part of the introduction, “On Mirrors and Looking,” I introduce readers to Marguerite Porete and The Mirror of Simple Souls, while using the image of the mirror to discuss fundamental problems in translation and desire. I touch on the work of the twentieth-century mystic Simone Weil and numerous modern and medieval translators and translation-theorists such as George Steiner, Vladimir Nabokov, and Henry Lovelich. The second part of the introduction, “Fulfilling Lack,” develops the relationship between lack and love that animates the Mirror’s spiritual project. I also compare Marguerite’s work to Julian of Norwich’s Shewings and the anonymous The Cloud of Unknowing, well-known English works of religious mysticism roughly contemporary with the Middle English translation of The Mirror of Simple Souls that I translate. And in the third part of the introduction, “On this Translation,” I explain the reasoning behind many of the choices made in my translations while demonstrating that the Middle English manuscript may be closer to Marguerite’s original than versions in other languages. Concluding the introduction, and placed between the first and second translations, is a lyrical essay, “Annihilation Diary,” which uses romantic loss as a basis for a discussion of The Mirror and as a means of establishing its relevance to modern readers. Presented in the form of short vignettes, “Annihilation Diary” prepares readers for the experience of reading the second translation’s “partials.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".