Literature as another language by Yiorgos Chouliaras

The paper by Yiorgos Chouliaras was given at the 33rd Zagreb Literary Talks held in October 2012

It is my great pleasure to be back in Zagreb and I wish to thank the Croatian Writers’ Association and the president, committee members, coordinator, and staff of the 33^rdZagreb Literary Talks for this invitation and their gracious hospitality.

Common perceptions regarding literature in other languages contrast this experience to a presumably normal process in the context of a mother tongue, whereby authors are selected by trial and error, if not otherwise, to contribute to its literary evolution. Even though unfortunate or fortunate circumstances may lead writers to write in languages other than their “own,” with celebrated examples including Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov, there is an assumed naturalism to the overall process, which discards observations to the contrary. Perceived as naturally restricted to those who can write and speak or read it, any language is indeed local, while, by corporealizing ideal readers, literature extends its globalizing impulse in space and time. By stretching the limits of language beyond immediate comprehension, this (pre)tension strings together distinct literary effects – generated by writers engaged with particular languages, which can be potentially produced, however, in any linguistic context – into literature as “another language.”

Let me now refer to a series of observations and comments as well as to some personal instances that could help unpack this summary statement.

Writers working in languages other than their native tongues; different modes of translation and their implications regarding national literatures; as well as various dimensions of production, distribution, and reception of heterolingual literary works are all aspects of the central theme of “literature in other languages,” with respect to which we have already heard several insightful accounts, as we look forward to more of them.

In fact, if we step back, we can consider ourselves embodiments of that global condition relating literature and language on which we share reflections, as writers, essayists, and translators from Croatia and other countries who communicate in the lingua franca of our age, that is, English. We write in a variety of languages, European and alphabetical in our case. These writings get translated and circulate in other languages, confirming José Saramago’s dictum that “writers create a national literature; translators create world literature.” And in the context of a dominant common tongue, explicitly or implicitly, on our own or through others, we translate ourselves into English.

This involves a translation, a transfer, in various senses of that word derived from Latin. To translate is not just to render in another language; it is also, as in physics, to move laterally without rotation, dilation or angular displacement; it is also, as in biology, to convert from one form to another; it is also, as in ecclesiastical terminology, to convey to heaven without death; it is also, in an archaic sense, to enrapture. (Of course, if I were addressing an audience that spoke Greek, I would also refer to metaphrasis, literally post-phrase, the Greek word for translation, and its affinities with metaphora or metaphor, literally transport.)

A related set of comments involves English as a common currency in linguistic exchanges today. A lingua franca is not unprecedented, as Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, German, and other languages, within and outside the sphere of European influence, have had that role in parts of the globe in the past. An overriding aspect is that only the language of empires or, more precisely, former empires can play that role. Therefore, empathy with Irish writers writing in Irish, when they say that English robbed them of their language, is well deserved. A strategy of resistance obviously involves revival of the language disused. As far as the paradigmatic Irish case is concerned, nevertheless, this was preceded by a parallel response that culminated in James Joyce robbing English back and taking it to the limit. In fact, as I have argued elsewhere, this may account for why Beckett eventually chose to write in French.

At the same time, global English, as a language of international communication and a medium of diverging usages in different contexts and linguistic communities, also robbed their language from those who write in English as a native tongue. This is the unlamented collateral plight of the dominant. In other words, the fact that English dominates has not been necessarily motivating to those generating literary discourses in what serves as a common language. In any case, a determining difference between those working in a dominant language and those working in some other language is this: those who dominate consider their domination natural.

The establishment of a lingua franca as the after-effect of political predominance has always been the case. Greek as the language of the Gospels was established on the trajectories of Alexander’s campaigns, while Latin as the language of Western Christianity pressuposes the Roman empire. Moreover, there is a significant component of technological asymmetry in such instances. The gravity of this component has grown in the digital age, despite or because of its ethereal electronics. A study by language technology experts, published on the European Day of Languages on September 26 this year, reports that digital support for 21 of the 30 languages investigated, out of approximately 80 European languages, is non-existent or weak.

In the four areas – automatic translation, speech interaction, text analysis, and the availability of language resources – in which language technology support was assessed, several languages, including Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Maltese, received the lowest score in all four areas, while 21 languages, including Basque, Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Hungarian, Polish, and Portuguese had fragmentary support, placing them in a set of high-risk languages in terms of digital extinction. Only English was assessed as having“good support,” followed by languages such as Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish with “moderate support.”

If I say that I raise my hand, as we talk, this is a linguistic instance of possessive individualism; in other words, I consider it natural that this is indeed my hand and mine alone. A similar attitude informs the relation that evolves with the language in which I write. It is my tongue and no one, not even I, should be allowed to extract it.

As an undergraduate on a scholarship to the United States, immediately after finishing high school in Thessaloniki, I received a creative award for poems I had written in English. This was repeated the following year. As I could not enter the competition with my own work again, I was ready, during the third year, to submit poems written in English as supposedly a translation of work by some unknown poet writing in Greek. Remember: This was before the days of the internet, even though my college had one of the earliest computer centers, frequented by Steve Jobs when he had attended for a year. However, I was told there could be no third submission.

If there is no money in writing poetry in English, I might as well continue to write in Greek, I joked in response. I was dead serious, of course, as you can imagine.

Given the vanity of our calling and to the extent any writing involves some kind of hubris, writers should be self-deprecating whenever they can. A mercenary re-telling of the story of my commitment to poetry in Greek is hereby intended as an incautious parable regarding choices by writers in a global environment.

Midway through these observations, I could summarize a principal point as follows: The surprising fact is not that writers write in their own language and sometimes in other languages. The surprising fact is that not everyone is writing in English.

Blind-sighted by the naturalism of association with our mother tongue, the language community in which it so happened that we were born and grew up, we forget that, even if unconsciously most of the time, writers choose their language as much as they choose to become writers. Of course, I should add without a blush of contradiction that we have all become writers entirely by accident.

I think some people might have been offended, feeling loyalties were being questioned, when I first argued that Dionysios Solomos, a fountainhead of modern Greek poetry and author of the poem from which the verses of the Greek national anthem have been borrowed, chose to write in Greek, even though he could have had a successful career as a poet writing in Italian, which was the locally dominant language in the Heptanese group of islands where he lived prior to their reverting to Greek territory.

I proceeded to augment the argument by recalling Cavafy’s exposure to English at an early age, though he did not have an English grandmother and library of books the way Borges did, as well as the intimacy with French displayed not only by the twin father of Greek surrealism and psychoanalysis, Andreas Embeirikos, but also by Nobel laureates Odysseas Elytis and George Seferis, even if the latter eventually became the standard-bearer of what could be abridged as an “Anglo-American” party of poetry in Greece under the imaginary tutelage of T. S. Eliot.

Let me add that I would anticipate comparable conditions in other national literatures I wish I knew more about, besides the pleasure, that is, associated with texts produced in their contexts. I do not consider writers choosing their language as something peculiar to the Greek case. What is peculiar or paradigmatic in the case of modern Greek literature revolves around its doubly charged relation to a Greek past that has been claimed also by others before, during, and after the nineteenth-century formation of a modern Greece.

In everything we consider in relation to language and literature, we must sustain a fact-grounded and comparative perspective. For example, allusions were made earlier to the condition of those writing in languages – whether Croatian, Irish or Greek – comprising a relatively small population of speakers. Their situation, however, means nothing compared to those who write in Welsh. It is estimated that there are hardly more than half a million of Welsh speakers out of 3.5 million people in Wales. At the same time, even Bengali, which is spoken by 85 million people in India alone, is sometimes considered a minority language in literary terms.

Specifics about national, European, and international forms of support for translations involving minority languages must also be taken into account. This is, I suppose, what allows Francis Boutle Publishers to be the foremost publisher of Cornish, while also recently bringing out anthologies of Galician, Breton, and Norman (from the Channel Islands) literature as well as books in Manx, spoken on the Isle of Man.

Many of these facts were brought up at a Translating Minority Languages event during the 2012 London Book Fair. The most compelling point was raised by my friend Gabriel Rosenstock, a poet writing in Irish principally, who is constantly translating from Irish to English or vice versa, while also using English as a bridge language when translating poetry from other languages into Irish. The life of a literary language, he pointed out, very much depends on inward and outward translations. This is especially true for smaller languages. Translations into them ensure that these cultures do not become too insular and narrow in their vision.

Use of a bridge language, commonly English, in translations to minority languages is often inescapable. After all, assuming no major misunderstandings, it is of greater significance that the translator be in command of the target rather than the original language of composition. At the same time, one should recall that, according to not entirely reliable estimates, only three percent of books published in the United States are translations, while literary translations represent less than one percent and involve mostly classics rather than contemporary works.

I should add that, whenever I have engaged in it, I have found translation to be demanding, but also very creative work. Several months ago I had committed myself to a talk on Wallace Stevens and I wanted to give the audience a sense of how his poems might sound in Greek. I ended up translating more than thirty of them. I imagine the process of translation as equivalent to how soloists must feel when they interprete a piece of music for a particular audience. The musical score remains the same, but interpretations may differ.

Let me also confess that, bilingual though I may be, I find it treacherous to translate my own work, as I may be tempted to rephrase it drastically in a different linguistic and cultural context, and I leave this task to friends, whom I tease that the least bothersome author to translate is someone who is dead. In fact, I have been blessed by translators into English, mostly poets and literary critics, principally David Mason and Maria Koundoura, but also David Connolly and George Economou, among several others.

Finally, having work translated into a language I do not know involves a special thrill that I have felt in relation to Turkish, for example, and I am particularly grateful to Nikola Đuretić for translating into Croatian and publishing U SREDIŠTU VODE (In the Center of Water), a book of selected poems that was launched here two years ago.

Let me try to wrap up. The fate of great works of fiction, like Don Quixote or Gulliver’s Travels, is to become children’s books. The fate of children is to grow up and never read them again. This is what should worry writers most, if they do not wish to end up as a minor sect in the great post-modern church of entertainment.

Fragmentation or a Babel of tongues, asymmetry or domination by a lingua franca, and resistance to fragmentation and asymmetry are three major features of the world of language and literature I have indirectly described. This global environment is far – F.A.R., fragmented, asymmetric, and resistance-prone – but also so close and so much part of us that we hardly take notice as we write.

Of course, to recall Barnett Newman’s quip, “aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,” and writers must abstain from over-interpreting the conditions of their work, as this might lead to contemplative inaction.

Yet, there are a few things we should be aware of. Even before Saussure, language cannot be considered as peripheral to our grasp of the world, but a determining aspect of it. Moreover, words, which are the raw materials in the factories of our mind, are collective products of social interaction and one must agree with Algerian-born Derrida that “I only have one language; it is not mine.”

If different languages separate those who speak them and if language separates those who speak from those who don’t, including speechless forms of life, literature as the ultimate language game carries the failing promise of a coming together. It is in this fundamental sense that literature is another language. Literature is what we do with a particular language, but literature also is what we can do with any language.

Our hosts are taking us on Sunday to the ancient town of Krapina, near which a paleontologist discovered in 1899 over eight hundred fossil remains belonging to Neanderthals. In fact, some of these fossil remains are said to exhibit traces of mortuary defleshing or cannibalism. We can discuss whether they might perhaps be writers during lunch.

For now, let me wink at our distant relations by recalling that a recent extraction of DNA from Neanderthal bones, assuming no contamination, suggests Neanderthals had the same version as modern humans of a gene called FOXP2 (i.e., Forkhead box protein P2), which has been called the “language gene,” because mutations in this gene have been associated with developmental verbal dyspraxia in individuals who have little or no cognitive handicaps, but are unable to perform the coordinated movements required for speech.

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Literature as another language by Yiorgos Chouliaras