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The
Translingual Imagination. By Steven G. Kellman. Pp xii
+ 134. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press,
2000. Hb.
©
Anthony Pym 2000
Review written
for Translation & Literature, but I think I'll
mix it in with a review of some Spanish books (this one
doesn't merit a review to itself)
This is an essay
about ‘authors who write in more than one language or at
least in a language other than their primary one’ (ix).
Steven K. Kellman, Professor of Comparative Literature at
the University of Texas, San Antonio, has assembled a significant
collection of such authors, almost all in the twentieth
century, almost all working into English, and has attempted
to fit them under the rubric of a special ‘translingual
imagination’. The first chapter establishes that there are
rather a lot of such authors; the second asks why this should
be so; and the rest of the book is a series of case studies
that might have been first written for other purposes (no
selection criterion is offered). The studies include anecdotes
of African translingualism, J.M Coetzee as reader of Beckett,
Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation compared
with the earlier and more optimistic Promised Land by Mary
Antin, the novels of Louis Begley—apparently because he
was a Jew born in Poland—, John Sayles’s decision to make
a film in Spanish rather than English, and a brief summation
in philosophical colours.
The topic
is important and remains inadequately studied (the only
significant previous book dealing with the general phenomenon
is perhaps Leonard Forster’s The Poet’s Tongues of 1970).
Translingualism should rightly be of interest to scholars
of literary translation, if only because many translators
could be described in terms of a similar ‘translingual imagination’.
But this is not yet the book we deserve.
Kellman’s essay
does suggest an underlying historical thesis: when you line
up Conrad, Nabokov, Beckett and Rushdie, second-language
writers become a fact of Modernism, with aesthetic consequences.
Then again, looking at the biographies, these writers belong
to specific groups caught up in migrations and exile. It
thus remains possible that anything affecting the literary
comes from social displacements and not immediately from
any privileged or generalized imagination. Yet Kellman seems
uninterested in sorting such things out. We do find inklings
of sociolinguistic categories, notably the distinction between
‘ambilinguals’ (those who have written important works in
more than one language’) and ‘monolingual translinguals’
(who have written only in a language other than their primary
one) (12). But that comes to no fruition, dangling in want
of a clear independent variable, then squashed under lists
of examples mixing both sides.
Kellman appears
more immediately happy pinning together easy generalizations
like the following: ‘If identity is shaped by language,
then monolingualism is a deficiency disorder’ (viii); ‘for
those who live in and through words, living in translation
is to be racked between life and death’ (5), ‘the compulsion
to conquer multiple grammars might be a symptom of megalomania’
(37); ‘by changing tongues, authors flirt with silence’
(113), and a lot more. It is not easy to extract anything
coherent from these propositions. Second-language writers
are quite normal people in one place, occupy a suicidal
position in another, then they are megalomaniacs, and finally
they risk losing speech. The admixture of translation as
yet another cheap metaphor (‘lost in translation’, etc.)
helps no one.
Perhaps the real
risk behind this way of doing academic business is that
everything and everyone becomes philosophically translingual,
and yet the mode of argumentation (the lists of names) really
needs a series of ‘special case’ scenarios. Kellman knows
that most of the world is at least bilingual; he is well
aware that the special case is Anglo-American monolingualism.
But he still wants us to be surprised at the fact that people
can write well in more than one language. Perhaps he himself
is genuinely surprised: he seems more or less restricted
to reading English-language texts, with only very occasional
glances to snippets of French and German (plus minor mistakes
in Spanish on pages 7, 18, 104). So is an Anglo-American
subject perhaps the one ultimately amazed at what is quite
normal for much of the world? There is indeed a strong
counter-argument to translingualism here, identified as
ideological monolingualism yet associated not with Anglo-American
culture but with quite a significant line-up of thinkers:
Yeats, Jefferson, Eliot, Goethe and Santayana all believed
that one could only express oneself completely in one’s
first language, to whom might be added Romantic aesthetics
en bloc, Wagner’s anti-semitism, the linguistic relativism
of Humboldt-Sapir-Whorf, and latter-day nationalists of
all orders. There is thus room for real debate. Yet Kellman’s
own position remains built on lists of names, all possibly
exceptions, and perhaps all necessarily exceptions (since
great writers are still supposed to be special people).
Those lists culminate in a few fragile summations like the
impossibility of attaining ‘universal comprehension’ (115)
(but who has the comprehension needed to judge such things?),
plus sporadically stupid rhetorical questions: ‘The Sapir-Whorf
thesis, the principle of linguistic relativity, haunts translinguals;
otherwise, why would they bother to switch languages?’ (53).
Why bother,
indeed? Just looking at the examples mustered here, one
might say writers switch languages in order to gain prestige
(most switches are into the major colonial languages), to
reach a wider audience, to address a more specialized audience,
or as a part of personal histories of migration. True, there
are cases like Beckett, who ostensibly moved to French in
order to obtain a more austere, distanced style. Yet there
seems little reason why such writerly motivations should
weigh more heavily than the rest of the world. Kellman does
not consider the dynamics of internationalized publishing,
nor translingual reception patterns, as if literature were
a direct result of authors’ personal backgrounds and nothing
more. Indeed, if some account had been offered of multilingual
readerships, the role of translation might have been more
focused. The fact that Kellman only looks for writerly reasons
suggests that he himself is more haunted by ideologies of
natural mother tongues than are many of his translingual
writers.
The shortcomings
of this book would feed into the general complaint that
Comparative Literature is little more than a display of
erudition, if only there were a little more erudition in
sight. There are no careful translingual comparisons, in
fact virtually no close readings of any kind. Such things
would have been useful in the chapter on Begley especially,
where there is much talk about style but no examples.
Translation
plays a very marginal and contradictory role in this essay.
At one point Coetzee is approvingly cited as saying that
translation privileges one language over another and is
thus ‘not synonymous with translingualism’ (54) (as if most
writers’ moves from one language to another were not questions
of privilege). However, the book ends with a stock reference
to Walter Benjamin (‘All translations aspire to pure language’),
which then allows translation to become ‘a function of translingualism,
which in general shares that futile aspiration’ (115). The
failure to reconcile such statements remains upsetting.
And of course, immediately after the futile Benjamin quote,
we have standard futile Wittgenstein: ‘Whereof one cannot
speak, thereof one must be silent’. Happily, Kellman accepts
the truth of that statement and finishes his book there.
- Last update
17 April 2001
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