Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Translation can clearly serve national purposes—but also their opposite, the cause of internationalism itself. A contemporary writer of French who uses the pen name Antoine Volodine has formulated in striking terms why he wishes to use his native language as if it were a foreign tongue. For Volodine, French is not just the language of Racine and Voltaire. Because translation into French has been practiced for a very long time, French is also the language of Pushkin, Shalamov, Li Bai, and García Márquez. Far from being the privileged vector of national identity, history, and culture, “French is a language that transmits cultures, philosophies and concerns that have nothing to do with the habits of French society or the francophone world.”[31] It is not that French is by its nature or destiny an international language: on the contrary, only the practice of translation into French makes the language a tool of internationalism in the modern world. Thanks to its long history of translation from foreign languages, French is now a possible vehicle for an imaginary, infinitely haunting literature that Volodine would like to consider absolutely foreign to it.

It would therefore be quite wrong to see the progressive interpenetration of English, French, German, and Italian together with terms and phrases from the ancient source tongues, Latin and Greek, and (in the writings of Volodine) Russian and Chinese, too, as the sole product of what is now called globalization. In any case, globalization does not spread only English into other languages and cultures: it could just as well be exemplified by the spread of pizza language and the vocabulary of pasta into corner stores and fast-food joints the world over. It is also the result of long efforts by translators to raise their national languages to international status. They did not necessarily seek to make their translations sound authentically foreign. Indeed, if that is what they were really trying to do, their success has made mincemeat of the ambition, because the words they imported or mimicked have now become part of the receiving language to such an extent that they are no longer foreign at all.

No less than 40 percent of all the headwords in any large English dictionary are imports from other languages. A foreignism—be it a word, a turn of phrase, or a grammatical structure that is brought into our marvelously and infuriatingly malleable tongue by a translator seeking to retain the authentic sound of the original—has its path already mapped out. Either it will be disregarded as a clumsy, awkward, or incomplete act of translation, or it will be absorbed, reused, integrated, and become not foreign at all.

However, contemporary efforts to produce translations into English that keep something authentically foreign about them are not strictly comparable to the kind of translators’ campaigns in centuries past that made German more like English, French more like Italian, Syriac more like Greek, and so forth. The foreignizers of today are not struggling to make English an international language, because English is the international language of the present. To some degree, they are seeking to enrich English with linguistic resources afforded by languages that are distant from it. “One subliminal idea I started out with as a translator was to help energize English itself,” Richard Pevear stated in an interview in The New Yorker.[32] That creative, writerly project rests on a wish to share with readers some of the feelings that Pevear has when reading a Russian novel. He has also often said that he is not a fluent speaker of the language and relies on his partner to provide a basic crib that he then works into a literary version.[33] Something similar may be true of other proponents of awkward and foreign-sounding translation styles. The project of writing translations that do the least “ethnocentric violence” to the original thus runs the risk of dissolving into something different—a representation of the funny ways foreigners speak.

The natural way to represent the foreignness of foreign utterances is to leave them in the original, in whole or in part. This resource is available in all languages and has always been used to some degree in every one of them.[34]

It is not easy to represent the foreignness of foreign languages in complete seriousness. It takes the wit of Chaplin or Celentano to do so for comic effect without causing offense.

What translation does in the first place is to represent the meaning of a foreign text. As we shall see, that’s quite hard enough.

SIX Native Command: Is Your Language Really Yours?