Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Second or vehicular languages are learned more quickly and also forgotten more easily than native tongues. Over the past fifty years, English has been acquired to some degree by countless millions across the continent of Europe and is now the only common language among speakers of the different native languages of Belgium, for example, or on the island of Cyprus. Russian, on the other hand, which was understood and used by the educated class across the entire sphere of influence of the U.S.S.R., from the Baltic to the Balkans and from Berlin to Outer Mongolia until 1989, has been forgotten very fast and, even when not forgotten entirely, is now usually left to one side for contact with foreigners. If language unification does proceed further in the twenty-first century, its course will be mapped not by the qualities or nature of the unifying language or of the languages it displaces; it will hang on the future course of world history.

Beyond multilingualism and language unification, the third path that leads away from translation is to stop fussing about what other cultures have to say and to stick to one’s own. Isolation has been the dream of many societies, and some have come close to achieving it. During the Edo period (1603–1868), Japan restricted contact with foreigners to a handful of adventurous Dutch, who were allowed to maintain a trading station on an island in Nagasaki harbor, and the Chinese. In Europe, Britain often seemed to wallow in “splendid isolation”—The Times of October 22, 1957, famously ran the headline FOG IN CHANNEL, CONTINENT CUT OFF—but that was more pose than reality. Not so in the tiny land of Albania. Enver Hoxha, the country’s Communist ruler from 1944 to 1985, first broke off relations with his nearest neighbor, Yugoslavia, in 1948, then with the Soviet Union in 1960, and then with Mao’s China in 1976. Albania remained committed to total isolation for many years thereafter, and at one point in the early 1980s there were no more than a dozen foreigners (including diplomatic staff) in the whole country.[10] Televisions were tuned so as to disable the reception of broadcasts from outside the state; only those books that confirmed Albania’s own view of its position in the world were translated (and there were not many of those); no foreign books were imported; commercial exchanges were as limited as cultural and linguistic contacts; and no foreign debts were contracted. On the very doorstep of Europe, just a short hop from the tourist sites of Corfu and the swankier resorts of the Italian Adriatic, Albania’s half century of voluntary isolation shows that relatively large groups of people are sometimes prepared to forgo all the supposed benefits of intercultural exchange.

The dream of isolation comes in many forms, but its recurrent shadow falls over the many stories that anthropologists have told us about preliterate societies living in remote parts of the world. Barely pastiching scientific work of this kind, Georges Perec uses chapter 25 of Life A User’s Manual to narrate the life of Marcel Appenzzell, a fictional pupil of the real Marcel Mauss, who set off to the jungle of Sumatra to establish contact with the Anadalams. After a debilitating journey through tropical forests, Appenzzell finally encounters the tribe. They say nothing. He leaves out what he believes to be traditional gifts and falls asleep. When he awakes, the Anadalams have disappeared. They have left his gifts, upended their huts, and walked away. He tracks them through the jungle, catches up with them, and repeats his procedure, believing it to be the right way to establish communication with these “precontact” people. But the result is the same. They leave. And so it goes on, week after terrible week, until the ethnographer grasps that the Anadalams do not want to engage in communication with him, or with anybody else. That is indeed their privilege. A people may choose autarchy in place of contact. Who are we to say that is wrong?

However, in Perec’s telling of this story, the Anadalams exemplify not only pride and self-sufficiency but also linguistic and cultural entropy. They possess a few metal tools they are no longer capable of fabricating themselves, suggesting they are dropouts from a more developed civilization. Their language also appears to have had a large part of its vocabulary cut away: