Une rose by any other name would smell as doux
By CARLIN ROMANOLIVES IN TRANSLATION:
Bilingual Writers on Identity
and Creativity.
Edited by Isabelle de Courtivron.
Palgrave Macmillan, $22.95; 208 pp.
FOR Isabelle de Courtivron, a professor of French studies at MIT, the idea of gathering essays by bilingual writers comes naturally.
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It's enough to keep issues of divided identity fresh even after decades of a bifurcated life.
The tradition of literati who live and work in more than one language dates back to antiquity, but today we tend to think of 20th-century examples as most prominent: Joseph Conrad emigrating from Polish to English, Samuel Beckett morphing (if not Murphying or Malone-ing) from English to French, Vladimir Nabokov ardently abandoning Russian for Ada (and Lolita) in English.
More recently, Russian-born Andrei Makine, winner of many laurels for his fiction in French, and Ha Jin, the Chinese-born author who won the National Book Award for Waiting, written in English, have maintained this lustrous line of excellence in a second language.
While Lives in Translation doesn't include pieces from either, its welcome achievement is to bring together reflections from an array of internationally acclaimed writers -- among them Anita Desai, Ariel Dorfman, Eva Hoffman, Anton Shammas and Ilan Stavans -- known for both multiple identities and their pondering of border crossings.
De Courtivron begins her introductory essay about bilingualism -- though several of these writers are trilingual or more -- by asking: "What does it mean? Living in two languages, between two languages, or in the overlap of two languages? What is it like to write in a language that is not the language in which you were raised? To create in words other than those of your earliest memories, so far from the sounds of home and childhood and origin?"
De Courtivron's contributors reply to those queries insightfully, and address many others, often with pungent concrete examples and moving biographical memories.
Desai grew up in Old Delhi, the daughter of an Indian father and a German mother, her linguistic world a mix of Hindi, Urdu, English and German. Her great challenge came, she recalls, on arriving in the United States: "India had prepared me for England, but not, I found, for America." Like several others in this volume, she reminds us that, second languages aside, many "Englishes" now coexist around the world: "I laughed at things others considered serious and ... they spoke at length of matters I would not think of divulging in public."
Dorfman, a Chilean novelist and Duke University professor, masterfully pinpoints various intricacies of bilingual literary identity. He notes, for instance, the tendency of some writers to initially resist their new country's language, "a tactic of cultural survival that holds on to the native language as a pure and intact entity, a bridge, a down payment on that ticket home."
More provocatively, he rightly notices that revolutions in communications and transportation, "the compression of the immense distances that used to separate migrants from their native lands," may "force bilingualism to be the norm rather than the exception" as travel expands.
Thus one of the linguistic consequences of globalism is that people now face pressing comparative questions about their native languages:
"Do you inhabit a language that does not have armies behind it and bombs and modems and technology? Do you reside in a language that will one day be extinct? ... Is your language perfumed with unpronounceable words by poets with unpronounceable names describing their unpronounceable forests and guttural maidens? How does such a language defend itself in our globalizing world?"
One answer comes from Irish poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, whose essay Linguistic Ecology: Preventing a Great Loss crisply explores her battles for the Irish language ever since asking her father in regard to a Mercy sister putting her to bed, "Canathaobh go bhfuil si seo ag labhairt Bearla liomsa, nach i seo Eire?" ("Why is this woman speaking English to me? Isn't this Ireland?")
Many of the lovely epiphanies in Lives in Translation, however, capture issues of personal resonance rather than global importance. Polish native Eva Hoffman movingly writes of how she "wanted Polish silenced" within her "so that I could make room within myself for English." Algerian novelist Leila Sebbar morosely recalls her Francophile Algerian father, who did not keep "a single book, a single word, of his language" in their house.
On the lighter side, Nancy Huston, a Canadian novelist who married the great Bulgarian-French thinker Tzetvan Todorov and has lived in Paris for decades, hilariously itemizes typical moments experienced by a longtime expatriate, such as when the French notice your handling of articles in their immortal tongue: "Excuse me, but, did you say UNE peignoire? UN baignoire? LA diapason? LE guérison? Did I hear you correctly? Well, I'll be -- you're an ALIEN, aren't you?"
It may be that one person's "can of worms" is just another's panier de crabes (basket of crabs). But as Lives in Translation demonstrates, absorbing the world through more than one language permanently inoculates one against the notion, common to people as disparate as analytic philosophers and Pentagon planners, that one's own concepts can be instantly universalized.
Yoko Tawada, the Japanese novelist who has lived in Germany for 20 years, gives a lovely instance that makes one wonder why Japanese university deans pay their faculty: In Japanese, she notes, "whatever belongs to the realm of learning (benkyo) does not belong to the realm of work (shigoto)."
Yet it is Huston who draws the larger point of this edifying volume. "The acquisition of a second tongue destroys the `naturalness' of the first," she muses. "From then on, nothing can be self-evident in any tongue; nothing belongs to you wholly and irrefutably; nothing will ever `go without saying' again."
Carlin Romano wrote this for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
