LOL Literatures in Other Languages

Book Month in the Philippines

2011-11-11T04:40:00.001+08:00

Call for papers on (M)Other Tongues

2011-11-07T12:51:00.000+08:00

Contributions are solicited for inclusion in the volume (M)Other Tongues. Papers may explore literary texts in any language discussing concepts of the mother tongue, its acquisition, its differentiation from other tongues, and whether it can be actually one, one’s own, or a mother’s language. Readings of literary texts are particularly welcome, but papers might as well pertain to the theory of autobiography and translation and to objects in other genres.

“The language in which we are speaking,” the protagonist of Joyce’s Portrait says in English about English, “will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words.” Everyone acquires language, yet Joyce raises the question: How? Does a subject, a prospective speaker lacking nothing but a vocabulary to say “I,” acquire speech by way of reaching for and accepting a language that is thus “gained” as a mother tongue? Or is it not rather that language only allows to articulate an “I,” and hence shapes it? Authors from St. Augustine to Kafka, Nabokov and Canetti discuss what it means to acquire a mother tongue, to form and reshape the language that enables to speak – not least of being estranged from speech. Deleuze suggests that by bringing about a “destruction of the maternal language,” literature renders into an expressive, communicative medium what is otherwise just a suppressive structure. Yet if that can be done in literature, language must itself comprise the possibility to be altered; a mother tongue might indeed not be a language until it is spoken, which means: altered, reshaped, thus becoming a (m)other tongue.

Please submit 300-500 word abstracts to prade@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de. Deadline: December 12, 2011.

On translingual literature

2011-11-01T20:54:00.001+08:00

From Natasha Lvovich of the City University of New York comes a report on last summer's Colloquium on Translingual Literature, plus ideas on more events we might be interested in. Here are her email posts, with permission from her:

"A brief report on our successful interdisciplinary venture last summer: the colloquium on Translingual Literature (of 6 participants) that I coordinated at the International Symposium of Bilingualism (ISB8) in Oslo, Norway. This was the first time ever that literature was featured at the main international gathering of second language/
bilingualism scholars (!). Our group delivered fascinating diverse presentations, triggered genuine interest, and made useful connections with academics across the disciplines. To my knowledge, several publications may come out as a result of this.

"Perhaps we can continue in the same vein? Steven Kellman and I have been looking into possible venues, and a couple of suggestions have emerged:

"1. AILC/IACL 2013 (International Association of Comparative Literature), July 18-24 2013, Paris, Sorbonne.
The theme of the conference is Comparative Literature as a Critical Approach, and it seems to me that a group on Translingual Literature focused on interdisciplinary inter-lingual inquiry in the increasingly globalized world might be an irresistible proposition. There are two options for groups: a 1,5 hour seminar meeting over several days OR a workshop/roundtable meeting once. More info here:
http://icla-ailc-2013.paris-sorbonne.fr/organisation-du-congres.html

"The deadline for group proposals is January 1, 2012. I am happy to coordinate an AILC group if there is enough interest and we make the deadline.

"2. MLA 2013, January 3-6, Boston, MA. There are several group possibilities there, including Special Sessions and Discussion Groups. Perhaps someone on this list can look into it and organize a gathering.

"There are of course other possibilities, including the next ISB (9) in Singapore."

A follow-up email:

"I am so glad I have ignited quite a few sparks here. Nobody stops us to have several panels organized simultaneously at different places. I will keep rolling our Translingual ball toward Paris - but recent
responses show that this is how we can make ourselves known as a growing field and call for attention in several disciplinary directions, organizing Translingual Lit groups at different gatherings. And this is how the snowball firms up and grows, right?

"More to come: The 19th ICL: Congres International des Linguistes, Geneva, July 22-27, celebrating the anniversary of Ferdinand De Saussure. Look it up: www.cil19.org. I use structural/semiotic approach to translingual texts, but I don't think as a group, we have a good chance at the purely linguistic conference. But who knows?

"Also, even though we missed AAAL (American Association of Aplied Linguistics) for 2012, we may have a good chance in 2013 in Dallas (see dates: http://www.aaal.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=8),
organizing in summer--especially because the new president of AAAL is now Aneta Pavlenko (congratulations, Aneta!), who strongly believes in using literature in L2/Bilingualism research.

"Since I've got a show of interest (across the continents and fields) for AILC 2013 in Paris, the Call for Proposals with the details will follow shortly. I am excited! Thank you!"

Will be in Passau

2011-06-10T03:03:00.000+08:00

Rizal, der Nationalheld der Filipinos: Damals und Heute
Symposium an der Universitat Passau
Donnerstag, 30. Juni 2011,
R. 147 b, Juridicum, Innstr. 39
Bis 14.00 Uhr

1) "Rizal in seiner Zeit" (Prof. Dr. Dahm)
2) "Rizal in Heidelberg" (Dr. Frey) Kaffeepause
3) ,,Jose Rizal on film and online"
Das Image Rizals in den heutigen Philippinen (in engl. Sprache) (Dr. Isagani Cruz)
4) Rizal und Gandhi und die Politik der Gewaltlosigkeit (Prof. Dr. Dahm)

Will be in Frankfurt

2011-06-06T04:07:00.000+08:00

Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt/M
Institut fur Orientalische und Ostasiatische Philologien
- Sudostasienwissenschaften -
Interdisziplinares Zentrum fur Ostasienstudien (IZO)
Einladung
zu einem Gastvortrag
mit
Dr. Isagani R. Cruz
[Literaturkritiker, Autor, Verleger etc., Manila]
Jose Rizal on film and online
am Dienstag, dem 21. Juni 2011, urn 16.00 Uhr c.t.,
Juridicum, 7. Stock, Raum Jur 717
(U 4,6, 7: Station Bockenheimer Warte)
gez. Prof. Dr. Arndt Graf
telefonische Ruckfragen unter:
069-798-28445

Symposium on bilingualism

2011-05-02T05:16:00.001+08:00

ISB8 - International Symposium of Bilingualism, Oslo 2011

Velkommen til ISB8 2011!

Denne viktige internasjonale konferansen for tospråklighet blir i år arrangert av Institutt for lingvistiske og nordiske studier ved Universitetet i Oslo fra 15. til 18. juni.

Konferansen inngår som en del av feiringen for 200-årsjubiléet for Universitetet i Oslo.

ISB8 - International Symposium on Bilingualism Oslo 2011

ISB8 will be hosted by the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Oslo from June 15 to June 18, 2011.

The University of Oslo celebrates its 200th anniversary in the same year and ISB8 is part of the program for a celebration that will last throughout the entire year.

Six papers will cover the following topics:

-Synesthesia in Translingual Texts

-The Case of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

-Language and National Identity in Beckett’s Comment c’est/How It is and Nabokov’s Pale Fire

-Translingual Israeli Arab Writers

-Acquiring a Second Language Literature: a Case Study in Translingualism

-Visual Applications of English-Chinese Code-mixing in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos and Xu Bing’s Square Word Calligraphy

Literary theory for teachers

2011-04-16T04:56:00.000+08:00

LITERARY THEORY FOR TEACHERS

Lectures by Dr. Isagani R. Cruz

May 9 to 13, 2011

Nicanor Reyes Hall – Case Study Room

Far Eastern University, Sampaloc, Manila, Philippines

A series of public lectures on the use of Literary Theory in teaching literature on the secondary and tertiary levels. The lectures will acquaint teachers with the fundamentals of literary theory, from its beginnings in China to Ecocriticism and Wikcrit. The lectures will focus on the way literary theories can be applied in practice to understand and to teach literary texts and other narratives, such as films. No prior knowledge of literary theory and criticism is required. The lectures will be conducted in English, but texts in several languages will be used as examples.

SCHEDULE:

9 May Monday 9-11 a.m.: Literature as Self-Expression: The Birth of Theory in China

9 May Monday 2-4 p.m.:

Literature as Mirror: Plato Begets Aristotle

10 May Tuesday 9-11 a.m.: Literature as Prayer: Medieval, Renaissance, Romantic

10 May Tuesday 2-4 p.m.: Literature as History: Rizal and Realism

11 May Wednesday 9-11 a.m.: Literature as Object: New Criticism & Structuralism

11 May Wednesday 2-4 p.m.: Literature as Weapon: Marx and the Marxists

12 May Thursday 9-11 a.m.: Literature as Self-Contradiction: Poststructuralism

12 May Thursday 2-4 p.m.: Literature as Sexual Politics: Feminism and Gay Criticism

13 May Friday 9-11 a.m.: Literature as World Politics: Postcolonial Theories

13 May Friday 2-4 p.m.: Literature in the 21st Century: The Death of Theory Online

Lecturer’s Profile

ISAGANI R. CRUZ, Ph.D., is one of The Outstanding Filipinos (TOFIL) of 2010. He is the Consultant for Academic Institutional Development of Far Eastern University. He is a Professor Emeritus of De La Salle University. He was an Undersecretary and is currently an Adviser of the Department of Education. He belongs to the Hall of Fame of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. In 2010, the world’s leading literary critics contributed articles to a book honoring him as the country’s foremost literary theorist.

Sick leave

2011-03-25T19:08:00.000+08:00

I'm currently battling a particularly bad strain of pneumonia and will be back blogging as soon as I regain my strength.

Gay language

2011-03-13T05:43:00.000+08:00

Should gay language be considered a different language? The difference between English as used by homosexuals and English as used by heterosexuals is not obvious, but for other languages, the difference is enormous. For example, in the Philippines, gay language (known as swardspeak) has a totally different vocabulary (not used by heterosexuals) and sometimes even a different grammar. A poem mixing straight Tagalog and gay Tagalog can be treated the usual way we read multilingual poems. In English, however, the difference can be pretty subtle. Here is an excellent account of a gay poem mixing gay and straight vocabularies. Since the gay words also have meanings in straight language, it is easy to miss the interplay of registers:

“Slang words may be deliberately adopted – with all their power to disturb – in order to insist on the difference between gay and straight love poetry. Here, their function is that of a consciously liberating discourse.

“Poems that take this line often overtly mix register, as we can see in the following example:

I love your eyes;

in my dreams

my breath is on your pants

fluctuating seashell

my hand is on the zipper

starfish opening a shell

my hand petting your jock

blue sun warming a salty ocean (R. Daniel Evans, ‘I Praise’)

“This extract describes a rapid and – in a naturalised reading – bathetic shift from eyes to groin as the addresser prepares to suck the addressee. Although it adopts a register familiar to love poetry, with its use of expressions like ‘I love your eyes’ and ‘dreams’ and the construction of an almost mawkisly romantic scenario with such trappings as ‘seashell,’ ‘starfish’ and ‘sun,’ the juxtaposition in lines 2-3 of two grammatically parallel phrases ‘in my dreams’/’on your pants/ neatly undercuts the potentially hackneyed romanticism of the opening couplet. The same technique is used in the next two lines, where ‘my hand’ is implicitly compared and contrasted to ‘starfish’ and ‘the zipper’ to ‘a shell.’ The final couplet resorts once more to the use of structural equivalence: the semantically connected verbs ‘petting’ and ‘warming’ oblige a reading in which ‘my hand’ and ‘blue sun,’ and ‘your jock’ and a ‘salty ocean’ are related both grammatically and metaphorically, exploiting the sexual implications of the second phrase to the full.” (Charles Lambert)

Oral language as another language

2011-03-09T05:02:00.000+08:00

Seeing foreign words in a predominantly monolingual work is a clear sign that language-mixing or language-appropriation is taking place. Much more difficult to detect (unless one is a native speaker of various languages or at least of the predominant language) is the interaction between the spoken register and the written register. All languages make such a distinction. (One thinks, in English, of fragments or run-on sentences, which speakers speak routinely but writers try very hard - except with reason - to avoid. Or in many languages, the general convention that words used in real speech to refer to the sexual organs are not found routinely in most literary texts, particularly older ones.) Here is an attempt to deal with the issue of two varieties or registers of the same language (one spoken, one oral) in the same literary text:

“What are the oral ‘traces’ when the written text is in another language? The authors of the articles in the second section [of volume 2 of the book Interfaces Between the Oral and the Written, edited by Alain Ricard and Flora Veit-Wild, 2005], ‘New Literary Languages,’ tackle this intriguing question. This section focuses on creation in African languages, where the translation from oral to written text is accomplished in the same language. Using Daniel Kunene’s groundbreaking work as a reference-point, Alain Ricard analyzes the first Sotho novel and endeavours to establish its paradigmatic nature as a text. Thomas Mofolo knew Sotho tradition and invented a new language to express new realities, particularly the African appropriation of Christianity. The Swahili writer Shaaban Robert is equally revealed, in Xavier Garnier’s article, as an innovator. A civil servant, Muslim, and nationalist, he wrote prolifically in the traditional verse-forms, but he invented Swahili prose. A different form of new prose was created by the Kenyan David Maillu, who, in his desire to pattern a novel on a new urban life-style, decided to mix languages and to mimic the speech of the young urbanized Kenyans. Analyzing this type of code-switching in one of Maillu’s novels, Thomas Geider details the processes by which the creation of a truly original piece of writing is accomplished.”

Arabic script

2011-03-06T05:37:00.000+08:00

The problems of monolingual readers of multilingual European texts are nothing compared to the problems of monolingual (or monodialectal) readers of texts in Arabic script. Because there is apparently no standard way of writing the different dialects (we should really call them languages, in the same way that we call various Chinese "dialects" as languages), it is extremely difficult for a reader to decipher texts written in non-universal Arabic. Here is an account of that difficulty:

“A text written in dialect is fully intelligible only to those Arab readers who are its native speakers or are familiar with it through other direct experience. This is especially true of the less central dialects, but it is applicable even to such a central dialect as that of Cairo or Beirut. Although these central dialects are, grosso modo, comprehensible to many Arabs throughout the Near East and North Africa through film, popular songs and the like, their nuances are, more often than not, lost on those from different regions. A novelist who writes dialogue in AM (i.e., his own dialect) is therefore likely to attract a much smaller reading public in neighbouring Arab countries than his colleague writing in FU. He also risks becoming a ‘local’ writer rather than one who addresses the reading public of the entire Arab world.

“Dialects in the Arab world never developed writing systems of their own, and AM is normally reduced to the uncongenial orthography of FU. Thus the reader, especially one who is not a native speaker of the dialect in question, faces many difficulties in deciphering them. Moreover, as there is no stable tradition of committing the dialects to writing, texts that employ AM are very often inconsistent in the use of Arabic characters for this purpose.

“Since the narrative sections of an Arabic novel or short story are customarily written in FU, the use of AM in the dialogue produces a text consisting of two different linguistic types. Admittedly, the use of dialectal dialogue is a common practice among European and other novelists, who are not loathe to mix dialectal repliques with narrative sections whose language is usually more akin to the standard variety. But it would seem that the lingual gap between the written and the spoken varieties of Arabic is much greater than what we find in most European languages.” (Genre and Language in Modern Arabic Literature, by Sasson Somekh, 1991)

Not easy to translate

2011-03-03T04:09:00.000+08:00

“A book that is easy to translate is, after all, useless,” says Ludvík Vaculík. Extremely difficult to translate is a book that mixes languages, because the translation will mask a major feature of the writing (everything will be in the target language, making it appear that the original was all in the same language). Some translators resort to footnoting (e.g., “in French in the original”) but that impedes the reading.

Here is Eva Eckert's 1993 account of Vaculík:

“The articles by Brodská and Hrabik-Samal, stylistic literary analyses of two well-known Cz authors, Bohumil Hrabal and Ludvík Vaculík, further exemplify the relationship of the spoken code and the standard language. Both authors are considered difficult to translate; Brodská and Hrabik-Samal address themselves to the causes of this difficulty. Hrabal’s language is characterized by endless baroque periodic sentences. Vaculík’s, on the other hand, is elliptic; it contains typically Cz metaphors and also various forms of the northeast Moravian Valachian dialect. CCz is always used to a specific purpose in Vaculík’s prose. The author intentionally elaborates his own language variety, Brodská suggests, to a point where it becomes untranslatable, by using neologisms, playing with words, and altering established grammatical constructions. In Vaculík’s words, ‘a book that is easy to translate is, after all, useless.’”

European tradition of mixing languages

2011-03-01T05:39:00.000+08:00

Mixing languages, of course, is not new. In fact, it is very old. Here is a passage from Transforming the Center, Eroding the Margins: Essays on Ethnic and Cultural Boundaries in German-Speaking Countries (1998), by Dagmar C. G. Lorez and Renate Posthofen (p. 258):

“Genthe describes the long European tradition of mixing languages within literary texts. While making verses, he tells, some Roman poets already made no difference between Greek and Latin, thereby witnessing the incorporation of Greek culture into Roman culture. Finally, since the eve of the Middle Ages and throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, several writers – including Molière in his Le Malade Imaginaire (1673, translated as The Hypochondriack, 1732) – elaborately assimilated their native language to the scholars’ Latin idiom. This species of poetry is called macaronic because it was inaugurated by Tifi degli Odasi’s Maccharonea in 1490.”

I find it interesting that the mixing of languages is thought to be also a mixing of cultures. This is a rather big jump from language to culture, but since each language theoretically embodies a particular culture, it is an avenue worth pursuing. Perhaps the labeling of English as an "international language" would then be problematized, because the language (in theory anyway, even if it has not yet been shown in practice) carries the culture of Britain (and today, of the United States). The Australian attempt to make English english, or the Indian attempt to make English Englishes, may be masking the hegemonic or imperial nature of the English language. Perhaps (a thought at this point, without any theoretical basis yet) the widespread use of the English language is threatening not just other languages but entire cultures.

Linguistic power follows economic power

2011-02-25T04:23:00.000+08:00

An Xiao Mina

Artist, designer, international ubernerd

Posted: February 24, 2011 10:41 AM

你说啥？

Three Guesses at a Global Chinese Language Future

More Americans are enrolling their students in Chinese class, and the dominant language on the Internet will soon be Chinese.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/an-xiao-mina/-three-guesses-at-a-globe_b_827608.html

Literary critics vs. linguists

2011-02-20T13:35:00.001+08:00

The debate between linguists and literary critics about code-switching (or as we prefer to term it, multilingual literature) might be traceable to Jacques Derrida's famous insight that writing precedes speech. Linguists look primarily at spoken language, while literary critics look primarily at written language. But if Derrida is right that writing precedes speech, then literary critics see a much bigger and more accurate picture of multilingual literature than linguists do.

Here is an account by linguist John Lipski, for example, of Ilan Stavans:

“A very different perspective comes from the self-declared admirer and promoter of Spanglish Ilan Stavans, an expatriate Mexican writer now teaching in Massachusetts, whose prolific popular writings on Spanglish and purported specimens of this ‘language’ have made him a lightning rod for polemic as well as a widely-cited source among international scholars unfamiliar with the reality of Spanish-English bilingualism in the United States. Rather than applying Spanglish to an already existent discourse mode or sociolinguistic register (as done, for example, by Ed Morales or by the New York Puerto Ricans cited by Zentella 1997), Stavans invents his own mixture of Spanish and English, loosely modeled after true intrasentential code-switching typical of U.S. Latino communities. … Stavans appears to regard all code-switching as a deliberate act of creativity, whereas most linguists who have studied code-switching – in a wide variety of language-contact environments throughout the world – analyze spontaneous code-switching in spoken langauge as a loosely monitored speech mode circumscribed by basic syntactic restrictions but largely below the level of conscious awareness. Only in written language, particularly in creative literature, is deliberate manipulation of code-switching to achieve specific aesthetic goals a viable option.” (Spanish and Empire, 2007)

If writing does precede speech, then even oral or non-literary code-switching is deliberate, just as Lipski concedes that creative writing is.

One-way influence?

2011-02-15T05:26:00.000+08:00

The standard way of looking at the interaction between English and another language is to say that English has influenced or even dominated the other language. For example, here is what the leading Englishes advocate, Braj B. Kachru, says in Asian Englishes: Beyond the Canon (2005), about English and Indian languages: “There is general agreement that English has functioned as the main agent for releasing the South Asian languages from the rigorous constraints of the classical literary traditions. With the influence of English literature came new experimentation, and resultant controversies. The issues were seen in new theoretical and methodological frameworks.”

On the other hand, it is time to investigate what happens to English as a literary language when writers with a different mother tongue write in it. I don't mean merely talking about how the language is different in literary texts written by second-language writers, because that has been studied quite well and even felt instinctively by readers. I mean looking at English itself as a language. There have been several studies of the number of non-English words that have entered English (I am talking of modern times, not the origins of English), but what about English structure? Has the grammar of English changed because of the influence of Englishes or different varieties of English? Has the English of monolingual American writers become different because of all the works written by immigrant or multilingual Americans?

I once gave a lecture on the influence of Philippine literature on American literature, and frankly, I was laughed out of the lecture hall. Yet Herman Melville apparently passed by the Philippines on one of his whaling trips; given his sensitivity to languages and nature, he could not have possibly not been influenced by the Philippine writing then available to him. Is it possible that the "strange" way he structured Moby Dick (usually attributed to his having dropped the project, read Shakespeare, and resumed the project without revising earlier work) been due to his experience reading the works of other countries (not necessarily the Philippines)? Would it not shake the ego of Anglo-American writers to realize that they are as beholden to speakers of other languages as these others are beholden to them?

Long tradition of mixing languages

2011-02-12T13:08:00.000+08:00

“Language mixing in literary texts has been commented upon by literary scholars and medievalists for a long time,” writes D. A. Trotter in Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain (2000), citing examples from Latin-French-English macaronic poems, Piers Plowman, English-Latin-French-Hebrew medieval drama, and Mary Play. He concludes his brief survey with this: “Even this rather sketchy survey of mixed-language texts from almost five centuries should have illustrated that switching is evidently a common phenomenon in the history of written English texts and occurs in a variety of domains, text types and/or genres.” Note the word "common." The large number of predominantly English literary texts today that incorporate words and sentences from various languages shows that the classical tradition of mixing languages within one text is continuing and, in fact, getting stronger.

Chinua Achebe on English

2011-02-09T04:25:00.000+08:00

Here's a familiar quote from Chinua Achebe's “English and the African Writer” (1965):

"My answer to the question, Can an African ever learn English well enough to be able to use it effectively in creative writing? is certainly yes. If on the other hand you ask: Can he ever learn to use it like a native speaker? I should say, I hope not. It is neither necessary nor desirable for him to be able to do so. The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience."

Literary critics in postcolonial countries tend to focus on one or both of two aspects of English: how a writer's English differs but should not differ from so-called "Standard English" (whatever that is) and/or how a writer's mother tongue influences (more often, distorts) his or her English. The kind of literary theory I am pushing for should remove the center of power from English (decenter or unprivilege it, as critics love to say) and to talk instead of the literary language that is created out of the merger of two languages - the mother tongue and the second language. The English of a literary text is not the English that the linguists are talking about (the "authentic language," as they love to say). Rather, it is a language that is intelligible only to readers and critics (and, of course, writers) of literature.

Ana Castillo

2011-02-05T05:51:00.001+08:00

In the hands of a poet, what is merely code-switching for linguists becomes a singular poetic code. Here is a discussion of the way Ana Castillo lifts Spanglish from a "mixed" language to a "pure" poetic one:

"Of Castillo's poetry collection I Ask the Impossible, John Stoehr observed in CityBeat online that the author 'breaks the mono-linguistic rule by writing a Chicana-brand of poetry in both Spanish and English, effortlessly intermingling the Latinate and Germanic languages, often breeding them into an intriguing hybrid. But it's not Spanglish --it's something more lyrical and thus more poetic.' Geeta Sharma Jensen, in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, dubbed it 'a work that celebrates a woman's strength and reminds people of social justice.' Noting that Castillo 'wrote these poems between 1989 and 2000,' Jensen quoted the book's introduction: 'They are meditations, odes, stiletto stammers. . . . They are the musings of a big-city gal and the prayers of a solitary woman who can feel equally at home in the desert or rancho.' Stoehr characterized the verses as 'irreverent, witty, passionate and intensely political,' and added that 'much of I Ask the Impossible is like hearing the voice of Carl Sandburg if he'd had a Mexican accent. Though Castillo would chafe at the comparison, she can hardly deny the similarities, especially in her homage to her hometown, "Chi-Town Born and Bred, Twentieth-Century Girl Propelled with Flare into the Third Millen-nium."' He continued: 'Beyond the Sandburgian free flow, Castillo brings to the fore her own unique voice, rife with the pain of ethnic life in the United States, the joys of a rich and diverse Mexican-American past and the struggles of her Chicana present. . . . [She is a] writer . . . who's likely to continue to fight the good fight and to break the rules for years to come.'"

Happy New Year!

2011-02-03T05:50:00.000+08:00

新年快樂

恭禧發財

恭禧发财

Happy Chinese New Year, everyone!

Mixtilingual poetry

2011-02-02T04:59:00.000+08:00

The alternative term for multilingual poetry - mixtilingual poetry - comes from an old article, "From Bilingual to Mixtilingual Speech: 'Code-Switching' Revisited" (1988), by Renzo Titone. Here's the abstract:

"Offers several justifications for the claim that code-switching is a positive, not a negative, phenomenon. Included are three examples of 'mixtilingual' poetry: poetry 'mixing languages' in order to evoke different feelings and images within a certain cultural context. The poems mix English and Spanish, English and Italian, and Italian and Spanish, respectively."

While the term mixtilingual makes explicit the presence of two or more languages in a single text, it hides a second and more sophisticated layer of language-based meaning-making in a text, that of a mother tongue beneath the surface of a second-language literary text. A text need not be obviously mixed to be mixed; what appears to be a monolingual text, if written by someone with a different mother tongue, is necessarily also mixed and should be read as a "mixtilingual" text. To make the lives of critics even more difficult, there is a third layer, which is the apparently monolingual text written in the mother tongue; in this case, Bakhtin's dialogics should bring out the other languages (idiolect, subtext, other voices, personal language, whatever) that are present in such a text.

Book alert: Digital Poetry

2011-01-30T08:14:00.000+08:00

Digital poetry, the poetry of the XXI^st century, highlighted in a new study and anthology

Jorge Luiz Antonio presents a panorama of digital poetry in Brazil and in the world

There are many ways of making poetry nowadays, but the one that mostly engages the new technologies of language is digital poetry. In Digital Poetry: Theory, History, Anthologies, Jorge Luiz Antonio presents a panorama of digital poetry history, from its origins, in 1959, until our days with the most advanced and creative innovations. The author shows how the resources of computer science, apparently cool and exact, can give new life to the universe of poetry when taking their producers and appreciators to the other artistic directions inside digital culture.

For Jorge Luiz Antonio his Digital Poetry: Theory, History, Anthologies is a book that "studies a type of contemporary poetry in its relationship with the arts, design and computational technology, which is a continuation and an unfolding of avant-garde, concrete, visual, and experimental poetry". According to the Portuguese poet E.M. de Melo e Castro, the work has "clearly the intention and the author's accomplishment of a discussion about the reasons that can be invoked for the study of the transformations that the use of the technologies is already causing in the concept of poetry".

Digital poetry: theory, history, anthologies comes accompanied by a DVD that gathers a complete anthology of digital poems and their predecessors, introducing 501 poems of 226 poets and 110 theoretical texts of 73 authors, Brazilians and foreigners, with about 1500 printed and electronic pages, giving a rare panorama of what has already been done in the area of poetic experimentation, in Brazil and in other countries. The DVD shows that "poetry, art, design, science and digital technology form the transdisciplinary quintet that a portion of the contemporary poets chose to accomplish their poetic communication", as Jorge Luiz Antonio says.

(Franklin Valverde, Onda Latina, Brazil)

Digital poetry: Theory, History, Anthologies is a co-edition of Navegar Press (São Paulo, Brazil), Luna Bisonte Prods (Columbus, Ohio, USA), FAPESP (The State of Sao Paulo Research Foundation (São Paulo, Brazil) and the Author.

On the author: Jorge Luiz Antonio, university teacher, researcher, FAPESP scholarship, post-doctor in IEL-UNICAMP, is also the author of studies on Cesario Verde and Augusto dos Anjos.

Roger Federer

2011-01-27T03:34:00.000+08:00

A break from talking about literature: let's talk about tennis. Here's an excerpt from a newspaper article about Roger Federer's being a polyglot (Swiss German, French, English):

"It is not uncommon for Federer to stay behind after his main press conference and answer questions in several languages for a variety of media in newspapers, radio and television.

"'Sometimes I wish I never told anybody I learned French or something like that.

"'I'm happy to speak it. It's a language we speak in Switzerland. I'm proud to have learned that language. At least I can communicate and have friends as well from that part of the world.'

"Federer, who has a South African mother, said he grew up speaking English and Swiss German.

"'That (being a polyglot) comes at a cost, sure. But I don't mind it. I try to have fun with it,' he said.

"'I have different humor in all the different languages, which is kind of fun for me, too. Getting to know myself through different languages is actually quite interesting for me.'"

I was struck by his observation that another language not only helps him communicate with people, but learn about himself. Since one of literature's major goals is to help writers and readers learn about themselves, having more than one language is surely a simple way to gain more self-knowledge. In the same vein, a novelist working with more than one language knows a lot more about his or her characters than one working monolingually.

Thomas Shimmin

2011-01-24T05:30:00.000+08:00

For those that know English and Manx Gaelic, here's a poem by the 19th-century poet Thomas "Tom the Dipper" Shimmin. Even those (like me) that do not know Manx can appreciate the (strict) rhyming scheme and the (almost strict) meter, probably due to its being originally a song:

I was born at the Yinnagh where stands yon big mill,

Ayns shen hooar mee'n chied greim va cur't ayns my veeal;
On the fifteenth of May, eighteen hundred and nought,
Eisht dooyrt ny shenn vraane ver-mayd eaddagh noa ort.

Not long I remained down there it is true,
Gys çheu Ballacross va mee 'choyrt lesh dy bieau.
My uncle he loved me, an infant forlorn;
Eisht cur't lesh va mee dys thie Ballagawne.

Not long I remained my youth to regale,
Eisht cur't lesh va mee dys Ballacashtal;
Whilst there I was sent to school and to trade,
As schoillar mie va mee ec three bleeaney jeig.

I began to improve in the shoemaking trade,
As greassee mie va mee ec nuy bleeaney jeig.
I soon became foreman, which was no disgrace,
Eisht phoose mee shenn ven erskyn daeed vlein dy eash.

Full thirty years long - I then lost my bride,
As dooinney treogh va mee ec jeih blein as daeed.
Again I got married to a good woman true,
Agh boggey ayns paitçhyn cha row ad ayn rieau.

Bred and born in the Lowlands I upward would go,
Son cha row mee booiagh dy ve injil myr shoh.
I am rising up higher again and again,
Ta mee nish beaghey ayns Kirkdale ec Slieau ny Garnane.

And shortly like Moses on top of the hill,
Yn çheer roym cha baghtal lane bainney as mill;
But do not mistake me, I now mean the soul.
Ta mee nish taggloo jeh'n çheer spyrrydoil.

Now I am getting old and death will devour.
Dy jean Creest leeideil as cur bea nooghyn my chour;
Then in the great judgement when all shall appear,
Goit seose marish Yeesey dys thie-mooar yn Ayr.

Spanglish as literary language

2011-01-22T06:30:00.000+08:00

The chicken-and-egg question is which comes first, the creative way in which people on the streets mix languages or the deliberate way in which poets creatively mix languages in a single text? Did Chaucer merely capture the language being spoken in the markets of his time, or did he create that language? In the case of Spanglish, poets can at least be credited with naming the language. See this encyclopedia entry:

"Spanglish has existed as long as Spanish has been in contact with English in the United States and the cultures have coexisted; however, the term gained currency in the 1970s with the explosion of bilingual Latino and Latina poetry. Nuyorican poets, such as Miguel Algarín, Tato Laviera, and Sandra Maria Esteves, and Chicano and Chicana poets, such as Alurista, Tino Villanueva, and Bernice Zamora, incorporated Spanglish in their writing and defended its use as a creative representation of the Latino and Latina vernacular. While Spanglish is more closely associated with poetry, writers such as Roberto Fernández, Junot Díaz, and Giannina Braschi regularly incorporate it in their prose."

The answer to the riddle might seem obvious (that people mixed languages before poets), but note that poets (not novelists, who more directly capture real-life speech) were the major contributors to the spread of Spanglish as a literary language. Perhaps William Wordsworth might have argued that ordinary human beings speak poetry in their everyday lives, but he was speaking metaphorically. We know very well that poets craft or distill ordinary language and that we do not find people talking to each other in rhyming couplets. I think that the role of poets in creating, not just mirroring, language is vastly underestimated.

Student view

2011-01-19T03:27:00.000+08:00

Here's a comment by a student about John Agard's "Half-Caste":

"The language of the poem is a mixture of Caribbean dialect and formal British English – the poet at one point says in Caribbean dialect: ‘Ah lookin at yu wid de keen half of mih eye’, but at another in BBC English: ‘Consequently when I dream I dream half-a-dream’. This very powerfully gets across the fact that Agard is of mixed heritage."

While obviously "amateur" and not "professional" in terms of literary theory, this comment reveals that even the ordinary reader senses that form should mirror content. If a poem talks about prejudice against people of mixed ethnic origin or heritage, then the poem itself should be "mixed," that is, should not aspire or pretend to be "pure." The simplest and most obvious way to do this is to use more than one language. Of course, this is merely on the "amateur" or student level. Literary critics have to study how the languages were mixed, why a "foreign" or "non-standard" word is used instead of the expected word in the main language, how the words in the other languages add to the sound pattern and/or visual appeal of the poem, and so on. But the initial acceptance of mixed-language poems is clearly there and clearly effective.

Ann Cotten

2011-01-16T20:43:00.000+08:00

The use of two languages clearly adds to the literariness of this stanza from Ann Cotten's "Die Klassenfahrt":

Ich bin ein Pechvogel, darling
was willst du von mir
Das Gastschampoo
fällt ins Klo
I wanted to kill you
but you said no
so what are we for?
Jetzt sitzen wir da
und weinen bitterlich
und niemand ist froh
weil nämlich
es stimmt gar nicht

Notice how the rhymes are possible because of the shift in languages (froh instead of happy; the initial syllable of darling and da; you to match Gastschampoo; etc.). The words are chosen as much for their meanings as for their sounds. In fact, the shifting of language complements the theme of the whole poem. In translation, the stanza loses its power. If the original were all in German or all in English, it would lose not just its power but its point.

Multilingual visual poetry

2011-01-14T18:05:00.000+08:00

At a much later stage, multilingual literary/aesthetic criticism should unpack the meaning or at least illuminate the creative process of multilingual visual poems like this one by Babi Badalov. The words/names in different languages are chosen not only for their visual appearance, but also for their meanings and sounds (it is poetry, or at least it is called such by the artist).

Macaronic, yes, but not anymore

2011-01-11T05:45:00.001+08:00

It is sad that a standard reference book, The New York Public Library Literature Companion (2001) perpetuates the prejudice against multilingual poetry through its definition of “macaronic verse”:

"MACARONIC VERSE. Verse that incorporates two or more languages. The form originated in the 15th century, when Tisi degli Odassi wrote comic poetry composed of vernacular words with Latin endings, but gained popularity through the work of his student, Teofilo Foleago. Poets since have exploited the humours potential of mixing languages. Less commonly, noncomedic poetry can also be referred to as macaronic, as in the work of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot."

The definition, by citing two of the greatest poets in the English language, deconstructs itself. Perhaps the word "macaronic" is similar to the word "negro." We cannot deny the historical fact that both words were indeed used in the past to denote a certain class of poems or people, but as the human race grew in wisdom, we have since abandoned those words for more accurate, less value-laden terms.

Colloquium on Translingual Literature

2011-01-09T04:52:00.005+08:00

From Natasha Lvovich comes this good news:

I am happy to announce that our Colloquium on Translingual Literature has been accepted for the International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB 8) to take place in June in Oslo, Norway. I am very pleased that our group (of six people) representing a fascinating range of topics, cultures, languages, and authors will help view L2/bilingualism issues through the lens of literary text, creativity, and overall interdisciplinarity. I believe this is a step forward for both L2- and literature-related disciplines and a significant accomplishment for the emerging field of Translingual Writing. Congratulations to the participants and a call for attendance and support for all those who will be able to come to the conference and participate in our discussions!

If you will be in Oslo in June, don't miss this colloquium. It is one of the rare occasions when multilingual texts will be studied from the point of view of literary criticism in addition to linguistics.

Sound and sense

2011-01-07T04:30:00.000+08:00

Paul Zumthor, in Toward a Medieval Poetics (1991), talks about “rhythm as a factor”: “Rules of rhythm played a major role in the poetic mutation that generated the medieval tradition, serving as both mold and catalyst. The line of verse was the seat of this mutation. If we examine the oldest poems in French or Occitanian, we find that rhythm, rhyme, syntax, and vocabulary are indissolubly interwoven in a way that reduces as far as possible the chance selection of an unpredictable linguistic feature.”

Things have not changed in poetry. A good poet chooses a word (whether in the main language or from a different language) not just because of the meaning of the poem (whether denotative or connotative) but because of its sound. The word must fit the rhythm (or meter) and the rhyme (or sound pattern of some kind) of the poem. This is one reason that studying a multilingual poem is very different from studying any other kind of written or spoken text by a bilingual or multilingual person. The poem is an artificial construct, artificial not in the sense of not real but artificial in the sense of deliberately constructed according to certain rules (i.e., artifice). The words in a poem are there because they not only help convey the meaning of the poem, but because they sound right. From the oldest poems to yesterday's poems in blogs (assuming the poems are good), the poet's choice of words is dictated not only by the mind (what the words mean), but by the ear (how the words sound) and, in the best poems, by the eyes (how the words look on the page).

Research tips

2011-01-05T04:55:00.000+08:00

Here's an account of some of the 20th century scholarship available to those interested in writing articles or books about the aesthetics of multilingual literary texts. This is from “Mixed Language Texts as Data and Evidence in English Historical Linguistics” by Herbert Schendl in Volume 1, page 57, of Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective (2002), edited by Donka Minkova and Robert P. Stockwell:

“Though there was some interest in ‘macaronic poetry’ before the 20^th century, serious research only began with Wehrle’s study on medieval macaronic hyms and lyrics (1933). Wehrle establishes a typology of macaronic poetry from the 13th to the 15th centuries and classifies patterns of Latin insertions from a formal literary perspective, viewing them as ‘a genre of versification.’ The second half of the 20^th century saw quite a number of literary studies on the aesthetic and poetic functions of language-mixing in macaronic poems, such as Zumthor (1960, 1963) in a European perspective, Harvey (1978) for Anglo-Norman lyrics, or Archibald (1992) for the poems of Dunbar and Skelton. These more recent studies emphasise the often highly artistic stylistic functions of poetic language-mixing.”

Greetings

2011-01-01T07:12:00.003+08:00

Gelukkige nuwejaar, voorspoedige nuwejaar, ilufio ètussé, Gëzuar vitin e ri, e glëckliches nëies, güets nëies johr, عام سعيد, shnorhavor nor tari, yeni iliniz mubarek, aw ni san'kura / bonne année, urte berri on, З новым годам, subho nababarsho, asgwas amegas, mbembe mbu, bonne année, sretna nova godina, bloavezh mat, bloavez mad, честита нова година, hnit thit ku mingalar pa, sun lin fi lok, kung hé fat tsoi, bon any nou, xin nian kuai le, xin nian hao, pace e salute, sretna nova godina, šťastný nový rok, godt nytår, sale naw tabrik, mbu mwa bwam, gelukkig nieuwjaar, happy new year, feliĉan novan jaron, head uut aastat, eƒé bé dzogbenyui nami, gott nýggjár, onnellista uutta vuotta, gelukkig nieuwjaar, bonne année, lokkich neijier, bon an, feliz aninovo, გილოცავთ ახალ წელს, ein gutes neues Jahr, prost Neujahr, kali chronia, kali xronia eutichismenos o kainourgios chronos, sal mubarak, nootan varshabhinandan, rogüerohory año nuévo-re, bònn ané, hauoli makahiki hou, שנה טובה, nav varsh ki subhkamna, nyob zoo xyoo tshiab, boldog új évet, farsælt komandi ár, selamat tahun baru, ath bhliain faoi mhaise, felice anno nuovo, buon anno, sugeng warsa enggal, akemashite omedetô, asseggas ameggaz, hosa varshada shubhaashayagalu, zhana zhiliniz kutti bolsin, sur sdei chhnam thmei, umwaka mwiza, seh heh bok mani bat uh seyo, sala we ya nû pîroz be, sabai di pi mai, felix sit annus novus, laimīgu Jauno gadu, feliçe annu nœvu, feliçe anno nêuvo, bonana, mbula ya sika elamu na tonbeli yo, laimingų Naujųjų Metų, gelükkig nyjaar, e gudd neit Joër, Среќна Нова Година, arahaba tratry ny taona, selamat tahun baru, nava varsha ashamshagal, is-sena t-tajba, kia porotu te ano ou, kia hari te tau hou, navin varshaachya hardik shubbheccha, ose:rase, Шинэ жилийн баярын мэнд хvргэе, wênd na kô-d yuum-songo, umyaka omucha omuhle, godt nyttår, bon annada, subha nababarsa, naba barsara hardika abhinandan, nawe kaalmo mobarak sha, سال نو مبارک, szczęśliwego nowego roku, feliz ano novo, ਨਵੇਂ ਸਾਲ ਦੀਆਂ ਵਧਾਈਆਂ, bun di bun onn, baxtalo nevo bersh, un an nou fericit, la mulţi ani, С Новым Годом, ia manuia le tausaga fou, nzoni fini ngou, bonu annu nou, bliadhna mhath ur, Срећна нова година, mwaha mwema, goredzva rakanaka, nain saal joon wadhayoon, suba aluth avuruddak vewa, šťastný nový rok, srečno novo leto, dobir leto, sanad wanagsan, feliz año nuevo, wan bun nyun yari, mwaka mzuri, heri ya mwaka mpya, gott nytt år, es guets Nöis, ia orana i te matahiti api, assugas amegaz, iniya puthandu nalVazhthukkal, yaña yıl belän, నూతన సంవత్శర శుభాకాంక్షలు, สวัสดีปีใหม่, tashi delek, losar tashi delek, tshidimu tshilenga, itumelele ngwaga o mosha, posa varshada shubashaya, yeni yiliniz kutlu olsun, gluk in'n tuk, Vyľ Aren, Щасливого Нового Року, З Новим роком, naya saal mubarik, yangi yilingiz qutlug' bo'lsin, Chúc Mừng Nǎm Mới, Cung Chúc Tân Niên, Cung Chúc Tân Xuân, ene boune anéye, ene boune sintéye, bone annéye, bone annéye èt bone santéye, blwyddyn newydd dda, bon lanné, dewenati, nyak'omtsha, a gut yohr, unyaka omusha omuhle, and in my own language (Filipino), manigong bagong taon!

Limitations of any language

2010-12-30T08:44:00.000+08:00

One of the persistent reasons many critics demand that a text be written completely in one language is the belief (long debunked) that every language is capable of expressing anything and everything. In particular, rabid defenders of the English language claim that the language can express any human reality. Writers know better. Even a consummate English user like T. S. Eliot was forced to use French and other languages every time he came up with a reality that the English language was incapable of handling. The silliness, however, is not limited only to English users. In Taiwan, using more than one language in a song (akin to poetry) is apparently frowned upon by the literati. Here is an account:

"The mainstream of the music industry works in accord with general attitudes of young Taiwanese. Mandarin is the language of their choice, although there are still some concepts that are better defined using Taiwanese or English, and that is where the code-mixing fits in. English is generally used for the purpose of adding prestige and an element of trendiness to a song, while Taiwanese is used to express an idea that Mandarin is incapable of expressing."

Like English, Mandarin is considered by its speakers as omnipowerful. It is interesting that a "smaller" language like Taiwanese has shown itself superior to Mandarin in certain cases. It is also interesting that, in Taiwan as in many other places, English is considered a prestige language. Truly, linguistics and literary criticism can never ignore political realities. Once China overtakes the United States in economic and military power (within our century!), we can be sure that Mandarin will be considered the prestige language, rather than English.

Black authors necessarily multilingual?

2010-12-28T21:11:00.001+08:00

This is the abstract of an article entitled "Expanding 'South Africanness': Debut Novels" (2009) by Margaret Lenta:

"In this article I examine a selection of debut novels published in South Africa in the period 1999 – 2008 in order to determine what inspired the authors to embark on the writing of prose fiction. A large number of such novels have been produced in this period, and most of them demonstrate the new freedom that authors feel to deal with subjects disapproved of or banned under apartheid. I have based my selection on the categories 'giving voice to previously silent communities'; 'sex and gender'; 'mixing languages', a phenomenon now characteristic of novels by black authors; 'writing back', that is, responding to and taking issue with earlier works; 'the roman à thèse', implying that the work becomes fictionalised argument. The final element is 'fusion', by which I mean that the novels register that people of different ethnic communities are now free to know each other outside of their work, and to form what ties they wish."

I wonder if it is true that mixing languages in a single work is now "characteristic of novels by black authors"? That would make multilingual novels mainstream, wouldn't it?

Spanglish

2010-12-25T05:35:00.002+08:00

The article "Spanglish: Speaking la Lengua Loca" (2007) by Ilan Stavans talks about the mainstreaming of a mixed language:

"Curiosity about Spanglish is abundant. Is it a dialect? Should it be compared with Creole? What are the similarities with black English? Will it become a full-fledged, self-sufficient language with its recognizable syntax? Linguists seem to have different responses to these questions. Personally, I answer to the latter question with a quote from linguist Max Weinreich, who wrote a multivolume history of Yiddish. Weinreich said that the difference between a language and a dialect is that the language has an army and a navy behind it. I also often call attention to the fact that in the last couple of decades, an effort to write in Spanglish has taken place in numerous circles, which means the form of communication is ceasing to exist at a strictly oral level. There are novels, stories, and poems in it already, as well as movies, songs, and endless Internet sites."

Multilingual literature does not have an army and a navy behind it, but it does count some of the world's best writers among its revolutionaries. As the history of the world shows, armies and navies eventually all surrender to the few, stout-hearted men and women of subversive movements.

The spoken mode in fiction

2010-12-19T19:39:00.000+08:00

Here's the table of contents of the book The Representation of the Spoken Mode in Fiction: How Authors Write How People Talk (2009), edited by Carolina P. Amador-Moreno and Ana Nunes:

Foreword by Prof. Michael McCarthy, University of Nottingham
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Writing and Reading Diglossia: Evidence from the French-speaking World – Rainier Grutman, University of Ottawa
Abstract
Introduction
Understanding diglossia
Writing diglossia
Reading diglossia
Textual evidence
Double-Dutch
Colonial creole
Maghrebi mix
Another form of hybridity
References
Code-Mixing in Biliterate and Multiliterate Irish Literary Texts – Tina Bennett-Kastor, Wichita State University
Abstract
Introduction
Structural categories of mixing and switching
Functional categories of mixing and switching
Multilingualism and multiliteracy in Ireland
Code-switching in theory and practice
Code-switching in spoken Irish
The texts
Conclusion
References
“Preserving every thing Irish”? The Hiberno-English Dialect of Kevin McCafferty, University of Bergen
Abstract
An oral writer?
Carleton’s peasant Hiberno-English
National writer, national dialect?
General English forms
Northern Hiberno-English forms
General Hiberno-English forms
Southern Hiberno-English forms
A levelled (Southern) dialect
Irish, not Scots
References
Representing Voice in Chicano Theater Through the Use of Orthography: An Analysis of Three Plays by Cherríe Moraga – Carla Jonsson, University of Stockholm
Abstract
Introduction
Code-switch – Lukas Bleichenbacher, University of Zurich
Abstract
Introduction
Code-switching: fiction and reality
Data and method
Situational code-switching
Metaphorical or marked code-switching
Indexical code-switching
Edited code-switching
Results and conclusions
References
Imitating the Conversational Mode in Audiovisual Fiction: Performance Phenomena and Non-clausal Units – Roberto Antonio Valdeón Garcia, University of Oviedo
Abstract
Introduction
Performance phenomena
Repeats
Non-clausal units: inserts
Conclusions
References
Index

We can see from the table of contents that this is a book which should be extremely useful to a multilingual literary critic. Unfortunately for me, I can't afford it, since it sells for US$ 109.95. Starving critics are poorer than starving writers!

Luis Alberto Urrea

2010-12-18T04:51:00.000+08:00

Readers know by instinct that the use of several languages in a literary work must have something to do with the meaning of the work. Here, for example, is a Book Club guide question to the novel Into the Beautiful North (2009), by Luis Alberto Urrea:

"Language and dialect play an integral role in the novel’s style. Spanish words and phonetic spellings are laced throughout, and Spanglish and slang are used on both sides of the border. What does Urrea achieve by mixing language in this way? What does it say about the ability of language to bridge—or not to bridge—cultural gaps?"

One can imagine ordinary booklovers (not professional literary critics nor even students in a literature class) asking themselves why a text would have more than one language, why utterances in other languages should not be translated into the main language (the way many novels do), why monolingual readers are being asked to read words that they cannot understand. Such first-level questions (we can no longer call them "naive" because of political correctness) should hopefully lead to deeper questions about the nature of literature itself, about why literary texts need (or do not need) to mirror reality, which at this time in humanity's history is multilingual.

Amazing Amazing Grace

2010-12-15T21:07:00.000+08:00

That it is important to sing (equivalent to reciting or writing or reading poetry) in many languages is recognized by people outside multilingual literary circles. Of course, a motivation was the setting of a world record, but interviews after the event had the singers saying that the world record was only secondary to being able to pray in many languages. Here's an account of the event:

Our Amazing Guinness World Record Attempt!

Manila, Philippines

Amazing Grace at EN2010

On Friday, July 23, Every Nation Ministries made an official attempt to set the Guinness World Record for “The Most Languages Performed in a Song (Multiple Singers)” by performing “Amazing Grace” in 50 different languages.

Background on the attempt:

The Guinness World Record attempt was performed during EN2010, the world conference of Every Nation Ministries. Every Nation has churches and ministries in 61 nations and has a vision to plant a church in “every nation” of the world. Thus, singing “Amazing Grace” in 50 different languages was chosen for the Guinness World Record. In the Philippines, Every Nation is represented by Victory Church which has 14 congregations in Metro Manila and 42 provincial churches outside Metro Manila.

This world conference is only held once every three years – the previous conference, EN07, was held in Araneta Coliseum with more than 14,000 participants from 41 different nations. This time, EN2010 was held at the SMX Convention Center with 19,173 participants from 45 different nations.

João Guimarães Rosa

2010-12-10T04:26:00.002+08:00

Here is an example of why everything gets lost in the translation of a multilingual novel (considered the best Brazilian novel):

"Born June 3, 1908 in Cordisburgo state of Minas Gerais, Rosa, the greatest Brazilian author since Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), came from a wealthy patrician family. He earned a medical degree and worked as a doctor and a diplomat before publishing in 1946 his first book, Sagarana, a collection of short stories. Grande Sertão: Veredas (Big Backlands: Pathways, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands in the American translation) was published in 1956.

"Rosa was responsible for inventing a new language mixing regional slang to Indian dialects and modern and archaic Portuguese and foreign languages. Grande Sertão: Veredas is the pinnacle of this accomplishment. The novel's story is an endless monologue told in the first person by Riobaldo, an ex-bandit, who with unfinished sentences and invented words recalls what happened to him and sexually-ambiguous character Diadorim in the backlands, starting at the end of the nineteenth century.

"He died at his home in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro, on November 19, 1967, of a heart attack just three days after being formally received at the Academia Brasileira de Letras. The author, who had a nearly fatal heart attack in 1962 was chosen in 1963 to become an 'immortal,' but refused to join the other 39 members of the Academy of Letter fearing 'the emotion of the moment.'

"A sample from Grande Sertão: Veredas extracted from the episode known as the 'Slaughter of the Ponies,' which was eliminated from the US translation:

"I can't remember how many days and nights it was. I'd say six, but I may be telling a lie. And if I hit on five or four, I may be telling a whopper. I only know it was a long time. It dragged on for years, sometimes I think. And at other times, when I consider the problem, in a different light, I think it just flitted by, in the whiz of a minute that seems unreal to me now, like a squabble between two hummingbirds.... We were trapped inside that house, which had become an easy target. Do you know how it feels to be trapped like that and have no way out?... I can tell you—and say this to you so you'll truly believe it—that old house protected us grudgingly: creaking with complaint, its dark old rooms fumed. As for me. I got to thinking that they were going to level the whole works, all four corners of the whole damn property. But they didn't. They didn't, as you are soon to see. Because what's going to happen is this: you're going to hear de whole story told."

We have no idea, from the English translation, how the languages worked to help each other out and make the text more complex.

Divortiare

2010-12-06T04:14:00.000+08:00

Another novel that mixes languages is Divortiare by Ika Natassa.

Here is a description: "Divortiare is a novel which includes dialogues containing English. The characters in this novel often mix bahasa Indonesia with English or even switch from bahasa Indonesia into English. Sometimes they also use ethnic languages such as Javanese or Bataknese."

Here is an excerpt:

Denny memelukku. Not this passionate-I-just-want-to-feel-you-up hug, but a warm, close, hug.

Tenggorokanku tercekat, dan aku cuma bisa berkata pelan, “You don’t want to be with me, Den. I’m ruined.”

Ada rasa lega yang menjalar di sekujur tubuhku saat mendengar jawabannya.

“Let me fix it.”

Aku mengangkat kepalaku dari pundaknya, dan ia tersenyum menatapku.

“I can fix it. And I will. If you just let me.”

“But it’s gonna take a while, Den. It’s gonna take a long while.”

“Then we have all the time in the world to make you fall in love with me, right ?”

Novel a-borning

2010-12-03T22:11:00.001+08:00

On 17 October 2009, Rosine Caplot wrote in her blog:

"I have no clue what I will write about. It will probably be a crime novel, with a very wicked murderer and a very smart detective. Or just a few of the fantasies I have in my head. Except for the sexual ones maybe. Or should I add them too?

"I also haven’t decided which language I’m going to write in. Víkþórr and I had the idea of writing a multilingual novel together, mixing all kinds of languages. For example,

And when Óláfr saw what 田中さん had done, he said: «Þú skalt deyja, því at þú hefir stolit vínbér frá mér!». 田中さん answered: 「すごいはオーラフル。」.

"I think that’s a very cool idea, even though nobody else would understand it of course. However, my intuition is telling me to write alone this time. I haven’t made up my mind about the language yet.

"This language mixing thing certainly is interesting!"

Yes, indeed, mixing languages in one literary text is very interesting, not just for readers but for writers. I wonder if she and her friend ever started or finished the novel?

Code-switching as characterization technique

2010-11-30T18:28:00.000+08:00

There is an interesting idea in the [unedited] abstract of "The code mixing and the social situation in the language of narration and the characters conversation in the novel 30 Hari Mencari Cinta" by Jeffry Widiatijono:

"Kachru (1978) proposes that code-mixing is the use of one or two languages which has constant linguistic transfer from one to another language by a speaker. As linguistic function, code-mixing usually appears when the speaker mixes up the language he/she usually uses with another language. In proving his idea, the writer of this study wants to reveal how the code-mixing appears in daily conversation. In this case, the novel 30 Hari Mencari Cinta has been chosen to become source of the data. In this novel, such code-mixing appears both in the language of narration and the characters' conversation mostly in informal ways. In the language of narration, for one thing, there can be found distinct codes and types of code-mixing as what Kachru states. In the characters' conversation, such distinct codes and types of code-mixing can also be found. In dealing with the social situation, Fishman (1971) states that social situation is constructed when individuals interact in appropriate role-relationships with each other, in the appropriate locales for these role-relationships, and discuss topics appropriate to their role-relationships. This is clear enough since in each conversation, those three terms can be found either in formal or informal language. The social
situation in the novel is varied depending on how close the relationship among characters is, and it helps the writer of the novel express how the situation of the characters in various ways. In this case, the social situation makes the story in the novel more varied."

Widiatijono appears to have discovered that the use of different languages within conversations in a novel serves as a clue to characterization. This is an idea that should answer the need of graduate students looking for a new angle to classic multilingual works (there are hundreds of these works, as well as hundreds of graduate students in search of a thesis topic). Study the conversations in these works, see how the use of more than one language is deliberate on the part of the author (not the character), and find out what the aesthetic purpose of the author is as far as characterization is concerned.

Linguists and multilingual novels

2010-11-28T05:44:00.000+08:00

In the book Filipino English and Taglish: Language Switching from Multiple Perspectives (2001), Roger M. Thompson mentions one reason linguists shy away from studying multilingual texts: “I could describe the linguistics of written Taglish as it appears in tabloid newspapers, novels, and other written forms, but these are subject to editing and may not reflect everything that is happening in the spoken language.” Apparently not having realized that Jacques Derrida’s “writing precedes and follows speech” is right, linguists are usually not willing to help multilingual literary critics. That is too bad, because we critics need the kind of scientific knowledge only linguists can give us.

Christian Simamora

2010-11-24T04:18:00.000+08:00

Here is a concluding paragraph from Najmah Soraya Wahdani's "Analysis of Code Switching and Code Mixing in the Novel Macarin Anjing by Christian Simamora":

"From the ten reasons why bilingual people switch or mix their codes, there are nine reasons that can be used to explain the code switching and code mixing in the novel Macarin Anjing by Christian Simamora. Most of the characters switch or mix their codes in order to express their group identity, which means that they belong to a particular speech community, of which the members are able to use both English and bahasa Indonesia in their dialogues. On the other hand, none of the characters switch or mix their codes in order to exclude other people when a comment is intended for only a limited audience. It is mainly because the characters do code switching and code mixing only within their own group (bilingual community). So, they feel that they do not have to exclude other people since they can use Bahasa Indonesia outside their group."

Linguists make a big deal out of group identity as a reason for code-mixing. That is only one, in fact not even quite a significant one, of the reasons a writer uses other languages in an erstwhile monolingual text. Writers do not see language as transparent, that is, not something that stays invisible while pointing to whatever it refers to. On the contrary, writers see both what is being referred to and what is doing the referring. The sounds and sometimes even the spelling or visual look of the foreign words are crucial to what a writer is trying to do. Writers do not write merely for an audience that knows all the languages being used in a text, which is what is implied by the linguistic dictum that code-mixing is used for group identity. Readers do not have to know the exact dictionary meanings of foreign words in a text. All readers have to know is how the words look and sound; the meaning can always be deduced from context. Writers harness the resources of other languages, importing not just the sounds and visual looks of words, but also the cultures that gave rise to those words, in order to make their meanings clearer and more complex. This is one reason we cannot leave the analysis of multilingual texts to linguists. Only literary critics can fully understand and appreciate multilingual texts. That is why they have the obligation to lead readers (particularly monolingual ones) to this understanding and appreciation.

Bakhtin revisited

2010-11-22T06:01:00.000+08:00

James Philip Zappen quotes from Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel”: “Hybridization is both linguistic and cultural. Hybridization ‘is a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor.’ Hybridization may be either intentional or unintentional. Unintentional hybridization is ‘a mixing of various “languages” co-existing within the boundaries of a single dialect, a single national language, a single branch, a single group of different branches or different groups of such branches, in the historical as well as paleontological past of languages.’ Intentional hybridization, such as the artistic image of a language re-created in the novel, is not only a mixing of various languages but is more importantly a ‘collision between different points of views on the world’ that produces ‘a semantic hybrid; not semantic and logical in the abstract (as in rhetoric), but rather a semantics that is concrete and social.’ Intentional, novelistic hybridization is thus productive of new linguistic and cultural possibilities, for just as the mixing of heteroglot languages forms a complex unity of self with other, so also the mixing of differing worldviews forms novel cultural hybrids.”

Bakhtin was looking at multilingual texts (or monolingual texts that actually use languages at different stages of development) from the outside, as a critic. We can look at these texts from the inside, as practising multilingual writers. We know that our selves are complex, we know that languages co-exist within us, we know that we have linguistic resources much richer than the language-challenged, but we also know that mixing languages is not a matter of our choice. The languages choose us. Texts write themselves through us. We do not write texts through our languages.

Madhu Rye

2010-11-20T04:28:00.001+08:00

Since I am not a subscriber to the Wiley Online Library, I have read only the first page of the article “Englishization of Contemporary Gujar āti Novel: Code Mixing and Style” by P. K. Thaker. The first page, however, appears to indicate that the writer looks at code-mixing as a device deliberately used by an author for artistic effect. That is certainly one way of doing multilingual literary criticism. It is, of course, merely a first step, because the much more difficult and most likely more revealing step is to take what does not look like a text that mixes codes or languages and show that it in fact does mix codes due to either the mother tongue of the author or the author’s own idiolect (or peculiar and individual language that only authors are able to cultivate). Here is a quote from the article:

“Sridhar, for example, has shown how ‘the mixture of English with Kannada is considered a matter of prestige, a mark of education, urbaneness and sophistication.’ We shall look at the instances of such sociolinguistically significant code-mixing between English and Gujarāti which we find in a Gujarāti novel, Sabhā, by Madhu Rye (published in 1972 by Vora, Ahmedabad). We shall also try to identify the stylistics implications of this phenomenon of code-mixing when used as a literary device.”

Jose Gallardo

2010-11-18T05:02:00.002+08:00

Here is an example of multilingual literary criticism that seems to me to be in the right direction. It looks not just at what a text wants to say, but the language it uses to say it:

"Gallardo’s style suggests the meaning of the text. His deviant language becomes a functional form as it incarnates the very language it refers to which is undergoing deviation. The medium is not just the message; the message is actually the medium. The language designed and employed arouses laughter as it assumes the possible configuration of a ludicrous language. Put in a total perspective, the poem recreates the possible speech habit of the Kapampangan community in its projected linguistic situation. No wonder, then, that the poet-addresser who is himself part of the list of writers he proudly presents, begets an illusion of a nightmare."

Instead of ignoring the language of a text, critics should put their praxis where their theory is: if language is indeed opaque, then we should look at the language and not just at what the language refers to. In Gallardo's case (as I think is the case with many other multilingual writers), the language (or more precisely, the mixing of languages) is very much a part of the content (not just the style) of the text.

New book by Adam Donaldson Powell

2010-11-14T03:48:00.000+08:00

Congratulations to a member of our community of multilingual writers! Here's the description from Amazon.com of The Stalker (Tale of a French Bitch), the new book by Adam Donaldson Powell: "The Stalker (Tale of a French Bitch) is a story that explores the battle between the sexes, sexual orientation, questions of gender and the psychological aspects of personal identity. Rachel, the main character, suffers from multiple personality disorder and enters into a relationship with a transsexual in transition (a shemale). There are twists and turns to this bilingual tale, which is mostly written in English but which also includes a bit of French."

Werner Reichhold

2010-11-13T06:15:00.000+08:00

It is fairly obvious (unless you don't speak German) that the following lines from the poem "Larval in Waiting" by Werner Reichhold are really in German, using English words:

"arcs of palms donate
imperceptible asseverations
                  desert nightfall
                 we are destined
                             to resort
with the habitual coolness of a snake’s tongue
that brings to attendance an enigmatic path
like nakedness caught by the call of insects"

I really don't think any monolingual English speaker would say "imperceptible asseverations" or "brings to attendance." The phrases are not ungrammatical; they are just not natural for monolingual English speakers. They are, however, quite "natural" for bilinguals. To appreciate the poetry, we really have to have two languages running simultaneously in our minds - English and German.

Needless to say, since Reichhold is also an artist of note, the words aspire to the condition not only of poetry or music but of the visual arts.

Mother tongue as second language

2010-11-11T08:02:00.001+08:00

One mark of a true poet, if we were to believe William Logan, is how the poet uses the mother tongue as though it were a second language. This is the other face of multilingual literary criticism. In addition to thinking of the effect of the mother tongue on a text written in a non-mother tongue, we should also think of how a monolingual poet can actually treat a mother tongue as a learned language. Here is Logan's observation about John Ashbery:
Ashbery is our Nabokovian genius (at times he seems invented by Nabokov): he’s the great lepidopterist of language and life in our late century. He delights in English as if it were his second language, or not his language at all.
Poets that deliberately distance themselves from their mother tongue are able to do what second-language poets do instinctively, namely, to stop treating language as transparent or directly related to reality, to think of language as an unnatural - rather than a natural - way of expressing what is inside, to return to what the Chinese critics said four thousand years ago that poetry is expressing what is in the heart, the heart being language-less.

Joseph Brodsky

2010-11-09T04:40:00.002+08:00

I'm too much of a cheapskate to part with my hard-earned English pounds, but I'm fairly sure I don't want to spend any currency on a review that starts off this way:

"Joseph Brodsky’s new selection, To Urania, gets off to a troubled start with a 20-line poem that contains at least one grammatical slip and a sentence of baffling absurdity. The slip occurs in line four, where we meet the construction ‘dined with the-devil-knows-whom’ – an accusative that seems to me justified by neither the rule-book nor colloquial usage. The absurd sentence follows two lines later. ‘Twice have drowned,’ we read (the first person being understood), ‘thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty.’ Eh? ‘Twice have drowned, thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty.’ I see."

Maybe Christopher Reid gets more intelligent as his review gets underway, or maybe his first paragraph is merely a rhetorical ploy ("you thought this was what I meant but actually this is not what I meant"), but in any case, I will never find out, since I will not subscribe to the London Review of Books just to read what I fear may be yet another case of someone misunderstanding why writers in a second language deliberately subvert the grammar of that language. Being ungrammatical, as long as one does it knowingly, is a way to attack the center. The simplest example is the way Australian postcolonial writers do not capitalize the word english to refer to the language; in this way, they dissociate the language from the British, who always capitalize the word.

The Google entry on the article quotes some of Reid's words: "writes in his second language and then translates it back into his own?" Reid inadvertently discovered the strength, rather than the weakness, of a second-language writer: s/he writes in the mother tongue, using words from the second language. Nobel laureate Brodsky, of course, thought and wrote in Russian but later thought in Russian but wrote in English. That was one of the best things that ever happened to the English language.

Ciaran Carson

2010-11-07T05:58:00.000+08:00

Understandably, poets writing in a second language often concern themselves with language itself. This paragraph from a review by Paul Franz of Ciaran Carson, who writes in English, which is his second language, points to a real advantage that such poets have over those writing in their mother tongue. The second language naturally adds ironic distance:

"Language and origins are Carson's abiding concerns, and one of the advantages of this Collected Poems is its delineation of his work's consistent thematic arc, thus providing a backdrop for his several abrupt and dramatic changes of style. For Carson, of course, these problems are not abstract, but emerge out of his particular experience growing up and living in Belfast, where he still makes his home. Born in 1948, Carson was raised in an environment unique even by the standards of his limited Catholic enclave: thanks to their parents' efforts, he and his siblings spent their first few years speaking only Irish. The ironic distance this implies from his second language, English, the language of the street and of officialdom, partially explains the elaborate playfulness of some of his recent styles. And yet, even before language became his work's central theme, one may detect the aftereffects of the gap it opened between his childhood and adult worlds. Inevitably, this gap also takes on historical and political dimensions."

Languages determine what we think

2010-11-05T04:55:00.000+08:00

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (either the strong or the weak version) is still not quite accepted by many scholars, for reasons I cannot understand, unless it's the old "my language is the best language in the whole wide world and can do anything your language can do" syndrome. You can enjoy a light treatment of the hypothesis (without the jargon of linguists, psychologists, philosophers, and other academics) in "5 Insane Ways Words Can Control Your Mind" by Sam Cooper of cracked.com. Here's an excerpt, dealing with the familiar color issue:

(BEGINNING OF EXCERPT)

It Makes People Who Speak Russian See More Colors Than You

Everyone's perception of colors should be the same. We have the same retinal structure due to evolution and the same wavelengths of light shooting at us.

Illustrated here, probably.

Yet somewhere, right now, there is a young couple at Home Depot looking at little cards with paint colors on them. The woman holds up four cards to her husband and says, "Do you like the eggshell, ivory, cream or bone?" at which point he looks at the cards, all of which are white, and says, "You're messing with me, right?"

"And what's all this 'taupe' bullshit?"

She's not. Experiments have found that whether or not you can register a color depends on whether or not you have a name for it in your language. You can see the color, it just doesn't register in your mind.

One study compared some young children from England with kids from a tribe in Nambia. In the English language, young kids usually learn 11 basic colors (black, white, gray, red, green, blue, yellow, pink, orange, purple and brown) but in Himba it's only five. For instance, they lump red, orange and pink together and call it "serandu."

We don't know what they call that hairstyle, but we call it "awesome."

If you showed the Himba toddler a pink card and then later showed him a red one and ask if they're the same card, the kid would often mistakenly say yes -- because they're both "serandu." Same as if you showed you "Eggshell" and an hour later showed you "Bone" and asked if it was the same card from before. Now, again, they can see the colors; if you hold up a pink card and a red card next to each other, the English kid and Himba kid both would say they're different. But not when they see them one at a time.

But if you teach him the new names for the colors, that one is "pink" and the other is "red," from then on he can identify them when seen by themselves, without the other one for comparison. Same as the girl or interior decorator who can immediately identify "eggshell" as distinct from "ivory" the moment she sees it on a wall, while her boyfriend couldn't do it with a gun to his head. The ability to recognize the color comes with having a name for it.

Also, with giving a shit.

Likewise, Turkish and Russian both split what we call "blue" into two different colors, for the darker and lighter shades. Therefore they consistently do a better job than English speakers when given the same "is this blue card the same as the last blue card" test. Even weirder, when testing the Russians they found that by giving them a verbal distraction (making them try to memorize a string of numbers while doing the color test) the advantage disappeared. It was the language part of their brain that was helping them "see" the color. (END OF EXCERPT)

English as a dead mouse

2010-11-03T06:08:00.002+08:00

In her "English as a Second Language," April Bernard describes the soul of the English language as "pretty as a dead mouse." That's an intriguing image, not only because dead mice are seldom, if ever, seen as pretty (poets still routinely follow the almost century-old New Critical command to yoke disparate images together), but also because English is not her second language. To poets, the English language is, indeed, a dead mouse when used by non-poets, but it remains pretty, as in pretty dead, not just as in pretty attractive.

Here is something linguists would never appreciate - that it is possible for a mother tongue to be a second language. A poet has her or his own language, which is the mother tongue, and the language that everybody else in the community speaks, what others may call their first language, is only the poet's second language. This is, of course, something that is way down the road for multilingual literary criticism. We still have to convince critics that poets writing in a second language are really writing in their mother tongue, using foreign words.

Wang Ping

2010-11-01T04:49:00.002+08:00

When a poet works in a second language, it is easier for her/him to ignore the nuances of the language. This seems to be what is happening to Wang Ping, at least when she talks about her own poetry:

"When I started reading, I started writing in both Chinese and English. After I began writing for awhile, though, I realized that my style writing in Chinese was very conservative, whereas my English-language poetry was much looser and freer. I felt I had much more freedom in English - my way of thinking in poetic images was somehow quite natural."

I think she feels "somehow quite natural" in a second language because she does not have the restrictions imposed by centuries of Chinese poetic tradition. It is good and bad that a poet writes in a language other than the mother tongue. On the one hand, it is good that the poet freely moves around the second language, something those born into that language cannot do because their minds have already been molded by the language. It is, therefore, good for a language to have second-language poets working with it. On the other hand, a poet should not forget that poetry, like everything else in life, is structured by history (or as critics like to put it, "constituted"). Veering away from tradition is just ignorance, not skill. By not having the knowledge that a mother-tongue poet has, the second-language poet runs the real risk of reinventing the wheel.

Take these lines from Wang Ping's "Syntax":

"Language, like woman,
Look best when free, undressed."

The deliberate use of the ungrammatical verb is in keeping with the general theme of the poem, but the image is not correct. I am a heterosexual male, but I cannot imagine a woman looking better naked than with a few pieces of clothing. There is a reason painters and sculptors cover even a small portion of the body of a naked woman: clothing increases rather than decreases sexual desire. How else explain the unattractiveness of the naked breasts of some tribal women? Similarly, to follow the metaphor of the lines, "To be or not to be" looks much better than "Decide." Undressed language never looks better than dressed or poetic language.

Writer Wanted in Manitoba

2010-10-30T04:48:00.001+08:00

Call for Applications: Writer/Storyteller-in-Residence

A professional writer and/or storyteller is sought for the position of Writer/Storyteller-in-Residence at the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture at the University of Manitoba. This four-month position, from approximately September 1 to December 16, 2011, will require the successful candidate to spend approximately 16 hours per week providing mentorship and practical artistic advice to developing writers and storytellers at the University of Manitoba, to give a limited number of readings
and/or performances on campus, and to lead an informal non-credit workshop. The remaining time is to be devoted to the writer or storyteller’s own artistic projects. The successful candidate will receive a salary of $20,000.00 CAD, accommodation and return transportation to Winnipeg.

The Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture is an interdisciplinary centre with a mandate to promote the creation and the study of the verbal arts, both oral and written. Located at the University of Manitoba in the city of Winnipeg, the Centre sponsors readings, lectures, master classes and creative community projects that explore the connections between oral and written culture. Winnipeg is renowned for its vibrant arts community and its multicultural citizenry, including the largest urban population of Aboriginal people in North America. The Centre builds upon these local cultural
strengths as a basis for its creative and critical work. To learn more about the Centre, visit http://umanitoba.ca/centres/ccwoc/.

Applicants should provide a covering letter summarizing their qualifications for the position and describing the artistic work they would undertake during the residency. Applications must also include a CV or résumé of career achievements (publications, performances, awards, residencies), a writing sample of no more than 20 pages (doublespaced and typed in a standard 12-point font) and two letters of reference discussing the applicant’s skills as an artist and a mentor.

Candidates of all nationalities are encouraged to apply; however, full proficiency in English is required, and publications or performance credits in English would be an asset.

The Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture is committed to principles of employment equity. The application deadline is November 22, 2010. Electronic submissions of application materials are accepted at the Centre’s email address, but attachments must be in Microsoft Word, PDF, RTF or DocX only. Please direct inquiries and electronic application materials to ccwoc@cc.umanitoba.ca.

Applicants may also submit hardcopy applications to:
Dr. Warren Cariou, Director
Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture, University of Manitoba
391 University College, 220 Dysart Road
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2M8 CANADA

Books and other materials sent in support of applications will not be returned.

Never as good in a second language

2010-10-29T14:31:00.001+08:00

Here are the first lines of the poem "Kitchen Polish" by John Guzlowski:

I can't tell you about Kant
in Polish, or the Reformation,
or deconstruction

or why the Nazis moved east
before moving west,
or where I came from,

but I can count to ten, say hello
and goodbye, ask for coffee,
bread or soup.

The lines capture the difficulty of writing in a second language. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to discuss really important things in a language other than your mother tongue. This poem shows it, instead of just telling it.

Unnecessary mixing

2010-10-24T08:00:00.001+08:00

Although as a theoretical principle it is better to have two rather than just one language in a poem, we have to keep in mind that mixing or adding languages should not be arbitrary. There should always be an aesthetic reason to incorporate or adopt foreign words and ideas into a text. This is a good point unwittingly raised by Bhisma Kukreti in a short review of Mero Bwada: "The language is pure Garhwali and Pant tried to avoid unnecessarily mixing Hindi wordings in Garhwali poetry as Purn pant said that the poets should avoid Hindi in creating Garhwali literature." I say "unwittingly," because Pant's dictum of avoiding a language is not aesthetically defensible. If Pant were correct, we would have to junk not just T. S. Eliot, but a good number of authors considered canonical around the world. What is really aesthetically indefensible is if a poet uses foreign words when local words would do as well. The foreign words should add meanings and submeanings that are unavailable in the local language.

Jahan Ramazani

2010-10-20T04:09:00.000+08:00

Here's a year-old news item about Jahan Ramazani that still holds interest:

"Co-editor of the two-volume Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry and of The Norton Anthology of English Literature section on the 20th century to the present, Ramazani said he has tried to help make these standard textbooks global in their reach.

"In his own research, he concentrated on 20th-century British, Irish and American poets earlier in his career, then turned his attention to Caribbean, African and South Asian writers. He realized these identifications and subdivisions in literary scholarship tended to distort global influences and conjunctions, he said. They were just plain inadequate.

"Western writers of the 20th century were influenced by contact with non-Western cultures, and vice versa. English is read and spoken all over the world, and information travels faster than the blink of an eye, but poetry has been considered 'stubbornly national,' as T.S. Eliot wrote.

"Eliot's own poetry, however, belies that statement, Ramazani pointed out. Although he was American-born and began writing poetry in the U.S., Eliot moved to London and became a British subject and thought of himself as having a European mind. Plus, he incorporated ancient languages and Eastern religions in his work. How does a literature scholar describe him in one term?

"'My book argues against local and national visions of poetry and culture and for developing new ways of thinking about poetry's transnationalism, as embedded in language, in the metaphors, lines, rhythms and images,' Ramazani said.

"'The miracle of poetry is that in such a small space it can travel so widely, moving in all different directions. If you look exclusively at local or national canons, you miss that,' he said.

"Ramazani distinguishes this cross-cultural literature from other products of globalization, such as the one-way export of Western television to other countries or the diluted versions of foods that have become popular in the U.S., such as Taco Bell and many Chinese restaurants.

"Not only was Eliot's poetry influenced by European and Eastern literature, but his work also influenced poets in the Caribbean and Africa, Ramazani said. For example, Caribbean poets, educated in English, learned to use Victorian and Romantic styles in their writing until the mid-20th century, when they heard recordings of Eliot reading his own poetry, with rhythms from American jazz and ordinary conversation. Hearing Eliot empowered them, Ramazani said, to use their own indigenous elements, such as the rhythms of calypso and Creole.

"'A foreign import can bring the writer back to the local. Poetry can be global in its outlook, but locally responsive,' he said."

Yes, indeed. Poets and critics that read only the literature of their own countries miss the whole point of literature. In this blog, I have deliberately tried to include as many "unknown" or "marginalized" poets and texts as I can, in order to remove the "stubbornly national" blinders that too many poets and critics have. I am particularly annoyed by critics that read only literatures written in English, as though the English language were the very first or the only language in which writers have written the world's masterpieces. (I have actually met literature professors who insist that we should read only the English translation but not translations into other languages of Oedipus Rex - or the Greek original - and even critics who actually quote the English translations, as though Sophocles thought and wrote in English. Sad.)

Call for papers (deadline: Nov. 12)

2010-10-17T06:43:00.003+08:00

Juliana Prade of Goethe University, Frankfurt, writes:

"I am organizing a seminar at the upcoming ACLA 2011 conference in Vancouver, Canada (March 31-April 3), and invite proposals for papers to enrich a hopefully interesting discourse on '(M)other Tongues.'

"Paper abstracts are invited that explore texts proposing or depicting concepts of the acquisition of the mother tongue and discuss whether it can be actually one, one’s own, or a mother’s language. Readings of literary texts are particularly welcome, but papers might as well pertain to the theory of autobiography and translation and to objects in other genres.

“'The language in which we are speaking,' the protagonist of Joyce’s Portrait says in English about English, 'will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words.' Everyone acquires language, yet Joyce raises the question: How? Does a subject, a prospective speaker lacking nothing but a vocabulary to say 'I,' acquire speech by way of reaching for and accepting a language that is thus 'gained' as a mother tongue? Or is it not rather that language only allows to articulate an 'I,' and hence shapes it? Authors from Augustine to Kafka, Nabokov and Canetti discuss what it means to acquire a mother tongue, to form and reshape the language that enables to speak – not least of being estranged from speech. Deleuze suggests that by bringing about a 'destruction of the maternal language,' literature renders into an expressive, communicative medium what is otherwise just a suppressive structure. Yet if that can be done in literature, language must itself comprise the possibility to be altered; a mother tongue might indeed not be a language until it is spoken, which means: altered, reshaped, thus becoming a (m)other tongue.

"Please submit 250-word abstracts via the ACLA 2011 page: http://www.acla.org/submit" on or before November 12, 2010.

Poetry in Indian English

2010-10-16T03:16:00.000+08:00

In a multilingual environment, an imported language like English inevitably becomes a welcome resource, rather than an imperialist hindrance, for poets. The language, however, undergoes radical changes, not least among which is the way the poetic tradition it brings to the new country becomes "indigenized" or "colonized by the colonized." Here is the abstract of an article by Ravinder Gargesh that examines Indian poetry in British English from a linguistic point of view, though because it moves towards semiotics, also moves towards literary criticism:

"English is a language of intellectual and creative activity in India. After independence and particularly from the 1950s onwards, English began to acquire a distinct Indian voice through greater innovations and creativity. In the domain of poetry, since the themes and substances are Indian, most creative writers in English in India emphasize that English is at home in India and India at home with the English language, so much so that if English is to be called a foreign language it is the native English, i.e., the British English, that is becoming more foreign in India. Most poets like Kamala Das, R. Parthasarathy, etc. are conscious of their multilingual situation. The poetry emanating from a bilingual sensitivity shows unique characteristics of the kind that Braj Kachru (1996a: xiii) had recognized as the nativized variety of English in India which he terms IE (Indian English) or on the larger canvas SAE (South Asian Englishes) which function not only as an `additional linguistic arm' in the culture of creativity (1996b: 17), but also as a marker of identity in local contexts (2005: 220). The present paper is an attempt at viewing the result of the productive linguistic innovations which are determined by the localized functions of a second language variety, which also implicate new communicative strategies or the ones that get transferred from local languages. The paper highlights some strategies utilized by some poets at the phonological, lexical, syntactic and figurative levels. In terms of discourse, larger configurations of historical and functional styles are also formed. Since the user of the non-native variety is bilingual, creativity is also manifested in different kinds of `mixing', `switching', `alteration' and `transcreation' of codes. The nativized variety reveals the use of native similes, metaphors, transforming of personalized rhetorical devices, transcreation of idiomatic expressions, use of culturally dependent speech styles, etc. The paper intends to show that as an end product what we get is the cultural semiotics of English as developing in India in a localized way, a form that is gradually moving away from the cultural semiotics of the standard British English."

Yiddish and Dutch

2010-10-11T04:22:00.003+08:00

Because the Jewish bible is most likely the most quoted book in all history, it is not surprising that its translations paved the way for the entrance of new words into a language. Here is a particular case:

"Hebraic Influences on the Dutch Language

"The influence of the Statenbijbel on the Dutch language can not be overestimated. Expressions deriving from this translation are still current in literature and colloquial usage. Besides such common words as Satan, cherubijn, etc., there are expressions like 'met de mantel der liefde bedekken' ('to cover with the coat of love'), borrowed from the story of Noah (Gen. 9:23). The influence of Yiddish began to be felt with the appearance of Dutch books by Jewish authors, which contained Yiddish expressions. Some Yiddish words that have become part of standard Dutch are Mokum, the popular nickname for Amsterdam ('place,' from makom); bajes ('prison,' from bayit); gabber ('friend,' from ḥaver); stiekem ('in secret,' from shetikah); and lef ('courage,' from lev). Many more are to be found in popular speech and thieves' slang – jatten ('to steal,' from yad), and kapoeres ('gone to pieces,' from kapparah). Others which were mainly used by Jews are disappearing with the dwindling of the Jewish community in Holland.

"The Jewish community has coined some Dutch words for its specific linguistic needs. By subtly changing the prefix of verbs and nouns, meaning has shifted – predominantly in the verbs aanbijten (lit. 'to bite on to,' to break the fast after Yom Kippur) and uitkomen (lit. 'to come out,' to convert to Judaism), and the noun voorzanger (lit. 'singer in front,' Cantor), which are not in use outside the Jewish community."

Even without researching, I am pretty sure that other languages have borrowed, perhaps even extensively, from translations into those languages of the Jewish and Christian scriptures.

Sex and mixing languages

2010-10-09T04:53:00.000+08:00

At least for Pedro Juan Gutierrez, mixing languages in a literary text is like sex. (Talk about the New Critical dictum of yoking opposite images together!) Here is an account of an interview:

"He once told an interviewer that 'the real leitmotiv of my books is poverty rather than sex.' At the same time, he's not making any apologies: 'Sex is very important for the condition of the Cuban people. We're a mix of races, Europeans and Africans, and I think that this mix, along with Cuba's temperate climate, with nobody wearing much clothing, encourages playfulness. We play with language, with gestures, with music, dancing - we're very playful. We're constantly inventing new dance steps. And I think sex forms a part of this playful expressiveness.'"

Language, after all, is as sexually stimulating as physical contact (how otherwise explain the universal and timeless appeal of pornography?). Is it possible that many poets refuse to play with different languages because playing with oneself is a guilt-laden (though much ignored) societal taboo? This is at least a nice thought to play with!

Khal Torabully

2010-10-06T06:17:00.001+08:00

Here's an account of the poetry of Khal Torabully:

"The poet framed many of his poetic texts with a distance from exotic views in which many encapsulated their experience of otherness. In his early Fausse-île I and II, Torabully made a work of reinterpretation and started a quest for a poetic language mixing the music of various languages in an idiom imagined as 'fossils of language.'

"His major work, Cale-d’étoiles-Coolitude, gave new twists to the French language, subverting and enriching it with Indian, Creole and Scandinavian sources. He argued for the centrality of the sea voyage in the indentured migration, going against the taboo of the kala pani or dark seas. In so doing, the poet framed his transcultural vision in the concept of what he termed 'coolitude.'"

You can watch Torabully reading a poem in YouTube.

Jofre de Foixà

2010-10-03T05:55:00.001+08:00

Jofre de Foixà’s dictum to writers in the early 14^th century is, unfortunately, still echoed by some creative writing teachers today: “Lengatge fay a gardar, car si tu vols far un cantar en frances, no.s tayn que.y mescles proenςal ne cicilia ne gallego ne altre lengatge que sia strayn a aquell; ne ayten be, si.l faς proenςal, no.s tayn que.y mescles frances ne altre lengatge sino d’aquell. (You should keep the same language, because if you want to compose a song in French, it is not fitting that you mix in Provenςal or Sicilian or Galician or an other language that be foreign to that one [being used]; just as, if you compose in Provenςal, it is not fitting that you mix in French or any other language except that one.)"

Despite the ancient dictum that a text should hold a mirror up to (multilingual) nature and despite the fact that writers from the beginning of literature mixed languages, some creative writing teachers and most literary critics still consider borrowing a word or idea from another language a weakness rather than a strength of a writer.

"Languism"?

2010-10-01T05:45:00.000+08:00

The language that Jamaicans use has been called Jamaican, primarily to avoid the negative connotations of patois and creole. No matter what the name is, the language continues to bear the brunt of the prejudice non-scholars have against so-called "mixed" languages. (Too many literary illiterates do not realize that English is the prime example of a language that unashamedly borrows words from all other languages.) Poets have a unique responsibility to fight this prejudice (we need a word like racism, sexism, or ageism, but linguism would lead to the adjective linguistic and languism sounds too odd). Philippine poet Gemino H. Abad likes to say that "we [referring to Filipinos] have colonized English." Carribean poet Kamau Brathwaite describes Jamaican this way: "English like a howl, or a shout or a machine-gun or the wind or a wave. In its contours, its rhythm and timbre, its sound explosions, it is not English."

Cardenas on inter-lingual poetry

2010-09-29T05:42:00.002+08:00

When asked by an interviewer, Brenda Cardenas reflects on her poems that mix Spanish and English:

Q: "You have an amazing flexibility and often cross borders. Your scholarly background is interdisciplinary; your poems are inter-lingual; and you write free verse, prose poems, Sapphics, and sonnets…"

A: "I’m interested in liminal spaces, in the spaces in between. That interest comes from often feeling like a crossroads–like I have one foot in one world and the other in another world, as do many other transcultural people. If you have been living in the United States for a while and you go to Mexico you are not Mexican enough for the Mexicans (they used to call you pocho). And in the United States you are certainly not American enough, or privileged enough or white enough."

People who move from one country to another feel it most intensely, but everyone actually lives in two or more worlds without knowing it - the world of the language as it limits and expands their imagination and the world they move around in during their daily tasks. The world of a language antedates the existence of a person and constitutes his/her identity, but everyone reconstitutes that language, in much the same way that T. S. Eliot said that every new poem or, as he called it, individual talent, changes the landscape of poetry. It matters only a little bit where one lives. What matters more is what language keeps forcing one to think in certain ways, while hearing or reading or knowing other languages frees one from what has been called the prison-house of language.

Looking outside is a duty

2010-09-26T13:11:00.000+08:00

Since poetry started, poets have been global, at least in the sense that, unlike ordinary mortals, they have always been open to foreign influences. When Ezra Pound opened himself up to Chinese culture, he learned his greatest lesson, as articulated in this 2010 text:
"Pound’s artistic credo was ‘Make it new,’ borrowed from the inscription in the bathtub of the legendary Chinese emperor Tang, who founded the Shang dynasty in the sixteenth century bc. Pound made poetry new by globalizing its language and expanding its subject matter to all that the human mind can encompass. The most astonishing accomplishment of The Cantos was the mad courage of its conception."
Because many readers have neither the time nor the chance to partake of the banquet of foreign cultures, they look to poets to furnish them with the vicarious experience of living outside their own country and their own century. In effect, being multilingual or multicultural is a duty, rather than just a preference, of the poet.

Second-language writing as defense mechanism?

2010-09-23T05:41:00.000+08:00

Niko Besnier, in “Crossing Genders, Mixing Languages: The Linguistic Construction of Transgenderism in Tonga” (2003), offers an explanation of code-switching that might be helpful for multilingual literary critics:

“Fakaleitī code-switch for complex and diverse reasons, and in this respect they do not differ from code-switchers in all other societies of the world. However, one of the most salient, although largely unarticulated, motivations for code-switching that this chapter has explored is the fact that the use of English represents for many fakaleitī a symbolic escape hatch out of social marginality. The claims embedded in their use of English and their code-switching serve as an idiom of resistance against the symbolic and material oppression that they experience sas both transgendered persons and poor Tongans.”

Is it possible that Filipino writers writing in English (to take only one example of second-language writing) use English because they are marginalized in Philippine society, which uses for the most part various vernacular languages in media, books, the street, the market, and real life? A radical thought, indeed, which has never been articulated as far as literature is concerned.

Maltese

2010-09-21T05:20:00.002+08:00

I have a question about Maltese literary texts. The first Maltese-language newspaper mixed English and Maltese. Did the poems in that newspaper also mix the two languages?

Here's the note from reference.com:

"The first Maltese language newspaper, l-Arlekkin jew Kawlata Ingliża u Maltija (The Harlequin, or a mix of English and Maltese) appeared in 1839, and featured the poems l-Imħabba u Fantasija (Love and Fantasy) and Sunett (A Sonnet)."

Mixing not just words but concepts

2010-09-19T06:07:00.000+08:00

At the “Cognitive Approaches to Literature Session” of the Modern Language Association Convention in New York in 2002, Martine Fernandes presented a paper entitled "Hybridity in Postcolonial Francophone Novels: A Cognitive Approach."

The abstract of the paper promises a theoretical approach to multilingual literature:

“I argue that cognitive linguistics, which is concerned with the conceptual apparatus that shapes our language, is useful to account for the literary representation of hybrid identities in postcolonial Francophone novels. My contention is that textual hybridity lies in emergent conceptual structures and not so much in the lexicon, i.e. in the mixing of codes, as most linguistic studies of hybridity in Francophone novels claim. Drawing upon George Lakoff's contemporary theory of metaphor, and Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner's theory of conceptual integration, I propose a definition of cultural hybridity as ‘conceptual blending’ that enables me to describe textual hybridity in its multiple forms (including but not limited to code mixing). … This cognitive approach not only addresses the need for a formal methodology to study Francophone literary texts but also contributes to the recognition of Francophone novels as ideologically and aesthetically complex literary productions.”

Indeed, not only Francophone novels, but all novels, even those presumably written by monolingual writers in their own languages, are “ideologically and aesthetically complex literary productions.” Part of the aesthetic complexity is the effect of the unacknowledged multilingualism of monolingual writers. Also part of that complexity is the interplay, not only of words borrowed from other languages, but of concepts and ideas growing out of the other languages.

Visual mixing of languages

2010-09-17T05:23:00.001+08:00

Here is an unexplored area of literary criticism. What happens when a writer whose mother tongue is Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, or some other language that makes readers read from right to left or top to bottom and not left to right the way the Latin alphabet makes us read? Is it possible that such a writer (if the writer is aware of concrete poetry or of book design or something similar that gives poetry a visual, in addition to an aural, character) would deliberately work with the direction of reading as a counterpoint? I know a little spoken Chinese and a little written Arabic, but far from enough to discern if an English text by a Chinese or Arabic writer has some visual pyrotechnics going on. It would not be unusual for a good writer to play with such possibilities. After all, hidden messages have been embedded in poems (usually just with letters that stand out). Think of Jose Lacaba's famous anti-Ferdinand Marcos poem published unwittingly by a pro-Marcos magazine during the height of the Marcos dictatorship.

I got this thought while I was going through an essay about computer programmers having difficulty with right-to-left languages:

"Complications arise, however, when left-to-right conventions are mixed with right-to-left conventions in the same document. Consider an Arabic/English dictionary or a Bible conlrnentary that quotes Hebrew or a Middle-Eastern encyclopedia that refers to Western names in roman letters; such documents, and many others, must go both ways."

It would probably take the New Critics' Ideal Reader to get what extremely clever second-language writers might be doing with visual habits of reading.

Forthcoming expensive book

2010-09-15T03:42:00.001+08:00

Language Mixing and Code-Switching in Writing

Approaches to Mixed-Language Written Discourse

Edited by Mark Sebba, Shahrzad Mahootian, Carla Jonsson

Price: $120.00
Binding/Format: Hardback
ISBN: 978-0-415-87946-0
Publish Date: June 1st 2011
Imprint: Routledge
Pages: 256 pages

"After many years in which interest in language alternation has focussed almost entirely on spoken code-switching, recently there has been renewed interest in written mixed-language texts. However, at the moment there is no general agreement on what constitutes the subject area and there is no widely applicable framework for analysis. The aim of this volume is to correct the deficiency just mentioned. Contributors introduce a range of approaches applied to different types of ‘multilingual texts’ (this term is used as an inclusive one, which covers both 'code-switching' in a traditional sense and other types of language mixing), and the collection will cover a range of different languages (including different scripts) and research methods. New perspectives developed in this book will be: the development of approaches to analysis which are specific to written discourse rather than based on spoken discourse; the introduction of approaches from the new literacy studies, treating mixed-language literacy from a practice perspective; the drawing together of 'old' and 'new' media types, e.g. medieval manuscripts and text messaging."

"Introduction: Researching and theorising mixed-language texts (Mark Sebba, Lancaster University) Part 1: Digital literacies 1. Linguistic and generic hybridity in web writing: the case of fan fiction (Sirpa Leppänen, University of Jyväskylä ) 2. Multilingual Texts on Web 2.0: The Case of Flickr.com (Carmen Lee, Open University of Hong Kong and David Barton, Lancaster University) 3. Multilingual web discussion forums: theoretical, practical and methodological issues (Samu Kytölä, University of Jyväskylä) Part 2: Literature, advertising and print media 4. Literary Language Mixing: (Re)Constructing Culture and Identity (Carla Jonsson, University of Stockholm) 5. Repertoires and resources: understanding code mixing in the media (Shahrzad Mahootian , Northeastern Illinois University) 6. Code-Switching in U S Latino Novels (Cecilia Montes-Alcalá, Georgia Institute of Technology) 7. "Hafa Adai… means hello!" Written Codeswitching in the Social Construction of Identity on Tourism Websites (Richard W. Hallett and Judith Kaplan-Weinger, Northeastern Illinois University)Part 3: Informal literacies 8. Analyzing multilingual text-messaging in Senegal - an approach for the study of mixed language SMS (Kristin Vold Lexander, University of Oslo) 9. Vernacular literacy practices in present-day Mali: combining ethnography and textual analysis to understand multilingual texts (Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye, Centre d’études africaines, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris and Cécile Van den Avenne, ICAR, Ecole Normale Supérieure-Lettres Sciences Humaines, Lyon) 10. Bilingualism meets digraphia: Script alternation and hybridity in Russian-American writing and beyond (Philipp Angermeyer, York University)"

I think the price of $120 is highway robbery, even if the contents of the book look promising. Here is where a digital book might be a better idea for Routledge, who will not have to get back the heavy investment in printing a book that will not sell too many copies (because there are so few of us interested in mixed-language literary texts).

Literary power

2010-09-13T05:57:00.000+08:00

As far as literary reputation is concerned, Karl Marx was right. The ruling ideas in the literary community are the ideas of the ruling class. Here is an early example of how literary quality is judged not by literary standards, but by political ones:

"Particularly after the 16th century foreign terms dominated written texts, in fact, some Turkish words disappeared altogether from the written language. In the field of literature, a great passion for creating art work of high quality persuaded the ruling elite to attribute higher value to literary works containing a high proportion of Arabic and Persian vocabulary, which resulted in the domination of foreign elements over Turkish. This development was at its extreme in the literary works originating in the palace. This trend of royal literature eventually had its impact on folk literature, and numerous foreign words and phrases were used by folk poets."

Literary critics have to be cautious of extra-literary pressures, such as the prejudices of many (most?) publishers, the narrow-mindedness of some (many?) academic administrators, the literary illiteracy of many (a great many?) readers. These pressures force critics to write only about "mainstream" (that really means, politically safe) literature, rather than texts that have high literary value in themselves. (I can criticize publishers, administrators, and readers because I am a publisher, an administrator, and a reader!)

John Bloomberg-Rissman

2010-09-11T04:24:00.000+08:00

Here’s a poem by John Bloomberg-Rissman:

In the House of the Hangman 178 (Boston 15)

Chick welders rule

the [true and] false

Einheit continuum.

Here’s a comment by Alan Baker about his poetry:

“The Californian poet John Bloomberg-Rissman has a substantial body of work behind him: several collections, a Selected Poems and a large-scale, unpublished work, Travels to Capitals, which draws on the poetry of Michael Palmer and the artwork of Donald Evans. Most of this work is self-published in limited editions and on his website. Bloomberg-Rissman’s early work has the American virtues of plain speech and direct statement, with conventional first-person narration. A quiet, humane and humorous voice. More recently however, he has adopted techniques such as random word-generation, and has blended his more conventional voice with alternative forms of discourse. Incorporations from other writers, snatches of news reports, overheard conversations and other ‘found’ language all appear in a single poem. The result is a fascinating and at times powerful mix.”

Found poetry has been around for quite a while. Part of what makes it fascinating and powerful is its multilingual character, since real people today do not speak in only one language, particularly in California. Multilingual literary criticism, perhaps like every other type of literary criticism, is a descendant of Plato and Aristotle, who – despite disagreeing on what exactly reality is – both agreed that literature’s main appeal is mimesis.

Rereading the Babel story

2010-09-09T21:14:00.000+08:00

This one is for those that read and believe the Old Testament.

How can we read Genesis 11:1-9?

"1 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. 3 They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth." 5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. 6 The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other." 8 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel – because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth."

Multiple languages are not the creation of the devil, but of God. The Old Testament interprets God’s action as motivated by fear at what humanity can do. Since we know from theology that the all-powerful God would never be threatened by puny humanity, the Biblical writer’s interpretation is wrong. If everything God created (see Genesis 1:31) is good, then multiple languages are good. Those that insist on having only one language (in a poem, in a country, in the world) are going against God’s will.

Hassani poetry

2010-09-07T21:06:00.000+08:00

From sahara-online comes this description of Hassani poetry:

"The Hassani poetry belongs to popular poetry and is characterized by various rhythmical and prosodic forms.

"As is the case with all Arab poetry, the Hassani poetry, whether expressed in the classic language or in dialect, takes a major importance.

"Even if Hassani poets pride themselves of exceeding the classic poetry and poets, dialectal poetry contains all the same many terms and even sentences of the literary Arabic language in addition to some words appertaining to other foreign languages.

"It takes also inspiration from coranic verses, hadiths and Arab poetry of different periods."

A multilingual literary critic has to discuss the effect on the poem not just of words from other languages, but even of words and expressions in different registers or types of a single language. There is really no end to a multilingual literary critic's job of work (in R. P. Blackmur's sense, not in the usual sense of work being a mere job).

Onomatopoeia

2010-09-05T06:44:00.001+08:00

One of the reasons cited by poets that use more than one language in a single text is verisimilitude or true-to-life-ness. One way to test whether a word is true to life or not is to do what the paradigm-shifting linguist Ferdinand de Saussure did – to check how different languages report the same sound. Take a rooster. Clearly, all roosters emit exactly the same sound when they crow. How that sound is written on paper (and if Saussure is right, how the sound is actually heard by a listener) depends on the mother tongue of the writer. Here is a list of the words used in some languages to mimic the sound of a cockcrow: kykyliky (Danish), kukeleku (Dutch), cock-a-doodle-doo (English), kukkurukkuk (Filipino), kukko kiekuu (Finnish), cocorico (French), kikeriki (German), kikiriku or kikiriki (Greek), coo-koo-ri-koo (Hebrew), kukuriku (Hungarian), chicchirichí (Italian), ko-ke-kok-ko-o (Japanese), cucurucu (Portuguese), kukareku (Russian), quiquiriquí or kikiriki (Spanish), kuckeliku (Swedish), kuk-kurri-kuuu u uru uuu (Turkish), kuklooku (Urdu).

Here is one difficulty multilingual writers have. If they use the sound as spelled in another language, they lose their monolingual reader, because the word would be unrecognizable. On the other hand, especially if the text is prose rather than verse and the sentence is supposed to be uttered by a foreigner or someone using a different language, it would not be true to life if the cockcrow sound were spelled in the main language of the text. For example, if I wrote in an English short story, “The Filipino heard the cock-a-doodle-doo of the rooster,” that may make sense to an American reader, but would be plain nonsense to a Filipino reader (who has never in her or his life heard a cock crow “cock-a-doodle-doo.”)

Early Welsh and Old English poetry

2010-09-02T06:24:00.003+08:00

Multilingual literary criticism is not new, although obviously not as old as multilingual literature itself. Here is a relatively early example of how the knowledge of two languages helps a critic enter more deeply into texts:

"Between languages:

the uncooperative text in early Welsh and Old English nature poetry

Sarah Lynn Higley

Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993 - Literary Criticism - 314 pages

"Early Welsh and Old English poetry are rarely spoken of together, but when they are, they have been described as like or different from one another. Sarah Higley breaks this cycle of mutual marginalization by examining what it means to read otherness or sameness into a text, concluding that too much of our reading is 'anglo-centric' in its expectations and dictated by invisible ideological agendas. ... Higley sees the English and Welsh traditions as foils to one another rather than as template and variation, and she starts with the connection of natural image and emotion, employed differently in these two contiguous but separate traditions. She shows how the English poems, long thought to be disjointed and cryptic, are invested in explanation and disclosure to a degree that the Welsh are not. The Welsh 'omissions' might be better understood as dynamic juxtapositions wherein other poetic aspects (metrics, imagery, context) serve to link ideas, perhaps even to disrupt them. She sees difficulty, ambiguity, and dialogism as loci of power - neither accidents of our reading distance nor defects in other classical standards of wholeness. Reading the English and the Welsh together with a respect for the mutual differences helps us to get beyond some of the cliche's about what is English and 'familiar' and what is Celtic and 'other.' Her argument revolves around the plight of the lone human as he or she is depicted in these texts in a precarious state of connection with the rest of the world: caught between society and wilderness, inside and outside, sacred and secular, meaning and nonmeaning. This focus on connection informs the title as well: 'between languages' expresses our position as readers reading two different cultures together, reading ancient literature mediated through modern poetic theory, and the position of medieval scholarship in its struggle between traditional and postmodern approaches."

Jorie Graham

2010-08-31T04:19:00.001+08:00

I had to share this. It's the transcript of a 2008 interview of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham (the video is available):

"Question: Why is English better for poetry than the Romance languages?

"Jorie Graham: The romance languages are languages that were far more infiltrated by Latin, and the further north you go and the further you go towards the reaches of the empire, the more the vocal language stayed alive in the midst of the Latin, so that if you get as far as England, which was a place that was never conquered entirely by Latin, you have both Anglo-Saxon and Latin present simultaneously, which makes, although the romance languages are very mellifluous and very beautiful, the complexity of the language as it exists in English is unique partly because at a certain point in the British Isles you would have needed both the Latin term and the Anglo-Saxon term for the same object. And Anglo-Saxon terms tend to be less generalizing and more precise so you would have a Latin word for something that would equally true anywhere in the Empire. In other words, the word for justice, and then you would have 14 names for different kinds of buckets used in the field, some are in the British Isles to milk endlessly different creatures and a specific bucket named for each use.

"So you have this already very rich pool, and then you bring that language across to the colonies, and you have a very absorptive greedy English language that begins to basically, unlike many romance cultures, happily steal words from Native American languages and Spanish and Dutch and Portuguese and French, a lot of Native American languages in particular and a lot of Spanish. So that, because it is a mercantile culture right from the start, it wants to be able to buy and sell, it needs every language that it can to do so.

"So you have an enormous vocabulary influx into the English language. So you have not only the tens of thousands of words invented by people like Shakespeare, but you also have all the fabulous riches of these stolen words that became absorbed into America. Then, unlike French, for example, that loves to keep its language quite pure, you have this language which is not only impure, and increasingly so, it probably absorbs new words every hour of every day, but it also makes it possible, because it is a language that evolved primarily in a society that was attempting and experimenting in the removal of a class system. And it is only an experiment, it still, you will notice in American English that you are allowed to use high and low diction in the same phrase and not feel like you are using an incorrect piece of language. If you were to begin speaking in Italian or French, a person would know within minutes or seconds, not only where in the country you come from, but also, really, what economic or social part of the culture you belong to.

"And, so, the American language is incredibly rich. One of the things that they say about America, that Americans have the largest vocabulary of any language that exists on the planet today, but they have the smallest speaking vocabulary.

"So when the French get very irritated and say why is English the universal language, there are so few words in it, it is because, on the average, Americans use a tiny percentage of the actual words that are at their disposal in the language. But it makes for an extraordinarily rich language if you are trying to write poetry."

English may indeed be a rich language for poetry, but even if it borrows liberally from other languages, it is still not the other languages. A multilingual poet using more than English in an English poem clearly has an advantage over one using only words already incorporated into English. One thinks of Chaucer, who deliberately included French words in Canterbury Tales, although these words were not in English at that time (and, of course, became English because of him). It is the English language poet, not the general public, that enriches the English language by borrowing words not because they are convenient or needed but because they add to the literariness or poetic quality or aesthetic beauty of the work. A poet that sticks only to what a dictionary currently includes is hampered by the limitations of the language; a poet that harnesses the resources of every language s/he has access to becomes a Chaucer.

Gemino H. Abad on language

2010-08-29T05:01:00.001+08:00

Poet, critic, and literary historian Gemino H. Abad, winner of Italy's Premio Feronia Citta di Fiano in 2009, gave a lecture on 28 August 2010 to the Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas [Writers Union of the Philippines]. He said: "It is the sense for language that needs to be nurtured and cultivated, because the sense for language is the poetic sense. It is the poetic sense that later in one's life, says the poet Yves Bonnefoy, 'opens to the intuition that all language refuses.' One may be language-bound, culture-bound, but it is the poetic sense that liberates. In that light, there is ultimately no English, no Filipino, no Cebuano -- there is only language itself, the supreme human achievement, the finest human technology. Indeed, language is the hidden Muse, for it is one's imagination's agon or struggle with language that gives rise to the literary work as both work of imagination and work of art."

Yes, indeed, for a literary artist, individual languages such as English, Filipino, and Cebuano, are just manifestations of Language Itself, langage rather than mere langue or parole. This theoretical insight brings in a new level to multilingual literary theory. In addition to unlocking the cultural and linguistic meanings brought by another language or other languages into an apparently monolingual or a clearly mixed language text, the multilingual critic also has to dig deeper to get at the langage behind the langue/parole (or Language Itself behind the dictionary words). Once a critic is able to do that, the critic no longer talks linguistics but literature.

Not "pidgin"

2010-08-27T20:10:00.000+08:00

In "Bridges of orality: Nigerian pidgin poetry" (1995), Ezenwa-Ohaeto writes:

"The exploitation of oral traditions through a synthesized creative crucible enables the modern Nigerian writer to produce fresh, exciting, and artistic poetry. The Pidgin language provides an appropriate medium for this exploitation of oral traditions in poetry, for it acts as a bridge between the orality of verbal communication and the formality of the written word. Thus Nigerian Pidgin poetry is constructed as part of this utilization of oral resources, which has revitalized the literary scene and the poetic tradition. However, the development and utilization of Pidgin as a language medium in Nigerian poetry owes its manifestation to the reality of its profuse use along the coast and also in the hinterland, where the indigenous Nigerian languages predominate."

If multilingual poems faithfully reflect reality, would it necessarily logically follow that monolingual poems distort reality? Is there really a community today that speaks and understands only one language? With CNN being omnipresent, one would think that English would be a second language to everyone outside English-speaking nations. With English itself having borrowed so many words from other languages, even those living in English-dominant communities cannot but be influenced by the "foreign" words.

I think the word pidgin unnecessarily puts a negative value on complex languages. We should find a better word, such as advanced language?

Book announcement

2010-08-25T01:48:00.000+08:00

Before the Divide : Hindi and Urdu Literary Culture

Edited by Francesca Orsini, Orient Blackswan, 2010, viii, 312 p, ISBN : 81-250-3829-0

Contents: Acknowledgements. 1. Introduction/Francesca Orsini. 2. Rekhta : poetry in mixed language: The emergence of Khari Boli literature in North India/Imre Bangha. 3. Riti and register: lexical variation in courtly Braj Bhasha texts/Allison Busch. 4. Dialogism in a medieval genre: the case of the Avadhi epics/Thomas De Bruijn. 5. Barahmasas in Hindi and Urdu/Francesca Orsini. 6. Sadarang, Adarang, Sabrang: Multi-coloured poetry in Hindustani music/Lalita Du Perron. 7. Looking beyond Gul-o-Bulbul: observations on Marsiyas by Fazli and Sauda/Christina Oesterheld. 8. Changing literary patterns in Eighteenth century North India: Quranic translations and the development of Urdu prose/Mehr Afshan Farooqi. 9. Networks, patrons, and genres for Late Braj Bhasha Poets: Ratnakar and Hariaudh/Valerie Ritter. Contributors. Bibliography. Index.

"Based on a workshop on 'Intermediary Genres in Hindi and Urdu', Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Culture is an attempt to rethink aspects of the literary histories of these two languages.

"Today, Hindi and Urdu are considered two separate languages, each with its own script, history, literary canon and cultural orientation. Yet, precolonial India was a deeply multilingual society with multiple traditions of knowledge and of literary production. Historically the divisions between Hindi and Urdu were not as sharp as we imagine them today. The essays in this volume reassess the definition and identity of language in the light of this. Various literary traditions have been examined keeping the historical, political and cultural developments in mind. The authors look at familiar and not so familiar Hindi and Urdu literary works and narratives and address logics of exclusion and inclusion that have gone into the creation of two separate languages (Hindi and Urdu) and the making of the literary canons of each. Issues of script, religious identity, gender are also considered.

"This volume is different in that it provides a new body of evidence and new categories that are needed to envisage the literary landscape of North India before the construction of separate 'Hindu-Hindi' and 'Muslim-Urdu' literary traditions.

"This collection of essays looking into the rearticulation of language and its identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will be useful for students of modern Indian history, language studies and cultural studies."

Agha Shahid Ali

2010-08-20T03:16:00.000+08:00

Here is a passage from Aamir R. Mufti’s “The After-Lives of Agha Shahid Ali” (21 March 2010), which shows how awareness of two languages enhances one reader's experience of reading poetry:

“Lord, cried out the idols, Don’t let us be broken;

Only we can convert the infidel tonight.

….

“And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee –

God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.

“The second and third couplets I have quoted sound like they could originally have been written in Urdu, so faithful is their replication of rhythms and attitudes that are characteristic of its poetry. It is not uncommon for Shahid’s western readers to wonder if they are reading translations from some other language. And the ghazal ends by invoking perhaps the most famous opening line in American literature — from Moby Dick — but it is simultaneously, of course, an Islamic reference as well.

“This cultural crisscrossing is a typical feature of his poems, which often weave a complex passage across civilisations. No language, no civilisation, no cultural ethos is to be left alone in peace with its own internal values, symbols and presuppositions:

“No language is old — or young — beyond English.

So what of a common tongue beyond English?

I know some words for war, all of them sharp,

but the sharpest one is jung — beyond English!

…

“Go all the way through jungle from aleph to zenith

to see English, like monkeys, swung beyond English.

….

“If someone asks where Shahid has disappeared,

he’s waging a war (no, jung) beyond English.

“This is not a set of multicultural clichés about the mutual coexistence of diverse cultures. Urdu — its rhythm, sounds and mood — is poured into English, so that we are left just a little bit uncertain about which language we are in. In the age of its global dominance, Anglophone writing, the poem suggests, has the ethical responsibility to look beyond itself. The mere repetition of the radif in each couplet produces an insistence, to be open to other worlds, to look ‘beyond English.’

“In many of his ghazals, and in fact in quite a bit of his poetry, Shahid seems to have attempted the impossible: writing Urdu poetry in English. It is evidence of his remarkable talent that to a measurable extent he seems to have succeeded.

“And of course this mixing of languages recalls the birth many centuries ago of Urdu itself, the quintessential mixed language, created when Persian and Arabic rhythms, sounds and moods were poured into Hindi, the vernacular of north India. An early name for Urdu is of course simply that — rekhta (poured, spilled or mixed).”

Mixed language poetry brings us back to the beginnings of poetry. Innovation is nothing else but being faithful to tradition.

Rūmī and Turkish

2010-08-17T05:04:00.000+08:00

I’ve recently rediscovered Rūmī, especially since he has become quite a favorite on YouTube. As a literary artist, of course, Rūmī has raised all sorts of questions about his choice of languages. For example, here’s a passage from Lars Johanson's "Rūmī and the Birth of Turkish Poetry" (1993):

“The questions heap up: Why did he not write more in Turkish? Was he not interested in the emergence of a Turkish literature? If he had been, would he have contented himself with a few simple verses and playful ‘macaroni’ mixtures of elements from two languages? What was wrong with his attitude towards Turkish? Did he regard it as a vulgar language; and did he even despise the common people speaking it?

“Such questions are, of course, wrongly posed. It cannot be concluded from Rūmī’s choice of language for his poetry whether he looked down on Turkish or not, and whether he was, as it is sometimes formulated, ‘for’ or ‘against’ the people (halktan yana vs. halka karşi). Even the question whether he was ‘interested’ in the emergence of a Turkish literature seems rather naïve. It is certainly in the retrospective only that it may appear as if Jelāleddīn Rūmī had been confronted with such an option at all.”

Indeed, a poet's choice of language should not be viewed as a clue to his/her views about the importance of the language. There are many writers that write in an international language to gain an audience outside their country, but who, when asked, will passionately defend the primacy of their mother tongue. The 19th-century Philippine novelist Jose Rizal is a good example: although he wrote his masterpieces in Spanish, he wanted to write in his mother tongue (Tagalog) because he believed that it was superior to Spanish (he says so in his novels); he tried towards the end of his life to write a novel in Tagalog, but failed because, by his own admission, he was not very good as a writer in Tagalog. Spanish (sprinkled with Tagalog words) was the medium he needed to discuss political ideology; Tagalog is better when it comes to concrete images. (An example often cited is Tagalog's having numerous words for rice, as opposed to the Indo-European languages.)

Kristin Naca

2010-08-15T16:28:00.003+08:00

Kristin Naca says "Speaking English Is Like":

"Brown and beige and blonde tiles set in panels of tile across the bathroom floor."

On the other hand, she says "Speaking Spanish Is Like":

"A bird in a tree sings to a parrot in a cage, next door."

A bilingual poet should write a similar pair of poems on "Writing English Is Like" and "Writing Spanish Is Like." I bet that, for a poet whose mother tongue is Spanish, writing English is also like human-made products (like poems) trying desperately to appear beautiful, while writing Spanish is like creatures not made by human hands, but beautiful by nature (pun intended). Sadly, though, writing Spanish, like speaking Spanish, is always associated with a cage, because the English language has become the language that liberates, whether Spanish speakers and writers like it or not. But which is in the cage - Spanish or English? For Naca, it seems that it is English that is the mere parrot. Is it not strange that she should say that, since the two poems are basically in English with the Spanish trying to enter, even if Spanish is the more melodious and natural language?

A new book by alurista

2010-08-13T05:04:00.000+08:00

PRESS RELEASE ABOUT ALURISTA'S LATEST BOOK:

"Aztlan Libre Press, a new, independent publishing company based out of San Antonio, Texas that is dedicated to the promotion, publication, and free expression of Xican@Literature and Art, announces the publication of its first book, Tunaluna, by the renowned veteran Chicano poet, alurista. This is alurista’s first publication in ten years.

"alurista is one of the seminal and most influential voices in the history of Chicano Literature. A pioneering poet of the Chicano Movement in the late 60s and 70s, he broke down barriers in the publishing world with his use of bilingual and multilingual writings in Spanish, English, Nahuatl and Maya. A scholar, activist, editor, organizer and philosopher, he holds a Ph.D in Spanish and Latin American Literature from the University of California in San Diego and is the author of ten books including Floricanto en Aztlán (1971), Timespace Huracán (1976), Spik in Glyph? (1981) and Z Eros (1995). His book, Et Tú Raza?, won the Before Columbus Foundation National Book Award in Poetry in 1996. Author of “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” he is a key figure in the reclaiming of the MeXicano cultural identity, history and
heritage through his integration of American Indian language, symbols and spirituality in his writings.

"Tunaluna is classic alurista: passionate, sensuous, and political. alurista’s tenth book of poetry is a collection of 52 poems that takes us on a time trip through the first decade of the 21st century where he bears witness to the 'Dubya' wars, terrorism, oil and $4 gallons of gas, slavery, and ultimately spiritual transformation and salvation. The 'Word Wizard of Aztlan' is at his razor-sharp best, playing with his palabras as well as with our senses and sensibilities.

"alurista is a Xicano poet for the ages and a chronicler of la Nueva Raza Cózmica. With Tunaluna he trumpets the return of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered-serpent of Aztec and Mayan prophecy, and helps to lead us out of war and into the dawn of a new consciousness and sun, el Sexto Sol, nahuicoatl, cuatro serpiente, the sun of justice."

Felicitaciones, alurista!

Amir Khusrau

2010-08-11T03:58:00.000+08:00

Here's something about early Indian mixed-language poetry:

"In Hindi, for instance even before the advent of the four recognized categories of Bhakti poetry Gyana-Kshri, Prem Margi Sufi, Ram Bhakti and Krishna Bhakti , the emergence of Amir Khusrau was noticeable . Though mainly a Persian poet, born in Patiali (Uttar Pradesh) or, according to some scholars, in Delhi Khusrau was a devout mystic and disciple of the Sufi saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auslia of Delhi, and his bridal songs, riddles and stray couplets mark the beginning of poetry in a mixed language with an amalgam of Khari Boli grammatical syntax and a sprinkling of Turkish, Persian and Arabic words. He sings praises of his motherland and mixes with the common man of his times so as to give unhampered expression to his feelings with exuberance and spontaneity."

When poets write in the "real language of men" (and women), they have no choice but to mix languages, because real men and women, in most countries that are not isolated, use words from other languages to beef up their own. No language is adequate to express everything that a human being feels; sensitive and articulate real men and women use words, ideas, and structures available from whatever language. Poets that speak for and to real men and women (not just to literary critics or linguists or language teachers) similarly harness the resources of every language they can get a hold of. If poetry indeed aspires to the condition of music (the universal language), then poetry has to use not just one language but as many as the poet can manage.

Artificial mixture of languages?

2010-08-09T03:47:00.000+08:00

Mixing languages does not mean merely using two languages as they actually exist. It also means creating a mixture that does not exist. This seems to be the case with a masterpiece of French literature, the Girart de Roussillon (1165-80?), which is “a poem of very high quality, composed in a mixed language exhibiting features of both French and Occitan.” The poem is “written in an artificial mixture of Provenςal and French.” Of course, especially with poems in the past, it is very difficult scientifically to determine for sure if a poet is using what William Wordsworth referred to as "the real language of men" (and women!), but for literary criticism, it may not be crucial to the understanding and appreciation of a text whether the poet is merely mirroring reality or constituting it. What is important is the poet integrates the two languages (whether authentic or manipulated) into a new whole that transcends, while harnessing the resources of, the two.

Not regarding oneself as "inferior"

2010-08-07T12:08:00.000+08:00

In her article "Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s ‘Bilingual Blues’ and ‘Turning the Times Tables’: Language Choice and Cultural Identity in Cuban-American Literature" (2007) Annabel Cox writes: “When bilingual literature is produced by Cubano-American writers, in common with other Latino bilingual production, it calls into question US-anglophone assumptions concerning superior and inferior cultures clearly indicated in attitudes towards non-English languages in the United States.” Although it cannot be denied that there is prejudice among mainstream American critics against American literature written in languages other than English, I often wonder if Ngugi wa thiongo's admonition that we must first decolonize our minds does not come into play here. I have forced myself, for example, to think of Philippine literature first before I think of American literature. I judge Ernest Hemingway's art on the basis of norms derived from the art of Bienvenido Santos and Nick Joaquin, rather than the other way around. Perhaps Cubano-American writers can think of their mixed-language literature as the "mainstream" and monolingual American texts as aberrations. The liberation of the mind through this simple but difficult technique is something only a creative writer can truly appreciate.

English for spirituality?

2010-08-04T05:35:00.000+08:00

One reason writers use multiple languages is that they correctly feel that something cannot be expressed only in one language. Ordinary readers have known this for a long time, although professional linguists and literary critics are hesitant to admit it, perhaps because of fear that they will find their own mother tongue (particularly English, which has the most number of fanatics) inadequate. Here is a post from an ordinary blogger whose mother tongue is Dutch:

My English is excellent (if I may say so myself) when it comes to complicated issues. I sometimes feel it's easier to talk about spirituality in English than my native Dutch.

Is spirituality really "easier to talk about" in English than in Dutch (or any other language)? That's very interesting, because many English poems deal with spirituality. (I am talking of real poems, not the Hallmark-type verse that abounds in "spiritual" inspirational books or websites.) On the other hand, think of the Catholic saints: how many of them had English as their mother tongue? Surely, a minority (though I haven't actually counted).

Teaching multilingual literature in the classroom

2010-08-01T05:27:00.000+08:00

In a 1983 article in The Modern Language Journal, Judith A. Myskens wrote that “very little mention of methods of teaching literature is made in teacher preparation materials.” Someone writing today, almost thirty years later, would probably still be able to say the same thing. Teachers assume that teaching literature is exactly the same as teaching language, or worse, teaching science. Attention is paid more to facts (names and biographies of authors, meanings of words, literary histories based on dates and events, structures of sentences, grammar, that sort of thing) rather than to literariness. This lack of sophistication in the teaching of literature works against multilingual literature, because students need much more than literary tools when dealing with entire subcultures or even cultures brought into a work that uses more than one language. Literary critics cannot stay only within the confines of academic discourse; they have to start thinking about the implication of multilingualism on actual classroom practice.

Another country's language

2010-07-30T04:23:00.000+08:00

One of the problems "selling" multilingual literary theory (as well as multilingual literature itself) is that many (if not most) literary critics are monolingual, if not in their speech, then in their outlook. Of course, we have to make allowances for "patriotic" critics claiming that their country's literature is better than that of other countries (think of American critics loving American literature, British critics loving British literature, French critics loving French literature, etc.), but on the whole, literary analysis suffers if the norms used are based on the literary tradition of only one country or set of related countries. I like the way comparative literature scholars or immigrant writers deal with the literature of the country where they currently or accidentally reside: they always "compare" the literature they are now reading to that they used to or still read.

One online discussion group, The Literature Network Forums, now and then has someone champion the literature of a country not his/her own. Take, for example, this post dated 30 May 2008:

"Now if you really want to learn an Eastern language, learn Persian. A literary history spanning thousands of years, this language has the most beautiful poetry. Almost untranslatable in English, you can spend your life-time studying poet after poet after poet right from the 6th century BC to the 21st century AD. Compared to Arabic, Persian is dead-easy. With only 7 clauses of mostly fairly straight forward verbs (Arabic has fourteen and most of them irregular!), the grammar is a doodle and a pleasure to learn. The vocabulary is huge but you learn with the passage of time. Here is a taste of the 20th century Persian Literature:

http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/bashiri.../blindowl.html

Surrealism, decadence, horror, no this is not French, this is Iranian Literature!"

I'm not sure about Persian being easy to learn, though I agree about the pleasure (I tried for a year, but gave up). I do know that I learned a lot about the social context of words. Here's a story I like to recount: A long time ago, I was hired to teach in a university in Iran. I hired a female tutor for Persian (in addition to a formal class handled by a male) for several months. After I thought I had learned enough to do a lecture to my class in Persian (Farsi is how we called it) instead of English (which my Iranian students had difficulty following), I discussed a work in my newly-learned language. After the class, one male Iranian student approached me and said, "Sir, you speak like a woman." Needless to say, I dropped my tutor and delivered all my lectures in English after that. I suspect (but do not know) that Persian literature has to be read with this gender distinction in mind.