Code-switching vs. Mixed language

Linguists like to distinguish between code-switching and mixed language. For example, Daniel Long distinguishes Ogasawara Mixed Language (OML) from the expected code-switching in the bilingual community after the Pacific War: "OML differs in many significant ways from normal code-mixing or code-switching between English and Japanese. When Japanese code-mix, for example, they generally do NOT: (a) ignore honorifics (keigo), (b) ignore polite forms (teineigo), (c) use English pronouns, (d) incorporate English whole phrase structure, (e) use English phonology, or (f) use English counters. These are all significant features of OML."

The task of multilingual literary critics is simpler. For us, whether a poet code switches or uses mixed language is not of primary concern (so far, anyway). What is crucial is that readers realize that there are two (or more) languages working within the literary text, in addition to the language of literature (the latter is what critics refer to when they talk about "literary competence").

Linguists on mixed language

Linguists have not quite figured out what to do about mixed languages. In a paper for the Redesigning Pedagogy: Culture, Knowledge and Understanding conference in Singapore in May 2007, Bao Duy Thai of the Australian National University starts by admitting that "there has hardly been a consensus on how a mixed language is defined (Bakker 2003; Backus 2003; Myers-Scotton 2002, 2003)." Here is where multilingual literary critics can do better than linguists. We can explore our twin definitions of multilingual literature, namely, first, literature that uses words from two or more languages, and second, literature written by a writer in a second or foreign language.

Jayanta Mahapatra

The poems of Jayanta Mahapatra have been justly praised for their incorporation of themes from Orissan culture, but not too much attention has been given to the way he writes in Oriya, using English words. I don't know Oriya, but I know English, and I know that these lines (from his "A Whorehouse in Calcutta Street") could not have been written by someone that thinks in English, unless we are talking of Inglish:

you miss them in the house's
dark spaces, how can't you?

Rather than detracting from so-called International English (also called english or Englishes), the lines add to the ability of the English language to reflect other languages. More precisely, from the point of view of literary criticism, the language signals a shift in worldview, a linguistic turn that brings the reader into another world (assuming the reader is not Indian). The reader becomes a dark space in the house, interrogated by the poem, challenged by the poem into becoming one with the poet and thus being illuminated by and illuminating the dark spaces in the lines.

Inglish

Here's an interesting observation by a blogger:

"India is becoming a major world power -- and predictably will join with China by the end of this century to be the dominant power globally (not just in having a third of the world's population in those two national markets, but economically and politically and culturally) and that the language they will be using globally will be a derivative of the Inglish melange, a more successful form globally than the Chinese versions."

The language being referred to is Inglish, the variety of English spoken and written in India. Inglish is a mixed language, with various elements of various Indian languages incorporated into the basic International English structure.

Has anyone read the famous Indian writers from the point of view of their use of Inglish in their works? We have too often assumed that Indian writers write in International English (whatever that is), when they were most likely writing in Inglish, using English words. This is an area where multilingual literary criticism can make itself felt.

Urdu a model of future literary languages?

Urdu appears to be the end result of poets writing in mixed languages, as recounted in this passage:

"The poets of the Mughal period who wrote poetry in the mixed language of Persian and Hindi, which was spoken in and around Delhi, called it Naz'm-e-Rekh'ti or Naz'm-e-Rekh'ta, meaning a kind of verse (naz'm) written in a language with a mixture of two or more languages. Later on all forms of poetry written in this mixed language were called Rekh'ti and the language itself was referred to as Zabaan-e-Rekh'ti. The basis for using this mixed language was laid down by the poets of Zabaan-e-Rekh'ti, which got its patronage from the Mughal court and people in the high places.

"Therefore, we can conclude that Urdu as a literary language was a product of various practices in written poetry in the amalgamated languages, born out of a mixture of Persian, Arabic, and local Hindi of the Delhi region in the Mughal period."

Is it possible that, in the future, there will evolve a literary language from the mixed-language poetry currently being written by multilingual poets? History tends to repeat itself, and it might well repeat itself with a new literary language. The poets now usually marginalized or even met with derision by monolingual critics might very well be the pioneers to be cited by future historians of literature.

Hungarian literature

I am now in Budapest. My tour guide says that Hungarian is spoken only by Hungarians. That sounds pretty much like Filipino, which is spoken only by Filipinos (and, of course, non-Filipinos that study it for various reasons, usually academic). But Hungarian literature, unlike literature in Filipino, has a worldwide readership through translations. Witness, for example, Magda Szabo. What are writers in Filipino not doing that Hungarian writers appear to be doing? Why are translators taking time to study and translate Hungarian and not taking time to do the same thing with writers in Filipino (or Tagalog or Cebuano or Ilocano)? The Philippines has been colonized or conquered several times in the past, just like Hungary. Where lies the difference?

Wikinovel attempt

Multilingual writers keep trying to join the Web 2.0 generation, though so far unfortunately with not consistently sterling success. Witness this candid admission by a group of such writers:

"Seeing how few collaborative multilingual literary projects exist in any form, this [disappointing] result is not particularly surprising. The Congress moved towards a similar goal but language exchange in conversation about shared texts is a bit less daunting than collaborative multilingual literary creation. No doubt, as automated translation becomes better and as interaction increases across linguistic boundaries in the world of electronic literature, more interlaced multilingual works will be possible."

In fact, despite the "failure" of this particular 2006 project, the idea of a wikinovel is an excellent one, since the Web offers writers from various linguistic traditions a way to work together without having to pay enormous airfares and hotel bills or getting a grant from usually fairly conservative writing retreats. I hope the writers of the Wikinovela: a project of hypertextual, collaborative, and multilingual creation on the Internet will come together again in virtual space to create their second work.

Lisel Mueller

Pulitzer Prize winner Lisel Mueller's "English as a Second Language" gives us an explicit example of how second language speakers react to writing drastically differently from first language speakers:

The underpaid young teacher
prints the letters t, r, e, e
on the blackboard and imagines
forests and gardens springing up
in the tired heads of her students.

But they see only four letters.

Similarly, when a reader reads a work in his/her own mother tongue written by someone to whom the language is only a second or foreign language, the reader thinks that s/he is on the same wavelength as the writer. That is clearly not the case, even in ordinary speech, as illustrated by the poem. Since poetry is even more dependent on precise language (including connotations and word history), it follows that the reader is even more in danger of totally misunderstanding a second-language work. In the poem above, since Mueller is also writing in a second language, the monolingual reader will miss the German characteristic of the verse (e.g., precision in number of syllables and stresses, even visual length of lines).

Puthi literature

For a good introduction to Puthi literature ("Puthi Literature is a special genre of literature written in a mixed vocabulary drawn from Bangla, Arabic, Urdu, Persian and Hindi. It was current during the 18th and the 19th centuries and its composers as well as readers were Muslims."), visit Banglapedia.

Sometimes, one-third of an entire work in Bangla would consist of words taken from other languages. Apparently, at that time, readers understood the poems because the mixed language was their own, not that deliberately propagated by schools or state.

Today, in the Philippines, many schools are trying to propagate a language (either English or a vernacular language) that is not the language that ordinary Filipinos speak at home or in the workplace. Derisively labeled "Taglish," the language that almost everybody speaks is used by novelists that specialize in romance. These novelists sell books in the thousands of copies per week. In contrast, books written in English or in one of the vernaculars rarely sell more than a couple of hundred copies a month. Let us hope that the experience of the Puthi writers is not repeated in the Philippines.

Javanese and Indonesian in a novel

Here is a longish (edited) excerpt from an analysis of a multilingual work:

"Bintang Berpijar di Langit Majapahit was written by Taufiq Saptoto Rohadi, also known by his pen name Tasaro. He is a talented writer who started his career in the journalistic and media world. The historical fiction is his first book.

"The setting in this novel is near the end of the Majapahit Golden Era. This novel is about a girl’s adventure. Hui Sing comes from China, and then she chooses to stay in Indonesia. She is one of the Cheng Ho admiral’s pupils, but he considers Hui Sing as his own daughter. She comes from the Ming Kingdom and accompanies Cheng Ho to go to Java to give a tranquility message to the King of Majapahit. Then she meets Respati, a brave Majapahit commander. Despite the ordeals, they finally get married and have a baby boy. Many murderers try to kill them. Hui Sing is saved but not her husband. Her enemies kidnap her son. Finally, Hui Sing takes revenge for her husband’s death and tries to find her son.

"There is a lot of code mixing in this novel. The code mixing could be in different word classes. To illustrate: 'Romo, Kartiwa hanya seorang nelayan, bukan prajurit yang siap berperang.' ('Father, Kartiwa is a fisherman, not a soldier who is ready for a battle.') Romo means father. In that particular sentence, the speaker is mixing two codes or languages, which are Javanese and Indonesian. The Javanese word is Romo and the rest are Indonesian.

"Another example is 'Aku rasa akan sangat mudah untuk menggebuk tubuh Hui Sing dalam posisi itu.' ('I think it will be easy to punch Hui Sing’s body from that position.') Menggebuk means to punch. In that, utterance the speaker has mixed Indonesian and Javanese codes. Furthermore, in the first example, the code mixing deals with the word class Noun; however, the code mixing in the second example deals with another word class - Verb."

I have nothing against linguistic analyses of literary works. In fact, much insight has been generated by linguists reading literature that has not been available to literary critics that do not have that deep a knowledge of linguistics. But it is important for literary critics to go beyond questions of language into questions of literature. In this example, it would be good to ask, for instance, how Indonesian and Javanese cultures differ and how the differences (as signaled by the code-mixing) illuminate the situation of the characters or move the plot forward.

Multilingual drama as dominant culture

In Raymond Williams's often-used classification of types of culture (residual, dominant, emergent), multilingual literature is clearly the emergent and (at least in the genre of drama) may already be the dominant form that literary writing is taking. Here is an observation that, from my own experience of watching plays from all over the world, is accurate:

"In the post-colonial world, creative writing for multilingual audiences flourished where readers (or viewers) could appreciate it. In Anglophone communities where many languages are in widespread use, dramatic performances for stage or television have achieved sophisticated effects through the use of several languages. Some plays offer the option of scenes not in English (for instance, Kee Thuan Chye’s Malaysian play, We Could *** You, Mr. Birch). Others employ scripts with a mixture of languages (for instance, Stella Koh’s monologue for a Singaporean audience, Emily of Emerald Hill, employs fragments in Hokkien, Cantonese, Malay, Hindi, and even African-American English of the American south). Such works make local use of global English." (p. 355 of Richard W. Bailey’s “English among the Languages,” in The Oxford History of English [2006], edited by Lynda Mugglestone).

Gonbidapena

I've been traveling these past few days and will be back in Manila only in the second week of June. (As I write this, I am in London.) This should explain why I most likely cannot blog regularly until I get home. When I do have quiet time in a hotel, however, I read, for my own enjoyment, multilingual literature, such as these lines from Antoine Cassar's "Gonbidapena":

Edan, erdaldunak, hau da zuen herria,
f’kull ħamrija l-għeruq, f’nifs ir-riħ kull żerriegħa,
et avant tout vignoble ce vin du mot nomade.

Cassar used to be a voice crying in the wilderness. With the increasing incidence of mixed-language poetry, he should no longer feel so alone.

Not Chaucer

I was taught in school that Chaucer was the first to mix languages among writers in English. That turns out, like many things I learned in school, not to be exactly correct.

In The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Volume I. From the Beginnings to the Cycles of Romance, the mixing of languages in literary English is traced to the entire period and not to Chaucer as an individual:

"In the writings of the end of the thirteenth century and the first half of the fourteenth, the proportion of Romanic words is so great that we may correctly say that the literary English of the period was a mixed language. The interesting group of poems, perhaps all by one author, consisting of Alisaunder, Arthur and Merlin and Cœur de Lion, contain many long passages in which nearly every important verb, noun, and adjective is French. Nor is this mixed vocabulary at all peculiar to works written in the south of England. In Cursor Mundi, and even in the prose of Richard Rolle, which are in the northern dialect, there is, on the average, at least one French word in every two lines. The alliterative poetry of the west midland and northern dialects from about 1350 onwards has an extraordinary abundance of words of French origin, many of which are common to several of the poets of this school, and do not occur elsewhere. The notion prevalent among writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that Chaucer corrupted the English language by the copious introduction of French words, was curiously wide of the mark. In reality, his language is certainly less marked by Gallicisms than that of most of the other poets of his time, and even than that of some poets of the early years of the fourteenth century. It cannot be absolutely proved that he ever, even in his translations, made use of any foreign word that had not already gained a recognised place in the English vocabulary."

There are still the unenlightened that think that English is a "pure" language. Scholarship has shown that English was, from the very beginning, a mixed language. Works written in English are, therefore, inherently mixed-language works, even if the writers themselves think that they are monolingual. Multilingual literary criticism need not restrict itself merely to obviously mixed-language texts, but can say quite a bit about seemingly monolingual works.

Medieval English

Literary critics are not the only ones to neglect multilingual texts. Here is an account of the current state of linguistic study about medieval English:

"Mainstream historical linguistics has completely neglected the analysis of mixed-language texts, i.e. of texts which show alternation and mixing of languages in various forms. ... While historical linguists are often unaware of the large number of such texts, philologists, medievalists, and literary scholars have tended to hold them in low esteem and not worthy of serious examination. These so-called ‘macaronic’ literary texts were frequently regarded as instances of artificial, sometimes highly artistic language-play or as exercises of clerics and students." (“Mixed-language texts as data and evidence in English historical linguistics,” by Herbert Schendl, in Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective [2002]).

"Macaronic" literary texts, as this blog has shown, have not disappeared, but have evolved into an even higher form of literature - multilingual literature.

Espanish

A snippet from the novel Loosing My Espanish (2004), by Herman G. Carrillo:

“a mi me gusto mucho, been so good to all of mis hijos, I’ve overheard mothers say when they were certain that I was within earshot.”

This combination of Spanish and English (or Spanglish) is not unique to the Cuban-American community in Chicago. In the Philippines, Taglish (a code-switching variety of Philippine English, mixing Tagalog and English) is the rule rather than the exception in bestselling novels (which are, incidentally, romances). Linguists theorize that mixing languages is a way of identifying oneself with one's community. Literary critics have a much harder task: they must justify (or not justify) the sudden shifts to the mother tongue from the point of view of literariness. The shifts should not occur haphazardly or idiosyncratically; they must be demanded by the literary situation (character, plot, structure, whatever).

Not just languages

One of the most difficult challenges facing a multilingual literary critic is that s/he has to be knowledgeable not only about languages, but about entire cultures or literary traditions. The same challenge faces, of course, not just the multilingual literary critic but all readers of all hybrid literatures (even those that appear monocultural, like British literature, which has deep roots in the literatures of other linguistic communities!).

Here is a typical observation by a critic about one type of literature (Urdu):

"While it is true that Persian and Arabic literary models are still very much
in use in Urdu, particularly in poetry, and, hence, a student possessing
knowledge of Arabic or Persian poetry can be instructed in Urdu poetic
literature with relative ease, it would be wrong to neglect the Pakistani
and Indian aspects of Urdu literature, especially in modern Urdu fiction
and drama — these narrative genres which, though borrowed from the
West, nevertheless portray the social reality of India and Pakistan. Even if
this social reality may prove difficult for a beginning student to
apprehend fully, neglecting it would result in missing out on some
important aspects of literary creativity in modern Urdu."

Similarly, a reader of Philippine literature in English that does not know Philippine literary traditions in Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilocano, and other vernacular languages runs the great risk of completely misreading a work.

We just cannot avoid being aware of other [sub]cultures and other languages. If we are not aware of them, we are like that favorite whipping-person of literary theorists - the reader that thinks that s/he has no theory.

Multilingual in one language

To restrict multilinguality to the idea of using two or more languages in the same literary text will deprive critics of a powerful tool to deal with texts in one language. Think of the debates about Greek in the early 20th century, when students led a movement to translate classical Greek texts into modern Greek. The scholarly arguments sometimes became a matter of life and death, as in the Oresteiaka riots of 1903, when three people were killed during protests for and against the staging in modern Greek of Aeschylus's masterpiece.

In the Philippines, until about a decade ago, Tagalog purists wanted to retain Tagalog as the national language and to reject the constitutionally-mandated Filipino, leading to legal and academic battles with writers in Cebuano and Ilocano. The conflict has been partially resolved by the country's leading university, the University of the Philippines, which came out with a dictionary of Filipino (rather than Tagalog). The dictionary was the work of literary giants, led by National Artist Virgilio S. Almario, who had proven his worth writing poetry in Tagalog and could never be accused of being anti-Tagalog (though some misguided non-Tagalog writers continue to regard him as a purist). Unfortunately, the dictionary has not led to a growth in the number of writers writing in Filipino, but it highlights the multilinguality of Philippine literature, where writers can make very fine distinctions between closely related languages. Russian critics of Philippine literature, like most readers based in other countries, do not appreciate the intensity of the linguistic conflict: to them, all Philippine literature is written in Russian.

Mixed language poetry contest

Last year's Mixed Language Poetry Contest drew a number of entries. Diehard, oldfashioned literary critics might snob such a popular attempt to draw out multilingual writers and the entries may not pass equally oldfashioned formalistic criteria, but the contest shows that some kind of emergent (to use Raymond Williams's word) literary culture is at hand.

Here are the first lines of one of the winners, "La Emoción no sabe Ninguna Lengua" by Carpe Noctem (a penname):

L'émotion ne sait aucune langue

Every day smiles go unnoticed, even more so the tears;
some people have no one to confide in, joyous rhapsody or fears.

El amor es dicho cada día sin el significado, y los corazones se rasgan en pedazos
las almas amargas funcionan salvaje y lo liberan, no dejando ninguna ocasión para cualquier clase de lanzamientos.

While the desire to use several languages in the same text is commendable, the technique in this particular poem is not particularly to be desired, because the poet uses the languages one at a time, instead of together. The poem is multilingual rather than interlingual. I think that, for a multilingual poem to achieve greatness, it should (as in T. S. Eliot's) shift to a different language because the mother tongue just does not have the capability to express whatever the poet is trying to express at that point. There is no way in English to say what Baudelaire said so well in French (hypocrite lecteur), so Eliot had to write his line in French. The lines above could be written in any of the three languages; the choice appears to be idiosyncratic rather than organic.

Albert Sbragia

I love it when a literary critic moves from critique to creation, as in this sentence from Albert Sbragia's "The Modern Macaronic": "Language tilts from its centripetal pole to the extremes of centrifugality."

I say to myself when I read a sentence like this, I wish I had written that!

Many times, creative writers think of critics as, well, second-class citizens of the literary world, because critics are always one step behind creative writers. When I advocated critic Bienvenido Lumbera during the deliberations to choose the Philippine National Artists in 2006, I argued not just for Lumbera (who eventually made it to the honor list) but for literary criticism itself as a genre of creative writing. Of course, it is true that there are plenty of literary critics that cannot write, but there are plenty of poets whose so-called poems are, well, garbage, and plenty of novelists that deserve to remain unread. There are a few literary critics that are as good, if not better than the creative writers they write about. At least in that one sentence, Sbragia rocks!

Contini and Philippine writing

Is multilingual literary criticism new? No. We can trace it to at least as early as the Italian Renaissance. In the last century, one big name in multilingual literary criticism was the Italian critic Gianfranco Contini, who analyzed the way Italian writers used other languages.

A recent article on Contini, "The Modern Macaronic" by Albert Sbragia, in The Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies, yields an insight that could very well apply to the Philippines, as well as to other multilingual countries:

"To understand the linguistic peculiarities of the Italian literary tradition, it is necessary to recur to the plurilinguistic anomaly of the Italian peninsula. This plurilingualism is largely the consequence of the precocious unification of a national literary language contrasted by the comparatively late social and political unification of the Italian nation."

Substitute Tagalog for Italian and you get a clue to the extremely complex linguistic situation in the Philippines, and why writings by Filipinos in English or Tagalog (or any other language) are very difficult to analyze, unless the critic is multilingual.

Chinese

Twice I enrolled in a Mandarin Chinese language class and twice I dropped out, because for the life of me I could not and still cannot distinguish among the four tones. I can recognize some Chinese characters (一 for 1, 二 for 2, 三 for 3, 四 for 4, 伍 for 5, 六 for 6, 七 for 7, 八 for 8, 九 for 9, which of course I know from playing Mandarin Mahjong!), but that's about it. Yet Chinese is the language most spoken in the world (okay, mainly by Chinese persons, but overseas Chinese happen to be all over the globe). If some predictions about the world economy in the 21st century will come true (and since linguistic power follows economic power), Mandarin Chinese will be the world's international language. I might be illiterate for the rest of this century or that portion of it when I will still be alive. It could be neurosis or even psychosis, but as a literary critic wanting to know world literature and knowing full well that I cannot read the literature of the world's next superpower, I am frightened by the possibility of being left out. Maybe I will enroll again and force myself not to drop out.

Wolof and Hausa

Something I would never have known B.G. (Before Google):

"The use of a second language is to be found in some Senegalese poetry where poems sometimes have Wolof phrases inserted and in Nigeria where Hausa words serve the same function. . . . An example of the use of Hausa in an Arabic poem is the rhyming word tunkwiyau [influenza] in a poem by al-Hājj Umar b. Abī Bakr al-Şalghawī (c. 1858-1934), a Kano merchant/scholar who emigrated to the Gold Coast."

This passage is from Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa: Classical Traditions and Modern Meaning (1996), by Stefan Sperl, C. Shackle, and Nicholas Awde, pp. 88-89.

Those of us in the English-speaking world are often ignorant of what is going on in literary communities that do not write in English. Using Mao Zedong's image of women holding up half of heaven, we could say that we (English writers) see only our small bit of heaven and do not realize that most of heaven is held up by poets not speaking the languages we speak.

Of course, Senegalese poets also write in French (English writers that do not read French or Francophone poetry are even worse, because there is no reason not to learn another great Western literary language); it is Wolof that is marginalized. Similarly, Nigerian poets also write in English, as well as Arabic; it is Hausa that is marginalized. The marginalization of languages is not just a political or a linguistic issue; it is a literary issue.

Tolstoi

I thought I'd post something I can't read:

«Hу, — думают, — команда!
Здесь ногу сломит чёрт,
Es ist ja eine Schande,
Wir müssen wieder fort».

This stanza is from a poem written by Lev Nikolayevich, Count Tolstoy or, as someone claims, by the other Tolstoi, playwright and novelist Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi.

If anyone knows a translation into English, I would be very grateful. It is frustrating that I cannot read what most likely is a masterpiece by an acknowledged great writer or, if it was Aleksei, then at least an example of macaronic verse, by a similarly famous writer. Albert Casuga says that we might have to wait for our grandchildren to start a generation of truly multilingual readers. I guess I was born too early!

Eminem and Hatima

It seems that ordinary readers (i.e., non-literary critics) enjoy multilingual poetry. Here's a reaction to a blog entry on macaronic verse:

"Hey, I never knew where the term 'macaronic' came from! Thanks! The zajal and an earlier strophic verse-form called the muwashshaha were erudite Arabic compositions based on a demotic refrain, sometimes in Romance vernacular or colloquial Arabic with Romance words mixed in. They probably emerged from poetic dueling, in which poets would be challenged to compose extemporaneously upon a set theme and melody. Kind of like Eminem in 'Six [sic] Mile.' My favorite is a poem of ibn Hatima of Almeria, with the refrain, 'My language is good Arabic (fasih) but my beloved's is foreign ('ajam)!' Can someone translate?"

Maybe, it's just me that isn't quite into Eminem, but that someone can be into him and into multilingual poetry makes me feel that there is hope for humanity!

Classifying multilingual writers

Let's do a preliminary classification of multilingual writers.

1. Some multilingual writers think in two or more languages, taking advantage of vocabulary and figures of speech available only in one language but not in the other/s.

2. Some multilingual writers think in one language and write in another (or others), unconsciously and instantaneously translating from their mother tongue to the other language/s.

3. Some multilingual writers deliberately or consciously translate from their mother tongue to other languages.

4. Some multilingual writers deliberately borrow words, phrases, or figures of speech from other languages which they speak fluently.

5. Some multilingual writers deliberately borrow words, phrases, or figures of speech from other languages which they do not speak fluently.

6. Some (we really can't call them) multilingual writers borrow isolated words, phrases, or figures of speech from other languages using a dictionary, an informant, or some other linguistic device.

Think of any more?

Victor Ordonez (+)

When it rains, it pours. Augusto Boal died 2 May, as did Al Robles. Yesterday (4 May), multilingual writer Victor Ordonez died in Makati, Philippines, of a lingering illness. He was not primarily a writer, having written only one novel (in English), but his work at UNESCO in Paris was crucial to the development of writing in many countries. He spoke several languages (I don't know exactly how many, but I saw him talking to delegates in a UN conference in their own languages) and most likely read several more. He spearheaded a number of innovative movements in education, not just in the world (he spent much of his later life in international circles), but in the Philippines, where he served in various capacities in government and the private sector. He was my friend, as he was a friend to countless others, especially writers.

Al Robles (+)

Sad news for poets: Alfred "Al" Robles, a bilingual poet based in San Francisco, died 2 May. Here is an excerpt from an interview by Darlene Rodrigues, where Robles talked about one of his most popular poems:

I wrote this poem called “Soon the White Snow Will Melt.” I was thinking about snow, and I was thinking of oppression and white people. And I was thinking of this one guy whose name is Richard Oaks. One day I saw him sitting at the Precita Bar, where all of us guys were just waiting to go up to Sacramento to read. He was just sitting there alone, drinking beer. He saw us and said, “What are you guys going to do?” We said, “We are gonna read.” He was a Mohawk Indian who later died near the Eel River. He felt deeply about the plight of his people as they were taking over Alcatraz. He said, “You guys are poets? What do you guys do?” I said, “We read.” He said, “You guys organize?” Cause he had some problems up north. He later got killed up there. We said, “Well, we gonna read. Would you like to?” He said, “Could I?” At that moment he became a poet. In one of his lines he was talking about oppression, and 99 percent of the people there were white. And he said, “Oppression, you know who you are.” And he wasn’t looking at us, right. He just kept on repeating that. He was very strong, very heavy. So I wrote these lines, “Soon the white snow will melt and underneath the black, brown, yellow, red earth will come to life.”

Allow me to change the words of John Donne to fit our situation: "No poet is an island, entire of itself; every poet is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Luzon [the island where I live in the Philippines] is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any poet's death diminishes me, because I am involved in poetry, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Tato Laviera

These are lines from "For Richie" by Tato Laviera:

for we scrambled
our intentions
not to be
ever defined
by the united states

but he knew …
but he knew
in his philosophical
intellectual
community gatherings

that the united states
lives in ultimate
(me esta saliendo)
in ultimate hell

From the point of view of multilingual criticism, there are at least two noteworthy things about these lines.

First, the use of Spanish between "lives in ultimate" and "in ultimate hell" highlights the ultimacy of the hell that a Puerto Rican experiences, living in lingeringly racist USA (at least, that part of the USA that Laviera lives in).

Laviera, of course, is the author of the famous lines:

i think in spanish
i write in english.

The second interesting aspect of the lines from "For Richie" is the English itself, which is not "Standard American English" (I've often wondered who exactly proclaimed as "standard" one particular dialect of American English!).

Incidentally, Laviera strikes a chord in Filipino readers. Many Filipino literary scholars regard the Philippines as the last colony of the USA (they call it a "neo-colony"), in the same way that Puerto Ricans see Puerto Rico, as in these lines from "For Richie":

that we were
the last colony

for he knew that
puerto rico last
will be first.

Both the Philippines and Puerto Rico are scrambling (to use Laviera's word) to have the dishonor of being the last US colony. Postcolonial literary critics will have a field day with this one!

Adan Baca

In the hands of a poet, code-switching becomes a powerful device for symbolizing problems with identity. For example, here are the first lines of Adan Baca's "El Hijo":

My jito is the culmination of years spent searching
for heritage
Geological ancestry
Yo soy Joaquin
With invisibility
Incomprehensible understanding
Looking for meaning
And greedily
Dispelling the erasing of my history.

By inserting the Spanish line "Yo soy Joaquin," the poet signifies how his Spanish ancestry makes him "invisible." Had he written "I am Joaquin," then he would be visible, because he would have been understood by his English-speaking neighbors. The poem works on the idea of language being one of the key markers of invisibility or alienation (as we used to put it in the 1960s).

The poem works on another level: readers that can understand the Spanish line are also invisible, because American and British literature teachers and readers, in general, focus on monolingual English poetry and marginalize poems that contain "foreign" words. Think of how a monolingual English reader of T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland differs from a bilingual French-English reader: the monolingual reader cannot get the full impact of "You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!"

Self-translation

Here is the abstract of a paper entitled "Writing Germany in Exile - the Bilingual Author as Cultural Mediator: Klaus Mann, Stefan Heym, Rudolf Arnheim and Hannah Arendt" (2004) by Verena Jung:

"This paper examines the process of self-translation undertaken by German exile writers who translated their own works, written in English, the language of their host country, back into their mother tongue, German. It postulates that the necessary precondition for self-translation is not just bilinguality but also biculturality and that it is this bicultural status of the self-translators as cultural mediators and not their poetic licence that leads to the significant changes and restructurings that the self-translators make in their German version. The awareness of the heteroskopic nature of the translation, that is, differences in knowledge base between the readerships of the English original version and the German version with regard to the German intertext are the motivation for restructuring their original version. In this process, self-translators differ from other translators and cultural mediators only in their access to the pre-stage of composition, access to the intertext, the intention and the inner language that preceded the original English version. Thus the self-translators act as editors of their own text and take their decisions to expand or reduce an aspect of their text based on the familiarity of their readership with the German cultural environment or intertext that informs the text."

I'm too cheap to buy and read the full text of the article, but the abstract points to a good area of investigation for multilingual critics - self-translation. Jung mentions biculturality - now a familiar concept for readers of this blog - but one apparent conclusion of the paper (that self-translation can be reduced to privileged editing) seems dubious (at least, until I get to read the entire paper). I've tried to translate myself from Filipino to English and the other way around, and believe me, it's much harder than translating other people's works either way (which I get paid to do now and then). In fact, I was asked once to translate a full-length play that I had written in Filipino into English for a publication in Hawaii and I gave up. I did manage to translate another, shorter play, Kuwadro (in Filipino), into Portrait (in English), but the English text is not really the same as the Filipino text, as anyone that has read or seen the play in both languages will tell me for sure (no one has really seen both, since Philippine audiences watch only the Filipino version and foreign audiences watch only the English one).

Ilocano writers

The most internationally visible of Filipino writers writing in a vernacular language are those writing in Ilokano (variously called Iluko or Ilocano). Representative websites are Bilingual Pen, which hosts a number of major Ilocano writers in English and Ilokano, and Dadapilan, which has news items of interest to Ilocano writers. Unless I am mistaken, the very first website (now no longer existing?) focusing on Philippine literature was that of GUMIL, an international organization of Ilocano writers.

One of the followers of my blog is Ilocano and has his own blog. I once translated an Ilokano poem (by 19th century writer Leona Florentino), using a dictionary and an Ilocano informant, but otherwise, my knowledge of Ilokano is zilch. If I were given another lifetime, I would certainly learn it, since it is the language of many Filipinos living abroad, particularly in Hawaii.

Every time I am asked to be a nominator for the Philippine National Artist award, I nominate Juan S. P. Hidalgo Jr., who writes in Ilokano. Unfortunately, he never makes it, for the simple reason that the judges (who usually are English or Tagalog-dominant) cannot read Ilokano and, therefore, cannot say if his writing is of high quality or not. I know his writing is excellent, because I have asked quite a number of people who read Ilokano and they all say he's one of the best, if not the best, of living Ilocano writers.

Too specialized?

Is multilingual literary criticism too specialized? We have to think about this as the idea of over-specialization gets hammered, as a side result of the worldwide economic crisis. (Read the New York Times article by Columbia professor Mark Taylor.)

My initial answer is yes and no.

Yes, because there are very few of us looking at the polyglot aspect of literature. Even in our own specialized field, we cannot even claim that we are in so-called mainstream literature courses. (In the Philippines, even if Philippine Literature in English is usually taught in undergraduate courses, it is taught as though English were not a second or a foreign language to Filipino writers.)

No, because bilinguality or multilinguality is most likely the rule rather than the exception for creative writers. Since they are very curious and very literate, even monolingual writers usually take the trouble to be able to read another language. If we are able to convince more critics to think about the relationship of mother tongues to languages of literary creation, we might be able to establish what could be the kind of truly multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary area that Taylor is looking for.

Kindred spirits in anthropology

Little by little, the academic world is waking up to the reality that monolingualism severely limits the way we think. Take anthropology, for instance. Here is a 20 January 2009 blog entry about the journal Anthropological Quarterly:

"In Polyglot Perspectives, scholars will present essays on books written in languages other than English. Such languages may include those in which there is a long tradition of anthropological scholarship, but we hope to give particular emphasis to less widely used languages in which a nascent anthropology is already making important contributions that may be invisible to the larger international community.

"In launching this new section, we acknowledge that, in many ways, the English language has been allowed to define the anthropological mainstream. We also acknowledge that, in many disciplines, English has become the language of scholarship in countries where English is not the locally dominant language. Anthropology, however, is both a cosmopolitan discipline and one that seeks to recognize and study politically less powerful cultures and languages."

English has become the language of scholarship in the Philippines, where I live, even if English is spoken by less than 50% of the adult population and read by less than 20%. Creative writing, however, is mostly in various vernacular languages, though criticism (like this blog) remains mostly in English. The linguistic schizophrenia takes its creative and critical toll.

Oh, for a gadget like the Universal Translator in Star Trek, through which beings from anywhere in the universe communicate with each other! (Of course, I strongly disagree with the tempocentric view that, in the future, the Federation Standard will be Standard American English!)

A course on multilingual literature?

Doris Sommer writes in her Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (2004) why she started blazing the trail of multilingual criticism:

“At the School for Criticism and Theory during the summer of 2002, I graduated to a veritable United Nations of interlocutors interpellated by a call unfamiliar to aesthetics but commonplace in each of their fascinating lives. Josiane Peltier, for example, writes about detective fiction in her native French and elegant English when she is not reading in Spanish and Chinese literatures; historian Olga Dror’s original Russian and acquired Hebrew added Vietnamese, Latin, and Chinese to study popular religion in Vietnam; Laura Ceia-Minjares reveals Tristan Tzara’s private Romanian reveries between his public antics in French.” (pp. vii-viii)

Is it time to offer a course on Multilingual Literature? I would be interested in team teaching the course, if it is offered simultaneously across universities (using Skype or its equivalent). It would be paradoxical if the course were offered only in one language, so it would be ideal if the course could be offered in various languages to students speaking and reading in different languages. If not a course, then perhaps a lecture or two, by the leading critics in the field (Sommer would be one of them, and others I have named in this blog before). Or at the very least, a podcasted lecture. Anyone interested?

Maghrebi writers

The book Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations (2003), edited by Doris Sommer, is described in Amazon.com this way:

"These essays bring home the most challenging observations of postmodernism — multiple identities, the fragility of meaning, the risks of communication. Sommer asserts that many people normally live — that is, think, feel, create, reason, persuade, laugh — in more than one language. She claims that traditional scholarship (aesthetics; language and philosophy; psychoanalysis, and politics) cannot see or hear more than one language at a time. The goal of these essays is to create a new field: bilingual arts & aesthetics which examine the aesthetic product produced by bilingual diasporic communities. The focus of this volume is the Americas, but examples and theoretical proposals come from Europe as well. In both areas, the issue offers another level of complexity to the migrant and cosmopolitan character of local societies in a global economy."

In his contribution to the book, Réda Bensmaïa, in “Introduction to Tetraglossia: The Situation of Maghrebi Writers,” writes (pages 88-89):

“What language should one write in? In what language should one make films? In what language should people be allowed to speak and write? In what places? At what time? Or still, in French? Arabic? In Berber? In Kabyle? In literary Arabic? Problems as concrete and vital as these explain the acuity of tensions, contradictions and difficulties facing every artist in Algeria. For the writers to write, for filmmakers to make films, is a question of life and death, as each one of their gestures, each of their choices is a foundation. In every case it is a matter of delineating a ‘terrain’ and to find, at any cost, one way out of the labyrinth of tongues and languages.”

In some countries, multilingual literature is not just a harmless and pleasurable intellectual exercise that writers engage in. It could be as crucial to life as one's choice of religion, ideology, spouse, or physician.

Rosario Ferré

Poet and fictionist Rosario Ferré Ramírez, in a 2001 event entitled "Writing In Between," is quoted as saying, "I write in Spanish like I speak it -- fast. It is impossible for me to write in English like I write in Spanish. I can't be trigger-happy in English. Writing in English is like looking at the world through a different set of binoculars."

Here is one type of bilingual writer -- the type that has an unequal command of two languages (despite writing well in both). There are other types that we have already discussed in this blog. It might be time to do a typology or classification of bilingual/multilingual writers.

Esmeralda Santiago 2

Esmeralda Santiago's self-description of speaking in Spanish while typing in English is another way of putting N.V.M. Gonzalez's statement that he writes in Tagalog using English words (which is practically identical to the statement of Bienvenido N. Santos that he writes in Capampangan using English words). We might be able to make a generalization about multilingual writing: Multilingual writers write in their mother tongues using words of other languages. Since this formulation, however, makes it appear that the writers do not think in but are merely translating into the non-mother tongues, we have to qualify it a bit: Multilingual writers think and write in their mother tongues while thinking in and using the words of other languages. That's still a rather clumsy formulation in terms of style, but as we go along, we should be able to put it in a more literary way.

Esmeralda Santiago 1

"Many times, when writing, I was surprised to hear myself speaking in Spanish while my fingers were typing the same sentence in English," writes Esmeralda Santiago in the introduction to her Cuando era puertorriquena (1994, p. xv, translated by Catherine E. Wall).

This is one of the greatest joys of a bilingual writer - to be able to use two languages at the same time. Most monolingual persons think that bilinguals (or polyglots or multilinguals) think in one language and translate, whether consciously or unconsciously, into other languages. Here is a bilingual author testifying that this is not true. Translation is not the key to bilingual writing. The key is adding to, not replacing, the mother tongue in the creative act.

Vladimir Nabokov

"Very few bilingual writers attempt perfect equality in their two languages," remarks Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour in her Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the "First" Emigration (1989, p. 51). Vladimir Nabokov, justly famous for his English novels, has received some multilingual criticism, but certainly not enough. The sentence "Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their nature, which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as 'nymphets'" sounds vaguely like the English of an earlier century, but it is, in fact, as critics that can read Russian have said in so many words, an attempt by Nabokov (in Lolita) to write in Russian using English words.

Looking for overseas Cubans

"I am looking for stories of Cubans who have left Cuba," wrote bilingual novelist Teresa Bevin in her blog last March 25. "I invite you all to share with other Cubans and the world your experiences and struggles. It does not matter when or how you left the island. All of our experiences deserve to be shared." If you are an overseas Cuban reading this blog, please reply to her (Teresabevin@teresabevin.com). For everyone: if you know of any blogs that, like hers, is bilingual, please alert me, so I can cross-reference.

Lin Yutang

Multilinguality cannot be separated from multiculturality. One of the advantages of having a mother tongue different from the language you write in is your bringing into the new culture the best of your original culture.

Take the example of Lin Yutang (mother tongue Chinese, second language English). The following famous passages from his English works show a distinctly Chinese character in terms of the content (ancient wisdom) and form (proverb-like):

A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.

Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.

If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.

Where there are too many policemen, there is no liberty. Where there are too many soldiers, there is no peace. Where there are too many lawyers, there is no justice.

Psycholinguists

"When an individual adapts to a new culture at the expense of his primary culture we speak of a process of deculturation," write Josiane F. Hamers and Michel Blanc in their Bilinguality and Bilingualism (2nd ed., 2000, pp. 205-206). "Deculturation," they add, "is associated with psychological distress. Extreme deculturation leads to assimilation, which may be accompanied by first-language loss. If no assimilation into the host culture occurs, deculturation leads to anomie, a complex psychological state implying feelings of alienation and isolation vis-à-vis the society one lives in. Acculturation models disagree, however, on the extent to which acculturation processes lead necessarily to a form of deculturation."

Psycholinguists studying bilinguality would benefit greatly from looking at second-language literature (especially since writers are stereotypically alienated anyway). When a work is in a second language, does alienation occur because of language? I am talking not about the writer (although psychologists obviously are more interested in human beings than words on the page), but about the text as it compares with texts by monolingual writers. Are Villa's poems, for example, powerful because he is writing in a second language? Could a monolingual poet have arranged the words this way in a line: "I clothed myself in fire"? (Clearly, unlike psychologists, I do not regard alienation as negative, since it leads to marvelous works of art, no matter what the personal cost is to the artist!)

Jose Garcia Villa & Hilario S. Francia

When Hilario S. Francia translated some of the poems of Jose Garcia Villa into Tagalog, we got a clue to the way a multilingual critic could approach Villa's work. (For those not familiar with Villa: Villa is considered a minor American poet and a major Philippine poet - minor defined the way American literary historians define the term, namely, in terms of quantity, not quality, and major defined the way Philippine literary historians define the term, namely, in terms of quality, not quantity. Villa lived most of his life in New York. He was considered by his contemporaries, such as Marianne Moore and E. E. Cummings, as equal to if not better than them.)

Here are two lines from one of Villa's poems:

In my desire to be Nude
I clothed myself in fire:-

Here is Francia's Tagalog translation:

Sa aking paghangad na maging Hubad
Dinamitan Ko ang aking sarili sa apoy:-

The translation works as a translation, but what is interesting to me is to speculate on what Villa was thinking as he was writing the poem. In Tagalog, the thought would have gone this way:

Nais kong maghubad
Kaya ako nasunog.

Literally, that means "I wanted to be naked so (1) I burned myself because society does not approve of me being naked, and/or (2) I was burning with the desire to be naked." The ambiguity (I use the word the way the New Critics used it, namely, as a poetic virtue) is inherent in the Tagalog. What Villa managed to do was to say the same thing, more or less, in English. What the English adds are the rhyme (desire / fire) and the second line's iambic meter, which situate the reader solidly in poetic tradition. These attributes based on the sounds of English might explain the power of Villa's lines.

Subtitling music

To serious poets, subtitling or dubbing music is a serious matter. One of the leading writers of the Philippines, Jose Lacaba, for example, has translated more than fifty English songs into Filipino. To people not in the arts, however, it is a joke. Here is a blog entry that evoked both serious and silly reactions: "Somebody with too much time on his hands has been taking up music videos in languages he does not understand, and adding subtitles in a language he does, and evidently people find the result hilarious. So, this idea is for a genre of music, which makes sense in two languages simultaneously. The meaning could be different, of course." One reaction goes this way: "Q: why do the French have only one egg for breakfast? A: because one egg is un oeuf." Here is an area of profit (since writers rarely make money from serious creative writing) for multilingual writers. Music companies might be willing to pay zillions for writers that can subtitle music, with the second-language lyrics matching the original score note for note, of course (in other words, you can sing the subtitles to the music).

"A Flea" by Anne Tardos

On her website (as of today), Anne Tardos presents seven poems, all of which except for one are in English. Reading the English poems, one can easily grasp her sensibility (an exquisite one). The exception in terms of language is "A Flea," a poem made up of lines in various languages. I have to admit that I do not know most of the languages used and, therefore, can enjoy only the music of the lines when I read them as spelled (hopefully, some of the languages do not behave like French, where spelling and pronunciation are not exactly identical twins!). In the manner of New Critics focusing only on a line instead of tackling a whole work, let me write a little bit about the following stanza:

When we exit a room we make room
Walking distance après-vous resistance

The first line is straightforward: by leaving a room, we cause space to be created inside the room, since we vacate the space that we used to occupy. The second line takes us a few minutes later, when some distance (walking distance) away from the room, resistance (a French word here, not an English word) appears in the room, because the space created both expands and contracts, not knowing what to do because we are no longer there. Of course, there is an allusion to "apres moi, le deluge," or more precisely, this is a commentary on that well-known quote (which, btw, is itself poetically ambiguous, since people still wonder if it was King Louis XV or his lover Madame de Pompadour who said it first). The sense (we don't know if our leaving makes any difference or not) complements the sound (internal rhyme, both aural and visual), since the clash between aural rhyme (room / room) and visual rhyme (distance / French resistance which has a different sound) mirrors the indecision of those we left behind. Truly, apres nous, le deluge. (Let's not forget that the poem is entitled "A Flea," with an undertone of the same sound flee, as in flee the scene.)

Anne Tardos

In her essay, "How Not To Teach Multilingual Writing" (2002), Anne Tardos writes: "I grew up learning one language after another, like many Europeans born during the Second World War, moving from country to country, learning language after language by necessity, being equally comfortable in all of them. I don’t much care whether we’re conversing in French, Hungarian, German, or English. When I’m going from site to site on the Internet, I often don’t realize what language I’m reading, until I make a conscious effort to identify it. Similarly, when writing poetry, I don’t necessarily make a point of noticing the language I’m writing in."

Here is an important ingredient in the writing of successful multilingual poems: the writer must think in all the languages being used. Thinking in one language and writing in another adds another remove (to use Plato's classic word) to the relationship between the creative work and Creation.

The multilingual critic does not have to think in those many languages. I can read Spanish, French, Cebuano, and even a little German fairly accurately, if laboriously, though I can't speak in those languages except to say "That's overpriced" or something like that. With reading knowledge, however, I think I do a passable job of judging if a work is worth my time or not.

Is there such a thing as national literature?

One reader asks, "Do national paradigms cross languages or not? Will a trilingual Swiss writer write the same story the same way in French, German, and Italian?"

I am not an expert on Swiss literature. Let me give what must be a similar example from Philippine literature.

There is Philippine literature in Tagalog, Philippine literature in Cebuano, Philippine literature in Iluko or Ilokano, Philippine literature in Chinese, Philippine literature in English, Philippine literature in Spanish, and so on. There are more than a hundred languages spoken in the Philippines, about twenty or so of them with living literatures.

Philippine literature in English is clearly very different from Philippine literature in Tagalog. It is not just the language. The themes are different, the poetic forms are different, the rhyme schemes are different (Tagalog does not rhyme only in terms of sounds, but of equivalent consonants), the sensibility is different. Even the quantity is different (Tagalog has thousands of novels, English has only a couple of hundred).

Although there have been a few English translations of Tagalog novels, it is clearly the novels originally written in English that have caught international attention. (One such novel, Miguel Syjuco's Ilustrado, won last year's Man Booker Prize.) We cannot argue that this is due to the huge number of English-speaking literary critics around the world; such critics do not necessarily take time to study English novels from Singapore, Hong Kong, and so on (postcolonial literary theory harps on such marginalization).

Writing is teaching

All writing is teaching. All writers know this. Even without stepping into a classroom, a writer becomes the key player in education because it is the writer's text that is read by teachers and students. The case for multilingual literary criticism becomes stronger in the context of the current pedagogical situation in the United States, where multicultural education is an expressed need. American teachers are looking for multicultural literary texts to help them educate American children. Since it is impossible to remove language from culture, we are really talking here of multilingual literature. Here, for example, is a typical comment on multicultural education: "Experts in multicultural education frequently emphasize the importance of using literature to increase cultural awareness (Piper, 1986; Tway, 1989). The literature used should accurately portray the history, customs, values, and language of a particular cultural group (Sims, 1982). Through sharing carefully selected literature, students can learn to understand and to appreciate a literary heritage that comes from many diverse backgrounds (Norton, 1990)." While writers have enough to think about when they put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), they should feel good that what they write will help generations of previously monolingual, monocultural children get ready for the new century of borderless cultures and languages. Multilingual and multicultural literary criticism, on the other hand, will help teachers "carefully select" quality literary texts.

Amy Tan 2

Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong's critique of Amy Tan revolves around the novelist's mistake in translating the term tang jie. Wong cites a passage from The Kitchen God's Wife: “We called each other tang jie, ‘sugar sister,’ the friendly way to refer to a girl cousin.”

“The phrase ‘sugar sister,’" writes Wong, "is an egregious mistranslation based on Amy Tan’s confusing two Chinese homophones, while the accompanying explanation of how the two young women come to address each other by that term betrays a profound ignorance of the Chinese kinship system. What is most remarkable about this passage is its very existence: that Amy Tan has seen fit to include and elaborate on such a ‘gratuitous’ detail – gratuitous in the sense of not functioning to advance the plot or deepen the characterization – on something of which she has little knowledge. Furthermore, this putative clarification issues from the mouth of Winnie, a native Chinese-speaker born and raised in China for whom it should be impossible to make such mistakes.”

This "mistake" is typical of second-language speakers where the second language has become the mother tongue. Filipinos writing in English, for example, that now think in English rather than in their original language (and, therefore, no longer translate into but actually create in English), make similar "mistakes." I put the word mistakes in quotes because not everybody agrees with Wong, but I agree with her. I think that Amy Tan actually does a disservice to the Chinese-American community by turning it, in the eyes of the non-Chinese but American reader, into a non-threatening, easily-assimilatable American-Chinese one. (A similar debate happened earlier in the Philippines before Chinese-Filipino writers agreed to drop the label "Filipino-Chinese.")

On the theoretical level, it is not correct to simply say that, in a literary text, the original language influences the second language; we also have to say that the second language influences the original language. (Influence may be a more polite way to say mistake.)

Amy Tan 1

The debate about Amy Tan's use of Chinese in her English novels reveals a paradox in bilingual writing. Tan, who once said, "I grew up, thankfully, with a love of language. That may have happened because I was bilingual at an early age. I stopped speaking Chinese when I was five, but I loved words," now clearly thinks in English and her Chinese has become, in effect, her second language. It is her Chinese that has been the object of unfavorable criticism (see, for example, pages 60-61 of Amy Tan (2005), by Bella Adams, referring to the widely-cited article "'Sugar Sisterhood': The Amy Tan Phenomenon," by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong [starting on page 174 of The Ethnic Canon (1995), edited by David Palumbo-Liu]). When the mother tongue becomes a second language, is the mother tongue falsified? Or does the writer who in effect forgets her/his mother tongue now become more Chinese than the Chinese (substitute any other people or language for "Chinese")? I know Tagalog writers who speak and apparently now think in English, whose Tagalog has been fixated to an earlier stage of the language (that is, it is no longer standard Tagalog nor is it comprehensible to young readers).

Postmodern?

A reader asks if multilingual literary criticism is postmodern. First of all, although I used the term postmodern to classify certain kinds of literary criticism in my book Beyond Futility: The Filipino as Critic (1984) (I shudder just thinking that I actually wrote that book!), I now am very uncomfortable with the term. First of all, the term itself was used to describe certain types of art pieces in the 1870s, which was more than 130 years ago! When the term is used not to refer to the movement called postmodernism but merely to indicate a time period (roughly, anything after the First World War), it becomes even more of a misnomer, because surely something must have changed in the last hundred years.

Once, I taught a graduate course where I told the students that I would not accept any critical paper that did not use a theory labeled "post-" (postmodernism, postmarxism, postfeminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, etc.). I've quickly gone beyond that cruel joke on students. Now, I make my requirements even more cruel: I tell my graduate students that they have to use a theory that started (note: started, not flourished) in our own century, namely the 21st century. They get stumped, of course, but the point is to make them realize that theory is dead (and they, therefore, now have to make it on their own).

Multilingual criticism (for lack of a better name) would be postmodern in the sense that it comes as a conscious effort only after the 20th century, which used to be pretty modern when we were living in it. It would not be postmodern in the sense that it reacts to what is or was modern, because writers have been multilingual from the beginning of literature, and so have some critics (even Plato might have read some Chinese or at least translations from Chinese, because some of his ideas on literature are suspiciously like those of much earlier Chinese literary critics). Modernism, as it is defined in most dictionaries of literature, is a fairly recent concept or movement, but multilingual writing of or about literature predates it, so multilingual criticism cannot be post-modernism.

Oh, if you wanted to be cute but not quite accurate, you could say that postmodernism, like any other post- theory or movement, is like a Post-it® (self-stick marker): the label arbitrarily sticks to one thing but can be removed very easily and made to stick to something very different.

Poetry by bilingual children

Sometimes, we so-called professional writers take a more-literary-than-thou attitude towards attempts by beginning language learners to write poetry. We think that poetry classes in schools and communities are well and good, as classes, but they should not be taken seriously as contributions to the grand tradition of world-class poetry (whatever that means). It might be instructive to look at what's happening in Georgia, where Latinos are being taught to write poetry in English. Melissa Cahmann-Taylor and Dorine Preston argue this way: "We debunk a key misconception about poetry, that it is an elite craft reserved for those who have both talent and Standard English proficiency. We argue that poetry is a powerful genre for developing students’ love of language, especially students in the early stages of Standard English language acquisition. Building upon Hornberger’s (1989, 2003) biliteracy framework, we analyse bilingual and bidialectal poetry by contemporary published poets as well as work by bilingual writers in our one-year poetry workshop."

They give an example of multilingual criticism in their brief mention of two famous lines from a poem by Lucille Clifton:

the grayer she do get, good God,
the Blacker she do be!

"Rhythm," they write, "is one of the dependable delights of Clifton’s poetry, and all any reader need do to appreciate vernacular music is ‘translate’ Clifton’s last two lines into ‘standard’ English, something like: ‘the grayer she gets, good God, / the blacker she gets.’ No comparison." Exactly! Certain poetic effects (in this case, rhythm) can only be achieved through a bilingual poem (here, a bidialectal poem).

The Lord is my mom

Some of the issues being discussed by translators of the Bible can be helpful to multilingual literary critics. Mark L. Strauss, in Distorting Scripture?: The Challenge of Bible Translation & Gender Accuracy (1998), argues that: "Study of Egyptian papyri over the past one hundred years has demonstrated conclusively that New Testament Greek is actually an example of Koine (or 'common') Greek, the everyday language of the people that spread throughout the Mediterranean region following the conquests of Alexander the Great (late fourth century B.C.). There is nothing archaic, solemn or mystical about the kind of language used by the inspired authors of the New Testament. It is the Greek of the street."

It is not just the language, of course, but the culture that is so important in Bible translation. For example, I feel very uncomfortable saying the line "The Lord is my shepherd," since there are no sheep where I live (urbanized, polluted, overpopulated Metro Manila) and I have no idea how to feel like a sheep. I know what the psalmist is driving at: God protects me and feeds me, the way shepherds (from what I've heard about them) take care of their sheep. In the English translation, however, the metaphor fails because the English word "shepherd" just does not have the cultural wealth that the original Hebrew word must have had. Using the theory that the Bible uses street language, is it possible (or theologically acceptable) to translate the phrase as "The Lord is my mom (or dad)"?

Perhaps multilingual literary critics can weigh in and join the Biblical debates on language.

Lesson from translation theory

"The translator is typically faced with the question of whether to modify the world of the text in order to make it accessible to the target culture or whether to attempt to bring the readers toward the culture that produced the text," writes Jeffrey Angles in his description of his course on translation theory at Western Michigan University. We can look at the same question from the point of view of the multilingual writer. The multilingual, multicultural writer is typically faced with the question of whether to dilute the meaning of a word in her/his mother tongue to make it accessible to the target readers (presumed to be monolingual and, sad to say, monocultural) or whether to attempt to bring the readers toward the mother-tongue culture that produced the word. Just as translators have an aesthetic, perhaps even ethical problem every time they face a word without an exact equivalent in the target language, other-language writers, too, have to decide, consciously or subconsciously, whether to distort the mirror to nature that they hold just to make the mother-tongue word comprehensible to the second-language audience. Case in point: Does Bobis' "smothered with coconut milk" capture the way Bicolanos regard coconut milk? In Australian English, even in other varieties of English, "smothered with coconut milk" is a description with no reference to taste or touch but only to sight. Is this a failure of descriptive skill on the part of Bobis or a failure of the English language to achieve unification of sensibility within a word (or words)?

Varieties within languages

When multicultural criticism becomes more advanced, we can start to analyze texts where two or more varieties of a language are used. Playwrights have been working with dialects for a long time, but only recently have playwrights been using varieties. (For those not familiar with the distinction between dialect and variety: Bronx English and Texas English are dialects of American English; American English and British English are varieties of English.) How helpful it would be to, for example, Filipino-Australian playwright and novelist Merlinda Bobis, if there were a critic that could speak Bicolano (her first language), Filipino (her second language), and English (her third language, in which she has won a major European prize), and could also understand the differences between Philippine English (the variety spoken in Manila, where Bobis used to live) and Australian English. I can't speak Bicolano and really wish I could fully appreciate Bobis' short stories. Here is a sentence from one of them: "Gingered chicken in green papayas, smothered with coconut milk, never fails to keep the tongue moist long after the meal is over." It is not just the biculturality that attracts here, but also the mixture of two varieties of English, not to mention the Bicolano or Filipino substructure.

Deciding on which language to write in

"You've written creatively in both English and Tagalog," a friend emailed me. "When you sit down to write, how do you decide which language to write in?"

That's a question that readers of this blog surely have different answers to.

My own answer is simple: I use the language of whoever is going to read what I write.

When I was still joining literary contests (I got "kicked upstairs" when I was named to the Hall of Fame of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards in Literature, which then made it awkward for me to join future national literary competitions), I would look for categories where I had more of a chance of winning (where there were fewer good writers). As I hoped, I won in less-explored areas, such as the one-act play in English (theatre groups in the Philippines prefer to stage full-length plays in vernacular languages), the formal essay in English (most literary writers would rather write personal essays), the full-length play in Filipino (most dramatists would rather make money with screenplays), the musical in Filipino (though I can't write genuine poetry if my life depended on it, I can spew out rhymed and metered lyrics on demand).

I earn quite a bit by being commissioned to do books. I write biographies and company histories, which clients prefer to be in English. I write for newspapers and magazines, which can be in either Filipino or English. The play I love to boast about is Josephine, which I wrote for over three years for my own pleasure (I used Filipino, Spanish, and English extensively and a few more languages in isolated lines); it never won anything nor made me any real money, though it's been staged several times by various professional and amateur theatre groups.

Esperanto?

One of the objectives of multilingual literature is to mirror more of the world than any one language can or, negatively, not to be blind to elements of reality that any one language is necessarily blind to. Why not, then, one could ask, use Esperanto, as one reactor to this blog suggests?

This is Wikipedia's account of how the debate about Esperanto has moved as far as literature is concerned: "Esperanto is intended to be an ethnically neutral auxiliary language. The lack of an inherent culture is one of the things that makes Esperanto so much easier to learn and to use than other languages. In an ethnic language like English or Chinese, the student has to learn innumerable arbitrary expressions. It's not enough to learn the grammar and vocabulary; many perfectly grammatical expressions are unacceptable because people simply don't speak that way. In Esperanto, such considerations are much less important. Speakers can say what they'd say in their native tongue, or whatever makes sense at the moment, and Esperantists from other language backgrounds aren't likely to notice the difference."

Whatever we think of Esperanto, the insight of Esperantists that using a language is not only knowing grammar and vocabulary but culture is accurate. One of the silliest defenses of English as an international language is that it is culture-free. Of course not! It is as British as the British or as American as the Americans! (Substitute for the proper nouns any people or place that speaks any of the Englishes.) A Filipino that writes in English is more British or American than Filipino. This may sound nativist or essentialist, but read a novel originally in Cebuano or Ilocano or Tagalog and read it again in its English translation. If you know both languages well (as many bilingual Filipinos do), you will immediately sense the difference (provided, of course, that you have literary competence as defined by the structuralists). The language itself imposes a different sensibility quite apart from plot, structure, character, imagery, theme, and other literary elements.

Rizal and Spanish

Ante Radaic, the Yugoslavian who wrote in Spanish about Philippine novelist Jose P. Rizal, was the first (and, as far as I know, the only) one to point out that Rizal wrote so much because of inferiority complex. Is it possible that what was obvious to Radaic (but not to all other critics that read Rizal in translation) is obvious only because of language? Radaic, unlike most readers today, read Rizal in the original Spanish (as did Rizal's Spanish biographer Jose Baron Fernandez, who also holds the singular view that Rizal's Spanish was pretty bad). Not reading Rizal in Spanish has made many literary critics say silly things, ranging from Rizal being a coward (provoking Spanish-speaking Nick Joaquin's spirited defense of Rizal against Radaic) to Rizal being a superhero (see the surprising defense of Rizal by leading Filipino-American critic E. San Juan Jr.). Multilingual critics have their work cut out for them: since they are the only ones capable of reading authors in the authors' original languages, they are the only ones that can truly appreciate what the authors are able to do. After all, as all writers know, a lot of effort goes into making words sound alike, have double meanings, fit into a musical rhythm, and so on, and translations, no matter how skilled the translators, do not capture this wrestle with words. What is lost in translation is also lost in criticism.

Nick Joaquin's Spanish-English

That Nick Joaquin is a major Philippine writer writing in English cannot be doubted. He was even named a Philippine National Artist for his writings in English. Even if many Filipinos and Filipino-Americans have been published in the US or UK, however, Joaquin has never been published in those countries, except in anthologies edited by fellow Filipinos, who held him and still hold him after his death in very high regard.

What is his English like? Many readers have already remarked that his English sounds very Spanish. In one of his most famous short stories, May Day Eve, he deliberately tried to sound Spanish even when writing in English. The story happens during the time that Spanish was spoken by the upper-classes in Manila (the characters are upper-class, with some characters even having studied in Spain) and when English was still unknown in the islands. In fact, Joaquin cleverly clues in the reader by ending the story with a Spanish sentence.

Take the second sentence from the story (the first one is kilometric and defies quick analysis): "And it was May again, said the old Anastasia." The name Anastasia, for one, cannot be pronounced the American or British way, because it makes sense only if pronounced the Spanish or Tagalog way (with a short second a). It is not just the name, however. There is the beginning of the sentence (most native English writers would not begin with the conjunction, but it is normal in Spanish, as in Y tu mamá también. The article "the" before "old" is also problematic if "native" English were used ("old Anastasia" would have been enough). In such a short sentence, Joaquin deliberately (skeptics would say carelessly) writes English to sound like Spanish; in multilingual criticism, it would be just as accurate to say that Joaquin's English is heavily influenced by his Spanish (he spoke Spanish at home).

We, of course, would not have time to do each sentence of the story (we would not even get through the first one!), but the language is not isolatable from the story itself. The story has to do with the new replacing the old, or with the inevitability of change. At the time Joaquin was composing the story, English, which entered the Philippines only towards the end of the 19th century, was quickly replacing Spanish, which had been the language of government for 300 years. In his essays, Joaquin did not hide his contempt for the language of the new American imperialists, for like most Spanish-speaking upper-class persons, he regarded Spanish as God's language and English as the language of the marketplace. The irony, which exists for many second-language writers, is that he said all of that in English!

A different Farsi (Persian)

One of the reasons I am aware of the need to be sensitive to the peculiarities of a language is my experience with Farsi (Persian). Although English was allowed as a medium of instruction in "foreign literature" classes, I felt I had to learn Persian to effectively teach undergraduate classes in American Literature in Iran in 1976. I took formal lessons in a classroom, taught by a male Iranian professor. Since I did not feel confident even after I had finished the short course, I engaged the tutoring services of a female Iranian professor (who, btw, following the custom in that country, was always accompanied by her husband, who quietly and patiently sat through our sessions). After a couple of months of daily tutorial sessions, I felt ready to give my first lecture in Persian. My students appeared appreciative of my lecture. After the class, however, one of the male students stayed to talk to me. "Sir," he said in English, "you speak like a woman."