Not mere fashion

Online discussions allow readers to give initial reactions to a work, pointing the way to literary theorists with more time to reflect. The thread in Another Subcontinent in January 2008 highlights an issue that a multilingual literary critic must face, namely, when a word is available in the writer's mother tongue, should the writer use a word in some other language?

"Sadly," writes one of the participants in the thread, "most of the discussions committed by the participants on this very thread lead to mark us as if we both are against the new trends, inevitable usage of multilingual form, and not in mood to allow the poet to use his/her genius while composing a particular poem. I, for me, just cannot beckon my flag in signaling as if its red-mark anywhere; because I am of the strong believer in writer’s total freedom. What I found in Indiego’s poem was the use of a particular term (wrench) in a deliberate form. She could have used this very word in her other work where reader might have gotten the feeling of appropriate use; but somehow I failed to see the usage in any relevance other than poet’s insistence in using multi-usage. Even Ehasaas is there as if pulled to make the poem in more fashionable manner, rather than illustrating pure need. I believe Indiego writes in beautiful manner, giving free reins to her inclinations and using words just as they come to her mind, irrespective of language. As a follower of new poetry and student of literature, I find her poem showing a keen sense of form and structure, and a special concern for the use of the right words in the right place. In other words, she could have written this in pure Marathi language in more expressive manner discarding question of 'new trend' in using multi-languages. I believe that a poet should labour to find the right words of the original language just as that great quotation of a beautiful girl goes, 'We must labour to be beautiful.' Here, once again, I would like to admit wholeheartedly that I am not favoring the poetry written only in conventional style measuring the various poetic meters; but would wish to see the usage of multi-languages in poem in natural form, not in deliberate attempt for the sake of keeping the wind of new trend."

It cannot be denied that some multilingual poets use "foreign" words out of whim or a desire to impress, but it cannot also be denied that some (if not most) multilingual poets have more serious artistic intentions (note my repeated references to T. S. Eliot's use of French). There is no doubt that we should worry about form, structure, and other language-independent aspects of a poem, but we should also study the language-specific aspects, such as the interaction of the sound of the word in its original language and the sound it makes in the language of the poem.

Month of the Filipino language

The Philippines devotes one month (August) every year to honor its national language, which legally is Filipino. There is much debate about what exactly Filipino is or even whether it should be the sole national language, because there are three major languages (Cebuano, Ilocano, and Tagalog) among the 171 distinct languages spoken in the islands, each one with loyalists expectedly claiming that their language is superior to the other two. Filipino, which is the language spoken in the major urban centers (Cebu, Davao, Manila), was identified by the 1987 Constitution as the country's official and national language, but it lacks the voluminous scholarship and long history that the three languages have. As far as this blog is concerned, what is interesting is the third week of the Buwan ng Wika (Month of the Filipino Language). The week (8-15 August) is devoted to “Filipino Language: Instrument toward Effective Communication and for Teaching Language and Literature." The Philippine government now actively promotes the use of Filipino for teaching literature. The need for multilingual literary competence has become even more pronounced. A higher-level student, using Filipino as medium of learning, reading a work originally in Greek (I use Greek, because Oedipus Rex is a favorite of university teachers), translated into English and subsequently into Tagalog, cannot fully understand, let alone appreciate, the literariness of a canonical text, without knowing how exactly the languages interact with each other. Although multilingual literary criticism may seem to be of interest only to critics and writers, it has implications for the education of children and young adults as well.

Oops! Wrong attribution!

Oops! It wasn't Sollors who wrote the passage I quoted in my entry on "Cosmopolitan vs. multilingual novels." (This is a problem when I speed-read Google Books.) It was Larry Rosenwald. My apologies to both authors.

For those that want to discover the rich field of multilingual Filipino and Filipino-American literature, I suggest as an entry point the widely-acclaimed novel Dogeaters (1991) by Jessica Hagedorn. Hagedorn's English has traces of the various languages she grew up with: English dialects (Scot and Irish), French, Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, and Filipino. The novel has quite a number of Tagalog words (which led John Updike to remark in his review that he wished he knew the language).

International Culture Lab

That the choice of language changes the meaning of a line is clear from empirical or experiential evidence. In the production of Outside Inn by the International Culture Lab, for example, one language (German), then another (English) was used separately in a performance, then the two languages together mixed. This is one finding of the theatrical experiment: "Audience members who had seen the same actors play in two languages had commented on how different the characters seem in one language or the other. The actors, in turn, noticed differences in the ways their characters responded to the same narrative circumstances depending upon the language they were using."

This is why teachers that teach the Iliad in English, for example, without referring to the Greek original and critics that talk about the English translation of the Iliad without considering the Greek text as a counterpoint fail to do justice to the literary text. Languages matter, and when used two or more at a time, they matter simultaneously.

One poem in 111 languages

Just for fun, watch Ashrita Furman set a world record for the most number of languages in a poetry reading.

Here is the way NTDTV describes the event held on 15 April 2009:

"The man holding more Guinness World Records more than anyone reached the century mark by organizing a poetry reading.

"This time, New Yorker Ashrita Furman organized a reading of a poem in 111 languages. With this event, Furman now holds 100 Guinness World Records, an achievement no one comes close to matching.

"More than a hundred people read the poem at City Hall Park in lower Manhattan. The poem was recited in widely spoken languages like English, Dutch and Korean, to less well-known languages like Bahkir, Galician, Inuktitut and Telugu.

"A Guinness representative presented Furman with a plaque recognizing his 100 current Guinness World Records."

Cosmopolitan vs. multilingual novels

In Multilingual America (1998), Werner Sollors writes:

"As a polyglot critic, obsessed with the relations among languages and among dialects, I can find a social utopia in any cosmopolitan city: Luxembourg, Jerusalem, Montreal, New York, or the Rustchuk Elias Canetti vividly describes in the early pages of Die gerettete Zunge. I find a domestic utopia in any good polyglot conversation, in which every participant is perpetually and expertly switching codes, and every other participant understands the switches. It is surprisingly hard, though, to name a literary utopia. There are great multidialectal novels like Moby-Dick or Huck Finn, or Berlin: Alexanderplatz, or practically anything by Dickens or Scott. But it is harder to name a great multilingual text. The authors who come to mind, like Rabelais or Mann or Nabokov or Canetti himself, are really writing not multilingual novels but cosmopolitan ones, unilingual puddings with lots of multilingual plums. No novel that I know is in this sense as linguistically complex as the ordinary conversation at any Cuban-Chinese restaurant in New York." (p. 345)

May I suggest to Sollors that he look into novels written by Filipinos and Filipino-Americans? All Filipinos (not just Filipino writers), without exception, are at least bilinguals; most are polyglots. Filipinos learn their mother tongue at birth, the national language (Filipino) when they go to market, and English when they go to school (if their mother tongue is Tagalog, which is close but not identical to Filipino, they would be mere bilinguals). If they live in a town where one of the three national lingua francas is spoken (Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilocano), that would be the fourth language. If they have Chinese ancestry, they speak Fookien Chinese with their parents and learn Mandarin Chinese in Chinese school. If they are Muslim, they learn to read Arabic. If they migrate to another island (which often happens), they learn the vernacular of that island. If they are very rich (very few are), they speak Spanish. If they live or work outside the country (a full 10% of the population do), they learn whatever is the language of that country. It is the rule, therefore, rather than the exception, whether s/he lives in the city or not, that the Filipino writer writes in more than one language. There is no such thing as a cosmopolitan Filipino novel, because every Filipino novel written in any language is necessarily a multilingual one.

Corazon Aquino

In this moment of deep grief over the passing of former Philippine president Corazon "Cory" Cojuangco Aquino, I cannot help but recall that I have used her first name many times in my lectures on deconstruction. The word Corazon contains within itself two contradictory meanings: corazon meaning heart and razon meaning reason. The binary between heart and mind characterizes not just the word, but Cory's too brief stay on earth. A mere housewife (as she described herself), she was forced by the murder of her husband Benigno to take his place and challenge dictator Ferdinand Marcos in a snap election for the presidency of the country. After millions of Filipinos forced Marcos out and installed her as president, she juggled heart and mind constantly through her term, rewriting the Constitution and reestablishing democracy, while taking inexplicable slight at a journalist's figure of speech ("President Aquino hid under the bed during a coup attempt") to sue him in a lower court (the guilty verdict against the journalist was rightly overturned by an appeals court). While she maintained a reputation for being incorruptible (sadly, later presidents had no such reputation), she also did not do enough to ensure that the Congress that she reestablished would also be incorruptible (sadly, the current Congress has again and again been accused of receiving bribes from the regularly-impeached President). Here is a case where language and reality blur into each other. In deconstructing the word Corazon, we actually view the presidency of the real Corazon from quite a different angle.

Multilingual education in the Philippines

You might be interested to know what's going on in the Philippines that touches on multilingual criticism. I wrote two columns on the latest major reform in the educational system. Here are the opening paragraphs of the columns:

One of the most significant and far-reaching contributions of Philippine Department of Education (DepEd) Secretary Jesli Lapus to the history of Philippine education is DepEd Order No. 74, series of 2009, entitled “Institutionalizing Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MLE).” The change in languages of instruction is probably the most radically new thing in the 2010 curriculum for elementary school. The Order will change the mediums or languages of instruction in basic education from the present bilingual system (Filipino and English) to a trilingual one (mother tongue, Filipino, and English). (Philippine Star, 23 July 2009)

DepEd Order No. 74, series of 2009, entitled “Institutionalizing Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MLE),” is the latest in a series of attempts since 1863 by the government to improve basic education by mandating the mediums or languages of instruction. Last week, I listed the efforts from 1863 to 1970. Let me continue the list. (Philippine Star, 30 July 2009)

You have to register with Philippine Star to read old columns, but registration is free anyway.

English as a Multi-Language

Those afflicted with what I call tempocentricism (the tendency to think that our times are the best of all times or even that there are no other times at all except ours) think of those that speak only English as monolingual. That would be true of most of humanity, but certainly not of serious literary writers. Serious writers know the history of every word they use in their works (of course, poets are more deliberate than prose writers, because they have fewer words to worry about).

An account of how a serious writer deliberately uses the multilingual character of the English language can be found in the Introduction by Gavin Alexander to the Penguin edition of Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (2004):

"[George] Puttenham’s prose style merits some consideration. ... One stylistic habit is seen everywhere: like many of his contemporaries he is fond of proceeding by twos. To take an example: ‘implying thereby how, by his discreet and wholesome lessons uttered in harmony and with melodious instruments, he brought the rude and savage people to a more civil and orderly life, nothing, as it seemeth, more prevailing or fit to redress and edify the cruel and sturdy courage of man than it.’ Many of the words which face each other across Puttenham’s conjunctions are synonyms. The technique belonged in the mixed language which Puttenham had written a history of. For most things English had an Anglo-Saxon term and an Anglo-Norman one; and the Latinate element represented by the influence of French was being fortified by the many borrowings from Latin which expanded the English lexicon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries." (p. lxvi)

In 20th-century and 21st-century English texts written by writers whose mother tongue is English, we can find the same mixing of British (or American) English with some other variety of English (Philippine, Indian, Singaporean, or others). It will take a thorough literary critic to go through even a short poem and show how the poet (assuming that the poet knows what s/he is doing) mixes different varieties of English for some aesthetic effect. Of course, as a theoretician, I can say that quite easily, but to put that in practice is an altogether different matter. A practical way to help both writers and readers is Alexander's: take only one sentence as an example to show how a writer uses various varieties (or registers or dialects) of the same language.

Yoko Tawada on a word

In an interview by Bettina Brandt in April, 2005, talking about her novel Das Nackte Auge, Yoko Tawada showed why even a single word is important for writers:

"BB: Can you tell us something about your work method?

"YT: A single word can inspire me. When this happens, I want to create a whole text out of that one word, which seems to contain the entire microcosm. That is my dream, and it is how I often start writing. I use variations of this word, place associations next to each other, create word chains like branches of a tree, and play with different forms and shapes. Finally, I realize that I have to create an ending, but I don't find an ending because I don't want to and cannot have a result. A text is a weird and wonderful plant that has grown in all directions out of a single word knot."

When that single word knot comes from a language other than the writer's mother tongue (which most likely happens with Tawada, since she is multilingual), literary critics have the obligation to recreate or to retrace the journey of that word through various languages. That is the least that readers of literary criticism expect.

Forum Play

Can multilingual literary criticism be interdisciplinary? It should be, and yes, it can be.

First, it should be, because the boundaries of disciplines disappeared with critical theory: intellectuals such as Michel Foucault are routinely cited not just by literary critics (Foucault was not even a literary critic) but by just about everyone else in academe. With the world going global, intellectual life has also gone global, in the sense that one can no longer stay within a very small specialized field.

Second, it can be, because there are many areas where it obviously benefits from other fields of human interest. Take the Forum Play, for example. Katrin Byreus's role-playing teaching exercise (derived from Augusto Boal), meant to make students directly involved in solving real-life problems, works with mixed-language groups, where the role players can speak in different languages to each other, even if the other players do not speak these other languages. Multilingual literary critics can help illuminate the dynamics of the Forum Play and help teachers use it more effectively. Listening to someone speaking in a language you don't understand is like reading a literary text with words from a language we don't read. The theoretical insights will be the same, even if the practical applications are clearly different. The Forum Play is interdisciplinary, involving theater, education, psychology, and so on; we cannot do multilingual literary criticism on the Forum Play without invoking or using these other fields.

Out of context means a new context

Yoko Tawada hits it right on the head. She says: "You can give a word more depth by listening to its history. Then we can ask ourselves, within one culture, what a certain word meant for Goethe or for Schiller. Or we could ask, more generally, what a particular word meant in the eighteenth century, or, say, in the fifteenth century. That is one method of giving a word more depth. What I am doing now in my writing, however, is to ask what a particular word means when it is inserted in the context of a multicultural and multilingual world where words from different languages create purely poetic correspondences."

When a word is used in a context that is not exclusively mother-tongue, i.e., if one or both the writer and reader are not mother-tongue speakers of the language in which that word occurs, then the word carries meanings that the methods of the historical critics or even New Critics will not be able to uncover. Using insights developed by literary theory (such as those from Reader-Response theories), multilingual literary criticism can unlock many meanings previously unknown to readers even in what we thought were already-overread texts.

Bakhtin

Very useful is the insight of Mikhail Bakhtin that all literary texts have multiple speakers or voices (the technical terms are dialogics and heteroglossia). A single line of poetry, contrary to the view of critics earlier than him, has more than one voice that we the readers can hear. A single line of second-language poetry, then, can be said to have the voice of the second language plus the voice of the mother tongue, in addition to the voices that Bakhtin identified. If we are to fully understand and appreciate the single line of poetry (and, of course, entire poems and works of literature), we must listen and hear these two voices, as well as all the other voices identified by dialogics.

Syntactic and lexical competence

The Statement on Second-Language Writing and Writers of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) has implications for multilingual literary criticism:

"Second-language writers include international visa students, refugees, and permanent residents as well as naturalized and native-born citizens of the United States and Canada. Many of them have grown up speaking languages other than English at home, in their communities, and in schools; others began to acquire English at a very young age and have used it alongside their native language. To many, English may be the third, fourth or fifth language. Many second-language writers are highly literate in their first language, while others have never learned to write in their mother tongue. Some are even native speakers of languages without a written form."

Here is what CCCC says about these second-language writers: "Most second-language writers are still in the process of acquiring syntactic and lexical competence — a process that will take a lifetime."

Does this apply to second-language literary writers? Is it possible that the "peculiarities" we find in second-language literary texts are due to syntactic and lexical incompetence? That would be indeed a disturbing possibility.

Principles 4

This is the fourth principle of multilingual literary criticism:

(4) The multilingual work is the general case; the apparently monolingual work is the special case.

I use the analogy of the relationship between Einsteinian and Newtonian physics. In treating things that we encounter every day, we do very well just using Newtonian physics, because the quantities that make a difference are pretty small. But these small, seemingly insignificant quantities are there; they are just ignored. The multilingual literary critic focuses on these seemingly insignificant items and shows why they are not insignificant after all. Still pursuing the analogy with physics, we could say that multilingual literary criticism is the Theory of Everything. It is primarily of theoretical interest. We cannot use it all the time because we would never do anything else nor read much more than what we are reading at the moment. Nevertheless, as we know from the enormous amount of work the critics used to do in the first half of the last century, there is a place in the intellectual world for such dedication to detail. By highlighting (or foregrounding, as literary critics like to say) the linguistic elements that are normally ignored, we help the reader appreciate more deeply the writer's craft.

Principles 3

This is the third principle of multilingual literary criticism:

(3) A work in a mother tongue should not be assumed to be monolingual.

This seems counterintuitive, but in fact, since many (all?) languages are made up of older languages, these earlier languages should be taken into account when reading a work, particularly if the writer is such a good writer (someone like James Joyce) that s/he has taken pains to research on these earlier languages. In fact, if we use the late lamented New Criticism, we have to say that a word contains within itself all the meanings ever attributed to that word, including the meanings in the language of origin. Within New Criticism, it is not necessary (nor is it even required) that the writer was/is aware of the origins of the word in the earlier languages; the word itself contains its own history.

Principles 2 revised

Let me rephrase the second principle to avoid ambiguity:

(2) A work not in the mother tongue cannot be read as though it were in a mother tongue.

By changing the article the to a, I have made it clearer that the text should not be read or judged purely in the context of mother-tongue texts.

Principles 2

This is the second principle of multilingual literary criticism:

(2) A work not in the mother tongue cannot be read as though it were in the mother tongue.

Extremely common, for example, is the mistake of reading Joseph Conrad (or anyone else writing in a language other than the mother tongue) as though he were Ernest Hemingway (or anyone else writing in the mother tongue). Most literary critics do not ignore the distinctive linguistic qualities of passages not in the mother tongue or passages that clearly echo the mother tongue, but the whole work, not just parts of it, should be read with the mother tongue in mind. Passages that appear to be in the second (or third) language are really in the mother tongue, using words in the second (or third) language. Criticism that would be valid were the work in the mother tongue might not be applicable to a work in a non-mother tongue.

An example that I often use is that of Cirilo Bautista's rhyming of men with mien in "Pedagogic." Since all the other end rhymes are correct from the point of view of an American or British speaker, there is no reason to think that the two words are not meant to rhyme. They rhyme only if you hear Bautista reciting the poem in public (which he has done on occasion); he himself pronounces mien to rhyme with men. Since his mother tongue is Tagalog (in which he has written his novels) and English is his second language, it is the Tagalog vowel sound that dominates, rather than the English vowel sound. The inexact rhyme is not a mistake but a deliberate way to alert the reader to the ethnicity of the speaker in the poem - an added dimension to the situation of a Filipino teacher teaching American students in a country with four seasons (the Philippines has no fall season).

Principles 1

This is the first principle of multilingual literary criticism:

(1) If a literary work is written in a language other than the mother tongue, the mother tongue has to be taken into account when reading the work.

This principle applies to a whole work or to part of a work (such as a word, a line, a verse, a phrase, a sentence, or a passage).

For example, when reading T. S. Eliot's "hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!," the critic has to ask questions of this sort:

Why does the poet shift to French?

What is gained or lost by using the French original instead of an English translation of Charles Baudelaire's phrase?

Would a translation of the phrase into a third language be more effective or less? (This question would be inevitable if we were reading a translation into a third language of the whole poem.)

If the English translation and the French original were read or spoken aloud simultaneously (which could be done by two readers or by one reader using imagination), would one serve as a counterpoint to the other in terms of meaning and/or music?

These are just questions that would arise from a purely formalistic reading. A more context-oriented reading would ask questions about the poet's intention, education, audience, and so on.

Clearly, despite the enormous scholarship already devoted to Eliot's line, not to mention his entire poem, there is still a wide open area for students of literature to explore.

Seamus Heaney

Although Thomas O'Grady focuses on place names in the following excerpt from his reading (2006) of Seamus Heaney's "Broagh" (1972), he exhibits the kind of mother tongue awareness that a multilingual critic needs to make full sense of a poem. This poem has been read several times by various critics, but O'Grady introduces a language element that illuminates not just the place names but the linguistic complexity of the poem:

"The most subtle of Heaney’s territorial claims on place — on place made word and on word made place — may be the poem 'Broagh,' the first word of which translates the title, a contracted variant of the Irish phrase bruach abhana:

Riverbank, the long rigs
ending in broad docken
and a canopied pad
down to the ford.

The garden mould
bruised easily, the shower
gathering in your heelmark
was the black O

in Broagh,
its low tattoo
among the windy boortrees
and rhubarb-blades

ended almost
suddenly, like that last
gh the strangers found
difficult to manage.

"Understandably, this poem has received a measure of critical attention, as well as a measure of readerly appreciation, for its obvious focus on the challenge that 'strangers' (plausibly, but not exclusively, the British) face in pronouncing correctly not only that lightly guttural gh but also that first vowel, the clipped o, which makes this seemingly simple word into a sort of two-syllable tongue-twister. Tellingly, however, 'Broagh' begins to operate as 'a verbal contraption' (W. H. Auden’s fine phrase) fueled by local specifics long before that tricky vowel. In fact, each line of the first stanza concludes with a word that, almost as much as the name Broagh itself, grounds the poem in Heaney’s particular world: 'rigs' is a regional term for ploughed furrows; 'docken' is a local variation on the deep-rooted weed known elsewhere as burdock; 'pad' approximates the local pronunciation of 'path'; and 'ford,' deriving from the Old Norse word fjord (found as a suffix in Irish placenames like Waterford and Wexford) and referring to a shallow point in the river that would allow one to wade across, has clearly been retained in the vernacular from the time of the Viking invasions of Ireland in the 9th and 10th centuries. (The Viking legacy would of course be Heaney’s central fascination in his 1975 volume North.) In a similar fashion, the word 'boortrees' in the third stanza resonates as the local pronunciation of 'bower trees' — that is, elderberry trees.

"Obviously, then, 'Broagh' — on the surface a mere two sentences, readable in one breath — is deceptively simple. And in a way that is Heaney’s point: no less than the language of poetry, the language of the everyday world can be loaded with implication — sometimes political implication."

There are three languages at work here - Irish, English, and the language of poetry. To navigate all three languages is a tough job, but O'Grady does it well.

Crystallizing mixed language in poetry?

Says Sarah Grey Thomson on p. 215 of Language Contact (2001):

"Some groups of Dutch teenagers – all of whom know at least some English – lard their Dutch sentences with English words, to such an extent that many sentences will have more English words than Dutch words. This is not a mixed language, or any language; it almost surely is not crystallized into a speech form with set rules of combination that must be learned, but is rather produced in an ad-hoc way, sentence by sentence and speaker by speaker, without any consistency in the choice of particular English inserts. ... The fact that the teenagers can do this deliberately, for reasons of fashion, provides further evidence that speakers can combine the lexicon of one language with the grammar of another whenever they wish to. All they need is a motive; and all that’s needed to produce a fully crystallized bilingual mixed language by this means is a strong motive that is shared by a group of people. "

Two thoughts arise related to poetry: first, since poetry is an artificial language in the sense that it does not naturally spring from normal conversations, perhaps we can formulate a set of rules that will govern or explain the use of words in another language in a poem; second, since there is a group of people that read and write poetry (the poetry community or the poetry-competent community), perhaps we can produce the fully crystallized "language" of poetry.

The South African scene

Kagablog reports about what is happening in South African poetry:

"sometimes poets write mainly in english and bring in either jazz\ blues\soul aspects, or rasta-speak, ragga rhythms or dub beats, or slam poetry and hip hop beats, or ghetto lingo and kwaito sounds, or traditional african oral, or all of these influences. though some poets choose to specialize in one of the genres and are quite comfortable with being classified as ‘page’ poet or ‘performance poet’, spoken word artist, ‘slam poet’ oral poet, ‘praise -poet’, etc many poets including those who are referred in the media by some of these labels choose not to confine themselves to any template or label. therefore you find a significant number of poets who write for both the page and the stage and who also have collection of poems that are a mixture of poems written in english, and poems written in hybrid language, rasta-speak and hip hop register, african languages, iscamtho\tsotsi-taal and a mix of these."

The field is wide open for readers not just of multilingual poetry but of multigenre poetry.

E. E. Cummings

We know that E. E. Cummings grew up studying Latin and Greek (all the way to a graduate degree from Harvard). We know that he used Latin for the title of his longest poem ("Puella Mea"), a poem that we could consider juvenile because of its parodies, but it is, after all, by Cummings, whose juvenilia is a lesser poet's mature work. Have we investigated how his poetry in English is informed by Latin?

Here are two lines from "Puella Mea":

If she a little turn her head
I know that I am wholly dead:

Does the structure strike you as Latin? Unlike English, Latin syntax depends on the words themselves and not the arrangement of words. Hence "she a little."

How about these lines from a "mature" work?

she being Brand

-new;and you
know consequently a
little stiff i was
careful of her

The absolute ablative ("she being Brand / -new") is clearly derived from Latin and not quite "standard" English (even allowing for the fact that English in general is derived from Latin).

Multilingual literary criticism can open up new avenues of understanding even in the case of clearly monolingual poetry.

Global literature

Adam Donaldson Powell writes:

"Many authors throughout history have played with using different languages in dialogues within the same work; and bilingual and multilingual adaptations in all possible forms is as popular today as ever before (especially in the international haiku network). However, the intent to use this literary form to reflect a modern globalized and mixed up cultural and linguistic world is a fairly new concept. We are moving from national literature in translation to multicultural/multilingual literature and 'global literature.' ... It is my hope that more 'global literature' will be written and published in the near future - including the employment of international cyberpunk and international urban dialects as language forms. Language is changing daily, and authors need to keep up ... and stay ahead artistically. This is just the beginning of a whole new world of literature."

I share Powell's hope that more writers will join the growing contemporary multilingual literary community. Globalization is a dirty word for some intellectuals, but like it or not, we have been globalized not only by McDonalds but by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (and other excellent writers that are read by everybody, not just their linguistic community). To be deliberate in being globalized is merely to be honest. What we need now (and I keep saying it, I know) is a parallel community of literary critics that will help us read globalized writers.

Read non-European languages

Steven G. Kellman, clearly the leading scholar in the field that this blog focuses on, writes that "Translingual transactions have occurred frequently throughout literary history, and they are wonderfully instructive to anyone interested in literature, language, and the connections between the two. Yet, though studies of individual translingual authors and of bilingualism in society abound, it is astonishing that almost nothing has been written about the general phenomenon of literary translingualism. Useful exceptions include Leonard Forster’s The Poet’s Tongues, Jane Miller’s essay “Writing in a Second Language,” and Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour’s Alien Tongues. ... However, much still remains to be learned about other languages, other groups, and other countries beyond the United States." (p. xi of The Translingual Imagination)

I salute Kellman's dedication to our shared mission of foregrounding the second-language issue in the reading of monolingual texts, but I should point out to him the need not just for him but for other American scholars to read books published outside the USA and in languages other than European ones. There has been, for a long time now, in books and articles written in Filipino, for example, a lively discussion about non-mother-tongue literature. One of the items in my bucket list is to formulate a theory out of the varied, sometimes disparate attempts to read literary texts from the point of view of two or more languages.

Ha Jin

Steven G. Kellman once asked Ha Jin, “In your fiction, do you consciously try to create an English style that simulates the Chinese spoken by your characters?”

Ha Jin answered, "Yes. I want to make the language sound authentic and purposely avoid standard English. Also, this is an opportunity to see how much English can absorb the distortion. In this respect, English is pliantly robust."

The role of the multilingual critic is to answer the question: Does the English [of Ha Jin and other similarly-situated writers] simulate the Chinese? To answer this question, the critic has to be fairly competent in both English and Chinese. That, needless to say, is extremely difficult, though not impossible: it is hard enough being competent in one of these complex languages. Perhaps this is the reason we don't really get literary criticism that addresses this question.

Saving languages

Jules Feller said it succintly in Notes de philologie wallone (1912): "Political necessity, material interest, constraint, and the moral superiority of the conqueror and his [sic] language can create within a single century the troubling phenomenon of a tongue being entirely forgotten by its nation. The first generation does its best to gabble the idiom of the foreign invaders. The second generation, if it be to its advantage, already knows the new language better than the old. The third generation for all practical purposes knows and employs only the new."

Writers have the ability, nay the duty, to keep alive the old language by deliberately using it in literary texts. Everything else may disappear within a century, but literary texts (if they are well-written) do not. As William Shakespeare said of words and poems:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

Multilingual writers are heroes not only in the realm of literature, but in the realms of language, culture, national identity, and even humanity itself.

Theater of the Absurd

I did my MA in Literature thesis on the Theater of the Absurd and many of my early plays were clearly heavily influenced by the Absurdists, particularly Eugène Ionesco. This partly explains why, very early in life, I became fascinated by multilingual writing. As Steven G. Kellman, on p. 7 of his The Translingual Imagination, writes, "It seems no mere coincidence that leading figures in the Theater of the Absurd, drama that foregrounds language and subverts communication, were translingual or from multilingual backgrounds – Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Fernando Arrabal, Eugène Ionesco, and Michel de Ghelderode." Kellman gives the Absurdists as examples of "authors who, sometimes even without relocating, have excelled in a second, third, or even fourth language."

Of course, there is a paradox in the phenomenon of writers not believing in language using several languages anyway, but that inherent self-contradiction of the Absurdist movement in theater (which most likely led to its death after so brief a hold on theatrical fashion) does not negate the need for critics to read multilingually the apparently monolingual works of these playwrights. Even with such a blatantly multilingual word like Godot in Waiting for Godot and En attendant Godot, critics appear hesitant to read both French and English texts simultaneously, to see how the two languages interact with each other in both versions.

Gustavo Pérez Firmat

In his introduction to his book Tongue Ties (2003), Gustavo Pérez Firmat writes: "Even in writers who write in only one language, the other language (be it their ‘second’ or their ‘first’) exerts a determining if often tacit pressure. This type of writing incorporates a ‘latent bilingualism,’ to use Claudio Guillén’s phrase, that manifests itself in deeper, often more disturbing ways than code-switching or interlingual play. In several chapters of the book, my effort will be to read bilingually in seemingly monolingual contexts, to examine how the absent or lost language shapes the writer’s transactions with his vehicular tongue." (p. 8)

This is the kind of reading that I wish more literary critics would do. Pérez Firmat has some debatable ideas about what mother tongues are like, but his method is clearly important. Because many (if not most) writers today do not know only one language, it is increasingly important to develop a literary method of analysis, if not a literary theory, that will allow us to explore the multilinguistic dimensions of a literary text.

True bilinguals

Many linguists doubt if there is such a thing as a "true bilingual," defined as a native speaker of two languages. Sarah Shin explains why the doubt exists: "There are many myths surrounding bilingualism that are particularly damaging to HL [Heritage Language] development. One such myth is that a bilingual is two monolinguals in one person. It is often assumed that ‘true bilinguals’ are those who are equally fluent in their two languages, with competence in both languages comparable to those of monolinguals of those languages. In reality, however, bilinguals will rarely have balanced proficiency in their two languages. Terms such as ‘full bilingual’ and ‘balanced bilingual’ represent idealized concepts that do not characterize the great majority of the world’s bilinguals. Rarely will any bilingual be equally proficient in speaking, listening, reading or writing both languages across all different situations and domains." ("The Role of Parents' Knowledge about Bilingualism in the Transmission of Heritage Languages," 2003).

The non-linguist Thomas Jefferson's remark that "No instance exists of a person’s writing two languages perfectly" simply points to the prevalence of this myth.

For a literary critic, the question of true bilingualism (or true multilingualism) is irrelevant. A writer does not have to know how to speak or listen to a language to write it, or more precisely, to use words or sentences from it. What the writer has to know, however, are the sounds of the words (idealized sounds, not necessarily the sounds that native speakers make, since native speakers have dialects or idiolects like everybody else in any language), especially when writing poetry. Literary critics, then, do not have to get entangled in the debates about true bilingualism. Writers can be multilingual without being "true bilinguals" or "true multilinguals" in the linguistic sense. (Linguists do not even talk about "true multilinguals.")

The question of audiences

"Who writes for whom, in what genres, and which languages? How do writers translate ‘native cultures’ for their varied audiences – whether domestic or global? How and why do writers claim specific readers? How do authors’ locational history and language choices affect their audience, their popularity with non-native reading groups, and ultimately, their inclusion in academic literary canons?" asks Lavina Dhingra Shankar in “Not Too Spicy: Exotic Mistresses of Cultural Translation in the Fiction of Chitra Divakaruni and Jhumpa Lahiri” (Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India, edited by Nalini Iyer and Bonnie Zare, 2009, pp. 24-25).

These questions are crucial to any study of multilingual literary texts. Who, for example, is the audience of Jessica Hagedorn's bestselling novel Dogeaters (1990), which has Filipino words and sentences liberally included in the English prose? (The bilinguality of the novel led John Updike to wish that he knew Filipino.) That so many bought and read this novel that did not know Filipino means that the novel can still be understood without knowing Filipino. Yet even the name of one of the key characters (Pucha) can be fully appreciated only with a knowledge of Filipino (it's a curse).

It is not only the text that the multilingual critic has to worry about; s/he has to explore also the question of audiences.

Idiotic geniuses

Being a genius does not exempt one from being an idiot. Take the case of William Butler Yeats, undoubtedly a genius in the field of writing. It was Yeats who said the following idiotic statements:

“Nobody can write with music and style in a language not learned in childhood and ever since the language of his thought.”

"We should write out our thoughts in as nearly as possible the language we thought them in, as though in a letter to an intimate friend."

As Steven G. Kellman has demonstrated again and again in his books and anthologies, there are literally hundreds (perhaps thousands) of writers that were born into one language, think in one language, and write in another (or another or another). It is not just Rabindranath Tagore (Yeats was talking about him) that proves the falsity of the claim, but so many others in so many countries. Of course, one does not have to go the other extreme, represented by Salman Rushdie, who thinks that one cannot write in the language one was born into (Rushie, another literary genius, holds the idiotic opinion that Indians should write only in English).

Andre Brink

In his essay "English and the Afrikaans Writer" (1983), Andre Brink compares Afrikaans with English (two languages he has written in): "It is remarkable, for example, what difference there exists between the ‘loads’ of emotional content the two languages can carry. Afrikaans, like French, appears to offer a much higher resistance to overstatement; it is much more at ease with superlatives and emotions. In English the threshold of overstatement is reached much more easily; ‘valid’ emotionalism in Afrikaans soon becomes unbearable in English. And this is but one, obvious, illustration of how one is forced to ‘refeel’ a novel in a new medium."

Although Brink's essay has elicited rather vehement negative reactions (see, for example, "The White South African Writer in Our National Situation" [1988] by Ntongela Masilela), it has nevertheless called attention to the importance of the medium to the literary quality of the work. It cannot be said that a novel works equally well in any language. Translators know this both instinctively and professionally. Writers know this through experience. But literary critics appear to be language-blind in this respect. There are certain things one cannot say in one language but can say very well in another language, in terms of literariness.

Henry Roth

In Switching Languages, Steven G. Kellman writes: "For his masterpiece of immigration fiction, Call It Sleep (1934), Henry Roth, whose first language was Yiddish, managed to create English prose supple enough to carry echoes of Yiddish, Polish, German, and Italian. Switching tongues is the natural way to negotiate a motley universe." (p. xvi)

To foreground or make explicit those "echoes" is the main task of a multilingual literary critic. We can see from Kellman's example how difficult the task is: a critic of Roth's novel would have to know English, Yiddish, Polish, German, and Italian. Critics might find that too demanding, but Roth clearly did not.

Multilingual authors have the right to demand that their critics know as much as, if not more than, they know.

Writing in a second language is unsettling

In his preface to his definitive anthology of multilingual writers, Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft (2003), Steven G. Kellman (the acknowledged authority on translingual literature) writes: "As much as flesh and blood, we are composed of and by words. If Homo sapiens is a species defined by language, then switching the language entails transforming the self. While it can be liberating, discarding one’s native tongue is also profoundly unsettling; it means constructing a new identity syllable by syllable." (p. xiv)

This is a great insight! Multilingual literature (I hesitate to call it "translingual" because that term appears to exclude the mixed-language texts that are becoming more common nowadays and also appears to prioritize authors that try to write in the second language on the same terms as "native speakers" of that language) challenges not just the literary community in general but, more importantly, the writers themselves. Multilingual literature is not just a literary exercise nor a literary phenomenon; it is a matter of life and death for writers, since writing is life or death for writers.

Language of poetry

Giulio C. Lepschy ends his lecture on "Mother Tongues and Literary Languages" with a brief discussion about what he calls "the language of poetry": "I am not convinced that an Italian native speaker is better qualified than an English Dantist to understand The Divine Comedy or that a native speaker of English is better suited than an Italian Shakespeare scholar to understand Hamlet. The real difficulty seems to lie not in the native language nor in the control we have of the idiom we use for everyday communication (be it a first or a second language) but rather in the nature of poetry. Here, we are touching something that concerns an essential quality of language, but in a sense that escapes the technical tools we employ as linguists. From this viewpoint no one is a native speaker of the language of poetry." (p. 27)

Here is the point where literary critics can start where linguists stop. First of all, there is no question that one does not have to be a native speaker of the natural language/s of a poem in order to read or analyze it, because that would lead to a situation were only Italians can read Dante or the British (or other native English speakers) can read Shakespeare. (Professional literary critics do not read Dante or Shakespeare in translation.)

What is a problem here is the question of the existence of a language of poetry. Those that believe in literary competence clearly also believe in the existence of such a language: the whole point of a literary education is to learn the language of literature. There are those that say, however, that poetry is for everyone, educated or not, literarily competent or not: poetry, after all, antedated literary criticism or even literary education. Nobody today wants to return to the days of Literature (with the capital L) and literature (not capitalized); nobody wants to talk about High Culture and Low Culture. There is an undeniable difference, however, between Dante or Shakespeare and the writers of poems printed on greeting cards or included in blogs. Are we talking about two different languages of poetry, or are these dialects or varieties of the same language? Intriguing question.

Growing interest in second-language literature

Giulio C. Lepschy, in the book I cited yesterday, says, "In recent years people have looked with growing interest at writers who use in their works ‘another’ language, different from their mother tongue."

One of the best bodies of work to study as far as non-mother tongue literature is concerned is Philippine literature in English. English is not the mother tongue of any of the writers in the Philippines, including those that have gained international recognition or emigrated to other countries. Despite having more than a hundred natural languages and over a dozen living literary vernacular languages, the Philippines has produced quite a number of novels, poems, and plays in the language of one of its former colonizers (the United States of America). The variety of English known as Philippine English has even received quite a bit of attention from linguists around the world. Yet there is little literary criticism done on Philippine texts written in English that takes into account the relationship of English to the mother tongue. This is a field wide open for students looking for graduate theses or even for young PhDs looking for a niche in the academic marketplace.

Literary language not usually mother tongue

Thank you to the reader that pointed me to the Google Books site of the book Mother Tongues and Other Reflections on the Italian Language (2002) by Giulio C. Lepschy. The entire section on the relationship of literary language to mother tongue is on the site (thank you, Google Books!). Here is part of what Lepschy says:

"A diglossic situation, however, in which the mother tongue and the literary medium are quite distinct (either because they are different varieties of the same language or because they are different languages), seems to be prevalent in recorded history throughout the world; and the modern European situation, in which a nation-state tends to favour the use of the same idiom for literary expression and for everyday communication among the whole population, appears to be the exception rather than the norm." (page 25)

This is a research finding that I did not know about, but it clearly shows the need for the kind of multilingual literary criticism that I am pushing. What many think to be the exception (mixed-language texts, texts not in the mother tongue) turns out to be the mainstream literary tradition!

Literary language vs mother tongue?

This is the abstract of an article entitled "Mother Tongues and Literary Languages" (Modern Language Review, 2001), by Giulio Lepschy:

"This lecture examines the notion of ‘native speaker’ and ‘mother tongue’: the former acquired popularity in the early twentieth century, the latter is based on a Medieval Latin expression (lingua materna) which particularly in its German shape (Muttersprache) became central for European national movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The implications of these notions are discussed with reference to Renaissance Latin, the revival of Hebrew, and modern Italian (particularly its twentieth-century development into a spoken language, distinct both from the dialects and from the traditional written language). Finally, the intriguing question is considered whether poets can more appropriately be said to express themselves in a native or a literary language."

Not being a subscriber to Modern Language Review (I would have to pay to read the article), I don't know how Lepschy answers the "intriguing question," but it is clear that the question is indeed intriguing.

William Wordsworth was not the first, but he was certainly the most influential poet to highlight the question by insisting that poets should write in "language really used by men." (Like poets of his time, Wordsworth did not realize that he had excluded women from the human race.) Of course, Wordsworth hedged by asking for "a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect," thus typically introducing vagueness into what would have been a categorical yes-or-no answer. If the language of poetry were a literary rather than a natural language, it would not be subject to the laws of natural language. That, indeed, would be intriguing.

Conference in November 2009

WORKSHOP MULTILINGUAL DISCOURSE PRODUCTION

November 06 - 07, 2009
University of Hamburg
-- Warburg Haus --
Heilwigstraße 116
D-20249 Hamburg

"Discourse production in multilingual contexts represents a specific type of language contact situation. Translation may be seen as the prototypical type of multilingual discourse production, other types would include parallel text production in different languages (e.g. for web sites) or the production of versions more loosely connected with the source text.

"When divergent communicative norms and conventions come into contact in any of these types of text production, one may find that such conventions transcend established language boundaries, potentially leading to the emergence of new genres. A case in point may be the so-called Corporate Philosophies in German, which owe much of their existence to the impact of English role models. These texts seem to represent hybrids in that they partly follow German communicative preferences and partly a communicative style more typical of English texts (cf. Böttger & Bührig 2003). If one looks back at the history of the European languages, it becomes clear that to some extent all of them have taken over textual conventions and/or structures from Latin, which may be related to the numerous translations from Latin into the vernaculars, generally representing a major part of early text production. For example, Koller (1998) has argued that Latin-German translations have substantially shaped the development of written German, in particular the literary language. Looking at English one finds, for instance, that the possible contexts of accusative-cum-infinitive constructions spread as a result of contact with Latin (cf. Fischer 1992, 1994). Another example can be seen in innovations in late-medieval Swedish, such as the use of new subordinating structures (cf. Höder 2008).

"Consequences of contact are manifold and may vary according to socio-historical circumstances as well as in relation to the functional and structural peculiarities of the linguistic systems involved. Factors which may determine the linguistic outcome of contact through translation could be:

* the quantitative basis (i.e. how many texts are translated from language A into language B and the ratio between translated and non-translated texts in language B)
* the prestige of the source vs. the target language (cf. Toury 1995, Baker 1996)
* the degree of standardization of the target language
* the degree of establishment of the genre in the target culture
* the possibility of establishing clear form-function equivalences (which in turn is related to the genetic proximity of the two languages) (cf. Becher, House & Kranich forthc.)

"In the workshop we wish to study in how far these and possibly other factors influence the result of language contact through translation and similar discourse production types. The central question is thus: Under which conditions does translatory activity have a (lasting) impact on the languages involved? This question may be approached from different angles."

The deadline for paper proposals has passed, but you might want to attend the conference.

"National" literary language

For many countries today, there is or should be no such thing as a "national language" as far as literature is concerned. Take Austria. Here is a description of what is happening there today:

"When we talk about Austria we are talking about 12 languages at least. This is, of course, less than the number of languages in Cameroon or India, but it was more than one language. It was not possible to establish German as the sole language of the Habsburg Monarchy. For every 'ethnic' group it was important to have their own language for university use. Within the Habsburg Monarchy some of these languages were indeed created for that purpose (like Ukrainian at the University of Czerniwzi/Czernowitz). During this time a lot of the writers or poets wrote in different languages like Franz Grillparzer or Karl Emil Franzos. And in this sense the literature of the Habsburg Monarchy was a multinational literature. In the present, too, Austrian literature is not only writing in German, as some of the German nationalists want us to believe. It is written not only in German but also in Slovenian, Croatian or Turkish, and when we think of the writers in exile, they use English, French or Spanish (just to mention a few languages)." [Herbert Arlt, "Multilingual Austrian Literature" (2002)]

Monolingual literary criticism, or criticism that ignores the mother tongue of a writer writing in a second or foreign language, perpetuates the oppressive notion of a "national literary language."

Ezra Pound's Canto XLIX

Although Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot are universally acclaimed as two of the world's greatest poets, their mixing of languages does not seem to have started a trend in poetry-writing. Pound trusted that his readers would appreciate at least the sounds of the foreign words, if not their meanings.

Take these two stanzas from "Canto XLIX: For the Seven Lakes":

State by creating riches shd. thereby get into debt?
This is infamy; this is Geryon.
This canal goes still to TenShi
Though the old king built it for pleasure

KEIMEN RANKEI
KIUMAN MANKEI
JITSU GETSU KOKWA
TAN FUKU TANKAI

Blogger Ben Kilpela, writing about Pound in general, observes:

"Actually, it has become a common expectation that the poet be obscure. This is a leading reason, I think, poetry has receded so far as an influential form of literature in our time. People just don’t have time to figure out what purpose modern poems have, and if and when they do figure one out, it seldom adds up to much beyond a vague, disordered expression of the poet’s state of mind."

This particular poem is "obscure" only if the reader does not know Japanese (I don't, so it is indeed "obscure" for me). A bilingual (Japanese & English) reader would most likely find the poem to be clear. This is one reason we need multilingual literary critics. We want to be able to understand every line of this poem (widely considered one of Pound's best), not just to enjoy the sounds of the words or letters. Multilingual literary critics can do poets a great favor, by making poetry again accessible (as it was in the old days) to everyone.

Gabu

Let me give an example of how multilingual literary criticism can illuminate aspects of a second-language poem. Here is a stanza from a canonical Philippine poem in English, "Gabu" by Carlos A. Angeles:

The waste of centuries is grey and dead

And neutral where the sea has beached its brine,

Where the split salt of its heart lies spread

Among the dark habiliments of Time.

Notice the meter. Except for the third line, it is strictly iambic pentameter. Why is the third line not in iambic pentameter?

In the formalist way of looking at poems, we would say one of two things. First, the poet was incompetent. Second, the poet wanted to emphasize the third line and therefore deliberately did not make it follow the metrical scheme.

Angeles has proven his competence as a poet in poem after poem, including this one, so the first conclusion is unacceptable. The second conclusion might be defensible, because the stanza might be talking about the heart of salt; the other three lines could be merely establishing the setting or condition for the insight. The second conclusion, however, would not sufficiently explain why Angeles did not just break the meter in the foot (or group of syllables, for those not familiar with literary critical jargon) "split salt." On the contrary, the entire line is not iambic (one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable), though it still has five feet (which is the definition of pentameter).

Multilingual literary criticism offers a third possibility. Angeles was from Leyte, an island in Central Philippines, where the language is Samar-Leyte or Waray. The vowels and accents of Waray are quite different from those of English. For one thing, there is a lot more natural rhythm or singsong in the language. "Split salt" has, for the native English speaker, two stresses, but it does not necessarily have that stress pattern for the native Waray speaker. The line, in other words, may be read as iambic.

The lack of a syllable in the last foot may also be explained by multilingual literary criticism. Filipinos tend to pronounce monosyllabic words starting with S as two-syllabled; "spread" has two syllables for Filipinos though it has only one for Americans. What appears as an error may now appear to be an interaction of mother tongue and second language, not an attempt at emphasis nor inability to count.

In fact, on the conceptual level, the emphasis of the stanza is really the darkness or deadness of the sea, which forms the central paradox of the whole poem, not its saltiness.

Studies of mixed-language literature

I am not the first to advocate the study of mixed-language literature, but as far as I know, I am the first to suggest that texts written in languages other than the writer's mother tongue should be read as mixed-language texts.

Here is an account of the criticism so far of mixed-language literature:

"Though there was some interest in ‘macaronic poetry’ before the 20th century, serious research only began with Wehrle’s study on medieval macaronic hymns 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’ (1933: vii). The second half of the 20th 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." (p. 57 of “Mixed-language texts as data and evidence in English historical linguistics,” by Herbert Schendl, in Studies in the History of the English Language, edited by Donka Minkova and Robert P. Stockwell, 2002).

Multilingual literary critics can use the findings of such studies to illuminate aspects of non-mother-tongue texts.

Empirical study of second language reading

When poets write in a second language, the sounds that the words make in their minds are different from the sounds they make when read or written by a mother-tongue poet. There is experimental proof of this, such as revealed in the article "Comparisons of native and foreign language poetry readings: Fluency, expressiveness, and their evaluation" (2004) in Psychological Research: "American college and German Gymnasium students read an English and German poem in their respective native (L1) and foreign (L2) languages. In L2, articulation rate (syl/s) was slower and phrase length (syl/pause) shorter than in L1. Only the German women read expressively: Mean pause duration was higher than all other groups in L1 and lower in L2. Evaluations of fluency and expressiveness by American teachers of German and German teachers of English paralleled these results."

Since poetry is made up of the sounds of words (what literary critics call "signifiers"), then the difference in sounds is crucial. This is one reason that critics have to start paying attention to the mother tongue of the second-language poet. The case of Cirilo F. Bautista rhyming men with mien is just one of numerous examples of second-language poets attributing a sound to a word different from that usually attributed by a mother-tongue poet.

Second-language readers

It is one thing for a first-language reader to read a work done in that language by a writer with a different mother tongue. It is quite another thing for a reader to read a work written in other than her or his mother tongue. The second situation is much more familiar to teachers of literature. It is not unusual at all for a teacher to encounter students that cannot get the connotations or context of the words in a foreign-language poem.

Linguists have looked at the second situation. For example, DI Hanauer of Israel summarizes his "The task of poetry reading and second language learning" (2001) this way: "The aim of the current study was to evaluate the role of the poetry-reading task for second language learning. The study followed Skehan's (1998) methodological approach to task choice and theoretical position on the importance of focus-on-form for language learning. The paper first describes the way poetry is read and understood by advanced second language learners and then considers the interaction between this description and the language learning process. The research methodology chosen was qualitative and consisted of an in-depth analysis of the protocols of ten dyads of advanced English language learners reading a poem from a popular song. The most basic contribution of this study is the development of a coding system that describes the types of responses elicited during poetry reading. Poetry reading is described as a close reading, meaning construction task that involves high levels of close consideration, analysis and elaboration of textual meanings. This coding system reveals how non-native readers of poetry notice form and consider the gap between input and output, thus extending their understanding of the potential uses and meanings of an existing linguistic structure. In addition, it shows how non-native readers view the distance between the poem's content and their own knowledge of the target culture and thus find their cultural awareness enhanced."

As far as I know, there is not much linguistic work done on the first situation. There is, moreover, a third situation: a reader reading a work not in her or his first language written by someone also not in the latter's mother tongue. This is a very complex situation that linguists should start studying.

Not just code-switching

A large number of linguists are interested in code-switching or any other kind of mixing of languages. Their studies illuminate many aspects of language use. For example, studies of Finglish (Finnish + English) have shown that speakers do not just shift languages out of lack of competence in one or the other language, but because the idioms are different. Idioms are based on ways of thinking about reality, so it is the way of thinking that is different.

Here, for example, is how Anne Putkuri describes the experience of mixing languages: "If you can't find a Finnish word, you quickly replace it with an English one. The word may be English, but you use the inflection rules of Finnish. I do word-for-word translations myself, too; I do the dishes, and I don't seem to be able to learn that in Finnish one washes the dishes."

Writers are even more precise in their choice of languages to mix or to use in a second-language or mixed-language text. The difference between do and wash is major for a poet (they do not rhyme, for instance); the choice is dictated by aesthetic, instead of just mere linguistic reasons.

Literary vs. linguistic competence

Followers of this blog having some difficulty distinguishing literary from linguistic competence might want to read Raman Selden, who was a fairly accurate and eminently readable interpreter of literary theories. Here is how Selden, writing about Michael Riffaterre, distinguished the two:

“It requires only ordinary linguistic competence to understand the poem’s ‘meaning,’ but the reader requires ‘literary competence’ to deal with the frequent ‘ungrammaticalities’ encountered in reading a poem. Faced with the stumbling-block of ungrammaticalness, the reader is forced, during the process of reading, to uncover a second (higher) level of significance which will explain the ungrammatical features of the text." (page 60 of A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory)

First, a reader has to understand (or have competence in) the language. Then, the reader has to understand (or have competence in) the literariness or the language of poetry (or literature in general) or the conventions that writers follow.

This is where one big difficulty arises when we are dealing either with a mixed language text or with a text written by a writer in a language other than the mother tongue. We have to have competence in the two or more languages involved before we have competence in literariness. Most literary critics have competence in literariness (they would not be literary critics if they did not!), but not all have competence in more than one language.

Linguistic competence (which, of course, includes familiarity with the culture, not only the grammar and vocabulary of the language) comes before literary competence. Otherwise, one falls into the trap that otherwise excellent translator Harold Augenbraum falls into when he translates the Spanish "el Ateneo" as "the atheneum" in the Penguin English translation of Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere.

Literary competence in education

Good news! The Philippine Department of Education, which oversees public or general primary and secondary education, has decided to include literary competence as a major component of its overall goal of "Functional Literacy for All." Previously, only linguistic or communicative competence (in Filipino, English, Spanish, Arabic, and other official or vernacular Philippine languages) was part of the declared goals of public education. If you know of other countries where literary competence (this term itself, not its equivalent) is explicitly mentioned as a goal of public education, please let me know so I can also mention them in this blog.

Visayan Students

Students are getting into mixed-language writing. At the University of the Philippines in the Visayas, based in the central islands of the Philippines, student-poets are producing mixed language poems (involving Cebuano, English, Filipino, Hiligaynon, Kinaray-a, and/or Tagalog). Here is "Silent Mode" in the website Verseculo Senti:

Ginubrahan kita ng trahe
Dahil sa susunod na linggo
Ay ikakasal ka na
Sa tsinoy na nakilala
Mo sa Boracay.

Ngunit bago pa man
Maubos ang sinulid
At mabali ang karayom
Na aking ginausar,
Bakas sa iyong mukha
Ang pagkabagabag
Na iyong dinadala.

Ginpamangkot kita kung bakit?
Anong nangyari?

Ngunit walang tingog at salita
Ang lumabas sa
Namamaga mong bibig.

There are some (particularly in the Sentro ng Wikang Filipino based in that university) that would argue that this is Filipino, the legal national language of the Philippines. Some would argue otherwise. I do not want to get into the linguistic debate here (although I have said quite a mouthful about it elsewhere). What is important is that, in this literary work, the mixing together of distinct languages works, because what the poem is talking about (a confused bride getting a taste of the violence that awaits her as a wife) is mirrored by the "confusion" generated by the mixing of languages, a confusion that is of no consequence to someone that understands all three languages. The speaker in the poem and the multilingual reader of the poem are, therefore, one in understanding what is going on in the mind of the bride. (Of course, from a political viewpoint, I cannot agree with the racism against the Chinese in the poem, but using purely formalist standards, the poem works.)

More on Cuban-American novelists

Here's an excerpt from Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona (1998), by Isabel Alvarez-Borland, pp. 153-154: “In addition to the prolific work by Cuban writers in the various literary genres in Miami and New York City, other Cuban-born novelists write in Spanish from other parts of the globe. For instance, Mireya Robles and René Vásquez Díaz visit Miami periodically but permanently reside in South Africa and Sweden, respectively. ... Among this multifarious group of Cuban-American writers producing in Spanish, poet-essayist Lourdes Gil stands out, for she has contributed to her one-and-a-half generation with her poetry and with some insightful essays on the predicament of writers such as herself. The choice of language is crucial for a writer, although in the case of Lourdes Gil the choice of Spanish assures her a place in the margins of the Anglo intellectual community. Most of Gil’s creative and scholarly writings have sought to explain her need to continue to write in Spanish. ... Interestingly, many writers publishing in Spanish are now beginning to translate their works into English in order to acquire a wider readership.”

The situation is similar to that of Filipino writers in the United States. US-based Epifanio San Juan Jr., for example, continues to write poetry in Tagalog, even as he writes his scholarly books in English.

Cuban-Americans working with English

Cubans born in Cuba and now working and writing in the United States have a keen sense of the interaction of mother tongue with second language. Here is an excerpt from the introduction to One Island, Many Voices: Conversations with Cuban-American Writers, by Eduardo R. del Rio:

"A sense of duality regarding the English language is another trait of Cuban-American literature that is prominent in the works of these twelve writers. For some of them, Spanish may be a mere memory or something experienced sporadically through familial bonds. Others, however, are more at home in the Spanish language, and English thus represents a direct confrontation with a new and confusing tongue. For all of these writers, however, their linguistic consciousness includes a sense of both languages. Because of this duality, the body of Cuban-American writers' works is written primarily in English, as they seek to express this conflict in the language that is the embodiment of it."

I like the way Del Rio notices that the English language itself is "the embodiment" of the linguistic problem. English (or as literary critics like to put it, english with the small letter e) is a language made up of many other languages. Even the old British English vs. American English issue was already a sign that the English language in itself has problems of identity. Why is American English (or British English) considered standard? Why not Cuban English? Or Singlish? Or Inglish? Or, in fact, why not Philippine English? Indeed, why is the economic imperialism of the 20th century still being played out in the 21st century in the realm of language? Multilinguistic literary criticism may hold the key to the answer to this question. By focusing on texts written in a second or foreign language, we might be able to grasp the nuances of the issue more manageably.

Famous elsewhere

Being appreciated by readers not sharing one's mother tongue is, of course, not new. A fairly recent example is Edgar Allan Poe, who was said to have been taken seriously first by the French before his fellow Americans. (This urban legend, of course, has already been debunked, but it still serves my purpose.) In translation or when read by non-"native speakers," a text loses its linguistic qualities (such as word-play) but gains focus (the non-language-based elements - such as characterization, plot, theme, ideas - are foregrounded). When we read a work written by a writer in a second or foreign language, on the other hand, the linguistic elements are enhanced, because the mother-tongue reader finds the language unfamiliar (literary critics like to say "defamiliar") and is forced to think about the words themselves. Like all new literary theories, multilingual literary criticism is a return to the old, the older tradition of criticism being that focused on words, not ideas.

Writings of the Buddha

Buddhists appear to be more comfortable with the idea of mixing languages than Christians, not because the Christian Bible is not mixed, but because most modern Christians read the Bible in translation and are not too concerned that the Bible was not written in English (or whatever modern language) and, therefore, shares the danger of all translations (there is no such thing as a faithful translation, as translation theory has repeatedly proven). Modern Buddhists also read the words of the Buddha in translation, but the mixed-language nature of the Buddhist scriptures (due to the early splintering of the tradition among followers) makes it impossible to ignore the linguistic interactions at the beginning of Buddhism. (See, for example, the 1975 discussion on language in The Life of Buddha as Legend and History.) Since it is not technically a religion, Buddhism is often left out when the world's great religions are discussed (namely, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism [in alphabetical order]). The Buddhist scriptures, just like Christian, Islamic, and Jewish writings, are literature and should be studied by literary critics (who may or may not be believers or followers of one or the other system of beliefs).

Every language is a mixed language?

Eventually, once multilingual criticism develops sophisticated tools for reading mother tongue interactions in second language texts, it will illuminate aspects of monolingual texts that have not yet been fully appreciated. After all, most (if not all) languages are inherently mixed. (There is surprise on the part of many when this kind of statement is made [see, for example, the current blog debate on the relationship of French to German].) The situation appears similar to that in physics, when we say that, for everyday life, we can make do with Newton, since we do not usually have to deal with anything that travels near the speed of light (in which case, we would have to start using Einstein). Even if we preferred to use Newton for convenience, however, we could just as well use Einstein (which would make things uselessly complicated but would be more accurate). When we read a work done by someone with a different mother tongue, we can learn many principles that we can then apply to works done by authors in their mother tongue.

What I am saying comes close to the (now considered old-fashioned) insight of T. S. Eliot that all works change their meaning when a new work is created (he said this in his still-anthologized 1922 essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent") or that every word in a poem contains all the meanings that were attached previously to that word. Any word in English (which, chances are, comes from another language) thus carries with it all the meanings in the language where it originally came from. There will, therefore, not be any monolingual text, strictly speaking.

Since it will be very hard to study every word in a monolingual text and to trace all the meanings in the language (or languages) where it came from, it is easier for us to study the obviously foreign words in a mixed-language text. But mixed-language texts are only the starting point. We are clearly interested in eventually learning more about apparently monolingual texts.

Writing poetry in a second language

There is poetry and there is poetry. The poetry being written by second language learners in order to learn the second language is, well, poetry, but it is not the poetry that this blog focuses on. I realize that there is a pre-Raymond Williams bias in that statement (for those not into literary theory, Williams was one of the first to point out that the word "literature" was basically a way for Oxford and Cambridge university professors to discourage their students from reading what people outside the campuses were reading), but as a literary critic, I am primarily interested in what established writers do. That is a dangerous thing to say these days, when canon-bashing is the rule rather than the exception. That notwithstanding, this is why I am only tangentially interested in what is going on in foreign-language teaching circles, such as what Diane Farruq apparently does exceeding well in "Write Poetry in a Foreign Language: Create Original Poems and Improve Writing Skills."

Aviram on literary competence

Here is a take on literary competence: "Literary competence is not the ability to resist the pleasures of reading but the ability to feel them. It arises, precisely, from the ability to distinguish between the literary and the nonliterary." These sentences come from a long study by Amittai F. Aviram entitled "Notes toward a new formalist criticism: Reading literature as a democratic exercise" (1998). In ordinary conversations with someone speaking in a second or foreign language, we are always aware that the person is not a so-called native speaker (if only because of different accents, vowel sounds, idioms, and so on). When reading a work in a language that is not the writer's mother tongue, we should also be aware that the language itself is not the writer's own and, therefore, is different from the language of a writer writing in a mother tongue. Moreover, when we read a literary text not in a mother tongue, we should take its being not in a mother tongue as an element of its literariness. What is literature if not language used and read in a special way? By ignoring the second-language nature of the text, we miss the extra pleasure of watching two languages interacting with each other.

Culler and Jose Garcia Villa

Here is a summary of Culler's idea of literary competence:

"Jonathan Culler, in his Structuralist Poetics, moves away from the idea of the underlying competence of literary works, and considers instead the literary competence of readers. Culler argues that this literary competence, regarded as a kind of grammar of literature, is acquired in education institutions. In his later work, On Deconstruction, he develops the idea further, drawing on diverse critical responses to institutions, and questioning the foundations of a literary competence that surreptitiously promotes the doctrines and values of specific traditions."

What is being "surreptitiously promoted" by the usual way of reading works by multilingual authors as though they were monolingual is the dubious primacy of the second language. For example, by reading Jose Garcia Villa's poems as though the poet spoke English from childhood, we fall into the silly trap that my American graduate school teacher in Survey of American Literature fell into when he pronounced Villa as a "minor American poet." He (and most other readers) failed to see that the line "Then musical as a sea-gull" in Villa's famous "Lyric 17" makes full sense only when we realize that Villa is writing in Tagalog, using English words.

Literary competence

Let us focus for a moment on the notion of "literary competence," a phrase made famous by Jonathan Culler, although the idea that more educated readers understand literature better than less educated readers (or that literary education is necessary if one is to read literature properly) has been around since the beginning of formal education.

Not very much attention has been given to the place of multilinguistic competence within literary competence. Culler and others, of course, have always talked about language (for example, you need to know the grammar of a language before you can understand a poem in that language), but they have, as far as I know, not talked about knowing the mother tongue of the author if the work is not in the mother tongue. I suggest that it is necessary for critics (as well as for more discriminating readers) to have linguistic competence in the mother tongue of a bilingual or multilingual author in order to fully or properly read a text written in a second or foreign language. That linguistic competence need not be of a very high level (the critic does not need to speak the language, but merely to read it or at least read a dictionary or similar reference work in that language); it should be enough to see how the mother tongue influences (interferes, supports, counterpoints, etc.) the language of the text.