Indonesian multilingual novel

A student thesis at the Petra Christian University investigates code-mixing in an Indonesian novel (that later became a film). Writes the student: "The writer has chosen one of the best-selling novels in Indonesia in 2004, 30 Hari Mencari Cinta (30 Days in Search for Love) which was written by Nova Riyanti Yusuf and Upi Avanto. ... The novel itself is so closely related to young people’s love and lives; therefore, the writer thinks it can represent them in a simpler way. The research is based on the language of narration and the characters’ conversation in the novel which often include code-mixing. ... In the novel 30 Hari Mencari Cinta, the writer Nova Riyanti Yusuf often includes code-mixing in the language of narration and the characters’ conversation. However, since it is a novel, she only gives the context without showing any further direction on how the code-mixing is composed there."

The thesis points to two distinct concerns of Wikcrit - code-mixing in dialogue (which is easily explained and often even dismissed as simply reflecting the way people actually speak in multilingual societies) and code-mixing in the narration (which is not as easily explained and which, therefore, needs the sophisticated tools of literary criticism). Unfortunately, I cannot read Bahasa Indonesia (or Bahasa Melayu or Malay) and cannot judge whether the student's work is accurate and useful for us. Needless to say, it is the novel that should be of interest, not the film (where the multilingual narration is, of course, irrelevant).

Multilingual literature is natural for many

To Ruth Vanita's observation in her "Gandhi’s tiger: multilingual elites, the battle for minds, and English Romantic literature in colonial India" (2002) --

"The average university graduate in Victorian England and in the early twentieth century could read and write English and French as well as Latin and some Greek. An average graduate in north India in the same period could read and write English, Hindi, Urdu, and the mother tongue (such as Punjabi) and also some Persian and/or Sanskrit." (p. 97)

-- we can add the Philippine equivalent: The average university graduate in the Philippines today can speak and/or read Filipino (the national language), English (the medium of instruction in most universities), the lingua franca (Cebuano, Ilocano, or Tagalog), and the mother tongue (Adasen, Yogad, or any of the 171 Philippine languages). If the graduate has Chinese blood and/or studied in a Chinese-medium school, s/he will also know how to speak, if not to read, Mandarin Chinese (taught in schools) and Fookien Chinese (the Chinese language most Chinese-Filipinos use). If the graduate is Muslim, s/he will know how to read Arabic. If the graduate has wealthy parents, s/he will know how to speak Spanish. If the graduate has a parent working overseas, s/he will have a rudimentary knowledge of Japanese, Italian, or whatever the language is in the country where the parent is (about 10 million adult Filipinos now work outside the country). To the British in Victorian England, to Indians, and to Filipinos, literary texts that use more than one language would be the rule rather than the exception.

Ma. Lourdes S. Bautista on code-switching

In the August 29 issue of the newspaper Manila Bulletin, linguist Ma. Lourdes S. Bautista summarizes current linguistic theory about code-switching:

"There was a time, some 40 years ago, when Taglish [Tagalog + English] was frowned upon. This was because Taglish was associated with a speaker’s inability to use either Tagalog or English in complete discourse. It was a sign of lack of proficiency in one of the two languages. This can be called 'deficiency-driven code switching.' ...

"But the more common kind of code switching now can be called 'proficiency-driven code switching.' This is the kind used by people who are proficient in both languages and who code-switch for purposes of communicative efficiency. I believe that bilinguals (and most Filipinos are bilingual, even trilingual) have the strategic competence to 'calculate,' in a sense, which language would provide the most expressive, most concise way of saying something. This kind of strategic competence is currently very evident in texting [SMS] – the texter can choose between English, Tagalog, or Taglish to state the message in the fastest, easiest way possible."

As it has always done, literature leads the way in the uses of language. Multilingual literary texts are written by writers proficient, not deficient in language skills. The general population (those using SMS) are reaping the benefits of the efforts of literary writers (admittedly and necessarily, a small percentage of the world's population) to break down the barriers between languages and to harness the best qualities of every language in the service of effective and pleasurable communication. Linguists explore universes of discourse where literary writers and critics have gone before.

Assia Djebar

For insights on Assia Djebar, look into Anne Donadey's World Literature Today essay: “The second half of the essay explores Djebar’s own practice of multilingual writing in the three published novels of her Algerian Quartet. Djebar is one of the foremost Maghrebian writers, and her work on language is truly remarkable. I analyze her use of Arabic words in her texts in French to argue that she creates a multilingual palimpsest which both reflects the process of violent French colonization of Algeria and subverts it linguistically by ‘arabiciz[ing] French.’”

Donadey's "arabicizing French" is like Gemino Abad's observation that Filipino writers have "colonized English." The often asked question of whether English should be considered an Asian language has been answered decisively in conferences and books: yes, English is not just the "language of yesterday's enemy" nor is it only the current international language, but it is an Asian, specifically a Filipino language. The Maghrebians have colonized French, just as Filipinos have colonized English. And as wikcrit shows, it is not just a matter of inserting Arabic or Tagalog words in a French or English text, but the French and the English itself being qualitatively different from the French and the English of "yesterday's enemies."

Postcolonial issues

Actually appreciating multilingual literature is complicated by the ideological battles being fought on the postcolonial beachheads of literary theory. Why is language such a big issue among multilingual writers? Anne Donadey gives an account of the critical war:

“The question of the language of writing is overdetermined in the context of anti- and postcolonial literatures. If postcolonial authors write in ‘la langue de l’adversaire d’hier’ (the language of yesterday’s enemy), even writers with a clearly anticolonial agenda are regularly accused, at worst of betrayal, at best of not being able to reach their intended audience. For female writers, it is often seen as a double betrayal, both of the national language and of a nationalist ideology in which women are viewed only as allegories of the nation. These questions, which are unavoidable in the francophone context, are also foregrounded in anglophone Africa, as evidenced by the controversial arguments of Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Yet the great theorists of decolonization such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Albert Memmi all wrote their electrifying manifestoes in the colonizer’s language, using French as ‘une arme de combat, pour une littérature nationale’ (a weapon in the struggle for national literature). Writers and critics have treated this issue in many different ways.” ("The Multilingual Strategies of Postcolonial Literature: Assia Djebar’s Algerian Palimpsest" in World Literature Today, 2000)

Having spent the greater part of my life doing literary theory and having realized, like Terry Eagleton and several other theorists, that the moment of literary theory has passed, I suggest that we roll up our sleeves and start actually reading texts within a multilingual and/or multicultural context. We might come up with conclusions quite different from what we get using mere theoretical reasoning. As Samuel Johnson so famously illustrated, there might be no way to prove philosophically that anything or anyone exists outside of ourselves, except by kicking a stone:

"After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- 'I refute it thus.'" (from Boswell)

Once we start reading literature in the "language of yesterday's enemy," we might find that such literature is as subversive and as anticolonial as the "language of our blood."

Ike Muila

Here's a blog entry about the poetry of Ike Muila:

"though there is an increase in the number of poets with poems that utilize hybridization, fusing english and african languages with slang\iscamtho, rasta and rap-speak, ike mboneni muila of the botsotso jesters is probably the only south african poet who writes\performs solely in a mix of languages, and is very passionate, irrepressible and unrepentant in calling the playful mixing of languages and slanguages, the sampling of folk-songs and children’s tales and snap-shots of township and village scenes art\poetry:

i am into creative writing as a poet artist performer
my narrative mix is in eleven languages spoken in south africa
by and bye trapped in one poem
the so called tsotsi taal
iscamtho lingo alive and kicking sense of humor in you and me
mixing of languages into a witty lingo
a language of identity
a language of an ordinary person in the street
a language of unity in diversity

"his poems bodly declare that his mission is to make art\poetry out of the mixing of languages and slanguages, out of the recollection, reconstruction, re-mixing and adaptation of children game-songs, folk songs\african classics games\songs\township classics\township tales and the exposition of everyday real-life stories in the streets, villages, townships and inner-city of azania."

Multilingual poetry is indeed - instead of an esoteric exercise for the elite of the linguistic and artistic world - the revolt of the unlettered against the miseducated.

Literature in a colonial language

Today, we call it multilingual or mixed-language literature, but during the European Renaissance, it was “the language question,” that is, the ideological struggle of the vernaculars against the international languages of that time.

The study by David Holton of the dialectal literature in Crete at that time is typical of scholarly work on that period. This is part of what he says:

“Between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries we can therefore observe an upward movement in the status of the vernacular [in Crete]; we might compare the rise of English in the period from the Norman Conquest to the age of Chaucer. The parallels are quite striking: in both cases we have to do with a colonial situation in which the conquerors speak a different language (Norman French or Italian), while the native population has both a vernacular and a formal or learned language. Of course the extent to which English was influenced by contact with French is much greater than the influence of Italian on Cretan dialect, which is mainly restricted to vocabulary. It is, however, noteworthy that the common language of Crete was Greek, that is Cretan dialect, and by the end of our period the use of Italian was more or less restricted to the realms of administration and culture. Educated men would of course be bilingual, but it is clear from documents of the sixteenth century that women, even from noble Venetian families, would usually know only Greek. Greek was written in both the Greek and Latin alphabets, and a number of manuscripts of literary works survives in Latin script.” (p. 14 of Literature and Society in Renaissance Crete, 1991)

We are privileged to watch a similar phenomenon unfolding in our time. The use of Filipino as a literary language is growing as an ideological protest against the continued dominance of English (the language of 20th century American colonizers) in literature classes in schools and in government in the Philippines. The Filipino language itself has a huge number of words borrowed from English, analogous to the situation of Chaucer with French and the Cretan writers with Italian. The Philippines is undergoing what Europe underwent five or six centuries earlier! Five or six centuries from now, if we will follow the logic of the European model, Philippine literary texts written in English will be, if I may borrow Holton's words (used in another context), "of much smaller literary significance."

Why Wikcrit is soooo difficult

Here is the abstract of a paper entitled "Once Again on Khitan Words in Chinese-Khitan Mixed Verses" by Alexander Vovin (published in Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae in 2003):

"The present paper deals with identification of the Khitan words preserved in Late Middle Chinese transcription in mixed language verses from the Qidan Guo Zhi. I argue that the only cogent way for identifying these Khitan words correctly is using the up-to-date version of Middle Chinese reconstruction, and not viewing them through the anachronistic prism of Modern and/or Early Mandarin readings of Chinese characters. On this basis I provide critical assessment of certain identifications proposed by my predecessors as well as several new identifications."

It is so easy to use "the anachronistic prism of Modern" language to read texts done before our century. The New Critics had lots of fun pointing out how what we now view as colorless words used to be pregnant with other meanings in 17th century England (such as John Donne's to die as to have an orgasm). Wikcritics find themselves in double trouble: they have to think in two or more languages at the same time, and they have to place themselves in another century.

My latest play

Just a little something to show you where I am coming from. Here are some lines from my musical play Baler sa Puso Ko [Baler in My Heart], which opened last Aug. 12 in the Philippines. The play is all in Filipino, except for lines sung by the Spanish and the American characters. Examples:

From the opening scene introducing the characters:

MGA KASTILA
Todos lahat magdiwang sa Baler, Baler
Porque ngayon ay fiesta de Baler, Baler
Kahit kailan, kahit saan, mula noon
Hanggang ngayon sikat el pueblo de Baler

From a scene much later when American soldiers arrive:

ANTERO AMATORIO [the leader of the Filipino soldiers]
Wat you sey wat you sey my Amerikeyno
Why you sey why you sey kami ay sa inyo

SUNDALONG AMERIKANO 1
I can talk a little Tágalog brown brother
We bili na you mura mura brown brother

ANTERO AMATORIO
Wat you mean wat you mean tarantado kayo
Hindi kami mabibili kahit nino

SUNDALONG AMERIKANO 1
Ang mga Espanyol because natatalo
Binayaran namin sila bargain you know

ANTERO AMATORIO
Weyt a minit weyt a minit we panalo
We not for seyl we not for seyl no no no no

SUNDALONG AMERIKANO 2
What is this jerk talking about ignorant fool
We came to liberate this barbarian cesspool

SUNDALONG AMERIKANO 3
These monkeys have no tails they speak real funny
They do not even know manifest destiny

(I apologize to those that do not understand Filipino.)

Henry Roth

Check out Judith Oster's excellent analysis of this scene from Henry Roth’s Mercy of a Rude Stream:

Mom, attuned to sorrow as she was, ... stroked his arm. “Mein orrim kindt. Sit down. Sit down, pleese .... So is it shoyn millt alle fon us, vee menshen. You should excuse mine English.... Alles mus’ go sleep, mein kindt, tsi rich, tsi poor.” ...

“Talk English, Mom,” Ira rebuked....

“I don’t mind your mother speaking Yiddish,” Larry assured Ira earnestly. “You seem to think I do. I really don’t. I can’t tell you why.”

“It’s atavistic,” Ira quipped uneasily.

“No, there’s something warm about it. Honestly. Please don’t stop her. Don’t be embarrassed, Ira. Some of it I think I understand. Your mother is very eloquent, do you know? She’s really comforting. I mean it.” (Crossing Cultures: Creating Identity in Chinese and Jewish American Literature, 2003, pp. 90-91)

Bani Basu

I wish I could read Bani Basu in the original. She is reputedly the first major Bengali Indian literary writer to use the actual language of people, rather than (as happens too often with writers in other languages) an artificial literary register: "One can take Moom (1998) which focuses on a Marwari family settled in Kolkata for generations. The language is Bangla laced with Hindi, the kind many Marwaris in Calcutta use. Such a hybrid language - if used at all in Bangla literature in the past - has only been done for comic effect, and always briefly. Bani Basu dares to write an entire novel in this mixed language quite seriously, without any trace of condescension or mockery." (Meenakshi Mukherjee, "Bani Basu's Novels")

LibriVox

I appreciate the heroic efforts of LibriVox to popularize non-English language readings through the Web, but I wish it had spent its time and money on something other than Ursula O. Maderal's poem "Araw ng Kamusmusan." There are better, more critically-acclaimed, more representative poems in Tagalog. In fact, if it can, it would be good for LibriVox to have more Filipino poems read on mp3. The 10 million or so Filipinos that live outside the Philippines should certainly welcome such readings. (I know that LibriVox depends almost completely on volunteers and cannot really choose what its readers read, but there must be a way to encourage more discriminating readers.)

Rekhti poetry

Very interesting is a study by Ruth Vanita entitled “Eloquent Parrots: Mixed Language and the Examples of Hinglish and Rekhti.” She defines rekhti poetry this way: "Rekhti is a genre of Urdu poetry, purportedly composed in ‘women’s language’, which arose in the 18th century and came into prominence in the early 19th century. Early literary Urdu, called rekhta, has a preponderance of Persian and Arabic vocabulary, but the language of rekhti, which approximates more to the non-literary language of everyday speech, incorporates words and idioms from north Indian languages and dialects." She traces today's Hinglish (Hindu + English) to rekhti. Here is yet another proof that literature precedes language, or as Jacques Derrida famously put it, writing precedes speech.

Tistarangit

The histories of writing and publishing are, to use a mathematical analogy, inversely proportional to each other. Writing started with multilingual texts (because languages themselves were born from other languages) and gradually became mostly monolingual. Publishing started with monolingual periodicals, moved to periodicals with monolingual texts in two or more languages (separate but equal, as in race relations), and now (principally on the Web) is moving towards multilingual or mixed texts. Literature, like everything else in history, swings like a pendulum, and writers are once again writing mixed or multilingual texts, primarily because languages themselves are moving from "pure" to "pidgin" forms (both linguistic adjectives, of course, are oversimplifications). Having monolingual texts in different languages is a necessary but I hope short-lived step towards truly multilingual publications.

I take as a case in point Tistarangit, the first online literary magazine of Sikkim. This magazine features texts in either English or one of the Indian languages, but as far as I know, not in the multilingual or mixed mode. Of course, using Wikcrit, we can analyze a poem such as this one and see that Indian languages determine the English syntax, but to move forward, Indian contributors to the magazine should start writing mixed verse (which, elsewhere in India, has gained a respectable following):

Cannibal Times
Raja Puniani

Come
I’ll eat you all

See
World has become
So much religious
(Even physics!)
And living so much expensive

You all are gods
Gods of your own world
I want to listen to your
Frustrations first
And
Wish to see
Masturbating
Before your own porno self

Go and
Sleep with the capitalists
In a city of communal riots

Class struggle
Demonstrates itself in
Class adjustments

All are violent and disturbed
In this risky
Peaceful co-existence

Democracy is
What people earn
Just as a bonded labour earns his privileges

Come
And
I’ll eat you all

I see me
In all of you

I see nothing
While I look at myself
Though I see
A lot

My mirror
These days
Scare me

I can’t keep gazing sky

Keep away that sky from me
The sky falls
On me

Nevertheless, I like the poem and wish I knew the Indian language that gives rise to the kind of English it uses.

Computer-assisted literary analysis

I wish I had time to try out computer software that is supposed to make the work of multilingual literary critics easier. For example, the CCS software colors every word according to its source language. With one look at a screen and without actually having to read a text, we can tell if a text is multilingual or not. The Palimpsest software apparently can help identify and count words in languages other than the main one of a text. Stylistic critics have been using computers for a long time to do their mechanical chores of counting. Perhaps computers can raise the level of literary criticism from the purely qualitative to a more quantitative one. Maybe C. P. Snow's classic divide (suddenly back again in the newspapers) can finally be bridged.

Using colors for multilingual texts

William Faulkner wanted his novel The Sound and the Fury printed in multicolors, each color belonging to one character's point of view (the novel has several points of view acting simultaneously, leading to immense confusion for unschooled readers). Technology has now given multilingual writers the solution that Faulkner desired, not in terms of different points of view, but for different languages in the same literary text. There is now software that can print, if you are reading on a computer, words in different colors (one for each language).

"Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents."

"For one example of using CSS, in Patrick Hanrahan’s novel NUNC, set the stylesheet to Number Two ('The author’s choice'). Stylesheet 2 uses the before: property to insert the characters’ names before their lines in a white #FFFFFF font on the black background. Patrick’s multilingual novels could be read by multilingual voice technology; language HTML font tags are included for each character’s lines, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Greek, German or Russian. Each character in the novel has their own font and color. They could also have their own voice accents."

Not being much of a techie, I haven't myself tried out this software, but it seems like an ideal solution for multilingual writers. Set the software to color the words according to the language (if you wish, per character as in Faulkner's novel). That will make life much easier for the reader.

Call for papers

Multilingual Texts in the Foreign Language (FL) Classroom
Location: Quebec, Canada
Call for Papers Date: 2009-09-30

The panel examines the potential of multilingual texts (novels, lyrics, cartoons, theater, film, etc.) for the foreign language classroom. Multilingual texts can model intercultural speakership, promote language and cultural awareness as well as heightened contextual understanding. Contributions are invited that investigate new approaches on multilingual competence and/or present practical proposals to utilize multilingual potential(s) for foreign language teaching.

Proposals of no more than 250 words should be sent electronically by 30 September 2009 to Susanne Even (evens@indiana.edu) and David Delamatta (ddelamatta@lfcc.edu). Please include a recent CV, your academic affiliation, postal address and telephone number, as well as any A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee).

Linguism?

There is no word for the equivalent of racism in the area of languages, so let me invent one for the sake of convenience - linguism. This is the discrimination suffered by speakers or writers of one language at the hands of speakers of another language. Linguism is difficult to detect when one is dealing only with written texts (although critics insisting on the use of only one language in a single literary text clearly think that their language is sufficient for all the needs of humanity), but it is very clear in ordinary discourse. Here's an example of a blog post where the writer does not even realize that she is guilty of linguism:

"There’s a lot of Chinese artists/bands that sing a whole song in Chinese, only to throw in some English phrases/words during the chorus?! It sounds quite silly, and I have no idea what the idea of this is? To my workmates, who don’t understand a lick of Chinese it sounded even MORE silly, gosh, one guy laughed so much tears started running from his eyes when we listened to the song 一半女生 –I ban nv sheng- by the Hong Kong duo ‘Twins’ who sang their whole verse in Chinese (something about growing up and not being a woman yet but also not being a girl…) and then went: 'Bye bye bye, bye bye happiness!' in the chorus and resulted in an instant laugh attack from my colleagues."

The only thing wrong with the word linguism is that the person afflicted with it would have to be called a linguist (unnecessarily making me thousands of enemies with one stroke of the computer, even though I have no intention of casting aspersions on language experts).

Carl Sandburg's "Languages"

Thought I'd share this profound poem by Carl Sandburg (despite its sexist language). We should not hold on to "pure" forms of language, because all languages (yes, even English!) will eventually die:

Languages
Carl Sandburg

There are no handles upon a language
Whereby men take hold of it
And mark it with signs for its remembrance.
It is a river, this language,
Once in a thousand years
Breaking a new course
Changing its way to the ocean.
It is mountain effluvia
Moving to valleys
And from nation to nation
Crossing borders and mixing.
Languages die like rivers.
Words wrapped round your tongue today
And broken to shape of thought
Between your teeth and lips speaking
Now and today
Shall be faded hieroglyphics
Ten thousand years from now.
Sing — and singing — remember
Your song dies and changes
And is not here tomorrow
Any more than the wind
Blowing ten thousand years ago.

Cassar's C'est la vie

These lines from Antoine Cassar's sonnet C'est la vie (2007) have received critical attention:

Run, rabbit, run, run, run, from the womb to the tomb,
de cuatro a dos a tres, del río a la mar,
play the fool, suffer school, zunzana ddur iddur,
engage-toi, perds ta foi, le regole imparar.

Marija Grech is quoted as saying: "The deeper significance of these poems may be said to lie not simply in the more traditional meaning of the individual words or verses, but more specifically in the play with sound that the movement from one language to another generates and exploits. As the poet explains, 'the mosaics are designed not so much to be read but to be heard'."

Critics always think that they know better than poets, and in this case, I will continue this self-deception. The lines clearly are meant to be heard, but they can also be read (I use read in two senses, namely, read as in looking for meanings and read as in view or see as in visual arts). That the lines are roughly the same length shows that they look like they are parts of a poem on a page; if the text were laid out as a prose paragraph, the sounds would be the same but the lines would not look like lines of poetry. The meaning (not just the sound) is, however, also worth the reader's time:

Run, rabbit, run, run, run, from the womb to the tomb,
from four to two to three, from the river to the sea,
play the fool, suffer school, the wasp goes round and round,
get involved, lose your faith, learn the rules (English translation supplied by the website itself)

"Womb to tomb," like "four to two to three" (from the puzzle in Oedipus Rex), refers to the passing of time. "River to the sea" refers to faith (if you see a river, there must be a sea; or image to reality). "Play the fool," of course, is from Shakespeare. And so on. The allusions and references play in the reader's mind like the sounds of the words. Had the poem been written in straight English, Spanish, French, or any other language, the sounds would not have mirrored the sense. In short, the choice of mixing languages is dictated in this instance by the poem itself, not by the poet. The poem could not have been written except by a multilingual poet. The inevitability of the bond between sense and sound is aesthetic, not biographical.

Not polykrit

Back to the drawing board for me, since polykrit just doesn't hack it, being, as one follower says, too close to hypocrite. Polyanalysis could do it, but it sounds too much like psychoanalysis. Wikcrit might be a possibility, as a portmanteau of wika (the Filipino word for language) and criticism.

Unwieldy names for literary theories sometimes work against the theories themselves. Take postcolonial literary theory (or theories), which by having too long a name makes it harder for critics to use it (as opposed to deconstruction or defamiliarization, polysyllabic words which critics pronounce in one breath anyway). Maybe wikcrit might do, at least in the meantime, until we find a more imaginative buzz word.

Polykrit

I've been looking for a short name for the unwieldy "Multilingual Literary Criticism." What about polykrit? It is a portmanteau of polyglot and the Filipino word kritika for literary theory cum criticism. The big literary theories have a word that characterizes them, even if that word does not really encompass what the theory tries to do. For example, there is deconstruction, which is widely misunderstood but is used anyway to refer to all post-structuralism, Derridean or otherwise. There is gynocritique, which puts together the really quite different sexual politics, French feminism, and other forms of literary feminism. There is marxism, which Marxists who don't completely agree with Marx use to talk about all forms of Marxism after Althusser. There is the originally weird but now universally accepted Englishes (or sometimes, english uncapitalized), standing for the struggle of Singlish, Taglish, etcetera-lish to put into its place American English or more usually British English (specifically, Received Pronunciation). I think I shall use polykrit from now on and see if it catches on.

Not poetry

Using two or more languages in a text does not qualify one to be a multilingual poet. In other words, there are multilingual poems and there are multilingual "poems." There are multilingual texts that are not poems at all. Take this post from the About.com thread on "Multilingual Poems / Translation":

Se demener a etre au septieme ciel sont les arts.
To struggle in our seven heaven are arts.

This is clearly not poetry because it does not fulfill the first requirement for a work of literature, namely, that it should follow the rules of grammar. (That rule, of course, allows for its own exception, namely, that the poet may deliberately and knowingly violate the rules of grammar for aesthetic purposes.)

The second line borders on the illiterate. That the writer used a computer program to translate the French into English is obvious. There are computer-generated poems that approach the level of poetry, but this is not one of them. It is worse that we are not even talking about a computer, but a human being who could have, with some effort and time, learned a second language.

Creating words

This post appears in the exchange on mixing Sanskrit and English:

"सर्वे जन्तु रुटिना: ! सर्वे जन्तु निराशया:
सर्वे छिद्राणि पंचन्तु ! मा कश्चित दु:ख-लॉग भरेत !

"Mardhekar always had a choice to NOT write Sanskrit mixed with English. Yet he wrote those lines. (And numerous others. Puncture-leli ratra can be easily replaced by malool ratra.) What about his usage like Motariche KLINNA manogat? There is not a single word KLINN in English or Marathi. It is a mixture of khinna + cleaner, and the amazing usage of Motari che klinna manogat, while prima facie talks about the motor-car's mental state, it goes beyond the object and talks about the Cleaner (Of the Driver-cleaner pair). What an amazing usage.

"I feel new idioms are created everywhere: in poetry, in drama, in cinema as years go by. It is inevitable."

Although I can't read Sanskrit, I agree that writers not only have the liberty but the duty to create words. Multilingual writers have an advantage in this regard, because they can put together words or syllables from two or more different languages. It is the job of the literary critic to "unpack" or "decode" the new word. To do this, the literary critic must be multilingual as well.

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.