Correcting a critical prejudice

Charles Li's contention (summarized by Stephen Wadley in my previous post) that "pidgins rarely, if ever, produce a literature" is soundly refuted by historical evidence. Here is an account of the language and literature situation in Bangladesh in the 18th century:

"After the Turkish conquest of Bengal in the 13th century, Persian became the official language and both Hindu and Muslim communities started learning the language for personal advancement. In addition to Persian, Muslims also learnt Arabic. This led to the influx of a large stock of Arabic-Persian words into Bangla. Following the establishment of administrative, commercial and cultural links of Bengal with the Mughal capital, Delhi, during the 16th century, a large number of Muslims started visiting Bengal. Urdu-speaking Muslims engaged in state, religious and educational activities, and their families started settling in Murshidabad, Hughli, Howrah etc. Urdu-Hindi words now began to have a significant influence on Bangla.

"Persian was so important at the time that, apart from Muslims and Hindus, the employees of the European trading companies too started learning it. Before coming to India the employees of the East India Company used to learn Persian at seminaries in Britain. After observing the state of Bangla language in the 18th century, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed in A Grammar of the Bengal Language (1778) said that those who spoke Bangla using the largest number of Arabic and Persian adjectives with Bangla verbs were regarded as knowing Bangla well. The documents and legal papers of the 18th century largely used this kind of language. Sukumar Sen termed it as a 'working language' or the 'language of usage'. Bharatchandra called it yabani mishal (Muslim mixture). He himself learned this language and claimed that although it did not possess high literary qualities it was understood by all. Bharatchandra and Garibullah came from the same region of Bhurshut Pargana at about the same time. The spoken language of the common people, irrespective of whether they were Hindu or Muslim, was the language of puthi literature and thus cannot be termed as an artificial literary language. The ordinary educated Muslim liked it because of the mixture of Arabic and Persian vocabulary.

"With some exceptions, most puthi literature was derivative with poets using Persian, Urdu and Hindi works as their sources. While borrowing from these works, they not only adopted the subjects but also many words, parts of sentences and even their syntax."

I highlighted the sentence about the language of literature not being an artificial language (on the contrary, puthi literature used the language of real men and women on the streets and even in court). Scholars prejudiced against pidgin and mixed languages are simply on denial mode. If William Wordsworth were around, he would doubtless say that literature in "mixed languages" is the norm and monolingual writing is the exception, since he proclaimed famously that poetry is nothing else but "the real language of men [and women!] in a state of vivid sensation."

Prejudice against "pidgin"

Prejudice against pidgins or mixed languages is deeply rooted among scholars, even linguists that should know better. Here is the beginning of the article "Altaic Influences on Beijing Dialect: The Manchu Case" (1996), by Stephen A. Wadley:

"Going even further with respect to the situation in northern China, [Mantaro Hashimoto] theorized that during the Qing (Manchu) dynasty (1644-1911), the language of the capital was not Chinese but rather a pidgin made up of Manchu and Chinese elements, as well as a few elements from Mongolian and other minor languages. Furthermore, he suggested that modern Beijing dialect was a descendant of that pidgin. Though this theory is impressionistically persuasive, the major obstacle in accepting it is the lack of solid empirical evidence. It might be expected that little or nothing would be written in this hypothesized 'mixed' language. Pidgins rarely, if ever, produce a literature. Hashimoto pointed to several texts of zidi shu (a type of 'drum song' popular in northern China during the Qing dynasty that were written in a mixture of Manchu and Chinese as a proof that the mixed language he hypothesized actually existed. Charles Li has argued convincingly that these texts were purposeful manipulations of the two languages, much in the same way that macaronic verse in the West was often simply a manipulation of Latin and a vernacular language to produce a comic idiom for the enjoyment of those who had to study Latin. Indeed, it would be unusual for a pidgin to assume the form of the language in zidi shu, since most pidgins rely on essentially a single language for their lexicon, rather than being a mixture of lexical elements. The fact that there are so few texts in this form also argues against them being a representation of the spoken language of time - although more and more texts of this type are coming to light.

"The evidence given us by the existence of zidi shu should not be abandoned entirely, however. The fact that the texts were produced tells us something about the language situation in northern China. First, there must have been some, even much, bilingualism among the inhabitants of Beijing then, otherwise there would be no audience for the pieces. Ji Yonghai has in fact presented evidence that the Manchus went through a period of bilingualism before abandoning their language for Chinese. Second, although the mixed-language zidi shu appear to be deliberate manipulations of language for comic effect, one may assume that part of the comedy is that the language parodies an actual language situation. As Whinnom has pointed out, target-language speakers often parody the language of non-native speakers of the language, not in the way they actually speak, but rather how they are perceived to speak. Thus they may produce evidence of a mixed language even though they do not produce the actual mixed language. In the zidi shu text Chaguan ('Inspecting the Pass') the Manchu language is put in the mouth of the chou (clown)."

Perhaps the prejudice stems not just from sociological causes, but from literary theory itself. Aristotle wrote about tragedy but, although he promised to do it, not really about comedy. Most literary historians say that this was due to his prioritizing tragedy over comedy. I think that Aristotle, despite his genius, just was not intelligent enough to make sense of comedy (to me, the higher form of literature).

English and creoles

Searching for mixed-language poetry is always fun. I was alerted to the mixing of languages in Guinea-Bissau by an isolated sentence in Wikipedia: "Lyrics are almost always in Guinea-Bissau Creole, a Portuguese-based creole language, and are often humorous and topical, revolving around current events and controversies, especially AIDS." Wikipedia itself describes the language: "Guinea-Bissau Creole (native name kriol,kiriol or kriolu varying with dialects; crioulo da Guiné in Portuguese) is the lingua franca of the West African country of Guinea Bissau. It is a Portuguese-based creole language, closely related to Cape Verdean creole. Kriolu is spoken as a first language by approximately 15% (190,000) of Bissau-Guineans, and as a second language by approximately 46% (600,000); it is also spoken in parts of Senegal, primarily as a trade language. Portuguese itself is the official language of Guinea Bissau, although it is not spoken regularly by a majority of the population."

This bit of information is interesting to me because, in the Philippines, which touts itself as the "world's third-largest English speaking nation," English "is not spoken regularly by a majority of the population." English is an official language and is supposed to be the primary medium of instruction, but in reality, it is the national language called Filipino that is spoken in cities and schools, and it is various vernacular-based creoles spoken outside the major cities. In literature, most English writers write in what they consider "pure" English (labeled by linguists as "Philippine English" or the variety of English that is written only by Filipinos); when the actual language spoken on the streets is used is literature, the effect (like that in Guinea Bissau) is often deliberately comic.

By the way, the ranking of the Philippines in the list of English-speaking countries varies widely from Number 18 in Nationmaster to Number 5 in Wikipedia. Only Filipinos who have never been to India, the USA, Nigeria, UK, and China claim that the Philippines is up there with the biggies. Don't ask me why it should be a source of pride to speak English. Ethnologue says that English is only the third most-spoken language in the world, trailing Chinese and Spanish. (For Philippine languages: Filipino is Number 37, Tagalog 39, Cebuano 57, Ilocano 98, Hiligaynon 115, Bikol 130.)

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman is central to any discussion of multilingual poetry. He consciously incorporated non-English words and cultural concepts to create what he thought was or should be American poetry. Betsy Erkkila says in Whitman the Political Poet (1996):

“Although he did not draw on the musical possibilities of black dialect in composing Leaves of Grass, Whitman did introduce several foreign terms – including Spanish, Italian, and French – as part of his effort to establish a native American idiom. These foreign borrowings are neither merely ignorant nor merely arrogant, as is commonly assumed; rather, they are part of Whitman’s effort to create a racially and ethnically mixed language to match America’s democratic pluralism. Whitman was particularly fond of borrowings from the French, which he used to reflect the French contribution to American nationality and to connect America’s experience to France’s enlightened, republican, and revolutionary heritage. The French language was a consistent feature of Whitman’s poems of international embrace and cosmopolitan philosophy, and through all editions of Leaves of Grass, his favorite French borrowings were words of unity, bonding, and affectionate address: rapport, ensemble, en masse, rondue, mélange, résumé, mon cher, mon enfant, ma femme, compagnon, and ami.

"Whitman also experimented with the sound and sense of native American terms. ‘What is the fitness – What the strange charm of aboriginal names? – Monongahela – it rolls with venison richness upon the palate.’ In his verse he introduced several native American words, including moccasin, squaw, quhaug, wigwam, powow, sachem, and titi; and in accordance with his desire to rename American places, Whitman commonly referred to New York and Long Island by their aboriginal names: Mannahatta and Paumanok.” (p. 86)

I applaud Erkkila's dismissal of the mainstream view of Whitman's use of many languages as "merely ignorant nor merely arrogant." Monolingual critics have done the literary world great harm by assuming that monolingualism is the norm and multilingualism is the aberration. On the contrary, as I have often tried to show in theory, any literary text is multilingual. The "languages" involved in any text, however, need not be the big-time languages, but idiolects or dialects. The text that is obviously multilingual because some of the words are either italicized or unfamiliar to "native speakers" assumes less intelligent readers than texts that use words from more than one language without any outward warning; these latter texts assume intelligent readers that know all (or at least most) of the languages being harnessed by the text.

Naturally mixed languages

We must make a distinction between different uses of more than one language in a literary text.

There are texts in one language where some words from another language (or other languages) are used. (Movies today like to do this, usually supplying subtitles but sometimes not. Writers have been doing this for the longest time, sometimes using italics but sometimes not.)

There are texts in more than one language. (Once termed macaronic or ladino, these are now sometimes called multilingual.)

There are texts in a language that is naturally mixed. (Literary critics dealing with mixed languages like to point this out. For example, Krishna Raina prefaces her study of "Mystic Trends in Kashmiri Poetry" with this: "The main language of Kashmir is Kashmiri. It is said that it is a mixed language and the greater part of its vocabulary is of Indian origin and it is allied to that of Sanskritic-Indo-Aryan languages of Northern India.")

In the first case, the author deliberately uses the other language or languages to enhance the text, either by simply adding a meaning that is not available in the main language or by alluding to the literary tradition in the other language or languages.

In the second case, the author deliberately harnesses the resources of various languages and cultures to do whatever is being done in the text.

In the third case, the author may or may not know that the language itself allows various literary traditions to help bring out the meaning. (The New Critics famously said that the "ideal reader" knows all the languages and cultures of the world and is able to point to the meanings inherent in every single word in a text. A word, for them, contained all the denotations and connotations and contexts earlier used by other authors. Of course, newer critics debunked the notion, but there was nothing theoretically wrong with the statement; it was just impossible in practice.)

I wish that literary critics of an English-language text today would zero in on the mixed nature of the language itself. After all, English today is not just Anglo-Saxon nor even just French or Latin-derived. For example, there are hundreds of words in Tagalog (a Philippine language) in English dictionaries.

Irena Klepfisz

Here's a stanza from Irena Klepfisz's poem entitled "Etlekhe verter oyf mame-loshn/ A few words in the mother tongue" (1984):

di lezbianke the one with
a roommate though we never used
the word

The use of a second language ironically called "mother tongue" (Yiddish, used by mothers) in a text primarily in a third language (English) to refer to the real "mother tongue" (Polish, used by peers) is necessary from an aesthetic point of view, because the poem focuses on the use of words to make sense of reality (by using the word lezbianke while saying that she and her friends never use the word, the persona reveals something not just about herself but also about the people around her).

In her article entitled "Pearls From Tears," Arlene Kramer Richards comments about this poem:

"She writes in two languages at once, alternating the Yiddish of her childhood and her feelings with the American English of her adulthood and of her readers. ... As she speaks to the childhood figures embedded in her soul in Yiddish, she teaches us her language. She will give us a few words in her ‘mother tongue.’ Mamaloshen is the time honored conventional way of referring to Yiddish, a language used by mothers talking to their babies and each other in a culture which used Hebrew for male religious tradition and used Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Check, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Bulgarian and other languages in school, trade, professions and contact with the world."

We cannot get more multilingual than that.

Teaching a multilingual poem

In its teaching guide to John Agard's poem "Half-Caste," BBC offers the following helpful tips to the student:

"The poet has decided not to use standard English in this poem.

"He doesn't use the standard form of punctuation. This is partly because it's a poem that is written to be performed aloud. Agard said: 'Sometimes I think no punctuation can be effective because if the words are floating in space it gives the reader a chance to punctuate with their own breath...'

"He uses the lower case where standard English would use capital letters. Even proper names - like 'picasso', or 'tchaikovsky' - are written in this way. What effect does this create?

"He writes in a Caribbean dialect -'yu' instead of 'you', for example, or 'dem' for 'them'. Why do you think Agard chose to write 'Half-Caste' in 'non-standard' form?"

Getting multilingual poetry into the classrooms (even virtual ones) is a giant step towards moving it into the mainstream. One of the barriers towards understanding multilingual or even simple immigrant poetry is the traditional tendency of literature teachers to use grammar as a standard for good writing. If we were to require conformity with grammatical rules as a criterion for good creative writing, we would dismiss Emily Dickinson as a silly poet (she wrote, "I wish I were a hay," and used dashes instead of commas and periods), e. e. cummings as plain stupid (no capital letters?), and most free-verse poets nowadays as just off the mark. (In Tagalog, Filipino literature teachers conveniently forget that Lope K. Santos, who wrote the Tagalog grammar book still used in many schools, did not follow in his fiction his own grammatical rules.)

By the way, I do not think that the poem uses a "non-standard" form nor even a "dialect." I find that, if we were to think of the Caribbeans as equal in stature to the US, these lines from the poem would be "standard":

explain yuself
wha yu mean
when yu say half-caste
yu mean when light an shadow
mix in de sky
is a half-caste weather

"Pidgin"

I hate the word pidgin, a staple word in linguistics. To me, it is as bad as half-breed, mestizo, or bastard. The word implies that there is a "pure" form of English (or whatever language) and the "pidgin" is less respectable. One might as well say that, since it seems very likely that the human race began in Africa, that non-Africans (particularly Caucassians) are less "pure" than Africans and are inferior human beings. (Note that I deliberately invert the usual racial stereotypes.)

Except for the use of the word pidgin, the article "Bridges of Orality: Nigerian Pidgin Poetry" (1995) in World Literature Today by Ezenwa-Ohaeto seems promising. This is the abstract:

"The exploitation of oral traditions through a synthesized creative crucible enables the modern Nigerian writer to produce fresh, exciting, and artistic poetry. The Pidgin language provides an appropriate medium for this exploitation of oral traditions in poetry, for it acts as a bridge between the orality of verbal communication and the formality of the written word. Thus Nigerian Pidgin poetry is constructed as part of this utilization of oral resources, which has revitalized the literary scene and the poetic tradition."

If all human experiences have the same value and if languages (whether "pure" or "pidgin") that reflect or constitute these experiences also have the same value, then it makes no sense to use pejorative words to denigrate one language when compared to another ("purer", "older") language.

To cite a simple implication: a resident of Manila in the Philippines speaks at least three languages (which are mutually comprehensible, so linguists will quibble that these are just dialects and not really languages), namely, Tagalog (the language spoken by her/his parents), Filipino (the language s/he speaks in the market or street), and Taglish (the language s/he speaks when s/he is with friends in the same age group). To say that the Tagalog of the parents is a "purer" language than either Filipino or Taglish is merely to reveal one's age.

Tagalog in Malta

Forgive me for getting excited, but it's the first time I heard from a scholarly source that Tagalog actually influenced a language outside the Philippines (although Philippine folklore does tell of people in Madagascar and people in the mountains of Taiwan speaking languages similar to Tagalog or Cebuano). Here's an excerpt from Thomas Stolz's "Chamorro and Malti as Mixed Languages" in The Mixed-Language Debate: Theoretical and Empirical Advances (2003), edited by Yaron Matras and Peter Bakker:

“The first known text written in Malti is a recently discovered poem by Pietru Caxaro composed around 1450 (Cachia 2000: 11-13). The earliest document of Chamorro was produced almost 220 years later. It is considerably longer than the Malti poem. In 1668, the Spanish missionary Sanvitores wrote a grammar-cum-catechism in Latin and Chamorro re-edited by Burrus (1954: 941-960). Almost at the same time (about 1650), the second Maltese text known so far appeared, a sonnet by Gann Frangisk Bonamico celebrating the Grandmaster of the Knights (Cachia 2000: 16-9). It is important to bear in mind that the early Maltese texts were originals produced by native speakers, whereas the Chamorro equivalents were written by a Spaniard probably with the help of a Tagalog assistant from the Spanish possessions in the Philippines (Burrus 1954: 936).” (p. 294)

I've never been to Malta but am now eager to get there somehow, just to hear any Tagalog-sounding word in Malti. Since Spaniards occupied the Philippines only in the last years of the 16th century (although Ferdinand Magellan visited in 1521), the Tagalog assistant must not have been very fluent in Spanish and must have been speaking Tagalog at least part of the time, influencing the writers then. More research needed!

A reader on multilingual literature

How do ordinary readers react to a work with more than one language? Here's a comment submitted to Amazon.com on Paulette Poujol Oriol's Vale of Tears (2006): "The setting and way that that this story was told was perfect. Oriol's words are almost poetic and I loved the mix of French creole into the dialog. Although I was equally glad that for every foreign phrase there was an English translation. The mixed language sentences added realism to the story and helped it to flow along."

Realism or verisimilitude is indeed one thing going for using more than one language in a literary text. For many readers, that is probably enough. For readers that want to get at what the author is really trying to say, however, it is of course better if the second or third language is as comprehensible as the main language; translations are a way to help the monolingual reader. For readers that need guidance on everything going on in the text, however, the literary critic has to step in, for it is only the multilingual literary critic that can point to the deeper meanings brought about by the inclusion of other cultures through the other languages in the text. After all, it is not only the literal meanings of the "foreign" words that are important (all one needs in this case is a bilingual dictionary), but the allusions and traditions in the cultures associated with those words. Multilingual literary criticism is really multicultural literary criticism.

Manigong bagong taon!

Mabungahong Bag-ong Tuig kaninyong tanan, Magayagayang ba'gong taon, Narang-ay a Baro a Tawen kadakayo amin, Manigong bagong taon, Mainuswagon nga Bag-ong Tuig ha iyo nga tanan, Mahigugmaon nga Bag-ong Dag-on kinyo tanan, Masaplalang Bayung Banwa keko ngan, Mahimungayaon nga Bag-ong Tuig, Gelukkige nuwejaar, Gëzuar vitin e ri, Բարի կաղանդ և ամանոր, e glëckliches nëies, عام سعيد , shnorhavor nor tari, yeni iliniz mubarek, aw ni san'kura, urte berri on, З новым годам, መልካም አዲስ አመት, subho nababarsho, asgwas amegas, mbembe mbu, bonne année, sretna nova godina, bloavezh mat, честита нова година, hnit thit ku mingalar pa, 新年快樂, 新年快乐, bon any nou, pace e salute, sretna nova godina, šťastný nový rok, godt nytår, sale naw tabrik, gelukkig Nieuwjaar, felicxan novan jaron, feliæan novan jaron, head uut aastat, eƒé bé dzogbenyui nami, gott nýggjár, onnellista uutta vuotta, gelukkig Nieuwjaar, bonne année, lokkich neijier, bon an, feliz aninovo, გილოცავთ ახალ წელს, ein gutes neues Jahr, Ευτυχισμένο το Νέο Έτος, sal mubarak, rogüerohory año nuévo-re, bònn ané, hauoli makahiki hou, שנה טובה, nav varsh ki subhkamna, nyob zoo xyoo tshiab, नये साल की हार्दिक शुभकामनायें, boldog új évet, farsælt komandi ár, selamat tahun baru, ath bhliain faoi mhaise, felice anno nuovo, sugeng warsa enggal, 明けましておめでとうございます, asseggas ameggaz, hosa varshada shubhaashayagalu, zhana zhiliniz kutti bolsin, sur sdei chhnam thmei, umwaka mwiza, umwaka mwiza, 즐거운 성탄절 보내시고 새해 복 많이 받으세요, sala we ya nû pîroz be, sabai di pi mai, felix sit annus novus, laimīgu Jauno gadu, feliçe annu nœvu, mbula ya sika elamu na tonbeli yo, laimingų Naujųjų Metų, gelükkig nyjaar, e gudd neit Joër, Среќна Нова Година, arahaba tratry ny taona, selamat tahun baru, nava varsha ashamshagal, is-sena t-tajba, kia porotu te ano ou, kia hari te tau hou, नवीन वर्षच्या हार्दिक शुभेच्छा, Шинэ жилийн баярын мэнд хvргэе, wênd na kô-d yuum-songo, umyaka omucha omuhle, godt nyttår, bon annada, nawe kaalmo mobarak sha, سال نو مبارک, szczęśliwego nowego roku, feliz ano novo, ਨਵੇਂ ਸਾਲ ਦੀਆਂ ਵਧਾਈਆਂ, bun di bun onn, baxtalo nevo bersh, un an nou fericit, С Новым Годом, ia manuia le tausaga fou, nzoni fini ngou, bonu annu nou, bliadhna mhath ur, Срећна нова година, mwaha mwema, goredzva rakanaka, nain saal joon wadhayoon, suba aluth avuruddak vewa, šťastný nový rok, srečno novo leto, dobir leto, sanad wanagsan, feliz año nuevo, wan bun nyun yari, mwaka mzuri, gott nytt år, es guets Nöis, manigong bagong taon, ia orana i te matahiti api, assugas amegaz, iniya puthandu nalVazhthukkal, yaña yıl belän, నూతన సంవత్శర శుభాకాంక్షలు, สวัสดีปีใหม่, tashi delek, tshidimu tshilenga,ርሑስ አውደ ዓመት, posa varshada shubashaya, yeni yiliniz kutlu olsun, gluk in'n tuk, Vyľ Aren, Z novym rokom, نايا سال مبارک هو, yangi yilingiz qutlug' bo'lsin, ༄༅།།ལོ་གསར་ལ་བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས་ཞུ།, Chúc Mừng Nǎm Mới, bone annéye, blwyddyn newydd dda, bon lanné, dewenati, אַ פֿרײליכע ניטל און אַ גוטער נײַער יאָר, روجىستىۋا بايرىمىڭىزغا مۇبارەك بولسۇن !

Happy new year in which all languages are equal!

Government vs multilingual literature

As a general rule, governments do not like mixed-language texts. The idea that people will write in the mixed-language that they speak in tends to be, for some reason, unpalatable to the ruling class in any country. Here is a 17th century example from India:

“After the fall of the Vijaynagar kingdom the Muslin dynasty of Qutb Shahi Kings of Golkonda took over and also ruled over a good part of northern Telugu area. Telugu writers, however, received some patronage from these kings specially Sultan Ibrahim Qutb Shah, who encouraged pure Telugu diction for composition, instead of a highely Sanskritised mixed language, which by that time almost completely controlled poetic activities.” [The Written Languages of the World: A Survey of the Degree and Modes of Use: India: Book 1 Constitutional Languages (1989), by Heinz Kloss and Grant D. McConnell, p. 547]

What literary critics call "hegemony" is at work here: the ruling class inevitably wants to recognize or legitimize works written only in their highly-educated language, rather than in the uneducated language of the oppressed classes. In the Philippines today, the bestselling novels of Bob Ong and numerous romance novelists (written in Taglish, a chaotic mixture of Tagalog, Filipino, and English) are not considered "respectable" and are not taken up in literature classes. Clearly, multilingual criticism cannot ignore political realities.

Theorizing

Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that there is no theorizing going on in the field of multilingual literature. There is, not just among linguists, but among literary critics, particularly the most perceptive ones. Take Gayatri Spivak, for example, clearly among the best of the best of living critics today. She has thought hard about French, which of course is not her "mother tongue" (a term she obviously is uncomfortable about). Here is a recent paragraph showing how Spivak's theorizing has influenced another theorist:

"There’s a very nice variation on the ‘you must begin where you are’ word of wisdom. It comes from the postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak. In an early interview with the Chicano poet and bicultural thinker Alfred Arteaga, Spivak talking about Samuel Beckett says about the bilingual writer: ‘One must clear one’s throat, clear a space, step away, spit out the mother tongue, write in French.’ This is a surprising physiological analogy through which to question connections between body and language. A lingual event is taking place, not in the voice but rather in its absenting, in the clearing of the throat."

Not everybody can understand Spivak, because the depth of her thought demands a similar profundity in her readers, but this account of one of her early statements is fairly easy to grasp. In fact, the writer of the paragraph, Caroline Bergvall, is able to draw quite a number of insights from the statement. Bergvall ends her provocative article, "A Cat in the Throat: On bilingual occupants" (2009), this way:

"I remembered this when the news broke recently of the American use of water torture, waterboarding, on some of its recent and current political prisoners. This excruciating invasion by systematic asphyxiation. Forcing up speech by drowning it. What kind of language emerges and for what kind of madness?"

Multilingual criticism (I still prefer to call it Wikcrit, along the same polemical line that second-wave feminists coined gynocritique) is not just about literary texts. It offers food for thought to all human beings concerned about violations of human, not just linguistic, rights.

Call for papers

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture has issued a call for papers relevant to our concerns. Deadline is 1 May 2010:

Reconstruction 11.1: Multilingual Realities in Translation

Edited by Angela Flury and Hervé Regnauld

"Cityscapes, landscapes, subway stations, tomato fields, universities, and bedrooms — the locales of multilingual or mixed language realities are everywhere. Yet literary and popular representations of multilingual realities as such remain largely constricted by the single language that must, in hegemonic fashion, encompass all others, especially on the printed page of a novel. The dominance of a single language also affects so-called nonliterary discourse; for instance English is now the primary language charged with disseminating scientific (and technological) words and concepts. Film, arguably, has come closest to conveying the Babeldom of public and private spheres, as its projected translation, by way of subtitles, nevertheless promises a semblance of cohesion. Perhaps this accessible rendering of multilingual fragmentation can even be regarded as one of the emerging conventions of world cinema as a contemporary global form.

"But multilingual realities are not exactly reader friendly in any medium, including film. One wonders at the function of characters’ thoughts made audible in Wim Wenders’s film Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire), when commuters on a Berlin subway train can be heard thinking in German and Turkish (though the English subtitles render only the German). One wonders what Apollinaire’s already fragmented conversation poem “Lundi Rue Christine“ would look like with bits of conversation in languages other than French. Would the bits make a meaningful difference? One wonders at the fragments of French floating through Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, fragments yet to be translated, even in the most recent edition. Charlotte Brontë’s Villette continued to be published well over a century without an annotated translation of all its French bits and pieces. One wonders how and to what extent the foreign language is immaterial (a point raised by Umberto Eco with reference to Tolstoy’s War and Peace).

"Another open question is the status of languages in the formation of scientific knowledge. When science is concerned, some languages play a unequaled role, as did Greek at the beginning of the Christian Era (or Common Era), Latin in the Middle Ages and English today. It seems English is becoming a language which invents (creates) scientific words (and concepts) and that there is no need to find any equivalent in other languages as most every scientist speaks and publishes in English. But can scientific neologisms properly be considered English in any traditional sense, even given the fact that neologism is a constant process in any language? How can scientific concepts, born inside of one language, be translated into another language? Does working in a 'single language' limit scientific creativity? Is there anything (or could there be) like a Pidgin, or Creole way of writing in the sciences?

"How do single language texts, in any discourse or genre, signify mixed language realities? What is at stake in the representation of multilingual realities in a particular text, medium, place, or time? To what extent do texts at different historical and cultural junctures reflect the ideologies of their scene of writing? What are the affects of characters/individuals in multilingual situations, the affects of multilingual space? How do 'other' languages in a given text/situation play with questions of figure and ground, decor and inflection? How have certain authors and artists made the conventions and realities of multilingual space a central thematics? What formal innovations have writers from various disciplines and traditions produced to address such realities and what are the politics of these experiments? What are the links between language and identity, and what are the problems which may arise from these links when translation is at stake?

"We invite papers that address the above issues and related questions from a variety of disciplines and in any conceivable context, including nationalism, imperialism, modernism, epistemology, sexuality, gender, class, religion, race, etc. Please send completed papers and abstracts to Angela Flury (aflury@depauw.edu) and Hervé Regnauld (herve.regnauld@uhb.fr) no later than May 1, 2010. Earlier submissions and queries are welcome as we may be able to collaborate authors in order to produce work that not only fits with the intent of the issue but with the standards of Reconstruction. Also, we encourage you to forward this CFP to interested parties and lists."

"Local" versus "national" languages

One of the reasons I got interested in developing a multilingual theory of literature is the need for tools to approach literary texts written in several Philippine languages other than Filipino (or its mother language Tagalog). Writers writing in, say, Ilocano or Cebuano have necessarily to mix languages in a single text, because Filipino (or earlier, Tagalog) and English (not to mention Spanish for older writers) are so hegemonic (i.e., powerful and omnipresent) that they inordinately influence all other languages in the country. It is inappropriate to use the technical tools we have for analyzing "purely" English or Tagalog texts on these "local" (as opposed to "national" or "international") texts. The Philippine situation (with its 170-plus languages) is not unique. The same phenomenon, I am sure, occurs in countries such as Indonesia.

An interesting article appears in the blog Antara Kita of the Indonesia and East Timor Studies Committee on the novel Sitti Djaoerah (1927), written in Angkola Batak instead of Indonesian (or Bahasa). I wish the article had dealt with the multilingual nature of the novel, which it must have had.

Multilingualism in medical texts

Multilingualism is not a purely literary or even everyday phenomenon. Other types of writing also tend to be multilingual. For example, during the medieval period in the UK, medical writings used more than one language in a single text. Write Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta in their Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English (2003):

"Multilingualism has an important role in scientific and medical writings produced in medieval England. The tendency to combine materials in different languages appears to be more prominent in medicine than in other disciplines, although language mixing is also attested, for example, in astronomical-astrological and alchemical writings of the period. The proportions of languages and patterns of switching in mixed-language materials vary. Primarily Latin materials contain parts in English or French, French materials include Latin and/or English passages, and English materials incorporate Latin and/or French."

It might be a truism that, in a society where the learned language is not the market language, writers (and other users of language) will tend to use more than one language in a single text, written or oral. Either the learned language or the market language will prove to be insufficient for one's communicative needs, especially since the languages involve different cultures or subcultures, not just dictionaries.

The writer's language

Poet-critic Gemino H. Abad, who won this year's Premio Feronia (the Italian international literary prize), recently gave a talk at a writers' forum in Manila. He said:

“Any given natural language has its own vocabulary, grammar, and syntax: those are the fountainhead of its communicative power, and one transgresses them at his own peril. But any language too has inner resources from the infinite possibilities of its vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, their figures and rhetoric: those are the fountainhead of its expressive or evocative power, and one is circumscribed only by his imagination by which, sometimes, by assiduously working the language, he might transcend its inadequacies or limitations.

“So then, after a time — a long, persevering time — the writer’s language becomes essentially his alone, both its matter — and its manner, by which its matter is endowed with its interpretative form.”

I quote the passage from the equally engaging column in today's The Philippine Star of Jose "Butch" Dalisay, whose novel Soledad's Sister was shortlisted in the 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize.

In our evolving multilingual theory of literature, we have to add "the writer's language" to the "natural" languages in a text. It is then easily seen that, in an apparently monolingual work, there are at least two languages at work - the language of the text and the writer's language. (Of course, this is old hat for followers of Mikhail Bakhtin.)

Literary texts important to linguists

Linguists usually base their research on what literary critics, following William Wordsworth, call "the real language of men (and women)." Some linguists, however, use literary texts (though artificial or human-made) for their research. This is a very recent example:

"Motion events in Chinese novels: Evidence for an equipollently-framed language," by Liang Chen and Jiansheng Guo (Journal of Pragmatics, Sept. 2009):

"Motion events typically involve an entity moving along a path in a certain manner. Research on language typology has identified three types of languages based on the characteristic expression of manner and path information. In satellite-framed languages, the main verb expresses information about manner of movement and a subordinate satellite element (e.g., a verb particle) to the verb conveys the path of movement. In verb-framed languages, the main verb expresses the core information of the path of movement, and the manner information is expressed in a subordinate structure (e.g., a gerundive). Both manner and path, however, are expressed by equivalent grammatical forms in equipollently-framed languages. In this paper, we explore the place of Mandarin Chinese in motion event typology through an examination of motion event descriptions in Chinese novels. We find that Chinese writers do not pattern their narrative descriptions of motion events as do writers of satellite-framed languages, nor as writers of verb-framed languages. Rather, Chinese writers follow unique habitual patterns of language use that lead to the contention that Chinese is an equipollently-framed language."

Writers have a lot of influence not only on readers and on other writers, but on scientific scholarship (in this case, on the science of linguistics). This is one reason creative writers have to be very careful about what they write and also one reason literary critics have to help scholars in other disciplines to understand what is really going on in a literary text.

Harry Potter in Camfranglais

I'm teaching a course in Speculative Fiction at both the Ateneo de Manila University and the De La Salle University (rival schools in the Philippines along the same lines as Oxford vs. Cambridge and Harvard vs. Yale), where I take up the Harry Potter series. Naturally, I got interested in the blurb of an article that apparently talks about the translation of the first four Harry Potter novels into Camfranglais. This is the only part I can read without paying the pay-per-view rate:

"Camfranglais: A novel slang in Cameroon schools
Jean-Paul Kouega
University of Yaounde

"Camfranglais is a newly created language, a composite slang used by secondary school pupils in Cameroon, West Africa. It draws its lexicon from French, English, West African Pidgin, various Cameroonian indigenous languages, Latin, and Spanish. Secondary school pupils use it among themselves to exclude outsiders while talking about such matters of adolescent interest as food, drinks, money, sex, and physical looks. There are four sections: language in the Cameroon educational system; Camfranglais defined; an analysis of a sample Camfranglais text; and the semantic domains of Camfranglais. There is a glossary of the terms cited."

Someone with access to English Today of Cambridge University Press may want to tell us what the article says about the use of many languages in one (translated) text. (I had an article published in English Today a long time ago, but they did not give me a complimentary subscription as a reward. All I got for the article was a lot of citations and reprints, but I wouldn't have minded a free lifetime subscription. I did say I was teaching Speculative Fiction, didn't I?)

Mixed languages do not multilingual lit make

When we have a language that in itself is a "mixed language," such as Yiddish or Taglish, literature written in it may be multilingual in the general or linguistic sense, but it is not exactly multilingual in the literary theory sense. What I mean is that the use of non-mother tongue words in a mother-tongue work does not automatically make the work multilingual. What we are really looking for are works that use the second language as a way to incorporate a foreign culture into the mother or native culture. It is not just words that matter, but cultures. Yiddish, Taglish, and other languages that combine two or more earlier or older languages (English does, too, after all) should be considered as "pure" languages, or at least, in the linguistic sense, dialects. As the New Critics loved to say, it is when truly unrelated or even opposing elements are yoked together in a metaphor that the metaphor attains the level of literature. When unrelated languages or cultures are suddenly brought together in the same literary text, something bigger than either language or culture occurs. Multilingual art happens.

Intellectual Property vs. poetic convention

YouTube songs that mix languages are sometimes (often?) removed "due to terms of use violation," which usually means copyright infringement (unless we are talking of obscenity, which occasionally makes it to YouTube). Music might be a different case, but in the case of poets taking lines deliberately from earlier poets, the issue of copyright (or Intellectual Property) violation has to be seen in the context of the poetic convention of allusion, or using a piece of some other poem to refer to that entire poem. It would be ridiculous to have footnotes in a poem (although T. S. Eliot did it famously in "The Waste Land," though still ridiculously). The reader of a poem is presumed to know the history of poetry, to have read the original poems which are being alluded or referred to, to realize that what is going on is not stealing somebody else's words or images but integrating poetic tradition into an existing work (exactly as Eliot theorized in "Tradition and the Individual Talent"). If we take lyrics for a song as an extension of poetry, then we could make a case for lyricists and singers that use lines from earlier artists without explicitly mentioning that these lines are allusive rather than original. I am upset that the song "Liubi, Liubi, I Love You" (described as "Romania's entry in Eurovision 2007, ... basically a love ode performed in six languages") was removed by YouTube.

English lyrics in a Hebrew song

For music buffs, here's the Hebrew song "Hamakolet" by Havareth that briefly shifts to English in the middle:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6g9kRy5J64

I was alerted to this by an old blog.

Offline & Kindle

The commercial server I use was down most of the day yesterday, and I realized how dependent I am on the Web for research and communication. Have I moved within seconds of E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops (or for younger Web followers, The Matrix)? I haven't even touched the books I bought last month but have been relying (much too much, it now appears) on Google Books. My friends tease me as "Professor Gadget," and now, instead of just being amused, I should be disturbed. Still, the next big thing excites me - the Rolltop. (I did think long and hard about the Kindle, but decided not to buy it because it doesn't have one of the best features of a book - I lend my books to my friends or donate them to a library after having read them. In fact, all my 7,000+ Philippine books are now in the Aklatang [Library] Emilio Aguinaldo of De La Salle University Dasmarinas and most of my 10,000+ non-Philippine books are now in the Library or in the Society of Fellows Room of De La Salle University in Manila.)

Rūmī

When studying multilingual verse, it is important to know if the “foreign” words in the text are there because the poet wants to use a second language to enhance whatever s/he is trying to do or if the words are there because they are there to begin with in the ordinary speech of people on the street. A multilingual literary text, in other words, may merely mirror what is going on in real life, or it may be a conscious creation by the writer to harness the resources of two or more languages. Such a distinction was clear even in 1993, when Lars Johanson studied the poetry of Rūmī. Wrote Johanson: “There are in Rūmī’s work no clear signs of contact with a TE [East Oghuzic Turkic] literary tradition. It is, in this connection, irrelevant that his Persian texts contain a number of Turkic words, since these were common integrated borrowings in the Persian of the period in question. Turkish was was not yet a literary medium, elaborated as a functional dialect in the sense of a TW [Anatolian Turkish]+lit variety; it was no equivalent poetic tool which Rūmī or other poets could have used immediately and adequately for their purposes. This is why it is often considered ‘rough.’ European vernaculars in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance were characterized similarly in comparison with Latin. Poets often wrote Latin with greater ease than their mother tongue.”

Also brought out in this passage is the idea that, when a poet uses words from a second language, s/he imports not just words but the literary tradition in that language. This use of a second literary tradition, more than the use of a second language, is actually more important as far as literary criticism is concerned. A critic must know not just the second language but the literary tradition in that language. A multilingual poet lives not just in one literary tradition (or even one geographical country), but in two or more literary traditions, making her/him truly a global artist.

Singapore and Hong Kong

Just off the press is an article about multilingual poetry in Singapore and Hong Kong: "Text messages: A tale of two songs: Singapore versus Hong Kong," by Kirkpatrick and Moody (2009). Unfortunately, reading it requires a subscription to ELT Journal (which I don't have). If you have or your library has a subscription to this journal, you might want to read the article and summarize its contents for us.

Salvador Novo

Here's the last part of the poem "Noche" by Salvador Novo (1904-1974):

Tu novia y la mía
harán encajes y proyectos.
Todos duermen, pero
Voici ma douce amie
si méprisée ici car elle est sage
and numerical and temperamental.
Adiós, amigo, éxito
con Lady Gordiva.
Por mí, Vive la France
aunque mi amiga
no pueda ahora, materialmente,
agradecer el compliment.

Rafael Hernández-Rodríguez comments that "in order not to be confused with a follower of socialist realism, he [Novo] ends his poem in the most pretentious way with multilingual verses." It is inevitable that every literary technique has a political implication. Conversely though less obviously, every political message needs a particular (not necessarily unique) literary technique.

Lawrence Rosenwald's Multilingual America

A book that I forgot to buy when I was in the US recently (on a book-buying spree) is Multilingual America: Language and the Making of American Literature (2008), by Lawrence Alan Rosenwald. Have you read it? What do you think about it? The publisher-friendly blurbs from Amazon.com are promising, but of course they may not tell the real picture:

"'This is a splendid book, unlike any currently in the field, and setting a standard for literary scholarship the rest of us can only aspire to. Lawrence Rosenwald brings to the project an impressive range of languages and a different vision of what we might want to do with texts. His goal is to write a history of American literature showcasing languages as the key players. Multilingual America is an impressive achievement: all Americanists will sit up and pay attention.' Wai Chi Dimock, Yale University

"'This is a remarkable work. This book addresses an extremely important and timely subject. It combines high intelligence and lucidity with deep erudition and modesty. Every page is extremely interesting. Every scholar or teacher of American literature will learn much from it, and it will be greatly useful to many students of American literature and culture (around the world as well as domestically), as well as to students and scholars of comparative literature and of intercultural encounter more broadly.' Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh

"Product Description: Throughout its history, America has been the scene of multiple encounters between communities speaking different languages. Literature has long sought to represent these encounters in various ways, from James Fenimore Cooper's frontier fictions to the Jewish-American writers who popularised Yiddish as a highly influential modern vernacular. While other studies have concentrated on isolated parts of this history, Lawrence Rosenwald's book is the first to consider the whole story of linguistic representation in American literature, and to consider as well how multilingual fictions can be translated and incorporated into a national literary history. He uses case studies to analyse the most important kinds of linguistic encounters, such as those between Europeans and Native Americans, those between slaveholders and African slaves, and those between immigrants and American citizens. This ambitious, engaging book is an important contribution to the study of American literature, history and culture."

Pat Mora book

Here's a book notice:

"In My Own True Name, Pat Mora investigates the origin of identity through 62 poems, crafted to give the reader a more-than-cursory view of the Mexican-American's status in this country. . . Mora is careful to illustrate how important language can be. When words are combined with the spirit of the land, the poet reveals the secret of language's power. Because she is a native of the southwestern United States, Mora translates that area into a homeland that rises above borders and nationalities. There is an indomitability accompanying that region, and it gives its people the strength to survive." — "Mi Poema Es Tu Poema: Mora celebrates multiculturalism in multilingual verses," Home News Tribune

And here's an excerpt from the poem "Mango Juice":

Eating mangoes
on a stick
...
is tossing
fragile cascarones
on your love's hair,
confetti teasing him
to remove his shoes
his mouth open
and laughing
as you glide
more mango in,
cool rich flesh
of México
music teasing
you to strew
streamers on trees
and cactus

Alina Troyano

One of the effects of the original macaronic verse was comic; writers used more than one language in a text to make their readers or audiences laugh. The comic impulse has not disappeared from multilingual literature. In the performing arts, for instance, there is Alina Troyano, described as "a Cuban lesbian performance artist whose work skewers racial, cultural, and sexual stereotypes." Here are typical verses from her:

"Hello people, you know me, I know you.
I am Carmelita Tropicana.

"I say Loisaida is the place to be. It is multicultural, multinational, multigenerational, mucho multi. And like myself , you've got to be multilingual.

"I am very good with the tongue."

Modern multilingual writing, however, is much more complex than macaronic verse. With the more subtle and more sophisticated tools now available to writers, modern writing is deadly serious, though it draws laughs. Here is how Lisa Alvarado writes about Troyano: "In the preface [of the book I, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing Between Cultures (2000)], there is a reference to Troyano's use of 'innuendo, bilingual puns, double entendre, burlesque, parody, political farce, biographical revisionism, and an irreverent appropriation and collaging of popular culture.' She draws text from popular movies, past stereotypical icons, and popular music. While the style is irreverent, her themes are hardly light. In placing expropriated material in another context, it becomes reinvented, with layers of new meaning and ultimately a critique of the original manifestation itself."

As in most cases of comic writing (or performing), we have to go beyond the smiles to appreciate the frowns.

Rai music

There are lyrics that are written in two or more languages, as well as the more familiar lyrics adapted to the melody of a song originally written in another language (such as the delightful "New York, New York" in Hungarian of Ildy Lee). As far as music is concerned, however, that scratches only the surface of the art form. More important is the blending of different types of music from different cultures. This is most obvious in Rai, which blends Algerian, Spanish, French, African, and Arabic musical forms. The mass audience that loves Sting's Desert Rose (which uses Rai) has been primed to accept multilingual poetry (which, of course, blends words rather than rhythms). On a really deep critical level, a critic should understand how a particular poem blends not just words but poetic traditions from different cultures. We are not there yet, since we are still trying to mainstream the use of words from other languages in a poem.

Multilingual popular music

Here's an old but still interesting account of singers and songwriters using more than one language in songs. The mass audience has awakened to multilingual writing! Vox populi, vox Dei?

Readers recommend: multilingual songs, by Dorian Lynskey, The Guardian, Friday 11 May 2007:

"Every year, media coverage of Eurovision reaffirms one of the fundamental assumptions underpinning British music's self-image, namely that pop in other languages is intrinsically inferior, not to mention hilarious. Even as music becomes more polyglot (at least half of this week's suggestions, including Air, CSS and Arcade Fire, were recorded in the past decade), the novelty factor lingers.

"Perhaps it's because so many lyricists struggle to make sense in their native argot, let alone anyone else's. Full marks for effort to the Clash (Spanish Bombs), despite doing to the Spanish language what Hitler's bombers did to Guernica, and the Fall (Bremen Nacht), apparently using German gleaned exclusively from Commando comics: 'Ich raus schnell mach von Bremen Nacht.' Achtung, schweinhund! Hande hoch! The most multilingual offering was Madonna's Sorry. It seems she can now apologise for Swept Away in 10 different languages.

"Predictably, French produced the richest pickings, though whether that's a tribute to the unrivalled sophistication of the Gallic tongue or the legacy of compulsory French lessons I cannot say. Faced with changing the gender of Randy and the Rainbows' Denise, and understandably averse to Dennis, Blondie invented a French casanova called Denis, and sang a verse accordingly. Amorous exchange students took notes.

"German industrial metal band Rammstein slip into English to make their point about US cultural dominance on Amerika. 'This is not a love song,' growls Till Lindemann. 'I don't sing my mother tongue.' Ukrainian-born New Yorker Eugene Hutz mixes Russian and English on Sally, a lusty manifesto for his gypsy-punk troupe. 'I ended up being walking United Nations,' he explains in an accent broader than the Dnieper.

"Pixies' Frank Black frequently amplified his alien quality with manic bursts of Spanish, but there's only room for one Anglo-Spanish entry - Venceremos (We Will Win), British jazzers Working Week's elegantly understated tribute to victims of the Chilean junta. Tracey Thorn, Robert Wyatt and Chile's Claudia Figueroa swap verses. Brazil's Jorge Ben mixes Portugese and English on the breezy Take it Easy My Brother Charles.

"Now for some less commonly heard languages. Along with Super Furry Animals, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci flew the flag for the Welsh vernacular in the early 90s. Patio Song does so with unforced charm. Sigur Ros went one better, inventing a lingo called Hopelandic. The ecstatic Hoppipolla, which you will recognise if you've seen any TV trailers in the past year or so, combines it with their native Icelandic. On Satta Massagana, reggae trio the Abyssinians prove their devotion to the Rastafarian homeland of Ethiopia with a refrain in Amharic.

"Bryan Ferry sang auf Deutsch on Roxy Music's Bitter-Sweet, but Ferry and Germany aren't such a happy match at the moment. Song for Europe is not only a better song with a fortuitous title; it has verses in French and Latin, the least pop language of them all. Enfin, Blur's ravishing To the End, reworked as a fully bilingual duet with Parisian icon Françoise Hardy. Et voilà, c'est tout."

Jain narratives

I was traveling these past few days and could not post. I'm home now in Manila and here's something that would have been interesting to go to last December:

"Jain Narratives in multilingual early modern North India: Apabhramsa texts from the 15th-18th centuries
Dr Eva de Clerq (Ghent & AHRC project)
Date: 5 December 2008 Time: 4:00 PM
Finishes: 5 December 2008 Time: 6:00 PM
Venue: Russell Square: College Buildings Room: 4421
Type of Event: Seminar
Series: CSAS Seminar Programme
Jains were perhaps the most multilingual writers and readers in medieval and early modern India, but their literary contribution is often ignored in literary histories. Particularly striking is their continued used of Apabhramsa for literary texts. These two sessions will present two texts. One is the story of Candragupta, Canakya and the Jain saint Bhadrabahu by the most famous "late Apabhramsa" poet, Raydhu. The other, Bhagavatidas's Mrgankalekha (1700), considered the "last" Apabhramsa poem, is a strikingly multilingual work in that it contains verses in Prakrit and "Hindi"."

De Clerq's observation that multilingual texts are "often ignored in literary histories" is sadly too familiar to us. We really need to be more vocal about our discovery that multilingual texts are the norm, and monolingual texts are only a special case (following the analogy of the Special Theory of Relativity, where "normal" happenings that we can see with our eyes are only a special case of what is really going on in reality).

How to write a multilingual script

Here's a good example of what to do if you are writing a screenplay and your characters need to speak in a language or languages other than the language of the script:

INT. KIDNAP SHACK – NIGHT
A corrugated-metal shack. We don’t see much of it.
A terrified Dagny is flanked by TWO KIDNAPPERS.
Their leader (the Voice) passes the phone to Dagny.

DAGNY
Papa? Papa!
(fast stream of Norwegian)
Give them what they want, please get me out of here, I’m scared! Papa!

MCGINTY (IN ARABIC)
Hospital! Where is hospital?

The old man scurries inside.

MCGINTY (CONT’D)
Friendly.

There are also comments on that blog from other screenwriters about what they do. Since multilingual screenwriting is relatively new (I presume that you have noticed how many recent films have dialogue in a language you cannot understand and is not subtitled), there are no real conventions yet. Multilingual creative writing is emergent, not dominant, so the rules will come later.

Starting young

One recent technique in child language acquisition is very promising for developing the audience for multilingual writing. Here is an account of the way a second language is taught to kids:

"There are, of course, many different ways of telling a story to a group. One of the most powerful ways with a group of beginners is to tell the story in the way that follows: (In this case the target language is Modern Greek):

"There was this man and he seemed very agitated. This andras, this guy, he went round and round the kipo behind his house (kipo is a garden) looking for something. The andras got down on his hands and knees and started scrabbling around in the border underneath the traiandafila, the roses.

"Now the wife of the andra, his yineka, happened to be in one of the upstairs rooms of the house. The yineka looked out through the bedroom parathiro and saw her andra searching for something in the border under the traiandafila.

"She asked him what he was doing. 'I’m looking for my house keys,' her andras shouted back.

"'Did you lose your house klidia down there in the kipo, in the border under the traiandafila?'

"'No,' said her andras, 'I didn’t lose my klidia here under the traiandafila, but the light is so much better here!'"

"I hope the text construction was logical enough for you to understand all the Greek words without having to strain too much. Bi-lingual stories of this sort are magic with small kids and people at this stage of linguistic brilliance (3-8) lap up and ‘interiorize’ the new language without realizing what is happening in their minds. When the story has been told half a dozen times with more and more target language words being used in each telling the whole story is told in the target language and the learners have the giddying sensation that they have understood everything."

We always say that the youth is the hope of the future. In this case, this is literally correct: the bilingual or multilingual generation now growing up is going to make multilingual writing/reading the rule, rather than the exception.

The London Skool

From poets reciting poems in different languages to poems written in different languages is a short journey, and events such as Risk of Poetry (June 2009) should hasten the development of multilingual writing. Check out the event on YouTube.

Here is the description of the event: "London Risk of Poetry delivers a collage of poetry, literary theory, imagery, fantasy, voices, music, exile, before and long after, by London Skool - an avant guarde band of multi-lingual poets and critics, who aim to create poetry and text from hybridisation of languages, genres and lifestyles in order to endanger the tranquillity of norms and shake up the standards of the literary genre, bringing together Ali Abdolrezaei, Parham Shahrjerdi, Abol Froushan, Mansor Pooyan, to propose the new directions in the Risk. Their aim is a globalisation of poetry through literary exchange between English, Persian, French, etc. (7 languages in the latest issue of www.POETRYMAG.ws) in a context of post exile, through translation and analysis. The event is on the occasion of the publication of Parham's multilingual book of the same title. Monday 1 June 2009 at 7:30pm Poetry Café 22 Betterton Street, London WC2 (Convent Garden tube)." Too bad I missed this event. I left London 22 May and was already in Budapest on 1 June.

US multilingual ethnic literature

In her "Code-switching in US ethnic literature: multiple perspectives presented through multiple languages" (2005), Holly E. Martin writes:

"For the multilingual author, switching between two or more languages is not an arbitrary act, nor is it simply an attempt to mimic the speech of his or her community; code-switching results from a conscious decision to create a desired effect and to promote the validity of the author’s heritage language. This article looks at code-switching in literary texts between Spanish and English, English and Chinese, and English and Jemez, a Native American language. Incorporating native and heritage languages along with English within a literary work, usually through code-switching, creates a multiple perspective and enhances an author’s ability to express his or her subject matter."

Among the five elements of the literary experience (author, text, reader, world, tradition), the one with the least attention focused on it is that of the reader. The study of multilingual literature is no exception. We need to do a lot more, as the article does, to focus on the reader and how the act of reading is enriched by the use of more than one language in a text.

Multilingual poem by Albert B. Casuga

There are all kinds of variations to the saying that "we use German (or English) to talk to dogs, Italian to talk to lovers, French to talk to cooks (or soldiers), and Spanish to talk to God." For example, some old folks in the Philippines say that we use Tagalog to talk to maids, English to talk to foreigners, and Spanish to talk to God. While sayings of that sort today sound racist, they do point to a genuine theological problem: what language does God use to think (assuming that divine beings think in the way we understand the word)? The answer, of course, is that God thinks in all languages. The best way to reach God then is to write in as many languages as you know at the same time.

Albert B. Casuga's most recent poem, "Basura Days," takes the theme of Christianity as T. S. Eliot understood it and applies it to today's most universal phenomenon, namely, garbage (trash, junk, shit, or whatever you want to call it) and builds a modern parable taking off from the Biblical insight that whatever we do to the least of God's creations (animate or inanimate), we do to God.

Here's a taste:

Prophylactics and sanitary napkins, masticated fries vomited
With the arrant fish bones, newsprint-wrapped pet faeces,
Faded pictures of grandmere leering at grandpere glancing
At some tightly dungareed wench flaunting palpable haunches
Sans underpants that was last millennium’s acceptance of taste
If not coyness or even breeding in vaulted manors of delicadeza ---
Are picked up by the City Dump Meister on an antiseptic mission
To rid these fallen-leaves-strewn paseos of accidental memories,
Recuerdos de faltas pasadas, putrid waste of body functions
And memento mori gone past their memorial usefulness.

For more, turn to Casuga's blog.

Nostradamus

Multilingual literary criticism (or Wikcrit, as I prefer to call it) will never fall into the trap I have called elsewhere as "tempocentrism" or the tendency not to look beyond our century's nose. The reason is simple: multilingual writing has been with us for centuries, macaronic verse being the most obvious example. A less literary example that is very popular is the multilingual (probably better put in quotes?) work of Michel de Nostredame (better known as Nostradamus), believed by some (though not by me) to have foretold all events since then and in the future. See a book on this or read a literal translation of his Les Propheties. It's a good respite from serious literary reading.

Multilinguality in a coming conference

"Professor Nargis Virani will present at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, Melbourne, Australia, on December 5, 2009

"Prof Nargis Virani is Assistant Professor of Arabic at The New School, University Liberal Studies. She received her MA in 1991 and her PhD in 1999 in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Harvard University, and also holds a Post-Graduate Diploma in Education from London University and a Bachelor of Commerce from Bombay University. During the course of her Arabic Studies she studied at many prestigious institutions in the Muslim world such as the University of Jordan in Amman, the Bourguiba Institute in Tunis, and al-Azhar mosque in Cairo. At al-Azhar she studied the Qur’an with the Shaykh of al-Azhar and holds a shahadah (certificate) and an ijazah (permission to teach the Qur’an). Her areas of specialization are Arabic Language and Literature, Persian Language and Literature, Islamic Intellectual Thought, and Sufism. Her doctoral dissertation entitled ‘I am the Nightingale of the Merciful Macaronic or Upside Down?’ analyzed the Mulamma’at, the mixed-language poems, in Rumi’s Diwan. In this work she proposes that ’speaking in many tongues’ be looked at as a brilliant linguistic strategy employed by the mystic to fashion an imaginative form of apophatic discourse. She is currently converting her dissertation into a book which will also include a translation into English of all of Rumi’s multilingual verses in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Greek, and Armenian. Dr Virani’s second book project is tentatively entitled, ‘Qur’an in Muslim Literary Memory’. She hopes to analyze the use of the Qur’an by a variety of ‘litterateurs’ from secular, religious, and mystical backgrounds."

Had I but world enough and time and money, I would be there.

Ahdaf Soueif's "new English"

Mohammed Albakry and Patsy Hunter Hancock's "Code Switching in Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love" (2008) ends with this paragraph:

"In the tradition of prominent postcolonial writers (e.g. Chinua Achebe,Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie, Raja Rao, to name a few), Soueif seems to push the frontiers of the English language so as to express and simulate the multicultural experience of her characters. She uses code switching, particularly lexical borrowing and transferring from Arabic, as a way of finding a ‘new English’, a language between two languages. This mixed new English seeks to encompass both her new home and ancestral home in order to enable her to participate in both worlds. The hybrid English, then, could become a means by which bilingual writers are able to preserve their cultural identity and capture its flavor while at the same time writing about it in the dominant language."

This description could apply to most multilingual writers, except obviously to those that do not live in two cultures but only in two (or more) languages (such as those that do not leave their land of birth but nevertheless use more than their mother tongue). Similar linguistically-heavy work could and should be done on writers forced by colonization or other historical circumstance to live in two language worlds without necessarily wanting to "participate" in another geographical or national world. For example, I do not think Nick Joaquin seriously wanted to live in Spain and from his writings clearly had nothing but disdain for the USA, yet his being born into the Spanish language and growing up in Tagalog but writing in English surely cannot be explained away by a desire to participate in two or more worlds. Linguists have much to learn from literary critics.

Definitions

It will be safe and convenient for us to adopt the definitions put forward by K. Alfons Knauth in his "Literary Multilingualism: General Outlines and the Western World" (2007), remembering, however, that he is dealing primarily with the better-known languages and presumably admits ignorance about languages with fewer literary works (such as the Bicol-Tagalog-English works of Abdon M. Balde Jr., this year's South East Asia Writers or S.E.A. WRITE Awardee from the Philippines). Knauth has extended definitions and examples of such sub-genres of multilingual literature as intertextual multilingualism, intratextual multilingualism, macaronic mixtilingualism, Occidental and Oriental multilingualism, courtly multilingualism, pentecostal multilingualism, modern diglossia, national and international multilingualism, simultaneism, globoglossia, primitivist multilingualism, futurist multilingualism, panlingualism, onomatopoetics, fascist multilingualism, postwar internationalism, poetic holography and zerography, fictional holography and zerography, conflictive multilingualism, and mass-medial multilingualism. I am not too comfortable with having so many sub-genres, particularly at this time when multilingualism itself has not entered mainstream or general literary theory and criticism, but the passion of Knauth more than makes up for his eagerness to rush ahead.

Hong Kong's language mix

I'm in Hong Kong, and I can't help but remember the article by Ho Judy Wong Yee in the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics (2008), which had this abstract:

"China resumed its sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997. Since then drastic changes in this former British colony have occurred. One of these changes is a shift in language policy, from bilingualism (Cantonese and English) to trilingualism (Cantonese, English and Putonghua). The present study is aimed at investigating tertiary students' use of Cantonese, English and Putonghua on a daily basis, analysing the roles and functions of each language and discussing how these may impact on language policy and language education. Research instruments included 52 students' language diaries and written analyses, 51 hours of audio-recordings of verbal exchanges, and focus group semi-structured interviews. Results show that the students' speech repertoire mainly consists of two languages: Cantonese and English and their various mixes. Cantonese is used to ensure understanding, consolidate solidarity and maintain social cohesion. The English-Cantonese mix has become a more powerful identity marker for educated people in Hong Kong than pure Cantonese. English and its supplement with Cantonese are often used in the domain of education. The majority of students seldom use Putonghua in everyday life, but there is a strong instrumental motivation to learn it. Measures are suggested to facilitate a more successful move from bilingualism to trilingualism."

The article confirms what the late linguist Andrew Gonzalez FSC kept saying, despite his having been instrumental in institutionalizing bilingualism in the educational system of the Philippines: "You cannot legislate language."

The other evening, I had dinner with friends who exemplify the multilingual character of Hong Kong society. One was born in Brazil, grew up speaking Chinese and Portuguese (Brazilian), and now speaks the English that she first learned in school. Another was born in the Philippines, grew up speaking Spanish at home, learned Filipino from her playmates, learned French when she lived in France and English when she lived in the US, and now speaks mainly English in Hong Kong.

If most readers are multilingual, why are writers still writing for imagined monolingual audiences? Is the idea of writing a text only in one language a product of language legislation? Is there an unwritten law that we should write a text only in one language? Just as we cannot legislate or limit language, we cannot and should not limit writers to writing in only one language while their readers speak in more than one language.

Zapotec

Here's an excerpt from "From language mixing to mixed language via purism? Spanish in contact with Zapotec (Oaxaca/Mexico)" by Martina Schrader-Kniffki (2008):

"The present study analyses aspects of the intense long-term contact between Spanish and Zapotec in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. After a short characterization of Zapotec and its language contact situation, which has developed since the colonial period, this article will systematically describe the consequences of this contact for Zapotec within a continuum of gradually differentiable contact varieties. Puristic attitudes of particular speaker groups who intend to reverse these consequences is a further aspect of this study. Puristic attitudes towards the Zapotec language are closely connected with the efforts of its standardization and manifest themselves in the lexicon of the incipient intents to introduce a written Zapotec variety. Inconsistent with this purism, the search for a standardization of this hitherto oral language is unfolding with an almost exclusive orientation towards Spanish as a well established written language. This orientation leads to a discontinuous contact variety of Zapotec." (p. 49)

All over the world, "purism" is the real enemy of multilingual writing. Instead of mirroring the "language really used by men" [and women], as William Wordsworth put it famously (excuse his sexist language), writers feel obligated to write in "well established written languages." Writers who give in to the demands of purist critics are betraying their craft, because they would rather be praised by prescriptive linguists or monolingual critics than by the vast masses of readers, who speak and would love to read in their natural mixed languages.

Bias against multilingual literature

The Review of English Studies (2000), in its review of David Wallace’s The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (1999), talks about the bias literary historians have against multilingual literature:

"Yet the new Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, for all its anxiety to be inclusive – of the various languages and literatures of the British Isles, of ‘literature’ as most broadly defined, and of its institutional as well as its authorial production – begins (at least as far as England is concerned) at 1066. Why should this be so? And what will be the effect of this implicit but seemingly authoritative pronouncement about what counts as ‘medieval’ within the English literary tradition? If Old English and Anglo-Latin literature are not part of ‘medieval English literature’, then what are they part of? Or are they – as the Cambridge History seems to wish – to be consigned to oblivion?"

The review adds: "One of the enduring lessons of literary theory of whatever school is that critical positions are necessarily particular, and cannot be hidden or half-hidden behind a façade of apparently stable authority or an implicit claim to some measure of enduring validity which might have the commercial advantage of guaranteeing ‘shelf-life.’"

Because multilingual literary works are rarely included in textbooks, literary anthologies, and even literary histories, they are "consigned to oblivion" unless a significant number of writers and critics take up the cudgels for them. Studies of the canon of literature in various countries invariably show that the majority rules, and as Henry David Thoreau so aptly put it, the majority are always wrong. (What he actually wrote was this: "Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? — in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable?" But we can change government to literary history and conscience to taste.)

One or four poems?

When a writer writes what should be the same poem in four different languages, are the products to be considered as only one poem translated three times (plus the original) or should they be considered four different poems? Translation theory tells us that they are four different poems, since each one is read within the context of different cultures. One of our followers gives us an insight into the making of the four poems, at the same time illuminating an issue lying at the heart of this blog, i.e., whether a language restricts or expands the possibilities of writing. Here is the relevant excerpt from the blog of Albert B. Casuga:

"The primary and necessarily the most ordinary medium of poetic expression, of course, is the poem’s sound/verbal system. The more melodious and sensible the verbal equipment of the language used, the sharper its edge in translating a thought into a palpable/real plane of experience.

"In this exercise, self-translation provided this writer with a limbering up that revealed intriguing discoveries. I found the Spanish version to have the most significant verbal devices that helped objectify/subjectify the putative lament ruing abandonment. I felt the lament’s tug more profoundly in the Ilocano version. I consider the English version a tad uninspired."

I wonder what would happen if the writer - as many other writers are now doing - mixes the four languages in the same poem. Will the pluses and minuses of each language neutralize each other, or will the whole become larger than its parts?

Down to the Bone

Thought I'd share this notice in Publisher's Weekly about Mayra Lazara Dole's debut novel Down to the Bone (2008):

"Laura Amores is a tortillera - slang for 'lesbian' in Miami's Cuban-American social scene, and a term either of endearment or a slur, depending on who is using it. But once Laura's secret is out, a tortillera is all Laura seems to be - to her mother, the nuns at her Catholic school and even some friends. Laura is thrown out of school and even from her house: 'I'm sorry, Laura, but I can't continue loving you if you stay gay,' Mami says as she literally pushes her daughter out the door. Luckily, Laura meets 'bois' who introduce her to Miami's Cuban gay scene, and her best friend shares her home and family, unconditionally. Laura remains reluctant to accept her gay identity, however, and her exploration of possible relationships - with a boi, a 'delicious' young woman and a boy she dates in hope of restoring herself to her mother's good graces - form the main arc of this honest, intense and at times moving romance. Using Spanish colloquialisms and slang, this debut author pulls off the tricky task of dialect in a manner that feels authentic. As Dole tackles a tough and important topic, her protagonist will win over a range of teen audiences, gay and straight. Ages 14-up."

It's hard to find driven authors nowadays that are not grim and determined. Fortunately for us, those that follow this blog (including Dole) share the unusual human trait so aptly described by Rafael Sabatini in the novel and film Scaramouche: "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad." Life is too serious to be taken seriously.

Words are sticks and stones

The commonsense saying that sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never harm you is not at all true. Words are just as harmful as sticks and stones, and writers - being stewards of language - know that best. Even in the non-literary world, words are deadly.

Take the way most Italians today use the word "Filippina" (the feminine form of the word "Filipino," referring to someone born in the Philippines). According to TIME Magazine, the word "Filippina" to Italians means "cleaning woman." Some years back, Filipinos raised a howl when the Oxford English Dictionary defined "Filipina" as "nanny" and a Greek Dictionary defined "Filipineza" as "maid." Today, there are unconfirmed reports (probably and hopefully untrue) that some South Korean tourists in Manila refer to Filipinos (not just Filipinas) as "monkeys." A hundred years ago, American soldiers invading the Philippines loudly called Filipinos "monkeys with no tails."

Italians, British, Greeks, Koreans, and Americans may think the words harmless, but Filipinos take these words to heart, as indeed they should be taken. This is why words are important, whether in real life or even more especially in literary works, where words are forever.

Language and imperialism

Those that insist that second-language writers write in exactly the same way as mother-tongue writers are, to use the jargon of literary theory, complicit in hegemony (translated into a bit more lay English, this means "subconsciously continuing colonial or class domination"). Literature in Africa, according to some, deliberately indigenizes European languages in order to decolonize or recolonize their former colonizers. (As Filipino poet Gemino H. Abad likes to put it when he talks about Filipinos writing in English, Filipinos have "colonized the English language.") Here, for example, is an observation by Peter W. Vakunta: "Linguistic creolization exists in virtually every country on the African continent. Everywhere, people of all ages are trying to jettison the yoke of cultural imperialism by indigenizing European languages in an attempt to better convey their thought patterns, imagination and lived experiences." In other words, when a writer consciously exploits her/his mother tongue while writing in a second or foreign language, political and not just aesthetic issues enter the picture.

Kenyan novels in English

In European-Language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa (1986), the idea is suggested but unfortunately not elaborated that language might be a key to the popularity of Kenyan novels in English in the 1970s. Writes Elisabeth Knight: “This popular literature managed to create its own distinctive idiom, colloquial, confident, resembling the journalese of Drum and its sister magazine Trust. The style is usually converstational and intimate. Dialogue plays an important part; as in Mangua’s Son of Woman, it is frequently an amalgam of predominantly American with some British slang and a number of archaisms. The language and register are often uneven, with a tendency to sentimentality and melodrama.” (p. 911)

I have not kept up with scholarship on Kenyan writing in English, but it would seem to me that we should move from readings based mainly on character, plot, and theme and move into the more specialized but probably more fruitful area of language use.

There are clearly more things to say of fiction than these statements (valid though they may be) that Knight makes of those popular novels:

"Characters tend to be stereotypes."

"While plot (generally of the multiple climax variety) is as a rule more important than character, traditional communal values are usually rejected if mentioned at all."

"Few of these novels are really pornographic. Many are curiously moral."

"While the heroes are bent on asserting their manhood, the heroines are happily not passive, submissive creatures despite some vestiges of a Western-style romantic literature of the woman’s magazine type."

"Though these writers are Kenyan they are, in the main, agents of a kind of cultural imperialism."

New Criticism, moral criticism, feminist criticism, and postcolonial criticism may be useful in general, but we still need to do the more tedious but necessary linguistic analysis, if we are to appreciate fully the efforts put in by writers.

Cycle, wheel, or pendulum

It's almost a truism to say that history repeats itself, or that the world moves in cycles. It looks that way with languages in literature. I was reading just the first paragraph of "Trilingualism in Early Middle English Miscellanies: Languages and Literature" by John Scahill (2003) when I was struck by his observation that "miscellanies containing English were trilingual until the end of this period, when the appearance of the nearly monolingual Auchinleck manuscript marks the appearance of a public whose literacy is essentially confined to English." From being multilingual, England became monolingual. Today, from being monolingual, England has fast become multilingual. Some may say it's because of immigration and globalization, but we in literature (being understandably inclined to give more importance to our field than perhaps is objectively justified) could say, at least to ourselves, that writers have a lot to do with it, with multilingual writers forcing readers to become multilingual.

Giant step towards multilinguality

This is a news item from Google:

Google gadget lets websites go multilingual

Agence France-Presse
First Posted 09:34:00 10/01/2009

"SAN FRANCISCO – Google on Wednesday released free software that lets website operators automatically translate online pages into any of 51 languages.

"A 'translator gadget' powered by Google Translate offers to transform pages for visitors if the language settings in their browsers are different from the language of a particular website, according to Google product manager Jeff Chin.

"'Automatic translation is convenient and helps people get a quick gist of the page,' Chin said in a blog post.

"'However, it's not a perfect substitute for the art of professional translation.'

"In August the Internet giant added automatic translation to Google Docs allowing users to translate documents into 42 languages.

"The 'Tools' menu on Google Docs now includes a 'Translate Document' feature which provides a list of the various languages offered, which run from Albanian to Icelandic to Vietnamese.

"The Mountain View, California-based company has already built automatic translation features into its popular email program Gmail and into services such as its blog reader."

Once most readers become multilingual, in the sense that they will no longer think that one language is more important than another and will be dissatisfied with reading in only one language, multilingual literature will gain in appeal and importance. Instead of being marginalized as it is now, it will become the mainstream, in a perfect example of what Raymond Williams described as the historical process of the emergent becoming a dominant form.

What a great gift from Google on International Translation Day!