Two views on multilingualism in fiction

Paul F. Bandia, in his review of Fictionalising Translation and Multilingualism (2005), edited by Dirk Delabastita and Rainier Grutman, talks about two views about the mixing of languages in a literary text.

The first view is this:  "Multilingualism in fiction can be said to challenge the dominant role of powerful global languages such as English by forcing the reader to engage in some form of translation in the reading process, thus marking the presence of other marginalized languages.  The dominant global language is made to share the literary space with other minority languages in an attempt to represent the multiple voices coexisting in today’s multiethnic societies.  For some the mere occurrence of these languages is an act of resistance to hegemonic languages, for others fictional heterolingualism is only an appropriate reflection of real-world language practices.  In postcolonial fiction, for instance, the writing of literary heteroglossia often implies a certain quest for an egalitarian relationship between languages."

The second view is this:  "Far from enacting resistance or creating a level playground for languages, multilingualism is often used not necessarily because of the incommensurability of languages, but rather for reasons pertaining to aesthetics, ideology or identity politics.”

As I've taken pains to establish (slowly and not so systematically, I admit), these two views deal only superficially with multilingual texts.  It is true that, on the surface, authors either deliberately want to give importance (equal or not) to the other languages or use the other languages to beef up the main language, but on a theoretical and deeper level, all literary texts are products of the interaction between two or more languages (not just voices as Bakhtin thought) - the mother tongue of the writer (in the case of monolingual writers, the idiolect) and the main language of the text (for lack of better words, the literary register or idiom).  Each language contains within itself the culture that originally or eventually created it ("eventually," because english today has replaced English).  We are thus dealing not only with multiple languages but with multiple cultures, whether the writer explicitly admits it or not (not all writers are self-conscious about their aesthetic decisions).

Salt

Has anybody following this blog read Earl Lovelace's Salt?  I haven't, but it's said to have successfully blended languages.

Jaipur literature festival

Here's an interesting account of a discussion held at the Jaipur Literature Festival last January:


"The Queen’s Hinglish: Ira Pande, Mark Tully, Prasoon Joshi

"In a lively debate, the panel and audience discussed the nature and implications of the English language in India. Prasoon Joshi argued that schoolchildren who learn English in schools have an ‘unfair advantage’ because ‘language is politics.’ The issue of English language in India is more than a joke, he said, because it is affecting people’s lives and prospects, and therefore there should be a uniform language in the education system.

"Mark Tully said he thought a good policy suggestion would be for all children up to class 6 to be educated in their mother-tongue but also be taught some English, though he observed that there was the problem of a shortage of good English teachers, which meant many children ended up knowing neither mother tongue or English properly. One audience member argued that children in India were not learning ‘Queen’s English but President’s American.’ Ira Pande talked of the ‘element of fun’ in mixing the languages, as long as it is not about point scoring, and that was ‘all part of a language growing.’ Ira Pande asked what about call centre English, to which Joshi responded that was ‘a split personality.’ One audience member noted that the integration of African American language into American English was in part due to the vernacular permeating popular culture through literature and music. Joshi went on to say that Indians find it easy to co-exist in the modern world because historically they are so used to co-existing with others, that even if English were to become more prevalent a language in India because of the growing IT culture, that it would not lose its cultural distinction."


The element of fun is a good way of putting the joy of creation.  Writers have fun writing; otherwise, they would not write.  Mixing languages in one text is certainly fun; otherwise, no one would be doing it.  As Sigmund Freud observed in Der Dichter und das Phantasieren, writers are the only humans on earth who have seriously developed the childhood talent of daydreaming.

Irish multilingual texts

"Code-Mixing in Biliterate and Multiliterate Irish Literary Texts" (2008) by Tina Bennett-Kastor studies texts that use more than one language (Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man, Maeve Binchy’s Firefly Summer, Cathal Ó Searcaigh’s “Do Jack Kerouac” and “Cainteoir Dúchais,” Nuala ni Dhomnaill’s “An Crann,” Brian Friel’s translations, and Antoine ó Flatharta’s Grásta i Meiriceá) and comes to the following conclusion:


"Multiliterate texts are constructed deliberately so that switch points or other points of linguistic contact within the text often signal additional, metaphorical levels of meaning which are coherent with the theme and/or other aspects of the work. To succeed in delivering these levels of meaning, the multiliterate writer must depend upon readers whose literacies overlap with those of the writer.  The implications for the development of a literary aesthetic in a multilingual society are that it is not enough to recognize that a written work exhibits two or more languages and to understand the meanings of the words in each language. To fully appreciate the aesthetic within the work, the writer and reader both must comprehend the complex political, historical, social, and cultural dimensions of the writer’s choice of language. As Ireland moves toward an increasingly integrated and full bilingualism, the potential for increased language interaction within literary works will grow. Literary theory, interpretation, and the teaching of literary analysis must keep up with the realization of this potential. ... The multiliterate writer calls out to the reader in what Joyce described in Ulysses as 'that other wor[l]d,' and depends on the reader both to hear these echoes, and to understand them."

Let's hear it for both James Joyce and Bennet-Kastor!

Plurifying languages

A think piece by Leevi Lehto, entitled "Plurifying the Languages of the Trite" (2006), contains this interesting footnote:


"Some coordinates of this kind of World Poetry would be: independence vis-à-vis National Literatures, including institutionally (I'm reminded here of Goethe's concept of 'world literature'); mixing of languages; borrowing of structures – rhythmical, syntactical – from other languages; writing in one's non-native languages; inventing new, ad hoc languages; conscious attempts to write for more heterogeneous, non-predetermined audiences… Should I add that this perspective is in strong opposition to the ideologies of 'conflict', or 'dialogue', of 'cultures'."


Instead of "the language of poetry," we should really be talking about "the languages of poetry," just as we now talk about "world literatures" rather than just "world literature."

Multilingual literature really old

If you think multilingual literature is a relatively new thing, you've got another think coming.  Read this account of Phoenician Semitic literature:

"The Byblos Syllabic texts is the earliest known example of mixing a Semitic language with modified Egyptian hieroglyphic characters. It appeared as inscriptions (eighteenth century B.C.), from the city of Byblos on the Phoenician coast. This script is described as a 'syllabary [that] is clearly inspired by the Egyptian hieroglyphic system, and in fact is the most important link known between the hieroglyphs and the Canaanite alphabet.'"


Of course, it might be argued that we are looking here only at the method rather than the content of writing, but since the method of writing is itself part of the language (think Chinese, where the visual appearances of characters themselves signify their meanings), we can say that the ancient Phoenician writers were thinking and writing in two languages.


Sadly, the account also tells us what happens when an international language kills a vernacular language:


"During the period of the Roman Empire the native Phoenician language died out and was replaced by Aramaic as the vernacular. Latin, the language of the soldiers and administrators, in turn fell before Greek, the language of letters of the eastern Mediterranean, by the 5th century AD."


Will English (or Mandarin Chinese) have the same effect today?  Let us hope not.

Surveying bias

Last year, Serafin M. Coronel-Medina, in an article entitled "Definitions and Critical Literature Review of Language Attitude, Language Choice and Language Shift:  Samples of Language Attitude Surveys," discussed a language survey that included, among other things, questions about the acceptability to readers of mixing languages in literature.  I wonder what the results of the survey were for the original community for which it was intended (Spanish and English-speaking communities) and for other language communities that may have used it.  It would certainly be interesting for a literary critic to know how readers feel about mixing languages in creative writing.  Perhaps we will finally have scientific proof of the existence (or non-existence) of the bias against multilingual literature.

Miguel Algarin

Here are lines from two poems by Miguel Algarin (I say two, because I believe that a translation is a different poem from its original), the first "My proposal is that," the second "Mi propuesta es que":

I want to live with you,

enjoy first, then procreate

children for the new century

Me gustaría vivir contigo,

gozar primero, después procrear

criaturas para el nuevo siglo

We can treat the two texts as translations (English to Spanish or vice-versa); that would be the usual way of dealing with them.  If we use multilingual literary criticism, however, we can look at the English text separately and realize, among other things, that (1) there is no rhyme, (2) the verb enjoy is used intransitively (which, though allowed in English, is not usual), and (3) procreate is an unusual word within the register or type of language being employed in the rest of the text.  These poetic characteristics will look like defects if we are not aware that the poet is really thinking in Spanish while writing in English (or as I like to say, following Bienvenido Santos and NVM Gonzalez, writing in Spanish using English words).  Notice that, if we go to the Spanish, (1) there is rhyme, (2) there is nothing wrong with the intrasitive use of gozar, and (3) procrear suits the register of the poem.  A reader reading only the English would have to use multilingual literary criticism to appreciate the beauty of the poem.  In fact, in English, the meter in the Spanish is lost, which then substantially diminishes the effect of the poem.

Jewish-Dutch literature

The Encyclopaedia Judaica (2008) contains the following account of language mixing in literature:

"Hebraic Influences on the Dutch Language

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

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

Here is a case of the language of literature influencing the language of everyday life, surely something for literary critics to celebrate.  The rest of the entry, by the way, lists some Jewish writers writing in Dutch - a huge area for research and criticism.

Resistance to multilingual criticism

One reason it has taken a long time for literary critics to realize that more than one language is at work in any literary piece is the widespread bias against mixing languages in everyday speech.  Here is Katherine Hoi Ying Chen's amusing account of such a bias in Hong Kong:


"Code-mixing, in general, is socially stigmatized in Hong Kong, yet in practice it is a common norm for the young. People who oppose code-mixing often have an ideological reason to it. The ideology involved here is on language purity and the purity of Chinese language and culture. Extreme believers consider using English in Cantonese a ‘contamination’ and ‘betrayal’ of the rich heritage of Chinese culture that the Cantonese language embodied. This ideology, in an extreme case, is vividly expressed in the following metalinguistic comment given by a university professor of Chinese language and literature:

" 'This kind of Chinese-English mixing freak speech is total rubbish not only [when it is used] outside of Hong Kong. Even within Hong Kong, it is totally useless for communicating with grass roots offspring of the Emperor Huang [i.e. ethnic Chinese people], or with the ethnic white leaders at the tip of the pyramid. Some people said, this kind of speech is like a special dermatological disease, [with a symptom of having] a piece of yellow [skin] and a piece of white [skin here and there].'

"This comment is probably a bit extreme, but it is in no way an uncommon attitude shared in Hong Kong about code-mixing. ... Despite the prevailing negative attitude, however, code-mixing is the norm of speech among the younger generation."

Perhaps, with younger generations in every country today (including previously monolingual countries like the United States) routinely mixing languages in their speech, younger literary critics will start seriously considering rereading all literary texts as multilingual texts, not just with Bakhtin's multiple voices but with multiple real-life languages interacting in ways older critics previously never dreamed of.  Perhaps what we have with multilingual literary criticism is something that can fill the gap that the death of theory has left in critical circles.

Patois and Linguistic Pastiche in Modern Literature

Here is a list of the essays in the book Patois and Linguistic Pastiche in Modern Literature (2007), edited by Giovanna Summerfield:

Introduction, by Giovanna Summerfield
Literary Synglossia: Vincenzo Consolo, Andrea Camilleri, Pietro Di Donato, Corrado Paina, by Jana Vizmuller-Zocco
Luciano Bianciardi and the Anarchy of Language: From the Risorgimento to the “Boom” Years, by Mark Pietralunga
Riccobene’s Nun mi maritu ppi procura: The Italian Canadian Linguistic Pastiches in a Comedy of Errors, by Salvatore Bancheri
Misrecognition unmasked? “Polynomic” Language, Expert Statuses and Orthographic Practices in Corsican Schools, by Alexandra Jaffe
Change and Variety in the Mosaic of German Dialects, by Iulia Pittman
“C’est une joie et une souffrance”: Mimetic Speech and Generic Pastiche in François Ozon’s 8 femmes, by Adrienne Angelo

The book is a major contribution to multilingual literary criticism.  Here is its rationale, as expressed by its editor:

"In modern literature dialect, patois, and linguistic pastiche have proved to be the marks of identity, of individual and regional nature.  Paraphrasing the words of Luigi Pirandello, one tends to use the standard national language to express a rational concept, while one opts to use one’s regional dialect for matters closer to the heart. The literary tradition has always accepted language mixing. Linguists and literary critics have analyzed this phenomenon from different perspectives, separately. An in-depth cooperative study of the causes, conditions, consequences, and limits of language mixing is still needed. Through a plurality of literary subjects, perspectives, and linguistic environments, this publication provides an overview of the linguistic and cultural contributions which underline, in turn, the importance of dialect use and conservation. This book recognizes the international and topical scope of interest in the academia and the public at large through the contributions made by the authors of the respective essays, who come from various parts of the world and from a wide range of disciplines, and also through the international and topical importance of the perspectives offered by these contributions."

Back in Manila

Finally, I'm back in the Philippines after a working holiday in the USA, with three lectures (Montclair State, UC Berkeley, and UCLA) and the West Coast launch of two books (The Other Other and Inter/Sections), all in three weeks of cold weather I am not used to and the usual battle against jet lag.  I got to a couple of bookstores and found little to interest me; the popular bestsellers (whether academic or New York Times type) have elbowed out books truly worth reading.  Fortunately still selling are the good old reliables (the philosophers of old, so-called "classic" novels, the canonical books required by well-intentioned teachers that have never given up the faith).  Bookstores still relegate non-English languages books either to the dictionary or travel sections or to some awkward category such as "Asian Studies" or "Foreign Language Books."  They still have a problem with books written in languages other than English by American writers.  On the plus side, however, I noticed that there were a number of mainstream television channels all in Spanish.  Perhaps the USA is indeed becoming a bilingual country.  That would definitely be a step forward.

"Standard"?

About John Agard's poem "Half-Caste," BBC has this as a guide question for students:


"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?"


We like to tell children that "sticks and stones can hurt your bones but words will never harm you," but in fact words like "dialect" and "non-standard"  harm us all the time.  To speak of a particular language or variety of a language as a "dialect" (thus relegating it to a status lower than a language) or "non-standard" (thus implying that the standard is the language of the former colonizer) is as bad as racist slurs.  Perhaps we should add to the unacceptable isms the word linguism (or something sounding as ugly as that) to refer to manifest or hidden bias against newer or emergent languages.

Language and culture

I'm preparing for my lecture tomorrow at UC Berkeley on why learning the Filipino language (or any other Philippine language) is important if a non-Filipino is to truly understand Filipino culture.  I intend to talk about everyday greetings such as "How are you?", which Americans routinely answer with "I'm good."  The same greeting in Filipino ("Kamusta?") is answered in various ways, depending on the actual state of the responder.  What is merely throat-clearing or a polite icebreaker for Americans is a real expression of concern (answered by an honest description of one's emotional state at the moment) for Filipinos.  From there, I intend to go into deeper ways to penetrate Philippine culture through language (or languages).  From everyday language to literature is a big step, but if the students attending the lecture turn out to be more sophisticated than the average student, we could go into multilingual literary criticism.

Freezing in New York

I've been in New York City for the past five days, which is my excuse for not blogging.  (It's New York!  You wouldn't want to be in front of your computer in New York, would you?)  I'm not sure there is a more multilingual city in the world.  So far, I have not yet boarded a taxi driven by a man speaking in English.  (Since the taxis here feature a GPS for the passenger, there is no reason to feign ignorance of English just to get more money off tourists.)  From the taxi drivers, as well as from people on the streets, I've heard easily 7 or 8 different languages.  To write in only one language about New York would clearly be a violation of that age-old principle that art should mirror life.

Poetry and climate change

Since the buzz phrase nowadays is “climate change,” here is part of Albert B. Casuga's poem “Umberto and Edo de Brazil” that uses more than one language to warn us that flooding threatens everyone, not just those that speak any one language:

Was it the surprise of a wayward downpour
stopped her from her frolic in the sea?
Or was it the intruding pall ruined her mark
of the sun, gone from the sky, gone from the sea?
Lluvia! Lluvia! She warned anyone who cared
to listen --- the beach frolic rolled unabated.

Notice that had the poet used the English "Rain! Rain!" instead of the Spanish "Lluvia! Lluvia!" the jolt intended by both the woman and the poet would have been lost.  Additionally, the rhythm would have suffered, because the monosyllabic "Rain" would have shortened the line.  Cleverly, the poet justifies the use of non-English words in an English poem by the characters in the narrative.  Such justification works better with readers used to monolingual poetry, but is not necessary for readers more attuned to multilingual writing.

The theme of the poem, of course, is enhanced by the use of more than one language.  The poem dramatically presents the peculiarity of today's weather conditions, brought about by climate change (something the whole world experiences and caused).

David Maillu

I wonder if the lack of serious critical appreciation of the fiction of David Maillu stems not so much from his being popular (there still being a kind of prejudice on the part of mainstream literary critics against commercially successful fiction) or from his philosophy and politics (not exactly the timid kinds), but from his mixing of languages in his writing.  In 1998, J. Roger Kurtz and Robert M. Kurtz set out to install Maillu in the canon of African literature (literature, not just popular literature) in an article entitled "Language and Ideology in Postcolonial Kenyan Literature:  The Case of David Maillu's Macaronic Fiction."  Their efforts appear to have gained some ground for Maillu fans (see the amusing take in Creative Ventures on Maillu's political crusade).  Maillu himself seems to thrive on alienating high-end critics.  Reports Evan Maina Mwangi in Africa Writes Back to Self:  Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality (2009):  "David Maillu playfully named one of his texts Unfit for Human Consumption (1973), and another of his works advertised in its title that it is about the Kommon Man (1975), complete with a misspelling, to align itself against the university-educated elites."  Just as everything personal is political, everything linguistic is also political - and vice-versa.

Kashmiri literature

Here's a challenge for young Indian literary critics looking for a niche for themselves.  Study the way languages interact with each other to create new literary frontiers in Kashmiri writing.  This was the situation in 1911 as painted by the Encyclopedia Brittanica:

"Kashmiri possesses a somewhat extensive literature, which has been very little studied. The missionary William Carey published in 1821 a version of the New Testament (in the Sarada character), which was the first book published in the language. In 1885 the Rev. J. Hinton Knowles published at Bombay a collection of Kashmiri proverbs and sayings, and K. F. Burkhard in 1895 published an edition of Mahmud Gami's poem on Yusuf and Zulaikha. This, with the exception of later translations of the Scriptures in the Persian character and a few minor works, is all the literature that has been printed or about which anything has been written. Mahmud Gami's poem is valuable as an example of the Kashmiri used by Mussulmans."

How has multilingual literary criticism progressed in India since 1911?  T. N. Kaul gives an update for the Kashmiri Overseas Association, but the situation does not look much better than it did in 1911.  The description remains on the level of mere description, not of analysis.  We still need serious literary analysis of Kashmiri works based on the mixing of languages.

Launch of a Festschrift

You are invited to the launch of Inter/Sections: Isagani R. Cruz and Friends, edited by David Jonathan Y. Bayot (published by Anvil Publishing for De La Salle University), at Powerbooks, Greenbelt, Makati, Philippines, on 15 April, Thursday, 5 to 6 p.m. Contributors to the book are: Gayatri Spivak, Catherine Belsey, Marjorie Perloff, Christopher Norris, E. San Juan Jr., Virgilio S. Almario, Alfred A. Yuson, Gemino H. Abad, Caroline Hau, Frank G. Rivera, Kathryn VanSpanckeren, Sharon Delmendo, Marilyn Atlas, Paulino Lim Jr., Cirilo F. Bautista, Soledad S. Reyes, Ma. Lourdes S. Bautista, Edna Z. Manlapaz, Tereso S. Tullao Jr., Rolando B. Tolentino, Rosario Cruz Lucero, Vicente Garcia Groyon, Shirley Lua, Clodualdo del Mundo Jr., Ma. Lourdes Jacob, Gerardo Z. Torres, Edwina Carreon, Dinah Roma Sianturi, Ronald Baytan, Genevieve L. Asenjo, and Jose Wendell Capili. The book will be relaunched in Los Angeles, California, USA, on 30 April, 6-8 p.m. (venue TBA), after a lecture by Dr. Cruz at UCLA.

Taiwan's "combination language"

A 2007 thesis gives us more insight into the Taigi literature debates:

"Another emphasis in Peng’s [Rui-Jin, 1991] article was the discussion of combination language. He believed that in the future, the language for Taiwan literature might be the combined language of Taiwan history and practical elements. The current languages such as Hakkanese, Minnanyu, indigenous languages, and Mandarin might be mixed to give rise to be a new language of Taiwan. He mentioned the 'Trilogy of A Chilly Night' by Li Ciao and 'Lang Tao Sha' by Dong Fang-Bai, both as works, which displayed such new language. This kind of combined language was a clever suggestion that needed further thought."

What is happening (or what happened) in Taiwan is very similar to what is happening in countries with several languages (such as the Philippines). Writers (who are the usually the most aware of postcolonial issues) tend to mix languages for many purposes, among which is the subversion of the colonial language, as well as the faithful representation of the reality of a postcolonial people (half dreaming of being part of the colonizing country and half remembering that they are being oppressed as the colonized).

Swedish and Tornedals Finnish

Here's the abstract of a paper presented during the Sociolinguistics Symposium held in Stockholm in April 2008:

"Literary Codeswitching: Shaping culture and identity" by Carla Jonsson:

"This paper focuses on the literary use of code-switching in novels and plays where code-switching occurs between different languages, dialects, styles and varieties. In this paper I argue that the authors and playwrights of such novels and plays can be seen as actors/agents in the sense that they can shape the readers' notions of culture and identity. For instance, by writing a Swedish novel where code-switching between Swedish and Tornedals Finnish (a historical minority language in Sweden) is used, the author creates and shapes the readers' view of what ‘the Finnish-Swedish culture’ is like. The author at the same time also shapes ‘the Finnish-Swedish culture’ in the sense that its language is legitimized, its voice is (or rather some of its voices are) heard, and its experiences are acknowledged. My presentation will focus on code-switching in relation to power and identity. These are 'global' functions of code-switching, according to Auer (1998, 1999), and as such relate to macro connections in society.

"In my presentation novels written in Sweden with code-switching between different languages, dialects, styles and varieties will be discussed together with Chicano plays written in the US, in which there is frequent code-switching between Spanish and English. Findings of my doctoral thesis on code-switching in Chicano theater will serve as basis of the discussion (Jonsson 2005).

"The sociolinguistic situation in California and other southwestern states with frequent contact between English and Spanish, has led to the emergence of Chicano discourse and to the creation of a particular Chicano literature. Similarly, recent development in Sweden has brought forth multiethnic varieties that are now beginning to be used in Swedish literature. In fact, multicultural and multilingual literature is a field of literature that is rapidly growing in Sweden. This literature (novels, poems and plays) uses multiethnic varieties and/or code-switching between different languages to express a multicultural and multilingual experience. My study concentrates on the use of code-switching in this type multilingual literature. One reason for choosing to emphasize on language use in literature is that most previous research in this field has focused on speech.

"Links will be drawn between the functions of code-switching in Chicano theater and the functions of code-switching in multilingual literature in Sweden. Issues of power, ideology and resistance play a central role in this discussion since code-switching can serve as a creative response to domination and since language in these forms of literature often fills empowering functions. The different novels and plays that constitute this multilingual literature, together create a literary platform that can be regarded as an alternative market (Bourdieu 1991) where it is possible for ethnic minority groups to make their voices heard. In addition, the possibility of constructing and reconstructing a separate identity through the use of code-switching in literature will be discussed. By employing code-switching in their work is possible for the authors and playwrights to reflect, construct and reconstruct a separate third space identity (Bhabha 1994) that draws upon the different cultural environments."

I still have to check if the proceedings of the symposium have been published.

Back to basics

It's good to look back at the simple (simplistic, really) explanation for schoolchildren that Michael Ryan gives in his Literary Theory: A Practical Introduction (2nd ed., 2007):

"Important concepts in post-colonial study are diaspora, hybridity, ambiguity, mimicry, mestizaje, and creolization. Most former imperial countries are now disaporic in the sense the people from former colonies have moved to imperial metropoles such as England and become English. Ideas regarding national or even ethnic cultural identity become more difficult to apply in situations where traditional and metropolitan cultural norms and identities meet and mix. ... Colonialists sought to impose their own culture on a quite different culture so that it would mime or imitate that of the imperial center. The desire for a homogeneous identity of ruler and ruled was confounded by the unequal relation of power which meant that such imposition was disturbed implicitly by tendencies toward non-compliance and willed dissonance. What resulted often was mimicry with irony rather than imitation. Some natives sought refuge in indigenous, often oral cultures or in ideals of a national culture based in their own experience and language. The assumption was that language bears worldviews within it, so that to adopt the imperial language was in effect to adopt the point of view of imperialism, with all of the arrogant assumptons that ran counter to one’s own interests as a subject of colonialism. But other writers and intellectuals embraced the opportunity for creative mixing that the colonial and post-colonial situation afforded. From this way of thinking resulted such terms as ‘mestizaje’ and ‘creolization,’ the idea that identities and languages from both sides of the imperial equation can combine to generate new subjective and linguistic possiblities. A mestizo is a mixed-race person, and a creole is a mixed language that combines elements of a language like English or French with local indigenous dialects." (196-97)

Ironically, Ryan reveals exactly the kind of imperialistic arrogance that he valiantly tries so hard to avoid - by calling local indigenous languages "dialects" rather than "languages" (which is what linguists call them), thus implying that English or French have a higher status than the "local" and "indigenous." Sometimes (as in movies such as Avatar and District 9), those oppressors that try to help the oppressed actually do not, in a deeper sense. I remember what the feminist Toril Moi said in answer to a question in a lecture at Oxford in 1988; asked if men should be feminists, she said, "They could, but they shouldn't, because they will occupy the only space that we have" (or words to that effect).

Nevertheless, Ryan's explanation for students more or less clarifies why we have to do what we do: none of the current literary theories can adequately account for the intricate relationship between mother (or "native") language and the colonial language in the writing of literature.

Chinese, not just English

It is not only English that is accused of killing national languages (called hegemony in critical language), but the language that is spoken and read by even more people - Chinese. Here is the lament of Chong-goan Lim, a writer in Taiwan:

"今仔日台灣文壇為何猶未寫出不朽的精采的作品, 除了一寡因素之外, 就是作家忽視母語, 輕視母語,… 一個無自信的人, 怎有才調寫出不朽的精采的作品, 結果也只好乖乖做文化的屬民, 文學的奴隸。所以今仔日的作家, 著愛重新整合創新台語, 按呢, 才有才調寫出現時現地醞釀佇心靈中的世界。

"Why does immortal work still not occur in the literature of Taiwan? There are some factors: one is that our writers ignored and looked down our own mother tongue because they were not confident of their vernacular. How could a writer without any confidence create an immortal work? Consequently, they had to subordinate themselves to Chinese culture and become the slaves of Chinese literature. So, today, we Taiwanese writers have to devote ourselves to literary works in Taigi. Then, we will be able to describe our world in our mind.

"台灣文學就是愛用台語來寫…台灣文學就是台灣人用台灣人的母語寫的文學…台語文學就是台灣文學。(Lim 1990)

"Taiwan Literature must be written in Taigi…Taiwan Literature is the literature written in the mother tongue of Taiwanese people…Taiwan Literature is Taigi literature."

Historically, linguistic superiority or prestige follows economic and/or political superiority. Only creative writers (by their nature as creative writers) can rise above the common beliefs of their age and see that languages need not be hostage to economics nor politics. We have to be careful, as literary critics, not to be carried away by the stupidity (yes, for that is what it is) of non-literary "intellectuals" who never seem to realize that economics and politics come and go, but art stays. Who remembers the GNP of the Greece of Sophocles or even the England of Shakespeare? Who remembers (without looking it up) the name of the American President during the time Nathaniel Hawthorne was writing The Scarlet Letter?

Ravi Kumar on translation

Article alert:

Ravi Kumar, part of our online community, has just published an article on translation in India:

The life of a translator in India.

Here's an excerpt:

"Bilinguals have always been respected in India as people with superior qualifications, and they have played a pivotal role in social and cultural change. Slowly, bilingualism has become so widespread that it is complementary in nature. For example, an individual may use a particular language at home, another in the neighbourhood and the bazaar, and still another in certain formal domains such as education, administration, and the like. In addition, the languages of national and international communication, Hindi and English, are also part of the linguistic repertoire of a sizeable number of Indians. In India, linguistic diversity is not an accident, rather it is inherited in the process of acquiring the composite culture of India."

Resisting mixed language in literature

The resistance to mixing languages in a single work of literature comes not from the great writers (who have all done it, unconsciously or consciously), but from lesser writers more interested in ideology or politics than in being true to reality. Here, for instance, is a historical instance of writers trying to keep Belarusian free from the pervasive influence of Russian:

"Popular is the mixed language which is called ‘trasianka’ (e.g. ‘stirred language), it is the mixture of Russian and Belarusian but many people who speak it are sure they speak pure Russian. In the beginning of the nineties there was even suggestion to recognize ‘trasianka’ as a state language. ...

"One of the first examples of Belarusian literature is Francišak Skaryna’s translation of Bible, printed in Prague in 1517-1519. It was the third printed Bible after the German and Czech ones in Europe. Important too are the Lithuanian Chronicles and the Lithuanian Statute (the first in the world prototype of modern Constitutions), numerous church writings all dating from the 16th century. After the establishment of the Uniat (Greek Catholic) Church and making union with Poland, Belarusian language began to be strongly polonized. This can be seen in the numerous ‘intermedia’ and ‘school dramas’ of that days which have been preserved to this day in manuscripts written in the Latin alphabet."

The sentiment of the writer against Russianizing or Polandizing Belarusian is clear. I strongly disagree with this kind of sentiment (which is, unfortunately, present in other postcolonial countries). Much more important than keeping languages distinct from each other or "pure" is the responsibility of writers to reflect and to constitute what is going on in real life.

Urdu as example of language development

"Mixed" literary languages eventually become regarded as "umixed" or "monolingual" literary languages. This has been documented extensively in the case of Urdu literature, but the same thing occurs, I suspect, in all literatures. English itself, after all, was never a "pure" language but has always been (and remains up to today) a language that incorporates words, concepts, and even grammar from other languages (think of syllabi and alumni, which should be syllabuses and alumnuses according to English, not Latin, grammar).

Here is an account of the way Urdu started as a mixed language and eventually became a literary language all its own:

"Before the advent of Modern Islam (late 6th Century), Arabs frequented the trade centres of the Indian subcontinent. It is conceivable that along with exchange of goods of trade, they also exchanged words of mutual interest from their languages. In the middle of the 7th Century, during the period of Khalifa Umar the Great, the Iranian Empire (of Yazdigar) fell to Arab Muslims resulting in the Muslim influence being extended up to Mulatto on the western shores of the river Sindh. However, Muslim forces were not able to establish their rule in the area. In 664 AD Muslims invaded India via Kabul and in 715 AD Mohammad Bin Qasim invaded Sindh but did not stay long. Nevertheless in the post-Christ period, those were the starting points in India for the establishment of a new homeland for the people of different culture and linguistic background. Their permanent presence as new communities among the established Indian communities would have necessitated the need of a mixed language. However, up to 1192, we do not have any written record of such a mixed language except in poetry Chand Barvai in his poem 'Parthi Raj Raso,' Dil-pat in his poem 'Khaman Raso' and Tur'pat Naal in his poem 'Bell Dev Raso' used a number of Arabic and Persian words like dunya, per'var'di'gar, salaam with correct pronunciation and some like kalak for khal'q and pai'gam for pai'ghaam, pher'maan for fermaan with modified pronunciation perhaps because of the absence of appropriate alphabets in Bridge Bha'sha to comprehend Arabic and Persian sounds. Again in that period similar examples can be found in the poetry of the Persian poets. They also used words from local Indian languages. In fact Hakim Sa'na'i, a 12th Century Persian poets, never visited India, but still used certain Hindi words.

"Although we find Arabic and Persian words filtering in the local Indian Bha'sha and Prak'rit, up to 1192, we see that, original inhabitants (mostly Hindus) and new settlers (mostly Muslims) formally used their own mother tongues with their scripts for their academic and religious literary pursuits.

"At an early stage the new mixed language was simple and without any formality in its daily use. However, with passage of time, this mixed language became structured and broadened its vocabulary by an increase borrowing of words and phrases from Persian, Turkish and Arabic languages. With little modification it accepted Persian alphabets and its script for itself. The use of these modified Persian alphabets along with the diacritical marks in the script gives to Urdu a unique ability to pronounce correctly the words from Hindi as well as from the foreign languages especially from Persian, Arabic and Persian. One cannot lose sight of several other reasons in the development and evolution of a language. It is important to recognise that there is a distinction between court (political or imperial need), mosque or church (religious need) and bazaar (commercial and days today's common purpose's need). To make a language acceptable elite and populist elements have to be present. The new mixed language developed in the environs of Delhi, the main seat of Muslim rulers (the new settlers) of India had their secular mother tongue Persian and their religious scripture Arabic."

Asma Sayed

From an old news report (2006):

"Since the 1960s, South Asian Canadian writers have been contributing to the richness of Canadian literature. The immigrant writers that arrived in the Sixties were writing in Punjabi, Urdu, and Gujarati, while later immigrants started writing in English as well. But while writers writing in English have been recognized for their work, those writing in their heritage languages have often been ignored. Asma Sayed, for her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Alberta, under the supervision of Dr. Jonathan Hart, is interested in studying the politics of language in South Asian Canadian writing.

“'My study is two-fold: on one hand, I analyze the use of heritage languages in the writings in English; on the other, I study the literatures solely created in those heritage languages. I intend to study the interrelationship of language, culture, and diaspora.'” Asma’s interest in this area is backed by her knowledge of Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, and Punjabi languages and Kachchi dialect.

"The first part of Asma’s research focuses on how heritage languages are used in English writing. 'These writers are experimenting with English to create a hybrid language. This is a language which mixes Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, or others with English. By bringing their different cultural backgrounds from around the world to their writing, and thus creating a hybrid or neo-language, they are extending that culture within Canadian society.'

"While these neo-languages speak volumes about resistance and culture-retention, there has been no extensive study to demonstrate the use of heritage languages by these ethnic writers. 'In fact, at times, their use of heritage languages in the English-Canadian texts has been received negatively. I think it is important to address this issue as I believe that these writers use this mixed language for a purpose. Language has been one of the primary means of struggle in the post-colonial literary world. While this linguistic hybridity challenges hegemony of English, it also serves the objective of retention of cultural identity.'”

Does anyone know Ms. (perhaps now Dr.) Sayed? It would be good to know what she now thinks.

Three quotes from J. K. Gayle

Here are quotes that begin "Literary Mulattos: Three Novelists' Translingual Mix for African American Writing and Criticism," by J. K. Gayle (2009 Australia Tarver Award for Critical Essay on Race, Post-colonialism, or Multi-Ethnic Studies):

"Phillis Wheatley, the first African American poet, switched languages, from Fulani to English, under duress, after being abducted from West Africa and sold to a Boston merchant at about the age of seven . . . . Yet for others translingualism is a way to vaunt their freedom." --Steven G. Kellman, Switching Languages

“'[T]ranslingualism' [should be] employed to describe writers who cross-culturally appropriate, criticize, and reinvent language. . . . Translingual, transport, transplant, translate: these terms may have something to do with a crossing over, a movement into a new state, a transformation. Does the translingual author . . . writing in English cross over, transform, become a new linguistic subject, attain a new discursive identity? Certainly the answer is 'yes,' and yet some writers . . . then cross back to the 'old' language." -- Martha J. Cutter, Review of Switching Languages

"The globalization of cultures . . . presupposes translingualism, or . . . [more specifically] an interlation, a contrastive juxtaposition of two or more apparently identical texts running simultaneously in two different languages — for example, a poem of Joseph Brodsky in the Russian original and in English autotranslation. Interlation is a multilingual variation on the same theme, where the roles of 'source' and 'target' languages are not established or are interchangeable. One language allows the reader to perceive what another language misses or conceals. . . . Robert Frost said that poetry is what gets lost in translation. By contrast, interlation increases, indeed doubles the benefits of poetry." -- Mikhail Epshtein, "Interlation vs. Translation: Stereotextuality"

Italian Canadian literature

"Italianistica versus Italian-Canadian Writing" (2008) by Joseph Pivato studies the literature in mixed languages in Canada today. Writes Pivato:

"Italian immigrants and their children are not voiceless; but speak clearly to each other and to all of us. One way that these people speak is through their arts, especially their writing: novels, stories, poems, plays, essays and experimental writing in mixed genres and mixed languages. They explore who they are; they record the immigrant experience; the meaning of growing up in Canada as both an Italian and a Canadian. These people with very humble backgrounds speak for themselves unmediated by the academic, the researcher or the professional journalist. Again I emphasise that this is direct speech with all its real vitality, spontaneity and peculiar anomalies."

Holding the mirror up to nature is still one of the crucial intentions of a lot of literature, and since nature (or the real world) for Italian immigrants in Canada involves mixing languages, their literature also employs more than one language.

1984 debate

Here’s an early account of the beginnings of Utah-based Chicano mixed-language literature, from Jerry Johnston of Deseret News (4 May 1984):

“Writers such as former Utahn Ricardo Sanchez write in a mixed idiom, meshing English with a kind of spicey barrio vernacular, where a truck is a ‘troca,’ a buddy is a ‘cuate’ and a dime’s called a ‘dime’ (pronounced DEE-may).

“It is the mixed language that throws a kink in a lot of critics. Spanish critic and poet Angel Gonzalez feels mixing the languages not only cuts down on the people who can appreciate the literature (you need to be bilingual) but it furthers a type of speaking that may never be accepted.

“Chicano writers and scholars hotly disagree. [Gary] Soto is quick to defend writers who used a mixed style and Frausto Ibarra says, ‘The mixed idiom style of writing can be a very provocative stance. Our Chicano writers here in the United States use it to great effect. We’re not talking about an either-or situation with languages, but creative people who have a linguistic repertoire.'

“Many Chicano writers from Utah have used it. Abelardo Delgado, who taught at the University for a while, spiced his poetry with Spanish words, so do many of the young Hispanic writers in Salt Lake City today.

“Is it legitimate?

“Scholar Francisco Lomeli remembers the first time he heard Alurista, the poet, read poetry written in a mixture of Spanish and English. He said it was wonderful, it gave credence and beauty to the type of language he was raised speaking in his home.

“It upsets some, entices some. Love it or not, however, we readers better get used to it. According to Tomas Frausto Ibarra, Soto, [Genaro] Padilla and dozens of other members of the Chicano literati, we’re going to be seeing a lot more good literary works written in ‘Pocho’ in the years to come.”

These are writers who consciously use two languages. They represent one end of the literary spectrum that multilingual criticism discusses. The other end is represented by texts that, whether the writers were conscious or not that they were doing it, are actually in more than one language, though they look on the surface like they are monolingual. This second end is harder to unlock; that is the reason we need to sharpen our critical tools first on texts in the first end (or texts that quite obviously use more than one language) before we tackle the really hard task of showing how hidden languages add to the meaning of manifest languages.

American literature not in English

Werner Sollors, in Sacvan Bercovitch's The Cambridge History of American Literature: Prose Writing, 1910-1950 (2003), writes:

“Code-switching and mixed languages are prevalent in American ethnic literature, whether such literature was originally written or published in English or in one of the many other languages that have been used in the United States. For American literature was also written in Yiddish (as was the letter that became Antin’s From Plotzk to Boston), Polish, Swedish, Welsh, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, or German – the list goes on and on – and this little-known non-English literature of the United States offers fascinating insights into American ethnic diversity in some formally accomplished and many thematically provocative works. The propaganda against foreign languages in the course of World War I marked only an interruption in a long tradition of non-English-language literary production in what is now the United States that started with recorded works in Native American and all colonial languages and continued with literature in scores of immigrant tongues. The propaganda may have been at least effective in removing this literature from scholarly attention in the second half of the twentieth century.” (p. 429)

Absolutely right! In fact, just a couple of years ago, in 2007, Benjamin Pimentel of California published a prize-winning novel in Filipino (Mga Gerilya sa Powell Street). American literature written in Filipino is alive and well, but monolingual American critics have no idea what treasures are being produced right under their noses. Vestiges of the First World War remain in literary scholarship, a strange irony, since literary critics have always prided themselves as being ahead of their times. In reading multilingual literature, they are clearly way behind American (and non-American) readers.

Murayama

Milton Murayama, writing about his novel All I Asking for Is My Body (1975), says, “The aim of writing is to get as close as possible to the experience, and if the experience is dialect, you write dialect. But there is a danger in being unintelligible in dialect. .. I wanted my pidgin to be intelligible to readers of standard English only.” Here lies one problem facing writers working within multilingual situations. Should the writer be faithful to the experience or be kind to the reader? Sometimes, one can be both, but not all the time. African writers decided long ago that they would spell words the way they heard them, and non-African readers have accepted that, despite obvious difficulties. Murayama (as evidenced in the title itself of his novel) tries to be a bit kinder to readers, but he does not really have to be. The burden of reading literature lies with the reader. With other types of writing (notably journalism or speechwriting or even business writing), the reader reigns supreme, because we want the reader to do something (vote for someone or allow us to do something related to our jobs or whatever). Literature, however, as the aphorism ars longa, vita brevis puts it, transcends any group of readers. Witness writers known after their time (Emily Dickinson comes to mind immediately). For me, a writer should write regardless of reader reception. The work will create its own audience. A multilingual work will create a multilingual reader. Conversely, since so many readers today are multilingual by virtue of geography, multilingual works may have come into their own.

Writing Across Cultures

I just returned to Manila from the Writing Across Cultures symposium held on March 9 & 10 in the City University of Hong Kong. Many of the speakers addressed the issues we discuss in this blog. Except for two or three, all of them were bilingual or multilingual, with many writing mixed-language literary texts. Marilyn Chin, for example, who brings together not just the Chinese and the English languages into her work, but ancient Chinese culture and modern American culture, gave the keynote address on the second day. Among the speakers were Catherine Cook, Jon Cook, Andrew Cowan, Alex Kuo, Nury Vittachi, Robin Hemley, P. K. Leung, Sharmistha Mohanty, Kim Cheng Boey, Jose Dalisay, Dai Fan, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Ouyang Yu, Dinah Sianturi, Bernice Chauly, Justin Hill, Agnes Lam. The organizers were Jane Camens and Xu Xi.

Bani Basu

Meenakshi Mukherjee writes about "Bani Basu's Novels":

"No two of Bani Basu's novels are alike, each one explores a different segment of experience where imagination is backed by research; she experiments with a variety of narrative modes, realism and irrealism sometimes co-exist in startling ways; she is capable of completely changing her language to suit the theme.

"As an example of the latter, 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."

More and more, critics are recognizing that texts using more than one language have grown way past the macaronic phase. The mixed language used in texts is not just a way of being authentic or mirroring how people speak in real life; it is also - as literary critics know - a way to break the barriers imposed by any one language. Necessarily, one language encompasses only one part of reality. To represent or constitute more of the real world, a writer more and more feels obliged to use more than one language in a single text.

Early Greek lyric

The study by Maria Elena de Luna of the Iliad and other Greek texts has something for multilingual critics. Here is the way reviewer Robert Wallace summarizes one of her points (on Hipponax):

"Ch. 2 ('The presence of γλῶσσαι βαρβαρικαί in the fragments of Hipponax') focuses on the question whether that poet's frequent use of non-Greek words reflects the popular mixed language of Ionia (Hipponax worked in Ephesos and Klazomenai), as some have thought, or was a sophisticated literary device. De Luna argues for the latter, profiting from excellent work on early Greek lyric especially by B. Gentili, A. Aloni, and G. Tedeschi."

To multilingual literary critics, such use is always (not just sometimes or often) "sophisticated" or, more precisely, deliberate. A writer can always translate dialectal words into the main language of a text, but choosing to retain the dialectal or other-language word has (or should have) a clear aesthetic intention - to incorporate not just another language but another culture or subculture into the text, thereby enriching the text.

Japanese writing

Is there such a thing as a language that developed in such isolation that it may be considered a "pure" language and, therefore, its literature may not be describable in terms of multilingual literary criticism? The most obvious example of an isolated language is Japanese, which has, in fact, been called a "language isolate," even if it doesn't appear in Ethnologue's list of such languages. As W. David Marx points out, however, "the most accepted theory of recent years points towards a connection to Korean and the inclusion of both languages in the Altaic family of languages: Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic (Manchu)." It will be extremely difficult in practice, but in theory, multilingual criticism can still uncover various cultural substrata even in the relatively "pure" context of Japanese writing.

Different Greeks

Margaret Alexiou writes in After Antiquity: Greek Language, Myth, and Metaphor (2002):

“The language of Greek prose fiction has attracted less attention than that of poetry and has followed a different path.... While the dominant poetic mode has been declamatory, or what Bakhtin terms ‘monologic,’ prose has been more ‘dialogic,’ affording a wider variety of registers and styles.... For prose fiction, the preferred registers during the nineteenth century range from ‘high’ puristic Greek to the ‘mixed’ language of the short stories of Georgios Vizyenos (1849-96) and Alexandros Papadiamandis (1851-1911), both of whom draw on registers from dialect to high puristic to convey distance, irony, and, above all, different narrative tones and voices. During the twentieth century, demotic has prevailed as the standard medium, but there is considerable variety in literary use of local dialect, from the Mytilenian colorings of Stratis Myrivilis to the Cretan tones of Nikos Kazantzakis, and a greater experimentation with register than was deemed appropriate in poetry.”

Even more difficult to analyze than the use of two or more languages in one text is the use of two or more registers (to non-linguists: types) of one language.

Polyglot literature

Hugo Baetens Beardsmore, in “Polyglot Literature and Linguistic Fiction” (2009), proposes a classification that is useful to us: "Polyglot literature has been produced in Western Europe since at least the Middle Ages. Its presence has been noted in Italy, Provence, Castille, The Netherlands, England, and it was produced both for the restricted literary circles of princely courts as well as the unlettered mass. Several varieties of linguistic usage come under the general heading of Polyglot literature. A first form consists in the use by one and the same author of two or more languages in separate literary texts. A second form consists in the use of more than one language by a single author within the same text. A third form owes its origin to a language contact situation and uses a non-standardised language where interference phenomena are manifest. Finally, a fourth form is one in which ‘freakish’ linguistic features, due to the imagination of their creators, are to be encountered. Unlike the first two categories, the last two are generally found in frontier areas of language contact."

The first form is not too interesting to us, except that it illuminates the mind of major writers such as Samuel Beckett. It is the second form that we usually talk about when we say "multilingual literature." The third form is, of course, also interesting, because an author apparently trying to mirror real language shares the attributes of that language (that language being by itself mixed). It is the fourth form that interests us most, because here is where literature takes over linguistics. The linguist may call parts of a literary text "freakish" (despite the quotation marks to indicate a non-literal meaning), but to literary critics, the freakishness is what writing is all about. When a writer uses two or more languages in a single text, s/he hopes to harness two or more cultures (not just languages), thereby increasing the scope and power of the text.

Adrienne Rich

Jane Hedley writes in "Nepantalist Poetics: Narrative and Cultural Identity in the Mixed-Language Writings of Irena Klepfisz and Gloria Anzaldúa" (1996):

"In What Is Found There, her recently published meditation on poetry and politics, Adrienne Rich suggests that in the late twentieth century North American poetry is beginning to be ‘a multicultural literature of discontinuity, migration, and difference.’ Often, she explains, it is a bilingual poetry, ‘incorporating patois and languages other than English’: bilingualism is a fact of life for many of these writers, and it is ‘expressive,’ Rich points out, ‘of the divisions as well as the resources of difference.’”

We are not the first to notice the emergence of multilingual literature (older than macaronic verse) nor the first to take it seriously (because macaronic verse was not quite taken seriously during its time), but we are the first to propose that multilingual literature is the general case and what is apparently monolingual writing is the special case, or to push our physics analogy more accurately, that apparently monolingual writing exhibits all the characteristics of multilingual writing, but since the effects of these on the writing seem negligible, critics do not realize that they are really multilingual.

Dalisay on practicality of multilingual writing

Just an alert about a column today about writing professionally. Jose "Butch" Dalisay, an internationally award-winning novelist, writes in his column Penman in Philippine Star:

"Learn to write bilingually. Many clients — NGOs, government and international agencies — need material in more than one language, especially when they’re reaching out to local communities. Also, you may need to conduct interviews in Filipino or other non-English languages."

It makes a lot of practical sense to be a multilingual writer.

Inner Circle of readers

Kachru's Inner Circle used to be called, before political correctness kicked in, Native Speakers. Perhaps Marc Prensky's term Digital Natives is more appropriate. In our Inner Circle of readers of a multilingual text are those that grew up with all the languages used in the text, not necessarily because these languages were all mother tongues (that would be impossible), but because, sometime before they read the text, they either studied the languages or lived in cultures that spoke those languages. Europeans are obviously privileged in this connection, because they constantly hear, if not speak, more than their own language. So are Filipinos, who are forced by the geography of their islands to learn at least three languages (their mother tongue, the national language, and English). But all peoples, if we look at their histories, are necessarily multilingual, since no language is exactly the same as it was at the time of the Tower of Babel. Clearly, in what Circle an individual reader is will be determined by the text itself. That means that, unlike Kachru and even Prensky, we do not peg a person to just one Circle. We all move into and out of one Circle, depending on the text.

Kachru-type classification

I'm thinking of applying Braj Kachru's classification of English speakers to multilingual literary criticism. We could classify readers of a literary text in this way:

INNER CIRCLE = readers who know all the languages and cultures from which all the words in a literary text come; these readers are able to understand and to appreciate everything that is going on in the text

OUTER CIRCLE = readers who know at least two but not all the languages and cultures from which the words in a literary text come; these readers are able to understand and to appreciate some or most of what is going on in the text

EXPANDING CIRCLE = readers who know only the main language of the text; these readers are barely able to understand and to appreciate what is going on in the text.

My Inner Circle comes very close to what the New Critics and the Reader-Response Theorists would call an Ideal Reader, which is something like the reader that James Joyce wanted (he famously said that, since he took a lifetime to write Finnegan's Wake, it should take a reader a lifetime to read it). Although the Ideal Reader is ideal (i.e., not real), we could all attempt to become one, at least as far as a literary text is concerned.

My Outer Circle is probably where most, if not all, multilingual critics belong. We at least know a couple of the languages being used by the writer. Since by definition, the critic always knows less than the writer (as evident in the history of literary criticism, literary theories always coming after literary movements), it is not bad at all, nor even humbling, to bow to the superior linguistic prowess of a writer.

My Expanding Circle describes probably 90% of critics writing today. Sadly monolingual, such critics miss the other languages and cultures embedded or harnessed in a text.

Happy Chinese New Year

恭喜发财 or 恭喜發財
No matter how the characters are read (the Chinese pronounce the same characters in different ways), the greeting is the same: Happy Chinese New Year (or more strictly translated, "Congratulations for having lived this long, and may you have more money this coming year than last year," or something like that). Since I have Chinese blood (my maternal great grandmother was 100% Chinese), I can say this with full sincerity (though I still cannot speak nor read Chinese, despite having attended classes in Mandarin): congratulations and be prosperous!

Happy Valentine's Day

Feliz día de San Valentín
ハッピー バレンタイン
Buon San Valentino
Alles Liebe zum Valentinstag
情人節快樂
情人节快乐
Bonne Saint Valentin

Writers change language

"‘Ordinary speakers’’ creativity in handling their own language has been in the focus of some scholars’ attention," writes Evgeniy Y. Golovko in "Language Contact and Group Identity: The Role of 'Folk' Linguistic Engineering" (2003). "For example, there are several works studying ‘language play’ in Russian. Most material in such works comes from fiction. It means that major ‘language players’ are people who have made ‘playing with language’ their profession. This professional play is not of much interest for the topic [purposive language change] under consideration. However, it should be kept in mind that the product of professional playing with language spreads to ‘ordinary speakers,’ and the ‘rules’ of language play are very well understood by them. On the other hand, examples of language play are not only found in professionals’ work, but also in folklore, of both adults and children. It is just these mere facts that point to ‘ordinary speakers’’ potential for purposive language change (in the end, language play is nothing but a conscious language change). However, the language change made in the process of language play remains a speech improvisation, it does not become part of the language system." (p. 179)

I like the clause "language play is nothing but a conscious language change," but I disagree that the work of "professional language players" (that's us) remains in the realm of fiction and does not cross over to the world of "ordinary speakers." When Sigmund Freud was trying to figure out the relationship of creative writing to daydreaming, he paid attention to the writers themselves, of course, but he also pointed out that the bigger question was why readers read the works of writers. His answer is our answer to the issue in the paragraph quoted above. The reason ordinary speakers or readers read multilingual literature is that they participate in the language change. Readers are looking for exactly the same things that writers are looking for (and have found).

German the mixed language

"In this age of globalisation," writes Uwe Pörksen as translated by Aingeal Flanagan (Goethe-Institut 2009), "no language in the world can maintain absolute, original purity. But did such linguistic purity ever exist? Or is it wishful thinking, a mere construct?"

Pörksen offers ten principles (about the German language) that we could adopt, mutatis mutandis, as our own in multilingual literary criticism. Here they are:

"1. Bilingualism has been the norm throughout the history of the world’s civilisations. For over one thousand years (from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries), the most formidable counterpart of the German language was written and spoken Latin.

"2. Of all other languages, the contact with Latin has thus far had the most profound effect on the German language.

"3. Luther’s German did not emerge out of an independent development of the oral language culture, for which he had a good ear; instead, it was a borrowed creation from the Latin written culture; it was an artificial language.

"4. We were trilingual in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and parts of the nineteenth centuries. We not only spoke German and Latin, but French too.

"5. The French language also had a lasting effect on German. Peter von Polenz's magnificent three-volume history of the German language sees this effect in the inclusion of Germany in the modern, Western European cultural context.

"6. An independent German ‘literary language’, a written civilisational language, has been developed in fits and starts since the High Middle Ages.

"7. The ‘continuous’, uniform use of language advocated by Leibniz emerged both out of the Latin and French languages and in contrast to them, and it did so independently of the modern state, without a central institute, and without an academy or language supervision.

"8. It was the conscious, active work of a variety of parties that led to this state of affairs.

"9. In the century and a half between the nineteenth century and the 1960s, our country was comparatively monolingual; the German language dominated in almost every sphere.

"10. A third incisive period of language contact began almost half a century ago, namely the contact with the English language. It is likely that this contact will have a profound effect in the long term."

Once we realize that the development of a language is a conscious effort by literary persons (in Pörksen's translated words), we start placing literature once again at the center of civilization, since language, as he correctly points out in his essay, precedes the creation of states. We also start to understand why it is crucial for literary critics to unlock the multilingual substructure of any literary text.

Horace

We have all been too grateful to Horace for introducing the phrase dulce et utile (actually, he never put it that way; his exact words in Ars Poetica 343-44 were "Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci, lectorem delectando pariterque monendo") that we forget that he was wrong in condemning mixed language writing. In his criticism of Lucilius, Horace argues that monolingualism is superior to multilingualism. As Anna Chahoud explains, "A poet who picks such language – Horace insists – is no less to blame than a lawyer who is prepared to jeopardise his professional credibility: a Roman poet, just like a Roman citizen acting in the forum, has nothing to gain from demoting himself to the rank of a bilingual Apulian (the natives of Canusium spoke Oscan and Greek)." Can we not see here a parallelism between the great defender of the purity of the Latin language and the defenders of the purity of the English (or any other) language? To insist on "purity" or monolingualism is to ensure the death of a language! That is what the history of Latin (the international language for centuries, as opposed to English which has been an international language for only one century) tells us.

George Puttenham

"Puttenham," writes Gavin Alexander in Sidney's "The Defense of Poesy" and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (2004), "is no Aristotle, and the affection in which he is held by students of the English Renaissance can appear like a very English love of the quaint and unintentionally comical." A wild thought: could the prejudice against multilingual writing be due in part to the overshadowing of George Puttenham by Philip Sidney? After all, it was Puttenham who loved using words in his prose from two languages: "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. Puttenham is not frightened to employ neologisms when he wants to, but he sympathizes with those of the previous generation who had called for a purification of English and a return to its Anglo-Saxon origins; he employs many archaic, rustic or unusual Saxonisms.” (Alexander, lxvi) Of course, it does not help that Puttenham's authorship of The Arte of English Poesie (1589) is in question, but as in the work Περὶ ὕψους (Perì hýpsous) [On the Sublime], the name of the author should not really matter.

Defense of pidgin

There is a clear relationship between racism and the fear of pidgin. An article that examines this statement in the context of "broken English" among Chinese in the 19th century is Kingsley Bolton's "Language And Hybridization: Pidgin Tales from the China Coast" (2000). Here is the abstract:

"This essay looks at the history of pidgin and creole studies in the context of linguistic theory with particular reference to the study of 'Chinese pidgin English.' It argues that, although linguistics makes the claim to be an objective and systematic science, an examination of the past reveals that its own discourses have been shaped by a range of powerful forces from outside the disciplinary study of language. In the case of pidgin and creole linguistics (or 'creolistics'), one obvious influence is from European 'race theory' of the late nineteenth century, seen most clearly in the adoption of a vocabulary which includes terms such as monogenesis, polygenesis and hybridization. In the case of Chinese pidgin English, early accounts of the use of 'broken English' are found in the memoirs of sailors and merchants on the South China coast, and these were later supplemented by missionary and colonial accounts from Canton, Hong Kong and the treaty ports of China. The most influential account was that of Leland (1876), whose 'comic' account of Pidgin-English Sing-song contributed to the formation of a cultural imaginary of Chinese people at a time of growing anti-Chinese racism in the United States and Britain. Although many pidgin and creole scholars have denied a direct link between racial mixing and language mixing, it appears evident that the fear (and attraction) of racial miscegenation was at the heart of many western responses to pidgin English in China."

At the root of the marginalization of multilingual poetry is an analogous "ism" on the part of literary critics, who were usually brought up in the age of the old and discredited prescriptive linguistics. Unable to accept that the "colloquial" or "substandard" or "ungrammatical" or "idiosyncratic" (or whatever pejorative term) language being used by multilingual writers may be just as valid and respectable as the language they learned in school, these critics do literature a great disservice by limiting its traditional role - which is to deconstruct language itself, to make it defamiliar, to make it construct reality rather than be constructed by it.

Erotic Christmas carol?

I wish I knew Italian and more Spanish to fully appreciate "Fata la Parte," a 19th-century villancico. This is how it goes:

Fata la parte
tutt'ogni cal,
qu'es morta la muller
de micer Cortal

Porque l'hai trovato
con un españolo
en su casa solo,
luego l´hai maçato.
Lui se l'ha escapato
por forsa y por arte.

Restava diciendo,
porque l'hovo visto,
¡o válasme Cristo!,
el dedo mordiendo,
gridando y piangendo:
¡Españoleto, guarte!

¡Guarda si te pillo,
don españoleto!
Supra del mi leto
te faró un martillo,
tal que en escrevillo
piangeran le carte.

Micer mi compare,
gracia della e de ti.
Lasa fare a mi
y non te curare.
Assai mal me pare
lui encornudarte.

Based on the translation by Ruth Caldwell and Ruth Westfall, this is my rough idea of what the song says: "Cortal's wife is dead, because he found her alone in his house with a Spaniard, so he killed her. The Spaniard escaped, but he should watch out, because if Cortal catches him and gives him a blow on the head, the very paper will weep."

In translation, the double entendre is not obvious. Can someone please unlock the double meaning for me? It is even said that this is a Christmas carol with a sacred theme. Is this true?

Emotional linguistics

In literary criticism it is very hard not to be emotional, because one of the main attractions of literature is its appeal to the emotions. While doing criticism, a critic can pretend to be schizophrenic and not be affected by the strength of the emotional appeal of a literary text, but it is a shame if the whole person is not involved in the act of criticism. Being passionate about a particular literary text is a common motivation to want to reread and reread that text in order to get at what exactly is going on inside the text. A critic has to really love a text in order to spend so much time with it.

Linguists go overboard, however, when they become emotional when discussing language. Such emotionalism mars an otherwise intelligent account of the language of the Qur'an by Ibn Warraq. Here are excerpts from the account:

"The Koran is putatively (in fact it is very difficult to decide exactly what the language of the Koran is) written in what we call Classical Arabic (CA), but modern Arab populations, leaving aside the problem of illiteracy in Arab countries, do not speak, read, or write, let alone think in Classical Arabic. We are confronted with the phenomenon of diglossia, that is to say, a situation where two varieties of the same language live side by side. The two variations are high and low. High Arabic is sometimes called Modern Literary Arabic or Modern Standard Arabic, and is learned through formal education in school like Latin or Sanskrit, and would be used in sermons, university lectures, news broadcasts and for mass media purposes. Low Arabic or Colloquial Arabic is a dialect which native speakers acquire as a mother tongue, and is used at home conversing with family and friends, and is also used in radio or television soap opera."

"You are asked aggressively, 'Do you know Arabic?' Then you are told triumphantly, 'You have to read the Koran in the original Arabic to understand it fully.' Non-Muslims, Western freethinkers and atheists are usually reduced to sullen silence with these Muslim tactics; they indeed become rather coy and self-defensive when it comes to criticism of Islam; they feebly complain 'Who am I to criticise Islam? I do not know any Arabic.' And yet they are quite happy to criticise Christianity. How many Western freethinkers and atheists know Hebrew? How many even know what the language of Esra chapter 4 verses 6-8 is? Or in what language the New Testament was written? Of course, Muslims are also free in their criticism of the Bible and Christianity without knowing a word of Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek."

Once religion gets into the picture, even linguists lose their objectivity. By looking at what happens to linguists when their emotions get the better of them, we literary critics can avoid the pitfalls of letting our strong emotions get in the way of helping readers unlock the meanings of a literary text.

"Macaronic" not pejorative

In most encyclopedias or websites, the word macaronic is mentioned in a pejorative or at least patronizing way. Macaronic verse is often considered a minor category of comic literature, something not worth much scholarly attention.

But the word macaronic need not be used in a trivial context. Here is an account of "Chorale Melodies used in Bach's Vocal Works: Christ ist erstanden":

"Many cantiones were translated into German long before the Reformation and were frequently sung antiphonally, particularly in Germany and Bohemia, with alternating Latin and German verses. A number of these mixed-language song pairs such as Surrexit Christus hodie – Erstanden ist der heilig Christ (and the completely macaronic In dulci jubilo – Nun singet und seid froh, with alternate Latin and German lines) were appropriated unchanged into the Reformation hymnbooks and are included in the Evangelisches Kirchen-Gesangbuch in German versions alone."

Here is a serious discussion of a serious form of art (sacred music). It is time to rehabilitate the word macaronic and to use it to indicate a serious form of literature.

Choosing between words

In The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979), Roger Scruton writes:

"Even in the case of literature – for which a semiological account might seem to be particularly suitable – it is doubtful that ‘aesthetic’ values and significances can be described in semantic terms. Even here the creation of aesthetic significance depends, in the last analysis, on the discovery of ‘correct’ and ‘appropriate’ details, and we cannot assimilate this idea of correctness to a semantic rule. The ability of the poet is the ability to choose between words despite their identical semantic properties, to choose, for example, the word sans instead of the word without, as in a famous Shakespearian example. It is the ability to choose between words with, as Frege would put it, the same sense but different tone. And we cannot assimilate ‘tone’ to any semantic category. A word acquires its tone as a consequence of its use and of the rules which govern it. Tone cannot therefore be the subject of a rule. It is for this reason that we must distinguish, even in literature, between style and linguistic competence. A style might be imitated, but it is already an aesthetic achievement, not available to any language user irrespective of his creative powers.” (p. 176)

In literature, particularly poetry, it is not the semantic or denotative meaning of a word that takes priority, but first its sound, then its cultural or literary source. To a poet or a critic, sans is a world of difference from without. We cannot imagine Shakespeare using without in the famous line "Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything" from Act 2, Scene 7, of As You Like It. The meter would not be correct, the French allusion would be lost, and most of all, the sudden shift to another language signalling the introduction of a major idea would not be there. Literal meaning is not everything (nor even a lot) in literature, particularly poetry, particularly Shakespeare.

Multilingual verse may be divine

In “‘I am the Nightingale of the Merciful’: Rumi’s Use of the Qur’an and Hadith” (2003), Nargis Virani argues that:

"Rumi inserted innumerable references to the Qur’an throughout his poetry either by direct quotation or by allusion. This general trend is maintained in Rumi’s mulamma’at. However, in accordance with the strictly technical definition of mulamma’ offered by literary critics of the medieval Muslim world, poems incorporating Arabic for the sole purpose of quoting the Qur’an are not considered mulamma’at. In this section, I discuss Rumi’s use of the Qur’an and Prophetic sayings, Hadith, and analyze his manner of inserting these quotations, both metrically and thematically, in Arabic, Persian and the mulamma’at verses. I argue that the complete fusion, which occurs metrically and thematically in these poems, mirrors the fusion between the Divine word and the poet’s.”

We learn two things from this brief paragraph. First, not all multilingual verse should be considered multilingual in our sense. The words in another language may only be quoted, in which case they do not really bring into the poem another culture. Second, when there is truly a fusion (rather than mere borrowing or quoting) among the words in both languages, that fusion may be considered divine. (The word "divine" need not refer to God, although believers would prefer it to; the word may simply refer to the Muse. When we say a work is "divine," we rarely mean that it has something to do with the Divine.)