Onomatopoeia

One of the reasons cited by poets that use more than one language in a single text is verisimilitude or true-to-life-ness.  One way to test whether a word is true to life or not is to do what the paradigm-shifting linguist Ferdinand de Saussure did – to check how different languages report the same sound.  Take a rooster.  Clearly, all roosters emit exactly the same sound when they crow.  How that sound is written on paper (and if Saussure is right, how the sound is actually heard by a listener) depends on the mother tongue of the writer.  Here is a list of the words used in some languages to mimic the sound of a cockcrow:  kykyliky (Danish), kukeleku (Dutch), cock-a-doodle-doo (English), kukkurukkuk (Filipino), kukko kiekuu (Finnish), cocorico (French), kikeriki (German), kikiriku or kikiriki (Greek), coo-koo-ri-koo (Hebrew), kukuriku (Hungarian), chicchirichí (Italian), ko-ke-kok-ko-o (Japanese), cucurucu (Portuguese), kukareku (Russian), quiquiriquí or kikiriki (Spanish), kuckeliku (Swedish), kuk-kurri-kuuu u uru uuu (Turkish), kuklooku (Urdu).

Here is one difficulty multilingual writers have.  If they use the sound as spelled in another language, they lose their monolingual reader, because the word would be unrecognizable.  On the other hand, especially if the text is prose rather than verse and the sentence is supposed to be uttered by a foreigner or someone using a different language, it would not be true to life if the cockcrow sound were spelled in the main language of the text.  For example, if I wrote in an English short story, “The Filipino heard the cock-a-doodle-doo of the rooster,” that may make sense to an American reader, but would be plain nonsense to a Filipino reader (who has never in her or his life heard a cock crow “cock-a-doodle-doo.”)

Early Welsh and Old English poetry

Multilingual literary criticism is not new, although obviously not as old as multilingual literature itself.  Here is a relatively early example of how the knowledge of two languages helps a critic enter more deeply into texts:

"Between languages: 

the uncooperative text in early Welsh and Old English nature poetry

Sarah Lynn Higley

Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993 - Literary Criticism - 314 pages

"Early Welsh and Old English poetry are rarely spoken of together, but when they are, they have been described as like or different from one another. Sarah Higley breaks this cycle of mutual marginalization by examining what it means to read otherness or sameness into a text, concluding that too much of our reading is 'anglo-centric' in its expectations and dictated by invisible ideological agendas. ... Higley sees the English and Welsh traditions as foils to one another rather than as template and variation, and she starts with the connection of natural image and emotion, employed differently in these two contiguous but separate traditions. She shows how the English poems, long thought to be disjointed and cryptic, are invested in explanation and disclosure to a degree that the Welsh are not. The Welsh 'omissions' might be better understood as dynamic juxtapositions wherein other poetic aspects (metrics, imagery, context) serve to link ideas, perhaps even to disrupt them. She sees difficulty, ambiguity, and dialogism as loci of power - neither accidents of our reading distance nor defects in other classical standards of wholeness. Reading the English and the Welsh together with a respect for the mutual differences helps us to get beyond some of the cliche's about what is English and 'familiar' and what is Celtic and 'other.' Her argument revolves around the plight of the lone human as he or she is depicted in these texts in a precarious state of connection with the rest of the world: caught between society and wilderness, inside and outside, sacred and secular, meaning and nonmeaning. This focus on connection informs the title as well: 'between languages' expresses our position as readers reading two different cultures together, reading ancient literature mediated through modern poetic theory, and the position of medieval scholarship in its struggle between traditional and postmodern approaches."

Jorie Graham

I had to share this.  It's the transcript of a 2008 interview of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham (the video is available):

"Question: Why is English better for poetry than the Romance languages? 

"Jorie Graham: The romance languages are languages that were far more infiltrated by Latin, and the further north you go and the further you go towards the reaches of the empire, the more the vocal language stayed alive in the midst of the Latin, so that if you get as far as England, which was a place that was never conquered entirely by Latin, you have both Anglo-Saxon and Latin present simultaneously, which makes, although the romance languages are very mellifluous and very beautiful, the complexity of the language as it exists in English is unique partly because at a certain point in the British Isles you would have needed both the Latin term and the Anglo-Saxon term for the same object. And Anglo-Saxon terms tend to be less generalizing and more precise so you would have a Latin word for something that would equally true anywhere in the Empire. In other words, the word for justice, and then you would have 14 names for different kinds of buckets used in the field, some are in the British Isles to milk endlessly different creatures and a specific bucket named for each use.

"So you have this already very rich pool, and then you bring that language across to the colonies, and you have a very absorptive greedy English language that begins to basically, unlike many romance cultures, happily steal words from Native American languages and Spanish and Dutch and Portuguese and French, a lot of Native American languages in particular and a lot of Spanish. So that, because it is a mercantile culture right from the start, it wants to be able to buy and sell, it needs every language that it can to do so.

"So you have an enormous vocabulary influx into the English language. So you have not only the tens of thousands of words invented by people like Shakespeare, but you also have all the fabulous riches of these stolen words that became absorbed into America. Then, unlike French, for example, that loves to keep its language quite pure, you have this language which is not only impure, and increasingly so, it probably absorbs new words every hour of every day, but it also makes it possible, because it is a language that evolved primarily in a society that was attempting and experimenting in the removal of a class system. And it is only an experiment, it still, you will notice in American English that you are allowed to use high and low diction in the same phrase and not feel like you are using an incorrect piece of language. If you were to begin speaking in Italian or French, a person would know within minutes or seconds, not only where in the country you come from, but also, really, what economic or social part of the culture you belong to.

"And, so, the American language is incredibly rich. One of the things that they say about America, that Americans have the largest vocabulary of any language that exists on the planet today, but they have the smallest speaking vocabulary.

"So when the French get very irritated and say why is English the universal language, there are so few words in it, it is because, on the average, Americans use a tiny percentage of the actual words that are at their disposal in the language. But it makes for an extraordinarily rich language if you are trying to write poetry."

English may indeed be a rich language for poetry, but even if it borrows liberally from other languages, it is still not the other languages.  A multilingual poet using more than English in an English poem clearly has an advantage over one using only words already incorporated into English.  One thinks of Chaucer, who deliberately included French words in Canterbury Tales, although these words were not in English at that time (and, of course, became English because of him).  It is the English language poet, not the general public, that enriches the English language by borrowing words not because they are convenient or needed but because they add to the literariness or poetic quality or aesthetic beauty of the work.  A poet that sticks only to what a dictionary currently includes is hampered by the limitations of the language; a poet that harnesses the resources of every language s/he has access to becomes a Chaucer.

Gemino H. Abad on language

Poet, critic, and literary historian Gemino H. Abad, winner of Italy's Premio Feronia Citta di Fiano in 2009, gave a lecture on 28 August 2010 to the Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas [Writers Union of the Philippines].  He said: "It is the sense for language that needs to be nurtured and cultivated, because the sense for language is the poetic sense.  It is the poetic sense that later in one's life, says the poet Yves Bonnefoy, 'opens to the intuition that all language refuses.'  One may be language-bound, culture-bound, but it is the poetic sense that liberates.  In that light, there is ultimately no English, no Filipino, no Cebuano -- there is only language itself, the supreme human achievement, the finest human technology.  Indeed, language is the hidden Muse, for it is one's imagination's agon or struggle with language that gives rise to the literary work as both work of imagination and work of art."


Yes, indeed, for a literary artist, individual languages such as English, Filipino, and Cebuano, are just manifestations of Language Itself, langage rather than mere langue or parole.  This theoretical insight brings in a new level to multilingual literary theory.  In addition to unlocking the cultural and linguistic meanings brought by another language or other languages into an apparently monolingual or a clearly mixed language text, the multilingual critic also has to dig deeper to get at the langage behind the langue/parole (or Language Itself behind the dictionary words).  Once a critic is able to do that, the critic no longer talks linguistics but literature.

Not "pidgin"

In "Bridges of orality:  Nigerian pidgin poetry" (1995), Ezenwa-Ohaeto writes:

"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. However, the development and utilization of Pidgin as a language medium in Nigerian poetry owes its manifestation to the reality of its profuse use along the coast and also in the hinterland, where the indigenous Nigerian languages predominate."


If multilingual poems faithfully reflect reality, would it necessarily logically follow that monolingual poems distort reality?  Is there really a community today that speaks and understands only one language?  With CNN being omnipresent, one would think that English would be a second language to everyone outside English-speaking nations.  With English itself having borrowed so many words from other languages, even those living in English-dominant communities cannot but be influenced by the "foreign" words.


I think the word pidgin unnecessarily puts a negative value on complex languages.  We should find a better word, such as advanced language?

Book announcement

Before the Divide : Hindi and Urdu Literary Culture

Edited by Francesca Orsini, Orient Blackswan, 2010, viii, 312 p, ISBN : 81-250-3829-0

Contents: Acknowledgements. 1. Introduction/Francesca Orsini. 2. Rekhta : poetry in mixed language: The emergence of Khari Boli literature in North India/Imre Bangha. 3. Riti and register: lexical variation in courtly Braj Bhasha texts/Allison Busch. 4. Dialogism in a medieval genre: the case of the Avadhi epics/Thomas De Bruijn. 5. Barahmasas in Hindi and Urdu/Francesca Orsini. 6. Sadarang, Adarang, Sabrang: Multi-coloured poetry in Hindustani music/Lalita Du Perron. 7. Looking beyond Gul-o-Bulbul: observations on Marsiyas by Fazli and Sauda/Christina Oesterheld. 8. Changing literary patterns in Eighteenth century North India: Quranic translations and the development of Urdu prose/Mehr Afshan Farooqi. 9. Networks, patrons, and genres for Late Braj Bhasha Poets: Ratnakar and Hariaudh/Valerie Ritter. Contributors. Bibliography. Index.

"Based on a workshop on 'Intermediary Genres in Hindi and Urdu', Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Culture is an attempt to rethink aspects of the literary histories of these two languages.

"Today, Hindi and Urdu are considered two separate languages, each with its own script, history, literary canon and cultural orientation. Yet, precolonial India was a deeply multilingual society with multiple traditions of knowledge and of literary production. Historically the divisions between Hindi and Urdu were not as sharp as we imagine them today. The essays in this volume reassess the definition and identity of language in the light of this. Various literary traditions have been examined keeping the historical, political and cultural developments in mind. The authors look at familiar and not so familiar Hindi and Urdu literary works and narratives and address logics of exclusion and inclusion that have gone into the creation of two separate languages (Hindi and Urdu) and the making of the literary canons of each. Issues of script, religious identity, gender are also considered.

"This volume is different in that it provides a new body of evidence and new categories that are needed to envisage the literary landscape of North India before the construction of separate 'Hindu-Hindi' and 'Muslim-Urdu' literary traditions.

"This collection of essays looking into the rearticulation of language and its identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will be useful for students of modern Indian history, language studies and cultural studies."

Agha Shahid Ali

Here is a passage from Aamir R. Mufti’s “The After-Lives of Agha Shahid Ali” (21 March 2010), which shows how awareness of two languages enhances one reader's experience of reading poetry:

“Lord, cried out the idols, Don’t let us be broken;

 Only we can convert the infidel tonight.

      ….

“And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee –

God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight. 

“The second and third couplets I have quoted sound like they could originally have been written in Urdu, so faithful is their replication of rhythms and attitudes that are characteristic of its poetry. It is not uncommon for Shahid’s western readers to wonder if they are reading translations from some other language. And the ghazal ends by invoking perhaps the most famous opening line in American literature — from Moby Dick — but it is simultaneously, of course, an Islamic reference as well.

“This cultural crisscrossing is a typical feature of his poems, which often weave a complex passage across civilisations. No language, no civilisation, no cultural ethos is to be left alone in peace with its own internal values, symbols and presuppositions:

“No language is old — or young — beyond English.

So what of a common tongue beyond English?

I know some words for war, all of them sharp,

but the sharpest one is jung — beyond English!

      …

“Go all the way through jungle from aleph to zenith

to see English, like monkeys, swung beyond English.

      ….

“If someone asks where Shahid has disappeared,

he’s waging a war (no, jung) beyond English.           

“This is not a set of multicultural clichés about the mutual coexistence of diverse cultures. Urdu — its rhythm, sounds and mood — is poured into English, so that we are left just a little bit uncertain about which language we are in. In the age of its global dominance, Anglophone writing, the poem suggests, has the ethical responsibility to look beyond itself. The mere repetition of the radif in each couplet produces an insistence, to be open to other worlds, to look ‘beyond English.’           

“In many of his ghazals, and in fact in quite a bit of his poetry, Shahid seems to have attempted the impossible: writing Urdu poetry in English. It is evidence of his remarkable talent that to a measurable extent he seems to have succeeded.            

“And of course this mixing of languages recalls the birth many centuries ago of Urdu itself, the quintessential mixed language, created when Persian and Arabic rhythms, sounds and moods were poured into Hindi, the vernacular of north India. An early name for Urdu is of course simply that — rekhta (poured, spilled or mixed).”

Mixed language poetry brings us back to the beginnings of poetry.  Innovation is nothing else but being faithful to tradition.

Rūmī and Turkish

I’ve recently rediscovered Rūmī, especially since he has become quite a favorite on YouTube.  As a literary artist, of course, Rūmī has raised all sorts of questions about his choice of languages.  For example, here’s a passage from Lars Johanson's "Rūmī and the Birth of Turkish Poetry" (1993):

“The questions heap up:  Why did he not write more in Turkish?  Was he not interested in the emergence of a Turkish literature?  If he had been, would he have contented himself with a few simple verses and playful ‘macaroni’ mixtures of elements from two languages?  What was wrong with his attitude towards Turkish?  Did he regard it as a vulgar language; and did he even despise the common people speaking it?

“Such questions are, of course, wrongly posed.  It cannot be concluded from Rūmī’s choice of language for his poetry whether he looked down on Turkish or not, and whether he was, as it is sometimes formulated, ‘for’ or ‘against’ the people (halktan yana vs. halka karşi).  Even the question whether he was ‘interested’ in the emergence of a Turkish literature seems rather naïve.  It is certainly in the retrospective only that it may appear as if Jelāleddīn Rūmī had been confronted with such an option at all.”

Indeed, a poet's choice of language should not be viewed as a clue to his/her views about the importance of the language.  There are many writers that write in an international language to gain an audience outside their country, but who, when asked, will passionately defend the primacy of their mother tongue.  The 19th-century Philippine novelist Jose Rizal is a good example:  although he wrote his masterpieces in Spanish, he wanted to write in his mother tongue (Tagalog) because he believed that it was superior to Spanish (he says so in his novels); he tried towards the end of his life to write a novel in Tagalog, but failed because, by his own admission, he was not very good as a writer in Tagalog.  Spanish (sprinkled with Tagalog words) was the medium he needed to discuss political ideology; Tagalog is better when it comes to concrete images.  (An example often cited is Tagalog's having numerous words for rice, as opposed to the Indo-European languages.)

Kristin Naca

Kristin Naca says "Speaking English Is Like":

"Brown and beige and blonde tiles set in panels of tile across the bathroom floor."


On the other hand, she says "Speaking Spanish Is Like":

"A bird in a tree sings to a parrot in a cage, next door."


A bilingual poet should write a similar pair of poems on "Writing English Is Like" and "Writing Spanish Is Like."  I bet that, for a poet whose mother tongue is Spanish, writing English is also like human-made products (like poems) trying desperately to appear beautiful, while writing Spanish is like creatures not made by human hands, but beautiful by nature (pun intended).  Sadly, though, writing Spanish, like speaking Spanish, is always associated with a cage, because the English language has become the language that liberates, whether Spanish speakers and writers like it or not.  But which is in the cage - Spanish or English?  For Naca, it seems that it is English that is the mere parrot.  Is it not strange that she should say that, since the two poems are basically in English with the Spanish trying to enter, even if Spanish is the more melodious and natural language?

A new book by alurista

PRESS RELEASE ABOUT ALURISTA'S LATEST BOOK:

"Aztlan Libre Press, a new, independent publishing company based out of San Antonio, Texas that is dedicated to the promotion, publication, and free expression of Xican@Literature and Art, announces the publication of its first book, Tunaluna, by the renowned veteran Chicano poet, alurista. This is alurista’s first publication in ten years.

"alurista is one of the seminal and most influential voices in the history of Chicano Literature. A pioneering poet of the Chicano Movement in the late 60s and 70s, he broke down barriers in the publishing world with his use of bilingual and multilingual writings in Spanish, English, Nahuatl and Maya. A scholar, activist, editor, organizer and philosopher, he holds a Ph.D in Spanish and Latin American Literature from the University of California in San Diego and is the author of ten books including Floricanto en Aztlán (1971), Timespace Huracán (1976), Spik in Glyph? (1981) and Z Eros (1995). His book, Et Tú Raza?, won the Before Columbus Foundation National Book Award in Poetry in 1996. Author of “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” he is a key figure in the reclaiming of the MeXicano cultural identity, history and
heritage through his integration of American Indian language, symbols and spirituality in his writings.

"Tunaluna is classic alurista: passionate, sensuous, and political. alurista’s tenth book of poetry is a collection of 52 poems that takes us on a time trip through the first decade of the 21st century where he bears witness to the 'Dubya' wars, terrorism, oil and $4 gallons of gas, slavery, and ultimately spiritual transformation and salvation. The 'Word Wizard of Aztlan' is at his razor-sharp best, playing with his palabras as well as with our senses and sensibilities.

"alurista is a Xicano poet for the ages and a chronicler of la Nueva Raza Cózmica. With Tunaluna he trumpets the return of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered-serpent of Aztec and Mayan prophecy, and helps to lead us out of war and into the dawn of a new consciousness and sun, el Sexto Sol, nahuicoatl, cuatro serpiente, the sun of justice."

Felicitaciones, alurista!

Amir Khusrau

Here's something about early Indian mixed-language poetry:

"In Hindi, for instance even before the advent of the four recognized categories of Bhakti poetry Gyana-Kshri, Prem Margi Sufi, Ram Bhakti and Krishna Bhakti , the emergence of Amir Khusrau was noticeable . Though mainly a Persian poet, born in Patiali (Uttar Pradesh) or, according to some scholars, in Delhi Khusrau was a devout mystic and disciple of the Sufi saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auslia of Delhi, and his bridal songs, riddles and stray couplets mark the beginning of poetry in a mixed language with an amalgam of Khari Boli grammatical syntax and a sprinkling of Turkish, Persian and Arabic words. He sings praises of his motherland and mixes with the common man of his times so as to give unhampered expression to his feelings with exuberance and spontaneity."

When poets write in the "real language of men" (and women), they have no choice but to mix languages, because real men and women, in most countries that are not isolated, use words from other languages to beef up their own.  No language is adequate to express everything that a human being feels; sensitive and articulate real men and women use words, ideas, and structures available from whatever language.  Poets that speak for and to real men and women (not just to literary critics or linguists or language teachers) similarly harness the resources of every language they can get a hold of.  If poetry indeed aspires to the condition of music (the universal language), then poetry has to use not just one language but as many as the poet can manage.

Artificial mixture of languages?

Mixing languages does not mean merely using two languages as they actually exist.  It also means creating a mixture that does not exist.  This seems to be the case with a masterpiece of French literature, the Girart de Roussillon (1165-80?), which is “a poem of very high quality, composed in a mixed language exhibiting features of both French and Occitan.”  The poem is “written in an artificial mixture of Provenςal and French.”  Of course, especially with poems in the past, it is very difficult scientifically to determine for sure if a poet is using what William Wordsworth referred to as "the real language of men" (and women!), but for literary criticism, it may not be crucial to the understanding and appreciation of a text whether the poet is merely mirroring reality or constituting it.  What is important is the poet integrates the two languages (whether authentic or manipulated) into a new whole that transcends, while harnessing the resources of, the two.

Not regarding oneself as "inferior"

In her article "Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s ‘Bilingual Blues’ and ‘Turning the Times Tables’:  Language Choice and Cultural Identity in Cuban-American Literature" (2007) Annabel Cox writes:  “When bilingual literature is produced by Cubano-American writers, in common with other Latino bilingual production, it calls into question US-anglophone assumptions concerning superior and inferior cultures clearly indicated in attitudes towards non-English languages in the United States.”  Although it cannot be denied that there is prejudice among mainstream American critics against American literature written in languages other than English, I often wonder if Ngugi wa thiongo's admonition that we must first decolonize our minds does not come into play here.  I have forced myself, for example, to think of Philippine literature first before I think of American literature.  I judge Ernest Hemingway's art on the basis of norms derived from the art of Bienvenido Santos and Nick Joaquin, rather than the other way around.  Perhaps Cubano-American writers can think of their mixed-language literature as the "mainstream" and monolingual American texts as aberrations.  The liberation of the mind through this simple but difficult technique is something only a creative writer can truly appreciate.

English for spirituality?

One reason writers use multiple languages is that they correctly feel that something cannot be expressed only in one language.  Ordinary readers have known this for a long time, although professional linguists and literary critics are hesitant to admit it, perhaps because of fear that they will find their own mother tongue (particularly English, which has the most number of fanatics) inadequate.  Here is a post from an ordinary blogger whose mother tongue is Dutch:

My English is excellent (if I may say so myself) when it comes to complicated issues. I sometimes feel it's easier to talk about spirituality in English than my native Dutch.


Is spirituality really "easier to talk about" in English than in Dutch (or any other language)?  That's very interesting, because many English poems deal with spirituality.  (I am talking of real poems, not the Hallmark-type verse that abounds in "spiritual" inspirational books or websites.)  On the other hand, think of the Catholic saints:  how many of them had English as their mother tongue?  Surely, a minority (though I haven't actually counted).

Teaching multilingual literature in the classroom

In a 1983 article in The Modern Language Journal, Judith A. Myskens wrote that “very little mention of methods of teaching literature is made in teacher preparation materials.”  Someone writing today, almost thirty years later, would probably still be able to say the same thing.  Teachers assume that teaching literature is exactly the same as teaching language, or worse, teaching science.  Attention is paid more to facts (names and biographies of authors, meanings of words, literary histories based on dates and events, structures of sentences, grammar, that sort of thing) rather than to literariness.  This lack of sophistication in the teaching of literature works against multilingual literature, because students need much more than literary tools when dealing with entire subcultures or even cultures brought into a work that uses more than one language.  Literary critics cannot stay only within the confines of academic discourse; they have to start thinking about the implication of multilingualism on actual classroom practice.

Another country's language

One of the problems "selling" multilingual literary theory (as well as multilingual literature itself) is that many (if not most) literary critics are monolingual, if not in their speech, then in their outlook.  Of course, we have to make allowances for "patriotic" critics claiming that their country's literature is better than that of other countries (think of American critics loving American literature, British critics loving British literature, French critics loving French literature, etc.), but on the whole, literary analysis suffers if the norms used are based on the literary tradition of only one country or set of related countries.  I like the way comparative literature scholars or immigrant writers deal with the literature of the country where they currently or accidentally reside:  they always "compare" the literature they are now reading to that they used to or still read.

One online discussion group, The Literature Network Forums, now and then has someone champion the literature of a country not his/her own.  Take, for example, this post dated 30 May 2008:

"Now if you really want to learn an Eastern language, learn Persian. A literary history spanning thousands of years, this language has the most beautiful poetry. Almost untranslatable in English, you can spend your life-time studying poet after poet after poet right from the 6th century BC to the 21st century AD. Compared to Arabic, Persian is dead-easy. With only 7 clauses of mostly fairly straight forward verbs (Arabic has fourteen and most of them irregular!), the grammar is a doodle and a pleasure to learn. The vocabulary is huge but you learn with the passage of time. Here is a taste of the 20th century Persian Literature:

http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/bashiri.../blindowl.html

Surrealism, decadence, horror, no this is not French, this is Iranian Literature!"


I'm not sure about Persian being easy to learn, though I agree about the pleasure (I tried for a year, but gave up).  I do know that I learned a lot about the social context of words.  Here's a story I like to recount:  A long time ago, I was hired to teach in a university in Iran.  I hired a female tutor for Persian (in addition to a formal class handled by a male) for several months.  After I thought I had learned enough to do a lecture to my class in Persian (Farsi is how we called it) instead of English (which my Iranian students had difficulty following), I discussed a work in my newly-learned language.  After the class, one male Iranian student approached me and said, "Sir, you speak like a woman."  Needless to say, I dropped my tutor and delivered all my lectures in English after that.  I suspect (but do not know) that Persian literature has to be read with this gender distinction in mind.

The influence of the Chinese language on English

Here's the abstract of a 2004 article in Language, Learning & Technology about Chinese student writers writing in English:

"Second Language Cyber Rhetoric: A Study of Chinese L2 Writers in an Online Usenet Group.

by Joel Bloch

ABSTRACT

It has been argued that the expectations of traditional L2 writing classroom can be problematic for Chinese students, particularly in the area of argumentation and critical thinking. On the other hand, writing on the Internet has been shown to be substantially different in ways that may liberate the students from the constraints of the classroom. This argument, however, has typically focused on American writers, ignoring how cyberspace is being appropriated by those outside of the Western tradition of rhetoric. In this study, I examine how Chinese writers use the Internet as an alternative writing space to produce a rhetoric that incorporates traditional Chinese rhetorical forms expressed in English. The study focuses on how a group of Chinese writers respond on the Internet to a television segment accusing the Chinese government of planting spies. I found that the Chinese writers use the Internet to build a collective response to the television show using a variety of rhetorical strategies, even to the point of forcing the television network to meet with them. By situating their arguments in the tradition of Chinese rhetoric, I found that these alternative forms of writing found in cyberspace are affected by the traditions of Chinese rhetoric."

Even if the writers studied are only students, they point the way for professional writers using English as a second language.  There is no need to be intimidated by Shakespeare and company.  Using your own mother tongue's rhetorical and literary devices, you can change the literary tradition in the English language.  This does not threaten the English language, but in fact makes it even richer.  The farther away the English language gets from the UK and the USA, the better it will be as a language for literature.

Computerized grammar checkers

One of the problems in working with a second language is unfamiliarity with its grammar.  Except for English (which is covered by Microsoft), other languages are sometimes difficult to use because of the lack of writer-friendly grammar guides. Computers may come to the rescue, the way they now do spelling checks and word counts.  Of course, like translation tools, computer programs deal only with the most common issues and are not much help with the nuances that writers work with.  Nevertheless, it's a first step in not looking silly to users of other languages.  For example, we could try CrossCheck for Swedish, BonPatron for French, and LanguageTool for several other languages.  A good writer, needless to say, knows not just common grammatical rules but the intricacies of grammar and usage of the other language, in order to know when and why to break the rules for more important aesthetic considerations.

Reposted list of authors writing in English as second language

This article is from the Books FAQ, by Evelyn C. Leeper eleeper@jaguar.stc.lucent.com with numerous contributions by others.

What English-language authors learned English as a second language?

AUTHOR | FIRST LANGUAGE

Achebe, Chinua Ibo*
Arlen, Michael (Dikran Kouyoumjian) Armenian?
Asimov, Isaac Yiddish*
Bellow, Saul Yiddish, French?
Brodsky, Joseph Russian
Bronowski, Jacob Polish
Broumas, Olga Greek
Budrys, Algis Lithuanian
Codrescu, Andrei Romanian
Conrad, Joseph Polish
Cousteau, Jacques French+
Dinesen, Isak (Karen Blixen) Danish
Heym, Stefan (Helmut Flieg) German
Ishiguro, Kazuo Japanese*
Kakuzo, Okakura Japanese
Kerouac, Jack French
Kingston, Maxine Hong Cantonese
Koestler, Arthur Hungarian
Kosinski, Jerzy Polish
Lewis, Saunders Welsh
Limonov, Eddie Russian
Lin Yu-tang Chinese (Mandarin?)
Lowe, Adolph German
Lundwall, Sam Swedish
Malinowski, Bronislaw Polish
Milosz, Czeslaw Polish
Mukherjee, Bharati Bangla
Nabokov, Vladimir Russian*
Narayan, R. K. Tamil
Nin, Anais French
Rand, Ayn Russian
Sabatini, Rafael Italian
Seth, Vikram Hindi
Skvorecky, Josef Czech
Smirnov, Yakov Russian
Soyinka, Wole Yoruba
Stoppard, Tom Czech*
Traven, B. German?
Tutuola, Amos Hausa? (from Nigeria)
van Gulik, Robert Dutch
Vincinzey, Stephen Hungarian
Wertenbaker, Timberlake French
Wongar, Banumbir Arnhem Land aboriginal language
Zukofsky, Louis Yiddish

* Learned English as a child.
+ First book was in English

B. Traven is a pseudonym for someone of uncertain national origin, who
went to great lengths to obfuscate his past. German was probably his
first language, despite his disclaimers that it was English. (More detail:
His works were mostly originally published in German, and usually
translated into English by someone else, but the US edition of THE
TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE was edited for word order from B. Traven's
own translation. (And we know he was faking the bad word order, since
his letters and diaries are in proper order.) He did sometimes publish
in English first a few times, and that part of a pre-publication English
manuscript for THE DEATH SHIP (originally published in German) is
known.)

Other possible candidates include Timothy Mo, who grew up in Hong Kong
and was later educated in England. There are numerous Indian and
Anglo-Indian writers, like Vikram Seth (Hindi/Punhabi/Hindustani),
R. K. Narayan (Tamil/Kannada), Raja Rao (Kannada), Bharati Mukerji
(Bengali), Gita Mehta (?), Anita Desai (?), Markandaya (?), Tagore
(Bengali), and Salman Rushdie (Hindi/Urdu), for whom English may very
well be their second language. Some of the modern Soviet expatriates
write in English now (see Smirnov, above). Also Guneli Gun (Turkish),
Wole Soyinka, Ayi Kwei Armah (?), Ngugi wa Thiong'o (Kikuyu),
Dambudzo Marechera (Shona), many other African writers, Waguih Ghali
(Arabic), Walter Abish (German), Apirana Taylor (Maaori), Albert Wendt
(Samoan). Other possibilities include a number of Chinese and East
Asian authors. Also possibly Mavis Gallant, who spoke French as a child
in Montreal. Jan Willem van de Wetering wrote in Dutch and then
translated his books into English.

How about switches to other languages? French has Samuel Beckett
(first language English), Camara Laye (Dahomey), Julien Green
(English), Leopold Senghor (Senegalese?), Leon Troyat (Lev Tarassov,
a.k.a. Lev Tarossian) (Russian? Armenian?), and Elie Wiesel (Magyar and
Yiddish). Russian has Fazil Iskander (Abkhaz) and Chingiz Aitmatov (a
Central Asian Turkish dialect). Leonora Carrington wrote several short
stories in French or Spanish, before their translation into English.
Was Paul Celan's first language was Hungarian?

Milan Kundera's first language was Czech, but he now writes in French.

Then there are bilingual-from-birth writers, such as Liám Ó Flaithearta
Flann Ó Brien (real name Brian O'Nolan or Ó Nualláin), and Sean Ó
Faoileán. Many authors have also written novels in Esperanto.

FROM ME:  The list does not contain the names of hundreds of Filipino authors writing in English.  None of these authors had English as their first language.

John Guzlowski

Is a literary text written in a second language necessarily less profound than a literary text written in a mother tongue?  The following poem (reprinted without permission from the author) raises this question.  It would be good for a critic (someone else, not me!) to examine the philosophical content of works by Joseph Conrad (to name the most apparently profound of authors writing in a second language) and compare them with that of works by any monolingual British author of the same stature.

Kitchen Polish

by John Guzlowski

I can't tell you about Kant
in Polish, or the Reformation,
or deconstruction

or why the Nazis moved east
before moving west,
or where I came from,

but I can count to ten, say hello
and goodbye, ask for coffee,
bread or soup.

I can tell you people die.
It's a fact of life,
and there's nothing

you or I can do about it.
I can say, "Please, God,"
and "Don't be afraid."

If I look out at the rain
I can tell you it's falling.
If there's snow,

I can say, "It's cold outside
today, and it'll most likely
be cold tomorrow."

John Skelton

When using another language in a text, a poet often pronounces the borrowed words differently from the way those words are pronounced were the text completely in the other language.  One can say that this is mispronunciation.  One can argue, however, that the "mispronunciation" merely indicates indigenization or adoption of the second language into the mother tongue.  Either way, it makes for interesting thought.  Witness the last stanza of the poem "Philip Sparrow" by John Skelton:

Si in i qui ta tes

Alas, I was evil at ease!

Di pro fun dis cla ma vi,

When I saw my sparrow die! The Latin endwords were not pronounced by the Romans to rhyme with ease or die, but the British pronounce Latin that way (or at least used to).  Of course, Skelton is working for comic effect, but that does not change the literary technique: the words in the second language are still forced to act like words in the first language.

Chinese vs. English

What happens when two major international languages clash?  Are they elephants trampling us, poor grass?  Here is a recent article by Malcolm Moore in Telegraph about a protest against English words in Chinese publications:

Huang Youyi, chairman of the International Federation of Translators, claims that words such as okay, bye-bye, nice, modern and guitar are slipping in to every day Chinese, and causing problems.

Mr Youyi said: "If we do not pay attention and we do not take measures to stop Chinese mingling with English, Chinese will no longer be a pure language in a couple of years.  "The terms DVD, MP3 and CEO are so abundant in Chinese and they are very popular. But these imported terms can cause confusion."

Mr Huang, who went to university in the United States and is also the head of the China International Publishing group, one of the country's largest publishers, fears that the increasing flow of English words and phrases into Chinese conversation could endanger the future of the language itself.

"In the long run, Chinese will lose its role as an independent language for communicating information and expressing human feelings," said Mr Huang.

As China has opened up and modernised, it has struggled to contain the inward flow of Western culture and language. Presently, only 20 foreign films are allowed to be screened in Chinese cinemas each year, while a wide swath of websites, including Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, have been banned.

Nevertheless, Western brands have proliferated, English-language television shows are widely available and there are huge numbers of students wanting to study English. "Some of our people think that using foreign words is a sign of being open-minded and international.  

I do not think so," said Mr Huang. "Instead, we should have confidence in our own language. You cannot expect others to respect you unless you respect yourself," he said.

Mr Huang presented proposals to the recent Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference meetings in Beijing that would ban publications from using English names, places, people and companies.

Instead, the publications would have to translate the terms into Chinese. A national committee would be formed to make a series of official translations. "You rarely see Chinese characters in any English newspaper," he said.

However, Mr Huang has had little support for his proposals. Gu Yuego, a researcher at the Institute of Linguistics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said: "If we cleaned out all the borrowed words, less than half of modern Chinese will be left."

He added: "Borrowing words from other languages is a global phenomenon. It is a positive sign of cultural exchange and assimilation. There is no way that China can close the door on this.

France has tried many times to cleanse English words from French and they just make fools of themselves. Our Coke-drinking, Nike-wearing youth is undoubtedly still Chinese, but it has a broader mind and greater knowledge about other countries and cultures."

The prejudice against mixing languages is not a thing of the past, nor is it a thing only of countries less powerful than China or the United States.  Literary critics participate in this prejudice by marginalizing texts that blatantly use more than one language.  Something we learn from the debate in China:  the mother tongue (Chinese) will not disappear even if the second language (English) is very strong.  Critics insisting on a less widely-spoken and less widely-written "pure" mother tongue need not worry.  If a language has a strong literary tradition like Chinese, it will emerge stronger, not weaker, after the encounter with another language or literary tradition.  The problem, of course, is if the mother tongue does not have a strong literary tradition.  Then, it is really in trouble.

Célestine Vaite

Words from the bilingual author's mouth:


"Why did you decide to write in English, your second language? Do you think in English as you write, or do you think in your native language and translate your thoughts? Does writing in a second language affect the way you developed your characters or tell a story?


"I always act my dialogues (it helps me see my character as if she/he was standing right in front of me) and I talk in French as my character - professional cleaner, teenager, doctor etc - would in flesh and bones. Then I write in English. As for the narrative voice, it comes out directly in English but with the French/Tahitian voice in my head, as if my mother or auntie was telling me the story. Very often I'm translating literally. So it's, mind your onions and not mind your business. Writing in English is a lot of fun! True, it is a lot of work, but it forces me to really think about what I'm writing, and gets me focused on the tempo, the rhythm of story-telling."

Reading Sandra Cisneros

Here is John S. Christie's view of code-switching in Sandra Cisneros's short story "Bien Pretty":

"Code-switching plays a major part in the work of Sandra Cisneros. Take, for instance, a line from her story, 'Bien Pretty': 'If you don't like it Largate, honey.'  Her inclusion of the untranslated Spanish provides the emotional power of the advice rendered, the streetwise experience coming exclusively from the Spanish word.  In Rechy's Miraculous Day, Amalia's gut reaction to a visit from her adulterous husband's girlfriend is forcibly revealed via the same Spanish expression: 'Largate,' an order of vehemence and scorn along of the lines of 'Get out of here,' but charged with a testiness English can't duplicate except in vulgarity.  Cisneros's expression also automatically reveals the relationship between the speaker and her audience; the narrator addressing a peer  in a familiar style.  The writer uses the shift as one further indication of her narrator's frank, yet informal advice to an audience of women who might share her problems and desires.  Embedded in a paragraph condemning the senseless heroines of telenovelas, and exalting the women she has 'known everywhere except on TV, in books and magazines,' the Spanish here emphasizes that such women are not media created beauties, but Latinas: 'Las girlfriends. Las comadres. Our mamas and tias. ... Passionate and powerful, tender and volatile, brave. And, above all, fierce.'  The theme of the paragraph, signaled by the code-switching, points us back to the title of the story where the rather flimsy and superficial English word 'pretty' is enclosed in a Spanish grammatical structure and the English connotations of the word are redirected into an assertion that Latinas outrank the media created, stereotypical versions of attractive women.  This persona, common in Cisneros's work, has no problem with being a Latina and in fact relishes the vitality of her dual linguistic ability.  We see this in her unsympathetic attitude toward the monolingual reader's handicaps, when Cisneros even teases the reader, making it clear that the lack of Spanish is a limitation: 'Pretty in Spanish. But you'll have to take my word for it. In English it just sounds goofy.'  Like the word 'pretty,' here the choice of 'goofy' (Disney connotations included) trivializes English, while Spanish throughout the story -- the lists of songs, of herbs, of dances, of instruments -- conveys what is vital and genuine to the writer."

Notice how a study of just two words (Largate and pretty) takes quite a long time to do!  This is probably one reason most critics shy away from doing multilingual literary criticism - not just lack of energy or competence but also lack of time.

Mexican literature

That there is a felt need for critics to deal with multilingual literature is seen in such side remarks as those of Karen Grimwade in a note to her 2009 translation of "La litterature mexicaine au carrefour de trois cultures" by Alain Nicolas:  "I did quite a bit of research into contemporary Mexican literature and this seemed to suggest that writers often play with mixing Spanish, English and Mexican languages in their work."

I think that most literature readers today realize that there is a lot of language mixing going on in contemporary texts, but they don't quite know how to deal with this mixing.  Many readers, I suspect, just gloss over the "foreign" words, thinking that the context will eventually tell them what those words mean.  These readers lose the literariness of the text, which deliberately appropriates "foreign" cultures into the culture of the writer and the readers.  Just like in the good old days when New Critics made readers "understand" (as Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren put it in their textbook series of Understanding Poetry, Understanding Fiction, and Understanding Drama) what seemed to be inscrutable literary masterpieces, multilingual literary critics today have an obligation to help the ordinary reader appreciate the skill and the beauty of mixed-language and even apparently monolingual texts.

Appropriating an international language

The idea that a writer writing in a non-mother tongue appropriates or colonizes the foreign language is not a new one.  For example, Philippine poet and critic Gemino H. Abad's statement that "Filipinos have colonized the English language" is often quoted.  Here is the abstract of the article "English and Postcolonial Writers' Burden:  Linguistic Innovations in Femi Fatoba's My Older Father and Other Stories" (2004) by Ayo Kehinde:

"In a situation where two or more languages and cultures are in contact, there is bound to be linguistic and cultural interference. This is the situation with African literature of English expression where important socio-cultural habits and traits are expressed in a foreign language. Based primarily on the examples from Femi Fatoba’s My 'Older' Father and Other Stories (1997), this essay attempts to examine how postcolonial writers have appropriated and reconstituted the English language in their texts through some linguistic processes which include loan words, loan coinages, loan blends, pidginization, code switching and the like. Fatoba strives to find a solution to the problem of bilingualism/biculturalism in his text by relying heavily on the domestication of the imported tongue. The essay observes that although Fatoba has deviated from the international literary norms (linguistically), in the text, he has not falsified the tradition he has transformed into the English language. Rather, he has been able to bridge the gap between the local color variety and the appropriate English language diction suitable to the characters and themes he depicts. The essay also contends that linguistic innovations in Fatoba’s stories offer an outlet for creativity in language and put a new life into the imported language. The paper is concluded by suggesting that in this age of globalization, African writers cannot afford to deny their works of wide readership; therefore, they should consider the appropriation and reconstitution of English as a medium of African literature."

I think that thinking of this kind is a necessary step in the path towards a multilingual literary theory.  It is clear from the literatures of postcolonial countries that the language of the center is indeed appropriated, reconstituted, or colonized by the margins.  The next step after examining what happens to the language of the center, however, is more important and much more difficult:  to see how the literature of the writers in the center itself consists of languages away from the center.  A simple example is the writing of Edgar Allan Poe, clearly an American writer writing in the American variety of English.  It has been known by literary critics for a long time now that Poe was writing for a British audience, in the (vain) hope that he would be famous in England (the former colonizer).  How can we explain the unusual syntax of the sentences in his works by looking at the British, French, and Italian languages embedded in his texts?  That is a tall order for Poe enthusiasts, who do not all have the time to look at his works word by word, not to mention learn the European languages!

In theory, however, rather than in practice, we can see what is going on.  That is the beauty of theory.  Einstein thought up of his theory of relativity all by himself, without actually doing anything with his hands.  It took almost a century before somebody took the trouble of verifying his ideas (by watching the planet Mercury) by doing practical work.  But without Einstein, we would not have the computer age we are living in today.  Literary theorists, though they may look odd to the ordinary literature teacher, may be changing the entire landscape of literary study, but it might take years before we know it.

Braj Kachru on mixed-language literature

Here are three slides from a lecture by World Englishes guru Braj B. Kachru:

"Contact Literatures in English 

• Result of the contact of English with other languages in multilingual and multicultural context like in the case of Africa and Asia.
• The contact varieties, as time passes, acquire stable characteristics in their pronunciation, syntax, vocabulary and discoursal and style strategies.
• Long-term contact results in Nativisation and Acculturation.

• Nativisation
• Refers to the process which creates a localized linguistic identity of a variety
• Acculturation
• Gives English distinct and local cultural identities. 

"Such writing can be found in South Asia, West Africa, the  Philippines and Southeast Asia.

"Three facts on the Bilingual’s Creativity in English 

• The institutionalized nonnative varieties have an educated variety and a cline of sub-varieties.
• Writers in contact literature in English engage in lectal mixing
• In such writing, there are style-shifts which are related to the underlying sociolinguistic and cultural context

"The result of such style-shifts, appropriate to non-Western contexts, is new discourse strategies, use distinctly different speech acts, and development of new registers in English.

"Issue’s on the Bilingual’s Creativity in English 

• Question of language deficiency vs. difference
• Recognition of Innovations used for stylistic effect as “foregrounding”
• Recognition of various text types – code mixed or noncode mixed – which  are internationally meant for bilingual readers who share the bilingual’s linguistic repertoire and cultural and literary canon.
• Recognizing functional appropriateness of lacalized sublanguages and registers
• Providing contrastive typologies of linguistic and cultural conventions
• Describing the formal and functional characteristics of bilingual’s language mixing and switching"

I am glad that linguists have raised the bar in their study of multilingual literature.  Linguistics, of course, does not (perhaps cannot) distinguish between the use of different languages in a text because the writer uses different languages outside the text (or in non-imaginative, real life) and the deliberate use of other languages that the writer may or may not actually speak or even know (the latter for aesthetic reasons).  This is an area where we need multilingual literary critics that can spot translingual or interlingual meanings intended or not consciously intended by writers.  (A clear problem in his presentation: a reader or a critic of a multilingual text need not be multilingual, just as a writer of a multilingual text need not be multilingual in real life.  Remember T. S. Eliot's shantih in The Waste Land?)

Karen Van Dyck

Vivienne Nilan interviewed Karen Van Dyck in 2006 and gave this account of the scholar's work with interlingual Greek-English literary texts:


“In town this week to deliver the 11th Kimon Friar Lecture at the American College of Greece, Van Dyck spoke on ‘Gringlish Literature and the Question of Translation.’

“What exactly is Gringlish? In her lecture Van Dyck explained how Gringlish was first coined to describe the particular way Greek immigrants in America spoke because they didn't know enough English, coming up with formulations such as ‘Ftasame ta belozeria’ for ‘It's gone below zero.’

“The term eventually stretched to cover ‘the differently macaronic talk of their children for whom Greek, not English, was the foreign language (‘to flori’ for ‘floor’) and the language of radio and TV announcers and rappers in Greece who borrow words and grammatical structures from English.’

“Van Dyck has taken it further, to describe what she calls Gringlish literature, which is far more than a humorous mishmash of the two languages and which feeds into her interest in ‘literature written at the interstices of two or more languages. I find it fascinating to see how languages interact and alter each other, transforming the predictable into the unexpected by mixing up rules. Hybrid idioms intrigue me because they contain puzzles that demand going outside the box for solutions. One set of linguistic rules and cultural references is not sufficient. Greek Italian, Greek French, Gringlish or Gralbanian, for that matter, underscore how languages infiltrate and rewire each other, suggesting alternative identities and cultural communities that are impossible to stamp on a passport or codify in a census.’

“What makes Van Dyck's approach unusual for a scholar is that she zeroes in on precisely the elements that a more traditional academic might slate as grammatically, syntactically or lexically incorrect.

“As she explained in her lecture, ‘Gringlish offers a different approach to literature as well as translation by putting the emphasis on interference and complementarity over purity and replication.’

“Greek-American writers are teaching English speakers to read in a different way, argues Van Dyck, who also believes the most exciting literature comes out of these ways of thinking between languages.

“Citing Conrad and Nabokov as familiar examples of writers who worked between languages, Van Dyck noted how few readers of Greek literature think of the influence of other languages on leading demoticists such as Psycharis and Korais.

“‘It is important to think about national literature sometimes doing transcultural and translinguistic work behind the scenes,’ she said.”