Ilocano writers

The most internationally visible of Filipino writers writing in a vernacular language are those writing in Ilokano (variously called Iluko or Ilocano). Representative websites are Bilingual Pen, which hosts a number of major Ilocano writers in English and Ilokano, and Dadapilan, which has news items of interest to Ilocano writers. Unless I am mistaken, the very first website (now no longer existing?) focusing on Philippine literature was that of GUMIL, an international organization of Ilocano writers.

One of the followers of my blog is Ilocano and has his own blog. I once translated an Ilokano poem (by 19th century writer Leona Florentino), using a dictionary and an Ilocano informant, but otherwise, my knowledge of Ilokano is zilch. If I were given another lifetime, I would certainly learn it, since it is the language of many Filipinos living abroad, particularly in Hawaii.

Every time I am asked to be a nominator for the Philippine National Artist award, I nominate Juan S. P. Hidalgo Jr., who writes in Ilokano. Unfortunately, he never makes it, for the simple reason that the judges (who usually are English or Tagalog-dominant) cannot read Ilokano and, therefore, cannot say if his writing is of high quality or not. I know his writing is excellent, because I have asked quite a number of people who read Ilokano and they all say he's one of the best, if not the best, of living Ilocano writers.

Too specialized?

Is multilingual literary criticism too specialized? We have to think about this as the idea of over-specialization gets hammered, as a side result of the worldwide economic crisis. (Read the New York Times article by Columbia professor Mark Taylor.)

My initial answer is yes and no.

Yes, because there are very few of us looking at the polyglot aspect of literature. Even in our own specialized field, we cannot even claim that we are in so-called mainstream literature courses. (In the Philippines, even if Philippine Literature in English is usually taught in undergraduate courses, it is taught as though English were not a second or a foreign language to Filipino writers.)

No, because bilinguality or multilinguality is most likely the rule rather than the exception for creative writers. Since they are very curious and very literate, even monolingual writers usually take the trouble to be able to read another language. If we are able to convince more critics to think about the relationship of mother tongues to languages of literary creation, we might be able to establish what could be the kind of truly multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary area that Taylor is looking for.

Kindred spirits in anthropology

Little by little, the academic world is waking up to the reality that monolingualism severely limits the way we think. Take anthropology, for instance. Here is a 20 January 2009 blog entry about the journal Anthropological Quarterly:

"In Polyglot Perspectives, scholars will present essays on books written in languages other than English. Such languages may include those in which there is a long tradition of anthropological scholarship, but we hope to give particular emphasis to less widely used languages in which a nascent anthropology is already making important contributions that may be invisible to the larger international community.

"In launching this new section, we acknowledge that, in many ways, the English language has been allowed to define the anthropological mainstream. We also acknowledge that, in many disciplines, English has become the language of scholarship in countries where English is not the locally dominant language. Anthropology, however, is both a cosmopolitan discipline and one that seeks to recognize and study politically less powerful cultures and languages."

English has become the language of scholarship in the Philippines, where I live, even if English is spoken by less than 50% of the adult population and read by less than 20%. Creative writing, however, is mostly in various vernacular languages, though criticism (like this blog) remains mostly in English. The linguistic schizophrenia takes its creative and critical toll.

Oh, for a gadget like the Universal Translator in Star Trek, through which beings from anywhere in the universe communicate with each other! (Of course, I strongly disagree with the tempocentric view that, in the future, the Federation Standard will be Standard American English!)

A course on multilingual literature?

Doris Sommer writes in her Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (2004) why she started blazing the trail of multilingual criticism:

“At the School for Criticism and Theory during the summer of 2002, I graduated to a veritable United Nations of interlocutors interpellated by a call unfamiliar to aesthetics but commonplace in each of their fascinating lives. Josiane Peltier, for example, writes about detective fiction in her native French and elegant English when she is not reading in Spanish and Chinese literatures; historian Olga Dror’s original Russian and acquired Hebrew added Vietnamese, Latin, and Chinese to study popular religion in Vietnam; Laura Ceia-Minjares reveals Tristan Tzara’s private Romanian reveries between his public antics in French.” (pp. vii-viii)

Is it time to offer a course on Multilingual Literature? I would be interested in team teaching the course, if it is offered simultaneously across universities (using Skype or its equivalent). It would be paradoxical if the course were offered only in one language, so it would be ideal if the course could be offered in various languages to students speaking and reading in different languages. If not a course, then perhaps a lecture or two, by the leading critics in the field (Sommer would be one of them, and others I have named in this blog before). Or at the very least, a podcasted lecture. Anyone interested?

Maghrebi writers

The book Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations (2003), edited by Doris Sommer, is described in Amazon.com this way:

"These essays bring home the most challenging observations of postmodernism — multiple identities, the fragility of meaning, the risks of communication. Sommer asserts that many people normally live — that is, think, feel, create, reason, persuade, laugh — in more than one language. She claims that traditional scholarship (aesthetics; language and philosophy; psychoanalysis, and politics) cannot see or hear more than one language at a time. The goal of these essays is to create a new field: bilingual arts & aesthetics which examine the aesthetic product produced by bilingual diasporic communities. The focus of this volume is the Americas, but examples and theoretical proposals come from Europe as well. In both areas, the issue offers another level of complexity to the migrant and cosmopolitan character of local societies in a global economy."

In his contribution to the book, Réda Bensmaïa, in “Introduction to Tetraglossia: The Situation of Maghrebi Writers,” writes (pages 88-89):

“What language should one write in? In what language should one make films? In what language should people be allowed to speak and write? In what places? At what time? Or still, in French? Arabic? In Berber? In Kabyle? In literary Arabic? Problems as concrete and vital as these explain the acuity of tensions, contradictions and difficulties facing every artist in Algeria. For the writers to write, for filmmakers to make films, is a question of life and death, as each one of their gestures, each of their choices is a foundation. In every case it is a matter of delineating a ‘terrain’ and to find, at any cost, one way out of the labyrinth of tongues and languages.”

In some countries, multilingual literature is not just a harmless and pleasurable intellectual exercise that writers engage in. It could be as crucial to life as one's choice of religion, ideology, spouse, or physician.

Rosario Ferré

Poet and fictionist Rosario Ferré Ramírez, in a 2001 event entitled "Writing In Between," is quoted as saying, "I write in Spanish like I speak it -- fast. It is impossible for me to write in English like I write in Spanish. I can't be trigger-happy in English. Writing in English is like looking at the world through a different set of binoculars."

Here is one type of bilingual writer -- the type that has an unequal command of two languages (despite writing well in both). There are other types that we have already discussed in this blog. It might be time to do a typology or classification of bilingual/multilingual writers.

Esmeralda Santiago 2

Esmeralda Santiago's self-description of speaking in Spanish while typing in English is another way of putting N.V.M. Gonzalez's statement that he writes in Tagalog using English words (which is practically identical to the statement of Bienvenido N. Santos that he writes in Capampangan using English words). We might be able to make a generalization about multilingual writing: Multilingual writers write in their mother tongues using words of other languages. Since this formulation, however, makes it appear that the writers do not think in but are merely translating into the non-mother tongues, we have to qualify it a bit: Multilingual writers think and write in their mother tongues while thinking in and using the words of other languages. That's still a rather clumsy formulation in terms of style, but as we go along, we should be able to put it in a more literary way.

Esmeralda Santiago 1

"Many times, when writing, I was surprised to hear myself speaking in Spanish while my fingers were typing the same sentence in English," writes Esmeralda Santiago in the introduction to her Cuando era puertorriquena (1994, p. xv, translated by Catherine E. Wall).

This is one of the greatest joys of a bilingual writer - to be able to use two languages at the same time. Most monolingual persons think that bilinguals (or polyglots or multilinguals) think in one language and translate, whether consciously or unconsciously, into other languages. Here is a bilingual author testifying that this is not true. Translation is not the key to bilingual writing. The key is adding to, not replacing, the mother tongue in the creative act.

Vladimir Nabokov

"Very few bilingual writers attempt perfect equality in their two languages," remarks Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour in her Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the "First" Emigration (1989, p. 51). Vladimir Nabokov, justly famous for his English novels, has received some multilingual criticism, but certainly not enough. The sentence "Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their nature, which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as 'nymphets'" sounds vaguely like the English of an earlier century, but it is, in fact, as critics that can read Russian have said in so many words, an attempt by Nabokov (in Lolita) to write in Russian using English words.

Looking for overseas Cubans

"I am looking for stories of Cubans who have left Cuba," wrote bilingual novelist Teresa Bevin in her blog last March 25. "I invite you all to share with other Cubans and the world your experiences and struggles. It does not matter when or how you left the island. All of our experiences deserve to be shared." If you are an overseas Cuban reading this blog, please reply to her (Teresabevin@teresabevin.com). For everyone: if you know of any blogs that, like hers, is bilingual, please alert me, so I can cross-reference.

Lin Yutang

Multilinguality cannot be separated from multiculturality. One of the advantages of having a mother tongue different from the language you write in is your bringing into the new culture the best of your original culture.

Take the example of Lin Yutang (mother tongue Chinese, second language English). The following famous passages from his English works show a distinctly Chinese character in terms of the content (ancient wisdom) and form (proverb-like):

A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.

Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.

If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.

Where there are too many policemen, there is no liberty. Where there are too many soldiers, there is no peace. Where there are too many lawyers, there is no justice.

Psycholinguists

"When an individual adapts to a new culture at the expense of his primary culture we speak of a process of deculturation," write Josiane F. Hamers and Michel Blanc in their Bilinguality and Bilingualism (2nd ed., 2000, pp. 205-206). "Deculturation," they add, "is associated with psychological distress. Extreme deculturation leads to assimilation, which may be accompanied by first-language loss. If no assimilation into the host culture occurs, deculturation leads to anomie, a complex psychological state implying feelings of alienation and isolation vis-à-vis the society one lives in. Acculturation models disagree, however, on the extent to which acculturation processes lead necessarily to a form of deculturation."

Psycholinguists studying bilinguality would benefit greatly from looking at second-language literature (especially since writers are stereotypically alienated anyway). When a work is in a second language, does alienation occur because of language? I am talking not about the writer (although psychologists obviously are more interested in human beings than words on the page), but about the text as it compares with texts by monolingual writers. Are Villa's poems, for example, powerful because he is writing in a second language? Could a monolingual poet have arranged the words this way in a line: "I clothed myself in fire"? (Clearly, unlike psychologists, I do not regard alienation as negative, since it leads to marvelous works of art, no matter what the personal cost is to the artist!)

Jose Garcia Villa & Hilario S. Francia

When Hilario S. Francia translated some of the poems of Jose Garcia Villa into Tagalog, we got a clue to the way a multilingual critic could approach Villa's work. (For those not familiar with Villa: Villa is considered a minor American poet and a major Philippine poet - minor defined the way American literary historians define the term, namely, in terms of quantity, not quality, and major defined the way Philippine literary historians define the term, namely, in terms of quality, not quantity. Villa lived most of his life in New York. He was considered by his contemporaries, such as Marianne Moore and E. E. Cummings, as equal to if not better than them.)

Here are two lines from one of Villa's poems:

In my desire to be Nude
I clothed myself in fire:-

Here is Francia's Tagalog translation:

Sa aking paghangad na maging Hubad
Dinamitan Ko ang aking sarili sa apoy:-

The translation works as a translation, but what is interesting to me is to speculate on what Villa was thinking as he was writing the poem. In Tagalog, the thought would have gone this way:

Nais kong maghubad
Kaya ako nasunog.

Literally, that means "I wanted to be naked so (1) I burned myself because society does not approve of me being naked, and/or (2) I was burning with the desire to be naked." The ambiguity (I use the word the way the New Critics used it, namely, as a poetic virtue) is inherent in the Tagalog. What Villa managed to do was to say the same thing, more or less, in English. What the English adds are the rhyme (desire / fire) and the second line's iambic meter, which situate the reader solidly in poetic tradition. These attributes based on the sounds of English might explain the power of Villa's lines.

Subtitling music

To serious poets, subtitling or dubbing music is a serious matter. One of the leading writers of the Philippines, Jose Lacaba, for example, has translated more than fifty English songs into Filipino. To people not in the arts, however, it is a joke. Here is a blog entry that evoked both serious and silly reactions: "Somebody with too much time on his hands has been taking up music videos in languages he does not understand, and adding subtitles in a language he does, and evidently people find the result hilarious. So, this idea is for a genre of music, which makes sense in two languages simultaneously. The meaning could be different, of course." One reaction goes this way: "Q: why do the French have only one egg for breakfast? A: because one egg is un oeuf." Here is an area of profit (since writers rarely make money from serious creative writing) for multilingual writers. Music companies might be willing to pay zillions for writers that can subtitle music, with the second-language lyrics matching the original score note for note, of course (in other words, you can sing the subtitles to the music).

"A Flea" by Anne Tardos

On her website (as of today), Anne Tardos presents seven poems, all of which except for one are in English. Reading the English poems, one can easily grasp her sensibility (an exquisite one). The exception in terms of language is "A Flea," a poem made up of lines in various languages. I have to admit that I do not know most of the languages used and, therefore, can enjoy only the music of the lines when I read them as spelled (hopefully, some of the languages do not behave like French, where spelling and pronunciation are not exactly identical twins!). In the manner of New Critics focusing only on a line instead of tackling a whole work, let me write a little bit about the following stanza:

When we exit a room we make room
Walking distance après-vous resistance

The first line is straightforward: by leaving a room, we cause space to be created inside the room, since we vacate the space that we used to occupy. The second line takes us a few minutes later, when some distance (walking distance) away from the room, resistance (a French word here, not an English word) appears in the room, because the space created both expands and contracts, not knowing what to do because we are no longer there. Of course, there is an allusion to "apres moi, le deluge," or more precisely, this is a commentary on that well-known quote (which, btw, is itself poetically ambiguous, since people still wonder if it was King Louis XV or his lover Madame de Pompadour who said it first). The sense (we don't know if our leaving makes any difference or not) complements the sound (internal rhyme, both aural and visual), since the clash between aural rhyme (room / room) and visual rhyme (distance / French resistance which has a different sound) mirrors the indecision of those we left behind. Truly, apres nous, le deluge. (Let's not forget that the poem is entitled "A Flea," with an undertone of the same sound flee, as in flee the scene.)

Anne Tardos

In her essay, "How Not To Teach Multilingual Writing" (2002), Anne Tardos writes: "I grew up learning one language after another, like many Europeans born during the Second World War, moving from country to country, learning language after language by necessity, being equally comfortable in all of them. I don’t much care whether we’re conversing in French, Hungarian, German, or English. When I’m going from site to site on the Internet, I often don’t realize what language I’m reading, until I make a conscious effort to identify it. Similarly, when writing poetry, I don’t necessarily make a point of noticing the language I’m writing in."

Here is an important ingredient in the writing of successful multilingual poems: the writer must think in all the languages being used. Thinking in one language and writing in another adds another remove (to use Plato's classic word) to the relationship between the creative work and Creation.

The multilingual critic does not have to think in those many languages. I can read Spanish, French, Cebuano, and even a little German fairly accurately, if laboriously, though I can't speak in those languages except to say "That's overpriced" or something like that. With reading knowledge, however, I think I do a passable job of judging if a work is worth my time or not.

Is there such a thing as national literature?

One reader asks, "Do national paradigms cross languages or not? Will a trilingual Swiss writer write the same story the same way in French, German, and Italian?"

I am not an expert on Swiss literature. Let me give what must be a similar example from Philippine literature.

There is Philippine literature in Tagalog, Philippine literature in Cebuano, Philippine literature in Iluko or Ilokano, Philippine literature in Chinese, Philippine literature in English, Philippine literature in Spanish, and so on. There are more than a hundred languages spoken in the Philippines, about twenty or so of them with living literatures.

Philippine literature in English is clearly very different from Philippine literature in Tagalog. It is not just the language. The themes are different, the poetic forms are different, the rhyme schemes are different (Tagalog does not rhyme only in terms of sounds, but of equivalent consonants), the sensibility is different. Even the quantity is different (Tagalog has thousands of novels, English has only a couple of hundred).

Although there have been a few English translations of Tagalog novels, it is clearly the novels originally written in English that have caught international attention. (One such novel, Miguel Syjuco's Ilustrado, won last year's Man Booker Prize.) We cannot argue that this is due to the huge number of English-speaking literary critics around the world; such critics do not necessarily take time to study English novels from Singapore, Hong Kong, and so on (postcolonial literary theory harps on such marginalization).

Writing is teaching

All writing is teaching. All writers know this. Even without stepping into a classroom, a writer becomes the key player in education because it is the writer's text that is read by teachers and students. The case for multilingual literary criticism becomes stronger in the context of the current pedagogical situation in the United States, where multicultural education is an expressed need. American teachers are looking for multicultural literary texts to help them educate American children. Since it is impossible to remove language from culture, we are really talking here of multilingual literature. Here, for example, is a typical comment on multicultural education: "Experts in multicultural education frequently emphasize the importance of using literature to increase cultural awareness (Piper, 1986; Tway, 1989). The literature used should accurately portray the history, customs, values, and language of a particular cultural group (Sims, 1982). Through sharing carefully selected literature, students can learn to understand and to appreciate a literary heritage that comes from many diverse backgrounds (Norton, 1990)." While writers have enough to think about when they put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), they should feel good that what they write will help generations of previously monolingual, monocultural children get ready for the new century of borderless cultures and languages. Multilingual and multicultural literary criticism, on the other hand, will help teachers "carefully select" quality literary texts.

Amy Tan 2

Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong's critique of Amy Tan revolves around the novelist's mistake in translating the term tang jie. Wong cites a passage from The Kitchen God's Wife: “We called each other tang jie, ‘sugar sister,’ the friendly way to refer to a girl cousin.”

“The phrase ‘sugar sister,’" writes Wong, "is an egregious mistranslation based on Amy Tan’s confusing two Chinese homophones, while the accompanying explanation of how the two young women come to address each other by that term betrays a profound ignorance of the Chinese kinship system. What is most remarkable about this passage is its very existence: that Amy Tan has seen fit to include and elaborate on such a ‘gratuitous’ detail – gratuitous in the sense of not functioning to advance the plot or deepen the characterization – on something of which she has little knowledge. Furthermore, this putative clarification issues from the mouth of Winnie, a native Chinese-speaker born and raised in China for whom it should be impossible to make such mistakes.”

This "mistake" is typical of second-language speakers where the second language has become the mother tongue. Filipinos writing in English, for example, that now think in English rather than in their original language (and, therefore, no longer translate into but actually create in English), make similar "mistakes." I put the word mistakes in quotes because not everybody agrees with Wong, but I agree with her. I think that Amy Tan actually does a disservice to the Chinese-American community by turning it, in the eyes of the non-Chinese but American reader, into a non-threatening, easily-assimilatable American-Chinese one. (A similar debate happened earlier in the Philippines before Chinese-Filipino writers agreed to drop the label "Filipino-Chinese.")

On the theoretical level, it is not correct to simply say that, in a literary text, the original language influences the second language; we also have to say that the second language influences the original language. (Influence may be a more polite way to say mistake.)

Amy Tan 1

The debate about Amy Tan's use of Chinese in her English novels reveals a paradox in bilingual writing. Tan, who once said, "I grew up, thankfully, with a love of language. That may have happened because I was bilingual at an early age. I stopped speaking Chinese when I was five, but I loved words," now clearly thinks in English and her Chinese has become, in effect, her second language. It is her Chinese that has been the object of unfavorable criticism (see, for example, pages 60-61 of Amy Tan (2005), by Bella Adams, referring to the widely-cited article "'Sugar Sisterhood': The Amy Tan Phenomenon," by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong [starting on page 174 of The Ethnic Canon (1995), edited by David Palumbo-Liu]). When the mother tongue becomes a second language, is the mother tongue falsified? Or does the writer who in effect forgets her/his mother tongue now become more Chinese than the Chinese (substitute any other people or language for "Chinese")? I know Tagalog writers who speak and apparently now think in English, whose Tagalog has been fixated to an earlier stage of the language (that is, it is no longer standard Tagalog nor is it comprehensible to young readers).