Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

EIGHTEEN No Language Is an Island: The Awkward Issue of L3

The invention of printing, the rise of dictionaries, the spread of literacy, and the establishment of nation-states are probably the main forces that have led us to accept without question that one language is not another, and that the boundaries between, say, English and Yiddish, French and Italian, are real, insuperable, and firmly fixed. The idea that a translation always occurs between an L1 and an L2, between a “source” and a “target,” is only one reflection of this specific culture of language, where different ways of speaking are conceptualized as distinct entities with clear lines between them. But it was not always thus.

On his return to Genoa in 1298 C.E., Marco Polo was flung into jail. He wasn’t put in solitary, and had the additional good fortune to find an old acquaintance inside. Marco Polo told the tale of his great adventures on the Old Silk Road to his cellmate, Rustichello da Pisa, who wrote it all down. Marco spoke in what we would call Italian, and Rustichello wrote his words down in French. The “original” Divisament du Monde (The Travels of Marco Polo) was in all probability an improvised translation, and it contains a telltale sign of the way it was composed: the first-person pronoun we sometimes designates Marco and Rustichello, sometimes Rustichello and his readers, sometimes Marco and his companions.[121] This kind of person-switching is typical of oral translation and makes it pretty certain that Marco spoke his account in one dialect and that Rustichello wrote it down in another. You can see the same phenomenon of “unstable anchoring” in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, a French-language film about the present traces of the extermination of European Jewry in the period of 1941 to 1944. Shoah is quite exceptional among movies because it does not edit out of the final cut the many acts of two-way translation between the French of the interviewer and the Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Czech, and German spoken by survivors and informants. (That is partly why it lasts nine hours.) In many sequences, the translator switches between repeating the words of the speaker without changing the orientation of the speech (as in: “I saw the trains being shunted …”) and giving the information provided by the interviewee in indirect report (as in: “He said that he used to see the trains being shunted …”). On occasions, when Lanzmann wants to pick up on an evasive answer and press the witness further, he falls into the same language-situational trap himself and asks the interpreter, not the witness, “What does that really mean?” Instead of transforming such a riposte into a question in Polish for the witness (“What did you really mean by that?”), the Polish interpreter answers Lanzmann directly in French in her own voice, giving him a personal explanation of what the witness had meant to say.[122] Such alternations are natural, almost unavoidable departures from the artificial interpreting norm, which overrides the fundamental equation of speaker and voice. In two-way human interaction using a linguistic intermediary who is physically present, it is uncommonly difficult to maintain the fiction of the translator’s nonexistence. Even at the UN, where professionals observe strict rules of noninterference and are put in soundproof glass boxes just to make sure, interpreters still occasionally break off from reproducing the other’s speech (using the same personal pronouns and tenses as the original speaker) and resort to a third-person report when something arises that lies outside the common run of diplomatic speech. Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader in the 1950s and 1960s, was notorious for his impromptu use of impenetrable Russian proverbs and jokes, and his interpreters would often find themselves saying—in the third person—“the general secretary of the CPSU just made a joke.”

Marco Polo and his translator-scribe were using two related but different languages to tell the world about the fantastic diversity of human societies. They were living among a welter of partly intercomprehensible dialects of an originally common tongue, but only one of them was well suited to bringing news of Shangdu to the West—and that was French. In the lands bordering the Mediterranean in the late Middle Ages, French was roughly the equivalent of what English is today;[123] the hybrid features of the first manuscript of The Travels might best be likened to the “Globish” written by nonnative speakers the world over nowadays.

But as soon as the manuscript of The Travels got into circulation, other scribes did what any copy editor would do in the modern world—they tidied it up, subjected it to what French publishers call the toilette du manuscrit, and put it into what was considered, respectively, “proper French,” “proper Tuscan,” and, for purposes of wider distribution and retranslation, “proper Latin,” too. By the end of the fourteenth century, there were versions in Czech, Gaelic, German, Tuscan, and Venetian, as well as French, all of them retranslated from the Latin translation, which had itself been done from an early version in the Italian dialect of Venice, based on a source that was either the text of the first known manuscript or something very close to it.[124] These progressive emendations of Marco Polo’s narrative mostly suppressed the voice switches of the original translation and turned it into a more situationally consistent narrative. That’s because those later scribes were not translating the traveler’s speech but a story that already was a written text. You could say that something very important was lost; you could also say that The Travels became a classic of exploration literature precisely because, like many modern novels, it was rewritten by professionals. Then as now, the borderline between translating and improving a text—between “helping the reader” and “trashing the source”—is not at all clear-cut.

The borderline between translating and rewriting is in fact no more wiggly than the one between source and target language in the case of many extended texts. Tolstoy’s War and Peace is an oft-quoted example of this. In the Russian original, parts of the novel are in French. This reflects the language practice of its characters—Russian aristocrats of the early nineteenth century used French for much of their social and intellectual lives. Indeed, when challenged by a Freemason to speak of his hopes and desires, Pierre Bezukhov found himself unsure of how to answer, “being unaccustomed to speak of abstract matters in Russian.”[125]

Translating War and Peace into French is both impossible and easy. Reproduced without alteration in French, the French speech of Russian aristocrats loses all its meaning as a marker of class, and there is no way of indicating by linguistic means alone that a sentence spoken in French is different from the other sentences that are (by force of translation) in French as well. The title page of the French translation may well say Traduit du russe, but that is only partly true. It is “translated” from French as well.

Identical translation problems arise in a vast array of European fiction. The first page of Balzac’s Le Père Goriot contains a sentence in English (“All is true!”) that has an entirely different environment and force when reproduced in an English translation of the text. But what can you do? Translate “All is true!” back into French? Or alter the spelling to “Oll eez troo” to indicate it having been thought by a Frenchman with an atrocious accent? Balzac had no qualms about altering the orthography of French to represent the regional accent of Nucingen, a Jewish banker from Alsace, who also appears in Le Père Goriot. Current conventions don’t allow translators to do that to the diction of narrators—but there’s no strictly logical reason for withholding a lousy accent from Balzac’s narrator, too.

In fact, the more you read in any language, the harder it gets to find an extended text written in that language alone. Two novels I read last year with much pleasure illustrate this point. Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is an entertaining fantasy of a Yiddish-speaking colony in modern-day Alaska. The English dialogue of the characters is understood to represent a translation from Yiddish—or rather, from an imaginary state of Yiddish enriched by fifty years of further existence as a living, growing language on American soil. Chabon’s text is a wonderful hybrid of real and imaginary languages that play with one another—and a translation of it into any other tongue could hardly be considered a translation “from English” alone. Similarly, English, August by Upamanyu Chatterjee mixes Hindi and Bengali with standard literary English to create a language picture of its central character, Agastya, nicknamed August in his English-language boarding school. A keen reader who speaks only English could use it to learn a number of Bengali and Hindi words, just as a reader of the short stories of Junot Díaz can pick up a good amount of Spanish from his hybrid, “Spanglish” texts. But Tolstoy, Balzac, Chabon, Chatterjee, and Díaz don’t switch around between tongues just to provide language lessons. They do so because language alternation (called “code switching” in some kinds of language study) is endemic to all kinds of language use.

I used to have a friend who ran a bank branch in a rural backwater of southwestern France. We always spoke to each other in French, but whenever he came across me in the street or a field, he would begin by saying “Peace and love,” which he pronounced pissanlerv. In the same period I knew a Scottish doctor who used to hurry his children along by saying “the tooter the sweeter,” blending tout de suite with something like “the sooner the better.” Both those acquaintances were speaking in a language (respectively, French and English) but they were also speaking another at the same time (respectively, English and French).

Translation is usually thought of as a process involving only L1 and L2, or source and target tongues. But, as we’ve seen, sources typically include smaller or larger amounts of L3, a language that is not either of translation’s traditional twins. When L3 is L2 (as in the case of War and Peace translated into French), it is inevitably rubbed out, but when it is not (in a Swedish translation of Chabon’s novel, for example), it’s not at all obvious how it should be handled. Mind-boggling though they may seem, these problems are not marginal to the way language is commonly used and therefore not irrelevant to translation, either. However convinced we may be that different languages are different things and not to be confused with one another, in practice we never stop muddling them up. The borderline between, say, English and French is more ragged and foggy than grammars and dictionaries would have us believe. “Sayonara, amigo!” may not be an officially English way of saying farewell, but few English speakers have any trouble in knowing what it means.