Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

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.