Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

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.

NINETEEN Global Flows: Center and Periphery in the Translation of Books

The Harvill Press was founded in London in 1948 to publish literary works of high quality from other languages, initially from Eastern Europe. By the time of its fiftieth anniversary, it was proud to announce that it had published English translations of works originally written in forty-three different tongues. In Paris, Ismail Kadare’s French publisher regularly informs readers of jacket blurbs that the Albanian novelist’s works have been translated into “more than forty languages.” Are these the same ones? With only a few exceptions, the answer is yes. Nowadays there are only about fifty languages between which imports and exports of translated books occur with any regularity.[126] That represents a minute fragment of global linguistic diversity, yet it covers a large proportion of the population of the world. That’s because translation languages are, by necessity, vehicular ones, read (if not also spoken) by vastly more people than those who have them as their native tongues.