Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

However, even in places not afflicted by political appropriation of that kind, the drift away from small languages toward a dominant tongue has been felt again and again. In the late nineteenth century, an editorialist for the Japanese daily newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun opined that his country had much to give to the world beyond Mount Fuji and Lake Biwa—it had magnificent literary works such as Genji Monogatari or Bakin’s Nansō Satomi Hakkenden. But the distance between Japanese and the European languages was too great to make translation feasible, in his view:

However great our future writers may be, their fame will never succeed in crossing beyond our borders … And so I would like to suggest to the public spirited men of the world that they engage themselves in the writing of English … In this day and age, it is self-evident that a man with great ambitions should study English writing. Study it, and strive, by using the language, to make his glory shine abroad. There is nothing great about a fame solely garnered in the context of this pathetic string of islands.[133]

Typical in this respect of a culture that feels peripheral to the conversation of the world, the Japanese journalist jumped to a conclusion that many have followed in the last hundred years. Maryse Condé, the distinguished French writer from Guadeloupe, has admitted that were she fifty years younger she would probably have chosen English instead of French as her language of expression. Edwidge Danticat, a French-speaking writer from Haiti who is fifty years younger, has done just that.

If you do write in a minor language—and all languages, even French, are minor ones now—getting translated into English is the summit of your ambition. If you write in Italian, you’re quite likely to get translated into Spanish, and if you write in Finnish, you’re almost certain to get translated into Swedish for the significant minority of Finnish citizens for whom Swedish is L1. But getting translated into Spanish or Swedish is unlikely to get your work out into the wider world. Whatever language you write in, the translation that counts is the English one.

English speakers are obviously not directly responsible for the use of English as a pivot, because the only folk for whom English is never a pivot language are the speakers of English themselves. Like all interlanguages of the past, English is made into a pivot by speakers of other tongues. China’s Confucius Institute, for instance, has commissioned an international team of scholars to make the philosophical and literary treasures of classical Chinese accessible to the rest of the planet. The Wu Jing Project aims to translate the Five Classics (a conventional term referring to a large number of separate texts, about twenty-five hundred pages in all) into “the major languages of the world.” However, these difficult works will not be translated into French, German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, and Malay from the original Chinese. The dissemination of The Five Classics into the eight languages selected will be done “on the basis of the English translation,” which will be treated, once it has been done, as the reference text.[134]

The position of English-language translators of literary texts from languages that have not been widely taught in the rest of the world is therefore unique. They control their source texts’ access not just to their target audience, but through the international trade in books and sometimes through double translation as well, they may open or shut the door to the rest of the world.

The solar structure of the global book world wasn’t designed by anyone. With its all-powerful English sun, major planets called French and German, outer elliptical rings where Russian occasionally crosses the path of Spanish and Italian, and its myriad distant satellites no weightier than stardust, the system is all the more remarkable for being in stark contradiction to the weblike network of cross-cultural relations that most people would like to see. But the orbital image of translation flows is only a metaphor. The structure of global translation is not a natural phenomenon but a cultural one. If enough people really want it to change—it will.

TWENTY A Question of Human Rights: Translation and the Spread of International Law