David L. Ulin
Language is a riddle to contemplate in a new book cowritten by J. M. Coetzee and translator Mariana Dimópulos.
Speaking in Tongues, by J. M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos,
Liveright, 119 pages, $26.99
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Language is a construct. Except, of course, when it is not. This conundrum sits at the center of Speaking in Tongues, a conversation in book form between the South African Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee and the Argentine writer and translator Mariana Dimópulos. “This is a book about languages,” the pair states in a cowritten introduction: “what languages can and what they cannot do.” Growing out of their collaboration on Dimópulos’s Spanish translation of Coetzee’s 2023 novel The Pole, it examines limitations as much as possibilities—even as, in this thought-provoking set of interrogations, such a distinction is often rendered moot. Think of Speaking in Tongues, then, as a work of what we might call quantum criticism, in which every argument comes encoded with its antithesis, with “reality” depending on the observer’s position.
A similar perspective might be applied to The Pole, which is both a novel and a subtle reflection on voice and point of view. The story of an affair between a Polish pianist and a banker’s wife from Barcelona, it is a spare book, in which, as Dimópulos comments in Speaking in Tongues, “the prose of the novel has been imagined as transparent, almost detached from all traits that could identify it as English, as if the old genie de la langue had been intentionally kept in his little bottle.”
There’s a reason for that—or several reasons, not least Dimópulos’s assertion that “the fictional characters depicted in this novel written entirely in English speak sometimes in Spanish, and sometimes in English as a second language.” This means the English of the narrative must necessarily, as Coetzee writes, be “starved . . . [of] native nutrients” to reflect its characters’ felicity in the language, or lack thereof. At the same time, Coetzee and Dimópulos insist, such a narrow focus opens a dialogue between novelist and translator, which we see enacted throughout this new book. “As legal copyright holder of [The Pole],” Coetzee explains, “and therefore in a sense its ‘owner,’ I intended that the English text, once it had metamorphosed into the Spanish text, would be retired for a while, withdraw into the shadows, while the Spanish text would give birth to a multiplicity of translations.”
That’s a fascinating idea, to return The Pole to the language, if not of its author, then of its setting. “This plan was defeated,” Coetzee acknowledges, “by a superior force that operates in the world publishing industry. Publishers in Poland, in France, in Japan and other countries simply declined to translate from the Spanish text.” Nonetheless, the situation raises a number of crucial questions, not least about the hegemony of English as both a cultural and political force. “As the United States had become master of the world,” Coetzee writes, “so the language of the United States had become the language of the world.” Lingua franca, in other words—language as mechanism not only of voice or narrative but also, and perhaps most essentially, of empire.
For Coetzee and Dimópulos, this is not so much a problem to solve as a riddle to contemplate; engaging in such a consideration is the intention of Speaking in Tongues. Broken into four parts, the book addresses, in addition to The Pole, matters of mother tongue and gender before turning to the act of translation itself. What connects these elements is the mutability of language, or perhaps we ought to say: its porousness. What I mean is that when we think about such issues, we cannot help but come face-to-face with subjectivity.
In certain cases, that subjectivity is baked in, as with the grammatical gendering of Romance languages. “Is gender a relatively superficial feature of language,” Coetzee asks, “a feature that we can easily and successfully excise; or does it lie so deep that we cannot cut it out without changing the language fundamentally?”
On the surface, the distinction may appear to be syntactic; “an entity might be classed as masculine in one language and as feminine in another,” Coetzee observes. Still, rather than frame gender as arbitrary or irrelevant, he wonders whether “some classificatory operation may be at work whose logic is unclear to us.” As an example, the authors look at English, which is—relatively speaking—more gender neutral. Read in this light, contemporary methods of re- (or de-) gendering English (in terms of pronouns and other shifts in usage) may be less applicable to other linguistic circumstances.
Subjectivity, again, or positioning, which only grows more complex in a world where the lines of language blur within us like those of heritage. Dimópulos was born in Buenos Aires, but her mother was Spanish, and many of her relatives “never mastered the autochthonal use of the second person in the Argentinian vernacular.” Her father’s parents were Greek. Coetzee, on the other hand, descended from a Pole who would choose to speak German on his mother’s side, and on his father’s, “from people who migrated from the Netherlands to the southern tip of Africa in the seventeenth century.” The family spoke English and Afrikaans.
What is the mother tongue here, amid these mash-ups of vernacular? What does it tell us that Coetzee’s ancestors conducted “their public life in English while continuing to speak Dutch at home”? Only this: that we are all mongrels, regardless of where we come from, which means the idea of a mother tongue is—must be—a construction. This realization, Coetzee suggests, led him to doubt the efficacy of English as master métier, and “to work more closely with my translators, with a new interest in hearing how I sounded outside the English language.”
And yet, translation offers a construction of a different sort, as both Coetzee and Dimópulos understand. In a forceful final chapter, they take on the slippery nature of that process, framing it as a re-rendering rather than a direct word-for-word conversion from source language to translated text. I think of the Italian expression traddutore, traditore—translator, traitor—which the authors invoke to indicate that the translator must insert herself, especially when there is idiomatic disjunction or inconsistency. “Translating,” Dimópulos contends, “is for me finding a solution to these extremely difficult cases of equivalence.”
The truth is that there is no solution, or at least not one that is definitive. The translation of feeling into language will always be elusive. This, Coetzee points out, is as true for writers as for translators; we are always casting in the dark for a word that may or may not come to us. “If the word cannot be found,” he asks, “does it really exist? . . . [Or] does the word that we cannot find in English (or whatever language we are writing in, living in) exist in some other language?” Perhaps the only answer is that both positions are equally true and false, that we can never know, that in the aftermath of Babel, as Speaking in Tongues concludes, “the only true dictionary is the lost one, the dictionary of the language that was lost when the impious tower was built: the original language, God’s language.”
David L. Ulin is the author of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, which was shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times.