Lives IN TRANSLATION BILINGUAL WRITERS ON IDENTITY AND CREATIVITY Eprrep ry IsABELLE DE COURTIVRON palgrave macmillanCopyright © Isabelle de Courtivren, 2003 [Allights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in ‘any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the exe of brief quotations embodied in extcal articles or eviews. First published in hardeover in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampehiee, England RG21 6XS, Companies and represencatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN isthe global academie imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martins Press, LLC and of Palgrave ‘Macmillan Ltd. Macmilan® ie a rgivtered trademark in the United States, Uniced Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark ia the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-61070-5 (paperback) ISBN-10: 0-230-61070-6 (paperbick) CCataloging:in-Publication Data is available atthe Library of Congres. ‘A catalogue record for this book is available fiom the British Library, Design by Letra Libre, Ine Fist PALGRAVE MACMILLAN paperback edition: January 2009 0987654321 Printed in che United States of America Tounared co Digicel Piucing 2008 For S.L. B. For NancyCONTENTS Acknowledgments Permissions Introduction by Isabelle de Courtivron “Various Lives” by Anita Desai “Writing in the Language of the Other” by Assia Djebar “The Wandering Bigamists of Language” by Ariel Dorfman “The Im/Possibility of Life-Writing in Two Languages” by Shirley Geok-lin Lim “ps by Eva Hoffman “The Mask and the Pen” by Nancy Huston “Bilingualism, Writing, and the Feeling of Not Quite Being There” by Sykvia Molley uw 19 29 39 9 35 6“Linguistic Ecology: Preventing a Great Loss” by Nuala Ni Dbombnaitl “To Write and Eye Words” by José FA. Oliver “Acabie: The Silenced Father Tongue” by Leila Sebbar “The Drowned Library (Reflections on Found, Lost, and Translated Books and Languages)” by Anton Shammas “My Love Affair with Spanglish” by Han Stavans “Writing in the Web of Words" by Yoko Tewada “Memoirs of a Bilingual Daughter” by Isabelle de Courtioron Contributors 9 93 101 1 129 147 157 167 “Si, dans le passé, des experts établirent un alphabet pour fixer les langues, j'aspire 4 trancrire une écriture libérée, non seule- ment de alphabet, mais encore de mes deux langues: celle de Tendroit 00 je suis née et celle de 'endroit ott j'ai débar- qué(....) Ilya la langue avec laquelle je pense et me parle, et celle qui ayant acquis une forme, sortira de ma bouche et de la plume. C'est la premiére que j'essaye d'insuffler aux mots. Sans elle, ils restent sans vie. Il est probable qu'elle se volatilise lors du trajet de ma bouche a la page. Néanmoins, a partir de cette langue sans existence, je me fraye un passage vers les mots in~ stitués, Je cherche a l'accorder a eux comme je cherche dans l'e- space un son. Je mfefforce d’adapter un état, qui fulgure Vintérieur de moi, A un état extérieur inaltérable. Tl est rare que je puisse les faire se joindre.” (Ig in the past, experts established an alphabet in order to dif- ferentiate languages from one another, I aspire to transcribe a writing that is free, not only from the alphabet but from each of my established languages: the one belonging to the place where I was born and the other to the place where I disem- barked(, . . .) There exist both the language with which I think and talk to myself, and the language which, having taken on material shape, exits from my mouth or pen. It is the former that I try to breathe into my actual words. Without it, the lat- ter remain lifeless. It is likely that the former will virtually evaporate during its journey from my mouth to the written page. Still, it is out of this language with no existence that I make my way towards the assigned words. I strive to match them up in the same way that I try to snatch a single sound from the vastness of the air. I struggle to make what blazes in- side of me take on concrete form. It is rare that I can make them truly coincide.”) —Sylvie Baron Supervielle, Le Pays de I’EcritureWRITING IN THE LANGUAGE OF THE OTHER Assta DyEBAR A WOMAN NOVELIST IN THE FRENCH LANGUAGE, that is how | might present myself today, my hands held out in a gesture of offering. ‘And what do I have to offer after entering literature, more than forty-five years ago, if not ten novels, two collections of short sto- ries, two plays, and a short collection of poems, an example of these works in one hand (let's say the right hand since, while 1 write, Iam not a “left-handed woman,”! and in the left hand two rolls of 16 mm color film (1,500 meters and 800 meters) corre- sponding to two full-length films that I wrote and directed. Such is my small harvest at my womanly age, which is the age of maturity. Where would the difference be between me and any other woman my age who would introduce herself with, for ex- ample, four adult children and two or three younger ones, perhaps even with one or two grandchildren in front of this group, and in this case it would be her human oeuvre? But now, this is my speech (parole): and my speech is in the French language. | am a woman and a “French speaker.” Certainly this speech might have been deployed in another register—in20 Assia Dyeoar Arabic, or eventually in another language. Nevertheless, my liter- ary writing, in its original text, can only be in French Thus, my speech, capable of doubling and trebling, participates in many cultures, even though I have but one manner of writing: the French one. In the past, one would say: “I am a man (or a woman) of my word” and assert: “I keep my word,”? and the meaning was under- stood almost in terms of honor. Well, I choose to present myself before you with this assertion: “I am a woman of my wording,” in 4a tone of seriousness and love. Ihave but one manner of writing: that of the French language; with it I trace each page of each book, whether fiction or reflections. en gn an un un Tam an Algerian woman, but rather than referring to my native land, I should refer to the language of my male and female ances- tors; “I am an Arabo-Berber woman’ and add “writing in French.” Since my first novel, forty-five years have elapsed, changing nothing of my identity whether ic involves papers, passport, the fact of belonging by blood and soil. Nonetheless, forty-five years later, I acknowledge this: I present myself first as a writer, a novelist, as if the act of writing, when it is daily, solitary to the point of asceticism, might come to modify the weight of belonging. Because identity is not made up only of Paper or blood but also of language. And if it seems that language, as is frequently said, is a “means of communication,” it is above all for me as a writer, a “means of transformation,” insofar as I prac- tice writing as an adventure, ee an un up an In May 1982, in Ottawa, during my first stay in Canada, I was to speak at a conference on French literature. I remember I had been Warring iv THe LANGUAGE OF THE OTHER a thinking about it very early in the morning, a little before the time specified for my talk. Rushed by having to make a public speech, I suddenly discov- ered this obvious fact: Up to now I have used the French language asa veil. A veil over my individual self, a veil over my woman's body; I could almost say a veil over my own voice. And I recalled my experience as a young girl going out into the street with a lady (my mother), a city woman enveloped in her white silk veil, a smaller veil of embroidered gauze over her face, and I, a litde girl with my hand clinging to the rough edge of im- maculate silk, conscious of the villagers’ voyeuristic glances at this, veiled city woman who went every Thursday to the bathhouse. ‘A veil neither of dissimulation nor of masking, but of sugges- tion and ambiguity, a barrier-veil to desires certainly, but also a veil subsuming the desire of men. ‘Thus it was for me a first stage in my journey as a writer. This writing, I wanted it far from me, as ifin its hollows, in its thin and thick cursive script, I could hide myself somewhat, conscious of the extraliterary curiosity that my writings would raise before I even began—in a way, a little like my mother’s city-woman silhouette marching through the village center in front of the peasants. T tried to explain to those men and women in Ottawa who had read my most recent texts (notably at the time, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment) to what degree I had paid the price for this am- biguity: about the ten years of nonpublication, living in voluntary muteness, | would almost say with sudden aphasia. As if I were trying, entangled in this silk veil symbolically evoked, to pull away from the French language without altogether leaving it! To go around it, then choose to reenter it. ‘To repossess it like a landlady, not as an occupant with heredi- tary rights. Thus, French was truly becoming for me a welcoming home, maybe even a permanent place where each day the ephemeral nature of dwelling is sensed. Finally I crossed the threshold freely, no longer submitting to a colonized situation.22 Assia DyesAR So well did I do so that this language seems to me a house that I will inhabit henceforth and thet I will wy co put my mark on every day—knowing all the while that over the soil that supports it I have no direct rights. But if 1 do not pretend to jus soli (birthright by soil), at least, at the risk of an easy wordplay, I can pursue not my right to the so/ (soil) but to the so/ei? (sun)! Because my characters, both in Women of Algiers as well as in my novel (A Sister to Scheberezade) struggle against the traditional veil, attempting to remove it yet becoming caught again, I, as au- thor, have found my space in this writing. A woman's space that willingly inscribes at the same time her inside and her outside, her intimacy and her unveiling, as much her anchor as its opposite, her navigation. Writing that could his- torically signify my extraterritoriality yet is becoming, gradually, my only true territory. en up un ap an “The language of the other,” | announced. After 1982, having writ- ten for over two years Fantasia: An Algerian Cavaleade, the first volume of a four-novel series that is a “quest for identity” and ad- mittedly semiautobiographical, I asked myself: This language of the other, what does it represent for me? By what means did it enter so deeply within me? Am I at the point that I have become the “other” in my society, am I at che point that I might seize my portion of “otherness,” of the foreignness that is inevitably in- cluded in 2 group of origin? I, who, barely twenty years old, en- tered into literature almost blindfolded, yet feeling as though drowned in light? ‘The first sentence in the book Fancasia answers, I would say di- rectly and certainly, any fundamental question, with its multiple answers that come to dic, like successive waves on the sand of the shore, without exhausting such questioning. Yes, my first answer was clearly my father’s hand: ‘Warring ins THe LaNouAce oF THE OTHER 23 litde Arab girl going to school for the first time, one autumn, A ening, walking hand in hand with her father. [As for me, need I remind you of the situation of any emigrant child today, n Europe or in Canada, who goes to school and is so- Galized litde by little in the host country’s language, in the “out Side language,” I would say. This child comes home every day and usually he finds his mother there, sometimes his father as well, speaking in the language of elsewhere, the language of rupture and separation. It is in this language that he hears his mother, the ‘sound of his origins, and he is sometimes unable to respond. As if absence, like the absence within himself, were calling out to him. For he was too rapidly thrown into the language of here—the lan- guage of the other, the outside language, and, in intimate contrast, ‘one that has become the language of “here and now.” ; ‘We can only imagine what fragile wavering, what imperceptible imbalance, what insidious risk of vertigo—if not of schizophrenia— penetrates this precocious identity. ; My childhood, as I have wanted to tell it, was split equally be~ tween two languages, my inner partition reflecting a parallel di- vision between the world of cloistered women and the world of men, native ones as well as foreigners. For me, the nubile girl who would never be cloistered, French—for an entire century the lan- guage of the conquerors, of the colonizers, of the new posses sors—this language had changed for me into the father’s language. Father had held out his hand to lead me to school. He would never become the future jailer: He was becoming the mediator. A profound change began then. Because he was a French teacher, he had assimilated an initial hybridity of which I would be the beneficiary. After more than a century of French occupation, which ended not so long ago in a flaying, a territory of languages still remains be- tween two peoples, two memories; the French language, body and voice, is installed within me like a proud fortress, whereas the4 Assia Diana mother tongue, all orality, made up of rags, tatters and shreds, re- sises and attacks, between two tired breathe.” (Djebar, Fantasia) “A territory of languages between to peoples,” | noted. This com- mon language was shared with other migrants, from other cultures and other tongues. How—whether one chooses or is pushed to write—yes, how does the language thus appropriated “function,” as it were, when it is put to use, ia the hands of the professional scribe? I would answer by putting forth the idea that, when one is a writer but has only recently come to a language—let us say with- out the cultural heritage that is carried with it—to write in the language of the other often means to make the “other” percepti- ble, the other in all languages, and the other's power of alterity. Let me explain. In 1982 I was finishing a second film project, a unique one: through film archival images reconstituting a recent Maghrebi past. No longer as a siraple historical illustration or as an aural commentary about images placed within a chronological continuity—no. 1 felt quite quickly that those who photographed, who took pictures of yesterday, had an “other” gaze (the gaze, I might say, “of a tourist”). They took pictures of everything, that is, of nothing re- ally essential. Because what was essential was clandestine, hidden, outside of the frame, To reconstitute on the screen several decades of a colonized people's life had to make you feel to what degree reality, in each image, was in the margins, how everything, once, a long time ago, barely seen, became emptied of meaning. In short, these images hid the past, by proposing a sort of deforming, illusory screen. How, then, to approach this “identity” of a past that is finished? The sound deneath the images could not be a commentary; it had to fill a void, to make us feel this emptiness. It should “denounce” and alert, without being polemical, or even “engagé.” I then un- derstood that, through the sound, I must bring back, suggest, per- haps even resuscitate invisible voices, the voices of those who had WRITING Inv THe LANGUAGE OF THE OTHE 25 not been photographed because they were crouching in the shade, because they were held in scorn. Memory is a woman's voice, Night after night We strangle it Under the bed With leaden sleep! sang an actress, beneath the body of the first Maghrebi women photographed in color, at the beginning of the 1920s. an an un ap oP So I return to this “other” of all writing. ‘Through this work on visual memory (nine months in the edit- ing booth, working with rolls of film but also with musicians made to sing, made to take up fragments of anonymous folk songs), I understood that, in the same way, in literature, the hidden, the for- gotten ones of my group of origin should be brought to light, but specifically in the French language. “Throughout the entire Algerian nineteenth century, a century of confrontations, of violence, of effervescence, no painter of battles had followed those ancestors who struggled, who pranced on horseback under the sun in order to defy and to die. I felt within me the ur- gency of bringing up these images but to do so with French words. Hence, in the language known as the language of the other, I found myself possessed by the need to reminisce about an else- where, about a dead Arabo-Berber past, my own. As if the hered- ity of blood was to be transmuted into a welcoming language, and in fact this is the true welcome, rather than merely stepping over the threshold of the other's home. “Thus my Ariadne’s thread became my ear. Yes I heard Arabic and Berber (the wails, cries, ululations of my ancestors of the nineteenth century); I could truly hear them and thereby resusci- tate them, those barbarians, in the French language.26 Assia Dyewan So much so that to write becomes to inscribe, to transcribe, to to bring back to the text, to the Paper, to the manuscript, to the hand, to bring back at the same time the fonereal chants and the buried bodies: yes to bring back the other (once considered the enemy, unable to assimilate) write from the depths (“en creus”), through language. Was I able to convey what was, for me, this work of exhuma- tion, of unearthing the “other” of language? Perhaps this is what 4 writer primarily does: always bring back what is buried, locked up, fed by the words of language. To bring the shadow so long engul darkness to light. em an ae an up In conclusion, I might ask myself Living in two cultures, strad- dling two memories, two languages, bringing together in one writing the dark aspect, the repressed—in the end, what difference does this make to me? ‘Am I doomed to be a woman in transition, a passing writer, 0 deliver the message in stereo, so that instead of double loyalty it is double betrayal that awaits me?” Not to write anymore, fearing the risk, bie by bit, of never again speaking the “words af the tribe” (according to the beautifil Italian novel by Natalia Ginsburg,* this would mean to never again be part of any tribe, of any group, without being able, in fact, to add up two pasts, two treasures, A gradual displacement, slow and infinite deracination, no doubt, as if it were necessary to wrench out one’s roots. Wrench. ing out while discovering yourself, discovering yourself because of wrenching out, en un un en un Who am I? I answered at the beginning: first and foremost a woman novelist in the French language. Why not end by asking myself this question once more: Who am I? A woman whove oul” canerl repudiation, she cannot truly claim a permanent place. Werrine is THE LANGUAGE OF THE OTHER 27 "s line it: In Islam, the igin is Arab and Islam. So let's underline it: ede hostess, that is, passagére; risking, at each moment, ‘Thus, in a religion that begins with an almost sacred emigra- i thous a destina- ‘ yman becomes a constant emigrant, wid tions OM becmuse ofthis, a crearure that deserves both the best and the worst. The best symbolically, the worst historically. "As for me, even though writing every day in the French lan- ite thi in fact only one of guage, or indeed because I write this way, I am in of Rae enen in this multitude. Simply a migrant. The most beauti fal label, I believe, in Islamic culture. Translated by Isabelle de Courtivron and Susan Slyomovics Notes 1. Refers tothe novel by Peter Handle, The Left-Handed Woman (Fara ‘Straus and Giroux, 1978) ct 7 os 2 Bele ete tlfeccporon snd dul meaning of eae fl : Peaeln gi sae ‘ete) and “double dérive” (to be cut ey 7 4, French translation of Natalia Ginsburg’ novel Lewco Peigli (Torino: Einaudi, [1963]; 1985). pee eee 5 “Passage” means both a pasenger and ‘pasing through: REFERENCES Djebar, Assia. Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1993To WRITE AND EyE WorDs José F. A. OLiver ‘To WRITE AND EYE WORDS, TO EYE THEM, like the trackers raise the hiding hunt, and to be the hunted, pursued relentlessly by let- ter-accomplices. Pace of words without repose, track of prints, pasturing of rest: to exist of words so as to be inside them. Shy and tender. Tender and calm like fingertips caress strange skin. Today, which is already tomorrow, I am searching for my tongues. Mondzunge, lengua luna, moon-tongue. Those day-falls of pale lights and shades, which became familiar nights and moons, pale light-rivering of the sky, remain close to me. “There was a house of two houses. Two houses like two cultures. ‘A house with two floors and a lullaby of nonwords melted the rhythm of uncertainties and two languages. Open doors and win- dows into forgotten voyages. The alemannic dialect of the first floor, the andalusian of the second. In-between steps without gen- der and the beginning of a game. Draft of the gender game: the bodies of words, their souls; a few steps separating she-moon and he-moon, la luna, der Mond. To submerge myself. Simply to dive into that current of fa- thers and ancestors, of mothers, at last. Breath and omen. Evi- dently I remain, evidently audible. To wander near the discarded,sal José F A.Ouver the farthest separated. To breathe between rags of tongues and perhaps to challenge those language-guards and alpha-beasty that incite me to name. I, to exist of earthen words, yearn for my 4 languages like the host for the good friend. ‘My lives, so peculiarly mine, respond continuously to these nights of antecedents, sudden dawns, days of pure invention. Set pieces like tongues of earth. Biographies and remote histories re- sembling theater. Monologues of satiated pleasures. Keeping me ‘company, the worn-out wings of an interrupted play that debuts unceasingly, and, like every uninvited guest, these lives arrive to upset my world of attitudes and contradictions. Intruders on my stage of roving theatrics. Hunters of shores. Timid underground lovers like blood brothers. Memories of a childhood in the Black Forest. Images of the time etched in the mind, summers at dusk and pitchforks of hay. Playing tag after housework, jumping on haystacks at nightfall with the children on my street. The bells and their ring of prayer and the admonitions of the adults always within earshot. The con~ tinuous reprimands following and falling into bed, beaten to a pulp. The gaiety anticipated by the next reveille. The first rays of sun and fresh-cut grass. The whistles of the scythes. Green-wets, The flavor of sap. Like that, day smelled of day. Like that, child- hood smelled of summers in short sleeves. Days like children. Days on light soles, where the moss, the juice of the red currants and the quince trees seduced me to for~ getting. I discovered how to dream and they let me. Without truly becoming conscious, in my little-great universe, of what was dream and what would cease being dream. In summer I dreamed Just as I was afraid in autumn, hiding myself from those mon- strous light-swallowing clouds, hurling kites at them to make my- self master of peril: Young Master of Tempests, before a gray canvas. But all the daring, in the end, only to bring me closer to my fears and distresses, surreptitiously to my mother’s skirt while she hung out the clothes. The wind spelling our attachment and the storm saying nothing less than protection To Warre ann Eve WorDs 95 ‘The winters were of snow. Masses of snow. I haven't stopped caressing those afternoons, closed in by its white coat. I remem- E per descending in sleighs, the Chasms of Death and the oranges in my mittens. Smell of the south beyond the icé chute like the wakeful nights on each trip back to the little homeland bearing to- ward Andalusia. I remember the slices of bread with jam, confec~ tions of cherry or strawberry, laid on thick, and that ancient little heat of our glazed tile stove that let us thaw after quixotic descents through sleigh courses that we had traced ourselves, plunging downhill: “Look out below! Sausage and mashed potatoes!"— Instants of a childhood in which I was one more among them. An expert in the games of the occasion. Still, there was someone that escaped slyly from those hidden idylls merely through his undeniable presence. Serenely surprised and, at times, wounded. Someone who, essentially, was not of the native soil. At least, he couldn't go unnoticed at vesper-meals of pure smoked speck, dinner well earned after the production-line haying that brought unity and solidarity to the neighbors, who showed a disposition for mutual help never seen before, facing the ‘August storms that loomed maliciously; or someone who didn't fit into the wintry landscape with its pork-fat sandwiches, the pointed hats, and the red, frozen noses. That “Someone,” no one but this One, had constructed with the lies of the time a refuge from questions and yearnings. Thad dug myself a den and I furnished it. A hospitable hideout in case the Other, which was confined in me, threatened to escape. He had to model a little sailor suit every Sunday afternoon, totally incomprehensible to the first, and white to top it off. Almost ready, so gallantly presented, he regarded the sight of himself with an air of embarrassment: decorated in that blue of extreme sea, that sailor-white, and covered in little gold buttons besides; be- coming excessively angry, or as angry as the moment required, then suddenly standing up straight as a stick, because he would have done anything to escape to the forest that bordered his house to play cops and robbers. Despite every resistance, Sunday went asTo Waite ano Eve Worns ry José F.A.Ouiver the rules of the games of the place that litde by lit- ee outside of the game, just as he kept entering, Eominating the rules in order to break them. a FP My liede lai, my peculiar hideout, in those days, was under a ee a Kind of wooden veranda, already aging and sted on filts, that served as a lookout. My place. Behind heaps of [pi Gecnted a few fine examples, singular really, the best gems = Culrare of Spanish Emigration could exhibit in those days. “Lightly indignant and stupefied at once, in the days of di repose we moved in another carzvan. Behind us dreams, phantasmagoria, Confined by languages, desires, memories, lences, recipes, and comy laints, we saw ourselves suddenly ; into the illusions and tne of the adults who we examined dee Filing, stacked against the cold eae swiped fruit boxes, and the week in equally surprising incidents, when they entered or lee ‘A desk I had constructed of wand snippets of bills that I had their shifts: a savory and copious selection on the imaginary tabi. eee eee eee pencils. We were in- exotic morsels of memory like sweets, and little porcelain fi saved from certain death in the urines—those daily glories completely wasted—but who, on Suns timate friends. Accomplices. days, in all their splendos, made us litde and tiny little Spaniards: ea yanpriaal Peereer ‘Time meaning nothing when the factory time-stamper stopped, a ane ine : londin Mond. So they adorned me and exterminated me very Spanishly. They . He-moon and She-moon. Lunesa Luna Mi washed, groomed, and perfumed me. “Heno de Pravia,” they called that damned fragrance. I don't know how many leagues it traveled on the wind. Te penetrated through people and land- scapes, leaving an odorless substance that brought on the ances- tors, the reason we carried liters of that contraband cologne, whenever we crossed the French-German border at Kehi, on ouy way back from Spain. Sundays I understood why. The working days, without a doubt, I couldn't help seeing myself changed into 2 chubby-cheeked Black Forest rascal who looked well fed, local and robust in lederhosen, those short little trousers made of deer- skin, which were never to be washed and which, apart from cov- ering and uncovering certain parts, served to clean the fat off the knives they used to cut the speck. And not only in August. There I saw myself again: untied and tied at once, before an~ other distinct language that smelled of earth, which made forget the dead and which, though I would realize it much later, would reject us. Which had to reject us. German without being German, Spanish without being Spanish. In movement: I. And, among my “Js,” consciousness. Translated by Moana Milton and José FA. Oliver146 ‘Thomas, Piri. Down These Maan Strects. New York: Vega, Ana Lydia. “Pollito Chicken." In Virgenes y martires, with Carm. Than Savas Knopf, 1967. sugo Filippi. Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico: Antillana, 1981 Weight, Richard. Native Zentella, Ana Celia. Growing Up Biling York. Malden, MA: Blaclowel, 199 “My Love Affair with Spanglish” is the source of § of a New American Langu Son [1940]. New York: Har sanglish: The Mal age. New York: HarperCelling/ Rayo, 3605 per and Row, 1969. 4 : Puerto Rian Chilton hoy ng WRITING IN THE WEB OF WorDS Yoko TAwapa WHEN I CAME TO EUROPE, I carried some burning questions in my travel bag: Will I become another person if I speak another language? Does a little sea horse look different if it no longer is called “tatsu-no-otoshigo” (the lost child of the dragon) but “the little horse from the sca”? ‘Will I no longer cook rice but eat it uncooked if there is only one word “tice” for cooked rice (gohan) as well as uncooked rice (kome)? Do I always have to cook chunky soup if I'm no longer sup- posed to say “to drink soup” but “to eat soup”? Do I have twice as much time after work if there are two words for the same space of time—evening” and “night”? In the “evening” one can go to the theater and during the “night” one can, sleep. In Japanese there is only one word, “yoru,” for evening as well as for night; therefore one does not sleep enough. Will I study with more self-confidence if “homework” is con- sidered “work” just like all other work in this society? Can one, in good conscience, take years writing a paper? In Japanese, unfortu- nately, whatever belongs to the realm of learning (benkyo) does not belong to the realm of work (shigoto).a8 YoRo Tawaon Tve been living in Hamburg for twenty years now. “Have you § become a different person?” I am asked. “Are you a different per son when you speak German?” I am asked. These questions not easily answered. If a person were to acquire an additional per~ sonality when learning an additional language, someone who speaks five languages would possess five personalities. Should this person look like a country fair with five different booths? I don’t ” have a single booth. I'm similar to a web. The structure of a web gets denser when new traits are incorporated. In this way, a new pattern is formed. There are more and more knots, tight and loose spots, irregularities, uncompleted comers, edges, holes, or super- imposed layers. This web, which can catch tiny planktons, I will call a multilingual web. ee up an un ap When I'm sitting in the airplane, I have no room to move. My back gets stiff, my feet and thighs swell, my tailbone does not sit right, and my skin gets dry. Only my tongue gets more and more moist and elastic. It prepares for the encounter with a foreign tongue. T arrived in Toronto and pronounced the name with pleasure. Toronto: How unusual for the sound “o” to occur three times in a place-name! I had already been enthusiastic about place-names where the sound “o” occurs twice. But three times was even better. To be precise, it was not the sound “o” but the letter “o” that fas- inated me, “O” was an oval disk. The word “Toronto” means “big water.” I was picked up by my nice, tall, English-speaking host, How are you? he asked. My back hurts from all that sitting in the plane, I answered. ‘That's because of the “disks” in your spinal column, he said. I don’t have a “disk” in my body, neither a “floppy disk” nor a music CD, let alone a CD-ROM, I answered. ‘Warrine iN THe Wes oF Wonos up Tt may be that the CDs in another language don't have any- thing to do with the disks in your spinal column, but when we are speaking English, we de have disks in our spinal column. In these disks, all positions or postures you have ever taken are “saved.” ‘And every time a disk pops out and grates against a nerve string, painful music is played. (On this day I change into @ CD rack, ‘Acoluma with thicty-three slots, In each there is a CD, Not sorted alphabetically, Not bound by category, Lam a DJ without hands, ‘Two disks turning simultancously, Or three disks or four or five, six, seven... ‘Oh, how ie swings and swirls, No more music, Only phrases, Where it hits and rubs, : ‘Where understanding is carefully avoided, ‘Where it staggers and stops, Where it laughs and loses the rhythms, Where lightning strikes, In Toronto, the city with three disks in irs name, Theard music in my spine. ‘A voyage knows no movements, but it moistens the tongue. When it speaks, the body changes. an an un uP ap are many Japanese words that contain the word “do. i Gee Samoa) Theans “path,” and activites lke judo, aikido, shodo (calligraphy), kado (ikebana), sado (tea ceremony) are at- tempts to understand the “path,” that is, the course of an individ ual life or of history. (By the way, I don’t quite like the word “path, because you get the feeling chat the “path” has to have a goal, in150 Yoro Tawaa fact, that it has to lead to truth. Therefore I sometimes transly street.” This sounds much more open, enticing, and witty.) In modern life, “judo” belongs to the realm of sports whereas calligraphy belongs to art. They don't have anything in common. anymore. But the small linguistic element “do” keeps them to. gether, even if the speaker is not aware of it. Someone who lives in a foreign language becomes aware of from one language into the other. Historical traces and hidden patterns of a language become evident in the mirror of a transla- tion. The patterns thus become more obvious, but at the same time they become more abstract and disembodied. For example, I can no longer pronounce a word like “Hokkaido” as if the word had an indestructible natural link to the island bears its name. I immediately start to dissect the place-name or I translate it into another language. More than a few authors despise such a patho- logical relationship to their mother tongue and avoid living in a foreign country. But I see an opportunity in this broken relation- ship to the mother tongue and to language in general. You become a.word fetishist, Every part or even every letter becomes touch- able, you no longer see the semantic unity, and you don't go with the flow of the speech. You stop everywhere and take close-ups of the details. The blow-up of the details is confusing, because it shows completely new pictures of a familiar object. Just as you are unable to recognize your own mother seen through a microscope, you cannot recognize your own mother tongue in a close-up pic- ture. But art is not supposed to picture the mother in a recogniz~ able way. The small elements of a word become independent and take a trip to find new relatives. In my case, the element “do” be~ came independent at the moment when a friend of mine at a cal- ligraphy exhibit in Hamburg asked me: “What's the meaning of ‘shodo’? Does that have something to do with judo?” this word with the word “street.” Then the “ikebana” would bee called “flower street” or “street of flowers,” calligraphy would bes called “writing street” or “street of writing,” and judo “elastic such relationships because s/he occasionally has to translate words = Warrine ms THE Wes of Worps as I became aware of the existence of the word “do” but, at the same time, it was distorted; the intonation and the difference be- ween a long and a short vowel got Jost because of the manner in which the word was pronounced, namely as a foreign word, Something similar happened on the level of siting: once T word “sado,” the tea ceremony, on a poster in a tea shop etsaniborg Waitten in the alphabet, the word looked like a river in Portugal. Perhaps one should go to this river to get the water for the tea ceremony. My thoughts wandered: With a postposi- tion “wa,” the word would be “sadowa,” then it would look like a place-name in Chechnya. In my head, the word has traveled through different language landscapes since it has been tran- scribed in another script. In the German language it is rather un- likely that a word ends with a “do” except for foreign words, such as “avocado” or “tornado.” But German music can end with 0 especially when it is written in C-major. Psychoanalysis can e th “libido.” wi Vhereas the old chain of words (judo-aikido-kado-sado~ shodo, etc.) imparts a historical way of thinking, the new chain of words offers possibilities for associations that have a lot to do ee the present and in which the elements from different cultures an realms come together in a surprising way. en up ap ap ap Ifyou live in several languages, you bring together words from oa ferent languages on a daily basis. When translating, for camp _ you may experience the coupling of two words that have a similar ‘meaning but otherwise have nothing to do with each other. Once, with a colleague at MIT, I was searching for a German word for the English word “nonprofit.” A direct translation would : “gewinnlos” iprofiess” or “without profit)” but this sounds a one would actually like to have had a profit. What do you call the virtuous attitude renouncing financial gain? We asked a colleague who then gave us the answer: “gemeinniitelich” (“being useful forasa Yoro Tawa, the community” or “serving the common good”) would be “4 German equivalent. He was right. However, an ocean lay betwes the two words. In such a moment one questions the concepts 1 derlying such words instead of being happy about the transla All of 2 sudden the English word “nonprofit” struck me a¢ stran, because renouncing profit can't mean, at the same time, being us fal for the community. But the German word “being useful for th community” is also suspect. Who, except for politicians and reli gious organizations, asserts without scruple that their activities serve the common good? This word is normally used only on your ‘tax return. Ifa German word looks like an English one, most of the time, it’s etymologically related. Nonetheless, the current meanings can be quite different. A friend from Hamburg told me that she read a lot of American detective stories in the original language when she was a high school student and that she always wondered why = so many Caucasians were murdered. It said again and again: The corpse was medium height, female, “Caucasian.” In German, the word “Caucasian” refers only to people originating from the area between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. If I put together a German and a Japanese word that sound alike, they usually are not historically related. A certain kind of noodle soup, for example, is called “ramen,” just like the German word “Rahmen,” which means “frame” in English. A shop where these noodles can be bought could be called “Rahmenhandlung.” Literally translated, this would mean “frame shop.” The pun here is—I am sory to have to explain it—that it also refers to a frame in a story or a framework. Historically, these two words have, of course, nothing to do with each other. That is why such a phe- nomenon is not taken seriously and is dismissed as a chance oc- currence. People with “a stiff mind” would ask me now: Why does ‘one have to get involved with such word plays? Nowadays one frequently sees words and images from different worlds juxtaposed. Through migration, world travels, or Internet surfing people often find themeelves in a situation where the jux- Warrine ins tHe Wes oF Wonns a taposition already exists but a corresponding frame of mind has not yet been developed. Sometimes I ride the bus through a city ‘and am surrounded by several conversations in several languages. “Two sentences where one right after the other penetrates my ears by chance dontt yet occupy a common space. You need a “frame- work’ to connect these sentences. “The story of the absurd connection between two words is not new. The surrealists thought of an operating table on top of which ‘a sewing machine and an umbrella would come together. It is also possible to connect two words in a poem through the shyme. Sometimes I think of a poem in Goethe's “West-dstlicher Divan (Poems of the West and the East: West-Eastern Divan) in which “fore” is shymed with “Wort.” Later in the poem other words, such as “Orte” and “Worte,” rhyme. These three words—“fort,” “Ort, and “Wort"—are not etymologically related, that is why this rela~ tionship is also a “word play.” But because the rhyme, as a poetic device, has become traditional, the rhyme is no longer considered ay. : i xin time think of these words together, have a lash of in- sight. Words create places (listen to the sound: “Worte schaffen rte”), but you have already left the place you inhabit, ae up ap gn oP When you make a connection between two words that lie miles apart, kind of electricity is produced in your head. There is a lash of lightning, and that i a “wonder-fill” feling, The shiny seen of a computer is addictive, because it reminds us of this flash. An e-mail from a boring person is actually as boring as his handwrit- ten letter. But every e-mail can fake liveliness because of the elec tronically shiny surface. The information you get on the Internet by means ofthe inks is not any more interesting than the infor mation you get in a library. But the electronic light reminds a that happy moment when a flash went off in your own head. ‘Nowadays you no longer need to use energy from your own body.oe 154 Yoro Tawapa Ir flows out of the socket. But beware! The shiny screen is compas. able to cocaine. While a person gets nonstop highs, his body is quickly used up. Moreover, it’s mostly an illusion that an electron. ically shiny text is equally “shiny” and “brilliant” in terms of its con- tent. Ic is possible to create in your own body a substance similar to drugs. In the same manner, you can create electricity in your own head. The process is cumbersome, slow, and does not always work, but it has 2 lot of advantages when compared to cocaine. Ido not speak metaphorically when I say “I feel lightning in my & head” (Idd rather maintain the opposite). What computer technol- ogy has achieved with the help of electricity is, in fact, an imita- tion of the old lightning feeling in your head. Many things in computer technology are merely transformations of old patterns of relationships between books and people into a flickering screen, For example, there was always hypertext in the shape of footnotes. But whereas the overfastidious, neurotic footnotes written in small print by a scholar, possessed by the word, often smell like dust in the library, they convey a piece of that mad passion, and hypertext conveys nothing but information. The playful interac- tion between a text and its readers has existed for a few thousand years. As we all know, a text changes its shape with every reading. That is why we do not need to regard computer technology as an extension of our literary life but rather should sce it as a sense- less restriction of linguistic and poetic forms, and we should work with this restriction creatively. The strict rules governing rhyme— for example, those governing the anagram or haiku—which at first seem foreign and superficial to our sensibilities, actually play an important role in poetry. By means of such rules, the infinite knowledge of the author can be freed of a conscious order that otherwise would govern it. Sometimes in my own work I have turned the limitations of the computer to my advantage as a “creative disturbance.” The limitation in question is the computer’s inability to convert pho- netic signs into ideograme. When I write in Japancse with sy Wearrixe in tite Wen oF Wonos 155 computer, I first have to type in phonetic signs (cither the Japan- ese Hiragara script or the alphabet). Because it is not possible to install enough keys on the keyboard, there is no computer with ideogram keys. At the end of each phrase, I push the spacebar to transform certain concepts into ideograms. But since there are a few thousand ideograms, the computer would have to understand the content of the text to find the right sign every time. It often cannot understand the text and chooses a surprising sign. This presents an opportunity for me to free a word from its context and to discover a hidden, oblique relationship with a totally strange word. Yesterday, when I wanted to write the word “sado” (tea ceremony) in Japanese, all of a sudden the name of the French author Sade appeared on the screen. Who would have made the connection between him and the tea ceremony? (The reason why the vowel “o” at the end was replaced by an “c” is a complicated boring problem I don't want to explain here.) Again, the computer did not understand the content of my text and brought both words together. It organized a surprising meeting, but it did not write a story in which a relationship develops. The story in which the Marquis de Sade performs a tea ceremony has yet to be written. Translated by Monika Totten