One of the most impressive and fascinating accounts of worldwide literary translation is To Be To Translated Or Not To Be, a rich report from International PEN/Instut Ramon Llull on the "international situation of literary translation" and edited by Esther Allen. Sure, it was released in 2007, but I only just read through it all. And it's too good for me to keep quiet -- or to paraphrase it. In a series of posts on Isak this week, I will share excerpts from the report. If you want to read the full report (highly encouraged), click here for the PDF. See Part I of this series here. Part II is, also, from the report's introduction by Esther Allen and Carlos Torner.
The real issue is not the English language itself, or its global scope, but the cultural forces within the language that are resistant to translation. The difficulty of crossing between languages—what International PEN President Jiří Gruša has called the “pain of communication”—is something the English-speaking world has been rather successful at avoiding: it’s so much easier and more practical to remain monolingual and let the rest of the world learn your language than to take on all the trouble, effort and expense involved in multilingualism and translation. Far from being agents of English’s imperial hegemony, the translators who work into and out of English have taken the difficulty of linguistic diversity upon themselves, thereby making it possible for people to continue to read and write their own languages without losing access to the lion’s share of the global conversation which now takes place in English. By using the global lingua franca as a medium to connect different languages, translators are helping solve the problem of the world dominance of English, not perpetuating it.
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The English-speaking world, particularly in its major cities, is by no means the monolingual place that a reader with no experience of it might imagine after reading this report. Amanda Hopkinson, director of the British Centre of Literary Translation, points out that children show up in London city schools speaking more than 350 different languages at home. Anyone who has ever ridden a New York subway has plunged into an environment probably as multilingual as any on earth. But if that same subway rider goes back up to the street and strolls into a bookstore, she’ll find little there that can help her win entry into the alien tongues that were ringing in her ears a few seconds earlier—almost everything there will have been written in English. The challenge, for the English-speaking world, is not to become multilingual—we already are, and beyond Mikhail Bakhtin’s wildest dreams—but to translate the polyglossia of our schools, streets and subways onto our bookshelves.
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