Interviews
A Roundtable with Emily Apter
Comparative Literature
Emily Apter: One of the key issues that concerns us here is how translation studies can be used in Comparative Literature. I first began to think in curricular ways about translation when I started chairing Comparative Literature at UCLA. What, I wondered, would bring people together from so many different languages and critical traditions? How could we find common ground among those formed in European languages and those specializing in postcolonial, immigrant and diasporic literatures? How could we distinguish Comparative Literature from English, a department that was increasingly embracing world literature? One approach, which made sense in a multiethnic, multilingual city like Los Angeles, was to develop an undergraduate major that took advantage of what has been called "heritage languages." In most universities the language resources of first and second generation immigrant students—many of them not specializing in the humanities—were going relatively untapped. At UCLA, there were lots of Korean, Armenian and Persian-speaking students and my question was: how to reach them? In thinking about how to devise a Comparative Literature major that would suit their interests and language skills, I began thinking about the émigré founders of Comparative Literature, people like Leo Spitzer and Eric Auerbach who faced the challenge of creating a literature degree program at the University of Istanbul that would adapt European philology and scholarship to a Turkish (and European) student constituency. This German Jewish émigré generation, committed to the mission of saving and exporting European civilization, was confronted with the task of "translating" Europe. The theory and practicum of translation, a mainstay of humanism and a daily necessity of scholars like Spitzer and Auerbach (fired from their posts in Germany after the Nuremberg laws, and dealing with wartime displacement), seemed newly relevant. Translation was crucial to Comparative Literature's constitution as a modern discipline in the 1930's, and it was just as crucial now, though with different objectives and politics. There were also other bridges: when Spitzer and Auerbach moved from Istanbul to literature departments in the United States, they conferred an exilic, melancholic, cosmopolitan cast to comparative literary studies, something Edward Said was very aware of when he took up Auerbach's work on Dante as the basis for his own ascription of humanism. I felt that there was a direct line leading from the Spitzer-Auerbach generation to the postcolonial one that took shape in the 80's and 90's (Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha among many others). For all these critics translation was a constant, whether they wrote about it as a major theme, or engaged in translating as a necessary part of their intellectual work.
As I thought about it more, translation was not only a unifying disciplinary catalyst traversing traditions and generations, it was also clearly relevant to the circumstances in which I found myself, in a state that was engaged in a language war between those in favor and those opposed to bilingualism. English-only, English-plus: these were the positions that added political heat to anti-bilingual ballot initiatives in California during the 1990's. This "language war" constituted the backdrop to my work on a book published in 2006 called The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. What was the source of such language fear? Why did so many North Americans feel so anxious about safeguarding Anglophone dominance? Though I was raised monolingually, I had always felt "at home" in multilingual contexts. When I was very young, we lived in Africa (my father worked on decolonization in Africa, we lived in Ghana and Uganda). I had begun to pick up Swahili before we returned to the U.S. Later in life I also experienced in a small way what it feels like to be linguistically colonized. During a year in England, the school insisted that I be given elocution lessons as part of instruction in how to "speak properly" by British standards. Ridding yourself of a "bad accent," dealing with feelings of shame that the wrong accent can produce (captured so well by Derrida in Monolingualism of the Other and Theresa Hak Cha in Dictée) made me wise to the sensation of physical forcing that accompanies the imposition of language norms. It brought home to me in a very concrete way what it means to empower or de-legitimate the way people speak. I think if you have spent time in almost any other country that is not monolingual in its policies, the monolingual, monocultural ideology of the U.S. strikes one as weird. Obviously the U.S. is not really monolingual at all, but the government consistently acts as if it should be; it fails to treat the fact of multilingualism as a cultural resource. If we are entering another language—Sputnik era now, it is for reasons of national security (the dearth of Arabic translators is a catastrophic security risk).
I've argued elsewhere (in an article in Transit), that there are interesting connections to be made between language border patrol issues in the "war on terror," and "south of the border" controls on immigrant language. But let me return momentarily to bilingual controversies. The language politics around bilingual education is fairly complicated in a state like California. It's not a simple case of Latino's "pro" and Anglos "contra" bilingual programs. A lot of Latinos are justly concerned that bilingual education leads to tracking, to classes of lesser quality, to the foreclosure of career opportunities. One very practical solution would be to institute English—plus as a requirement across the board. All students would receive bi- or multilingual instruction; they would become completely fluent in more than one language. This pedagogical imperative, in addition to curtailing an isolationist cultural parochialism, would surely defuse language fear and blunt the use of monolingualism as a foil for anti-immigration policies. All these factors gave my interest in translation a practical, "real-world" grounding. I had been trained in "high theory," and was in some ways more comfortable thinking about language in semiotic, rhetorical, and philosophical terms. This afternoon's talk ["Papers on Technique": The Future of Theory in Comparative Literature] attests to an ongoing commitment to thinking translation as theory, but it argues for a theory that retains its vital investment in the political. Ideally, I would like to see translation theory develop in ways that would make it crucial to changing the landscape of language politics in American education. I have been talking to my colleague Mary Louise Pratt, about the idea of spearheading an initiative to designate English, Spanish and French official languages of the Americas. The upside would be a trilingual curriculum. The down-side would be the risk of marginalizing or minoritizing other major languages (Chinese and Hindi perhaps the most obvious). But maybe you have to start somewhere and then refine the model.
Translation
EA: The other [question] of course is: what is translation? That's one of the big concerns in my book and, as you know, I begin the book with twenty theses on translation, starting with "nothing is translatable" and ending up with "everything is translatable." I believe strongly in both propositions; both are true depending on how language is being used; on whether we are dealing with vehicular or non-vehicular, natural or artificial, analog or digital languages. The new translation studies has to take on the problem of language as a medium or test-case of mediality.
In addition to opening up the problem of how to use translation to rethink the status of language in the context of technological literacy, The Translation Zone focuses on what counts as a discrete language. The old adage that "language is a dialect protected by an army" is germane in this regard. How is "a language" constituted by power, by the policing of grammatical usage? How have writers used non-standard language—vernacular usage, code-switching, eye dialect—to erode the codes and institutions of literariness? Some play with non-standard language hails from a Joycean place: ungrammaticality and plurilingual invention as fount for avant-garde experimentalism. But there is also a way in which non-standard language has been "othered" in a very negative way within mainstream learning. It is held aloof because it is associated with subcultural force-fields (rap lyrics are the favored example). Non-vehicular speech, I think, warrants greater study, not only because it potentially challenges the imperialism of dominant languages or the protocols of eloquence, but also because it reveals language in a creatively combustive state of translatability and provisionality.
Am I advocating that we de-learn grammar and structure? No, not at all; I think that there has to be a vehicular normative tongue to make contestatory poetics possible, to make experiments with pidgin, creole, or broken English by writers like Ken Saro-wiwa or the West Indian-Scots poet Jackie Kay, intelligible. I am also very interested in the way in which non-standard language takes you somewhere politically outside cartographies of nation and ethnicity. Dialects, internet patois, diglossic vernaculars, all fit poorly inside national vocabularies of nation-names or peoples. Language requires a new nominalism; perhaps a regionalism of names that takes stock of transnational communication, diasporic community, anti-globalization groups and transitory coalitions. The extra-national group subjects I see emerging—some of them burgeoning in zones of "translatese"—brings us back to some of your original questions about exile and the foundations of comparative literature. Language that is between discrete vehicular tongues produces a kind of exilic space within language, a netherworld; let's call it the space of translatio.
Exile Within Language
Kate Parker: I wanted to ask a question. One of the places in which I first encountered the term "exile" was actually in a class on feminist theory, in a section on third-world feminism. It was also pulling on this idea of being in L.A. schools, for example Gloria Anzaldúa, being made to speak English and feeling as though a culture was forcibly trying to shape your identity both as a woman and as a Mexican-American. I'm wondering, when you're talking about Spitzer and Auerbach, I'm getting a picture in my mind of this wonderful symbiotic relationship that develops between Spitzer and the culture, but then I wonder if that's even possible for women, who feel doubly alienated, if this might be perceived as a step backward by women who are trying to carve out a space for themselves. I am thinking perhaps of second-wave feminism, maybe, as opposed to "today's feminism," I am curious if there is some sort of specific intersection between women, and exile, and language.
EA: Anzaldúa points us once again to the way in which women, immigrants, minorities, and native peoples experience exile in the place where they live and work. Though wary about drawing facile parallels or "intersections" between European exiles of the thirties and minorities of today, I do think this exilic condition creates a link between the old Comp Lit and the new.
In my mind, Spitzer and Auerbach represent contrasting modes of living exilic translatio. Spitzer seemed to enjoy himself in Turkey. He managed to bring most of his library, he had a good group of international students, and he apparently went to lots of parties and dances. He studied Turkish and even wrote an article in Turkish called "Learning Turkish" in which he compared the challenge of learning the language to that of an "old man learning to ski." Auerbach, from what I was able to glean, did not learn Turkish though he lived in Turkey much longer (eleven years compared to Spitzer's three). Both humanists were aware of the profound historical irony of their situation: brought in by Ataturk's government as part of a mandate to establish a modern humanities curriculum at the University of Istanbul, they displaced Turkish professors who were associated with a "backward" Ottoman system. Auerbach wrote to Walter Benjamin about having exchanged one "primal nationalism" for another. In addition to Mimesis—that ever-famous staple of Comp Lit in which he presented himself as a shipwrecked survivor, trying to keep the vestiges of western humanism alive—Auerbach wrote a Romance Studies primer for his Turkish students. This book confirms the impression that Auerbach conceived of his mission as a one-way translation: he was bringing western culture to Turkey, and did not really see how the complex politics of Ataturk's linguistic modernization program was the harbinger of literary world-systems that required a new philology. (This said, I did allow in my book that Auerbach's last book, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, indirectly addressed the problem of linguistic imperialism in ways that are very relevant to today's debates).
In my book Spitzer comes off better than Auerbach; I resurrect him as an important forerunner of global comparatism. His seminar, though mostly concentrating on European stylistics and philology, seems to have offered an early effort to adapt the Euro-curriculum to the uses of non-Euro constituency. His explications de texte evince sensitivity to the vast geographical spread of language. Like many philologists before him, he was fascinated by the genetic trees of language (a precursor to Franco Moretti in this regard, I'm thinking of his book Graphs, Maps and Trees). He saw etymons as nubs of cultural affect, microcosms of worldliness, miniature contact zones. Spitzer also showed acuity in mobilizing instances of untranslatability and uncommensurability. Though he might offer an approximative term for a Turkish word in his article on "learning Turkish," he flags its limits. Spitzer's willingness to practice a comparatism that takes full account of "untranslatables" set him apart from his American colleagues; he seemed, paradoxically enough, comfortable with the alienating effects of language. He even became fascinated, after he had lived in the U.S., with words like Sunkist and Kodak. A whole theory of neologism was built on linguistic product-branding and trademarks, despite his distaste for the crass commercialism of mass culture (in this he was not unlike his Frankfurt School contemporaries).
I haven't addressed that part of the question pertaining to women and double alienation. Anzaldúa comes out of an emancipatory moment in the late seventies, and she is hyper-conscious of a double history of oppression; the conditions that have made it hard for women and gay people to speak out, the conditions that have made it hard for Latinos and people of color to make their voices heard. I guess I'd argue that on the one hand, alienation from one's native tongue can be intellectually and ontologically freeing; a way of encountering the strange technics of language, its inhuman, non-possessive character. Giorgio Agamben has written about this in Means Without Ends. Notes on Politics (2000), when he speaks—in the manner of Benjamin, of "the experience of the pure existence of language." On the other hand, linguistic alienation can be a violent, un-homing experience; at its worst a kind of cultural rape or identity-theft.
KP: Yes, and in the 1980's she writes "How to Tame a Wild Tongue," an essay we teach in Writing I, in which she actively compares the stealing of her native tongue to a kind of rape; its actually a physical act when they force her tongue down. In my class, students really took to this essay because it describes so vividly the experience of exile on two levels, and she clearly marks this both as a woman and as a Latina.
EA: Hélène Cixous, an interesting counterpart to Anzaldúa, wrote a wonderful book called Vivre l'Orange [To Live the Orange]. It's interesting because it is a bilingual text—French/ English—that flaunts the fact that its two halves are incommensurate. Cixous writes things in English that don't carry over in the French version, and vice versa. She writes her way into a zone of untranslatability. In this book—which is an address to Iranian feminists fearful at the prospect of losing freedoms after Ayatollah Khomeini's assumption of power—she captures what it is like to facie exile in one's own land.
Internal exile/linguistic exile. Such experiences are shaped by censorship and intolerance, by culturally hegemonic languages, by shifting determinations of what it means to be at home in language. I probably prefer the term "linguistic habitus to "home" because the latter carries familialist baggage; problematic associations around "fatherland" and "mother tongue." Too much identity nostalgia around language and home risks giving rise to new forms of nationalist or sexist essentialism; even reinforcing the tendency towards linguistic racial profiling that we see in immigration processing. The challenge is to critique linguistic essentialism while remaining sensitive to identitarian linguistic belonging. Ultimately, we need to look carefully at peoples' psychic investments in language in order to remain vigilant against the corporate take-over of small, endangered languages and literatures.
KP: It is really interesting that you talk about the American monolithic attachment to language and one of the things that happens frequently when the students read the bilingual Anzaldúa essay, (and I imagine as well with Cixous' Vivre l'Orange) is that they have this experience of exile themselves. They come to class very frustrated, saying "There are no translation notes here. I can't read this!" and "What does this mean?" And soon they come to this conclusion that this is how Anzaldúa herself must feel and must have felt as a young person in school. It's interesting that you say this because I think that is precisely the kind of assumption we should always understand, but even when another language is presented, that we have a strong feeling that we have a right to a translation of it, a right to know what it means, presents itself very strongly.
EA: But I do understand that. You mentioned "the right to language" and I think that phrase illuminates language politics as understood through the ethics of citizenship and cultural enfranchisement. The right to language is a huge issue, especially in the places and times where people have been denied that right. In the early nineteenth century, Benjamin Constant wrote an essay on "usurpation and conquest" protesting Napoleon's use of language as a weapon of cultural imperialism. In Constant's view, the imposition of French, which amounted to the nullification of the right to language by peoples in conquered countries or territories, was a devastating form of ethnic cleansing. Allowing for anachronism, one could say that the ongoing defense of Black Vernacular English similarly invokes an ethics of language rights; a basic right to language.
Chris Boehm: I was interested in the notion of exile within a language as these zones of untranslatability, and how much something like this is indebted to Lacan in the "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious," in which the signifier is always slipping, there's always minimally a gap in language that can't be fully signified, it can't be fully made sense of, there's always that moment in which you're not sure what's going on, what is meant and what has been said.
EA: Let me answer a Lacan question by turning to Derrida. It's interesting how the deferral model of signification can be reconciled with the exilic model that we discussed earlier. Derrida's notions of the "monolingualism of the other,"—that "other language which is in me" links linguistic impersonalism to the autobiographical narrative of exile (in Derrida's case, his upbringing in Algeria and experience of statelessness when his French citizenship was revoked during the war.) When Derrida began publishing, he was largely received as a voice of disembodied "theory," but later on he was subjectively situated, not just by identity markers (Algerian, French, Jew), but by the pragmatics of speech (accent, cultural mannerisms). The "slippage" in Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other challenges the suturing of language, ethnic affiliation, and nation names. In The Translation Zone I took this very much to heart. By dislinking the names of nations and the names of languages an peoples, I tried to define zones of linguistic indeterminacy and interaction that elude nominalism, or the essentialism of cultural labels and proper names. At one point in the book I became quite obsessed with the phrase (common in French): "translated from the American." It's a mistake to say "translated from the American" because "American" refers to a nation, not a language. But the "mistake" is spot-on in referring to that "X" which is not-language, not-nation. That X, or aporia, refers perhaps to the "it-ness" or techne of language as such. What interests me is to explore how a new translation studies and a new comparative literature will negotiate this de-nationalized itness in relation to the cultural politics of language names.