Hay Festival 2012: David Bellos extract – language is the final perfection

Traditional Arabic Koranic Calligraphy on Mosque Walls, Morocco.
Picture: Petr Svarc / Alamy

By David BellosLast Updated: 11:59AM BST 01/06/2012

When it comes to translation, English casts a long shadow over other tongues, argues David Bellos, in an extract from Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The flow of translations has always had a hierarchical structure: the present situation reproduces a pattern that can be observed many times in the historical past. Translation typically takes place not between languages felt by their speakers to be on an equal footing, but between those that in some respect have a vertical relationship between them. Laws, commands, instructions and treaties are translated down – from Sumerian, Greek, Latin, in ancient times, from German in the Habsburg empire, from Ottoman Turkish in the long period of Ottoman sway in the Mediterranean Basin – into vernaculars spoken by people who needed to grasp what the rules and agreements that affected them were. Novels, plays, philosophical and mathematical treatises, and religious texts may accompany them, but not always.

Out of these kinds of situations the world over have grown ideas among the speakers of culturally dominant tongues that their language is inherently superior, and the only true vehicle of thought.

In the Muslim world, for example, there was little doubt in past centuries about which language was top: “The perfect language is the language of the Arabs and the perfection of eloquence is the speech of the Arabs, all others being deficient. The Arabic language among languages is like the human form among beasts. Just as humanity emerged as the final form among animals, so is the Arabic language the final perfection of human language and of the art of writing, after which there is no more,” said one grammarian.

Seventeenth-century Frenchmen made the same assertion about French, and similar expressions of confidence in the superiority of Greek, Persian, Latin and Chinese .

Obviously, there are no rational grounds for such kinds of linguistic preference: all languages can be made to serve whatever ends their speakers wish to achieve. But the feeling that a difficult foreign text only makes sense when it’s been put into the language we prefer to use for thinking hard thoughts can easily ambush a sensible mind.

Years ago I sat in a library in Konstanz trying to make sense of Hegel by reading him very slowly in German . It was hard going, and I never really got the hang of it. I sneaked a look at what the German student in the next carrel was reading. It was Hegel, too – but in English! Such experiences can easily lead you into a barely conscious, self-comforting persuasion that your language alone is the one in which real meaning is to be found.

But however great the service that a clarifying, explanatory translation of a foreign text may provide, we should always resist the false conclusion that the target language – whatever language it is – is “better” at expressing this or that kind of thought.

Yet the truth is that today 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 inter-languages 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 2,500 pages in all) into “the major languages of the world”. However, these difficult works will be not translated into French, German, Spanish, Russian or Arabic.

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.

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 text’s 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 book world wasn’t designed by anyone. With its all-powerful English sun, major planets called French and German, outer rings where Russian occasionally crosses the path of Spanish and Italian, and its distant satellites no weightier than stardust, the system is all the more remarkable for being in contradiction to the 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.

This is an edited extract from David Bellos’s Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (Penguin) He is speaking at 4pm on the Wales Stage (Event 16). Hay runs a number of festivals abroad from Kerala to Cartegena. Visit hayfestival.org

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