The International PEN Report on Translation, Globalization and the English Language

PEN American Center is the U.S. branch of the world’s oldest international literary and human rights organization. There's a quote from Arthur Miller on the PEN web site calling the organization "the voice of cultures truthfully addressing one another rather than governments or armies in confrontation. The object is not to win something, but to illuminate something." The belief that a healthy society is based on free expression is the backbone of PEN's programs. They reach out to the world and into diverse communities within the United States to promote writing and literature at all levels.

Why am I talking about this in a blog on life in France? The reasons are several. I live in a small community where English is not spoken by most people. However it's a community whose elderly citizens and some of its younger ones are bilingual; they speak both French and Occitan and are richer for it. As for English, it's a mandatory subject in the one-room school for kids from 9 to 11 years old; I'm the (volunteer) English teacher. The villagers in general understand some English and would like to learn much more, as a second language. They don't want to replace their native language, they want to broaden their connections to the world. Why? Even in this remote area, where many people pass through during the summer and winter months, English is the language of common ground, the fall-back language: if visitors don't speak French well enough to make themselves understood, they rely on English to communicate. English has become the language Esperanto aimed to be.

I've had mixed reactions to this reality, mostly because of the infiltration of American culture into other cultures. I've been in Foucault's camp for years, ever since I read his ideas about the flattening of American culture and the implication that, as American products (including particularly music, films, literature, and pop culture) are consumed globally, cultural differences are flattened. I like color and difference. But cultures have always invaded each other, adopted and adapted. What makes now different? Accessibility, power, money...

I also believe that we should speak the language of the culture in which we live (not to the exclusion of our native language), out of respect and for the many doors it opens both literally and figuratively.  This leads to better cultural understanding and societal participation as we more effectively interact with our fellow citizens: a multicultural environment with multilingual citizens. Not speaking the language is disempowering, creating disequilibrium on many levels -- not the least of which is psychological.

The positive aspects of this melding are effectively exposed in the PEN Report on the international situation of literary translation. It presents some very convincing arguments about how the growing presence of the English language around the world can foster a sharing of ideas between cultures, enriching rather than flattening them, through literature in translation.

The international PEN report refers to literature as the "common currency among nations" and the "unhampered transmission of thought." You can find a pdf of the report on the University of Columbia's Center for Literary Translation web site: http://www.centerforliterarytranslation.org/  Scroll down to the bottom on the left hand side of the page and you'll find the correct link.

The sixty-seven page document discusses the global presence of the English language and the complex, perplexing reality of why so little literature is translated from other languages into English when the predominant language of our planet is English. The number of those who speak English as a native language coupled with the number of those who speak it as a second language topples the billion mark. And that's growing. An obvious reality is that literature published in English has the potential of reaching a very large, international audience and therefore translations into English of literature originally written in other languages have the potential of weaving together ideas from multiple cultures by making them accessible to readers worldwide.

The Report's Introduction, written by Columbia's Esther Allen and Carles Torner from the Institut Ramon Llull (Barcelona, Spain), quotes from Shakespeare's Richard II, Act 1, Scene 3, where Thomas Mowbray reacts to his being banished from his native land and hence his native language, his only language:

    A heavy sentence, my most sovereign liege,

    And all unlook'd for from your highness' mouth:

    A dearer merit, not so deep a maim

    As to be cast forth in the common air,

    Have I deserved at your highness' hands.

    The language I have learn'd these forty years,

    My native English, now I must forego:

    And now my tongue's use is to me no more

    Than an unstringed viol or a harp,

    Or like a cunning instrument cased up,

    Or, being open, put into his hands

    That knows no touch to tune the harmony:

    Within my mouth you have engaol'd my tongue,

    Doubly portcullis'd with my teeth and lips;

    And dull unfeeling barren ignorance

    Is made my gaoler to attend on me.

    I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,

    Too far in years to be a pupil now:

    What is thy sentence then but speechless death,

    Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?

Allen and Torner state that with the passing of four centuries, Mowbury's lament has been nearly reversed: today odds are that an English speaker will be understood in more places on our planet than any speaker of any other language. It has become important to master English to avoid exclusion. Research shows that lesser-spoken languages and dialects are disappearing. We cannot blame that entirely on the growing presence of the English language; as the Report accurately points out, many other widely spoken languages, such as Spanish and Chinese, have replaced lesser spoken languages. But does this trend necessarily bring with it an eventual disappearance of cultural differences as well? 

I would say that that is indeed the risk we're facing, unless the trend in publishing changes, unless publishers increase the number of English translations of works originating in other languages. If their motivation for publishing spins around the financial -- obviously a primary concern that cannot be discarded--, then why not publish more English translations of foreign works to sell to an ever-increasing global market of English speakers, thereby diffusing ideas from different cultures while making money as well? Illuminating while winning, winning by illuminating. Read the report and let me know what you think. I'm off to edit a translation.