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Dav id Bellos, A rthur G oldhammer, and Ly dia Dav is on Translation : The N ew Yorker
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August 13, 2012
Language Is Music
Posted by Mary Hawthorne
The tall windows on the second floor of the French Embassy’s Cultural Services were flung wide open one recent mild
evening. Waning late-afternoon light filled a large room, turnings its yellow walls cadmium orange. Joy-drunk birds in
Central Park competed with the traffic sounds below as guests stood around in an adjoining reception area chatting and
sipping Veuve Cliquot and eating tuna tartare served in miniature ice-cream cones. The occasion: the award ceremony
of the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation’s Twenty-fifth Annual Translation Prize.
After everyone was seated in the yellow room, a group of panelists—Alyson Waters (moderator), David Bellos, Lydia
Davis, and Lorin Stein—took up the subject of the evolution of French translation over the past twenty-five years.
They touched on such things as why smaller presses publish more books in translation than the big houses (the books
are cheap to produce and are often translated by way of love, in-house, cutting costs even further; the larger houses
have bigger fish to fry); the fact that just three per cent of books currently published in English are books in translation,
of which only a fraction are from the French; why that number is so small (not a lot of great literature or philosophy or
significant social theory coming out of France nowadays); the shaming fact that most in the American media (including
many literary reviewers) cannot read in a second language; the role of the translator as cultural gatekeeper and curator
(it is often the translator who suggests and vouches for a book’s worthiness to publishers); the importance of the
French language as a cultural pipeline (the French translate everything, from virtually any language: Estonian, Japanese,
Hindi, Hopi, Hungarian, you name it; hence many foreign books in English come to us only by way of translation from
the French); which books the panelists would like to translate or retranslate: Lorin Stein (the poems of Apollinaire);
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Dav id Bellos, A rthur G oldhammer, and Ly dia Dav is on Translation : The N ew Yorker
Lydia Davis (the third volume of Michel Leiris’s “The Rules of the Game”; she’s done the other two); David Bellos
(“La Vie de Roman Gary”).
During a Q. & A. following the discussion, a member of the audience stood up and asked whether the panelists had
any response to a Times editorial by Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard, in which he suggested that
the study of foreign languages at the university level was not necessarily crucial going forward, owing to, among other
things, the strides being made in machine translation.
At this, David Bellos grew nearly apoplectic (origin early seventeenth century: from French apoplectique or late Latin
apoplecticus, from Greek apoplēktikos, from apoplēssein “disable by a stroke” see: apoplexy): “Ohhh, God, I— I
mean, everyone’s allowed to go off the rails every now and then, but, I mean—really,” he said indignantly. A brief
discussion in refute among the panelists ensued, and then it was time for another champagne break.
I hadn’t read the Summers editorial yet, but I thought about it on my way back to Queens on the 7 train to Jackson
Heights, wishing I knew what all the people around me were saying and reading, in Spanish, Korean, Russian, Chinese,
Urdu, Bengali, Tagalog, Pashto … When I got home, I called up the piece and found the offending paragraphs:
The world is much more open, and events abroad affect the lives of Americans more than ever before.
This makes it essential that the educational experience breed cosmopolitanism—that students have
international experiences, and classes in the social sciences draw on examples from around the world. It
seems logical, too, that more in the way of language study be expected of students. I am not so sure.
English’s emergence as the global language, along with the rapid progress in machine translation and the
fragmentation of languages spoken around the world, make it less clear that the substantial investment
necessary to speak a foreign tongue is universally worthwhile. While there is no gainsaying the insights
that come from mastering a language, it will over time become less essential in doing business in Asia,
treating patients in Africa or helping resolve conflicts in the Middle East.
Not surprisingly, these few words have already received considerable pushback. Apart from the obvious practical
benefits of speaking more than one language in a globalized world, studies suggest that bilingualism confers tangible
cognitive benefits to children and the elderly alike. Still, I found Summers’s statement so astonishing, and, in its strange
way, fascinating, that I decided to ask a few of the translators who were present that night to respond to it more fully.
I wrote to David Bellos, Lydia Davis, and Arthur Goldhammer (who shared this year’s translation prize for nonfiction
with Richard Howard; Marina Harss won the fiction prize). Below are their slightly edited responses.
David Bellos had this to say:
You ask what, specifically, is wrong with this statement.
One thing about it is right. Summers is writing about the future of American universities, not about the
entire educational system. In that context, it is true that teaching foreign languages from scratch to
eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds is costly and not very efficient. A far better investment would be to
teach foreign languages to eight-to-twelve-year-olds—they learn faster, and their teachers don’t have
professional salaries. But one thing is pure sleight of rhetorical hand. “The fragmentation of languages”
following “emergence” and “progress” makes it sound as though linguistic diversity is getting worse.
There is no evidence whatever that this is so. Linguistic diversity is as old as language itself.
The second sentence presupposes that at present or at some recent time it is or was essential to master a
language in order to do business in Asia, to treat patients in Africa, or to resolve the situation in the
Middle East. The presupposition is fantastical. Over the past century, far too few American or European
adventurers, administrators, and peacemakers were, or are, sufficiently competent in Chinese,
Vietnamese, Japanese, Wolof, Hausa, Swahili, Arabic, or Ivrit to have any real clue as to what their
interlocutors wanted or needed. The only real point Summers is making, one that is widely shared by the
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Dav id Bellos, A rthur G oldhammer, and Ly dia Dav is on Translation : The N ew Yorker
ignorant, is that English is enough, because everybody is now learning English. That is where it gets
interesting. Allow me to expand on this, since I was in Geneva recently talking to interpreters and
teachers of translation at the E.T.I. [the University of Geneva’s School of Translation and Interpretation]
about this very problem:
English speakers are now a relatively small minority among global users of English. However, the
majority of users of English do not write or speak “English” but, rather, a vehicular tongue called I.E.
(International English) which is highly inflected by the (very diverse) native languages of its users. The
effect is that it is often easier to translate a piece of I.E. into a third language if you know the native
language of the user—and sometimes it is positively necessary. I.E. is not designed to carry nuance, and
for that reason it is often ambiguous and of uncertain meaning. Non-native users of it are perfectly aware
of this. All users of I.E. are fluent/native speakers of another language, which they can (and do) use for
more important, personal, or subtle kinds of communication (such as inevitably arise in business,
diplomacy, and treating the sick). The only people disenfranchised by recourse to I.E. are those native
speakers of English who do not have another idiom for side-channel consultation. Hoping that the
“imperfect” English used by a large part of the world for functional communication will one day come to
resemble “real” English is quite futile. It will diverge more and more, and its dialectal variations are likely
to become increasingly distinct.
You ask why learning a foreign language is critical to our educational system.
Where to begin? Maybe with the Romans, who insisted on teaching Greek to all their highborn citizens.
Or with the Russian Empire, which taught its élite to speak French. Or the French, who until very
recently made everyone learn Latin. Mastery of a foreign language has been a required skill in every
Western civilization since time immemorial. Columbus, Descartes, Newton, Euler—find me an important
Western thinker in any field, and you’ll find someone who spoke and wrote in at least two languages.
Why should we think of abandoning the fountainhead of Western culture? The real impact of this long
tradition is, however, not in the field of business or diplomacy or mathematics or exploration; it is
because mastery of a foreign language is a prerequisite for understanding how to use your own. That’s
why we teach it.
You ask what makes the substantial investment necessary worthwhile.
No great investment is really necessary. Teach it young and it gets learned fast. But no amount of
teaching can supply motivation, which is a far more effective pedagogical tool. Motivation can come only
from the real world. That’s why it is so important for people with clout, like Larry Summers, to shut up.
Many American youngsters are inspired to learn Japanese because they are fans of manga and anime. In
my own, now ancient, generation, many British adolescents fell in love with French because of Sartre
and Camus. Others got the Russian bug from the excitement caused by Yuri Gagarin and Laika.
Language teachers are to some extent prisoners of what’s “hot,” but it’s also their job to find sources of
excitement in foreign cultures that will make youngsters want to learn the language.
You ask what would be lost if foreign languages continue to be dropped from the curriculum.
Full command of spoken and written English: to be able to understand what is specific about your own
language is a huge advantage if you want to manipulate it with subtlety and effect. International clout:
monolingual academic, businessman, diplomat, or taxi-driver is not going to be taken seriously in Tallinn,
Mumbai, or Beijing. Or Paris, Frankfurt, or Dubai. Everything else.
You ask when I took up French and why.
In preadolescent depression, around the age of twelve, I realized I was no good at mathematics, art,
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Dav id Bellos, A rthur G oldhammer, and Ly dia Dav is on Translation : The N ew Yorker
music, or sport, and as I had a very nice teacher of French I decided, in a rather arbitrary way, that I
just had to be good at something. It turned out that I was rather good at French, and so I also learned
Latin and German and Russian (the last not very well). Most of what I know properly I learned before I
left secondary school. I’ve lived off it for half a century. What continues to engage me is the possibility
of sharing this kind of knowledge with young people and seeing them (or at least, some of them)
blossom into open-minded and curious global citizens.
Arthur Goldhammer wrote:
While the temptation to condemn the former Harvard president’s words as the nec plus ultra of
philistinism is comprehensible, that isn’t my reaction. To be sure, the adequacy of such a reductive
analogy between the rewards of studying anything, be it a foreign language or quantum field theory, and
the pecuniary returns on an investment of time and tuition can be questioned on many grounds. It’s a
view that, as the French would say, is aussi partial que partiel—as biased as it is incomplete. But it’s
perfectly reasonable, I think, to question why our curricula are what they are.
I was a mathematician before I became a translator, so I recognize the kernel of truth in what Summers
said: life is finite, one can’t master everything, choices have to be made. But—to put it in terms Summers
would surely recognize—we choose under conditions of uncertainty, with imperfect knowledge of
where life may take us. A certain diversification of one’s educational portfolio is therefore a kind of
insurance against imponderable risks. If Summers has read Stendhal, he may recall that Julien Sorel is
chastised by one particularly egregious provincial ecclesiastic examiner—a Larry Summers avant la
lettre—for investing too much time in the study of a profane author like Horace, to the detriment of his
eternal soul. The surprise, though, is that this misplaced investment pays off handsomely in the next
phase of Julien’s life, for it is the young provincial’s knowledge of the Latin poet that delights the
marquis de la Mole sufficiently to persuade him to gamble on hiring the fledgling scholar as his secretary.
Still, having been a mathematician, I’m not quite as convinced as some of my innumerate colleagues that,
to borrow again from French, hors de l’église, pas de salut, that outside the church of belles lettres,
there is no salvation. There is a tendency to conflate the teaching of language with the teaching of
literature, which I think is unhealthy for both the minority passion and the more “universally worthwhile”
pursuit. And Summers is of course right to imply that most people underestimate the “substantial
investment” necessary to truly master a foreign language. Yet the reward for that investment is perhaps
greater than Summers allows. The counter-revolutionary writer Joseph de Maistre, contesting the idea
that there is such a thing as “man” endowed with certain inalienable rights, once remarked that he had
known Frenchmen, Italians, and Spaniards but never “man.” I would stand this statement on its head: we
must all seek to overcome the misfortune of our birth as merely this or that, one thing or another, French
or American, by working hard to see ourselves as others see us. Learning a foreign language is not the
only way to do that, but it is one way.
In my own case, I started learning French in the eighth grade, in a New Jersey public school, for no
particular reason other than that it was offered. I had never set foot in France and had no family
connection there. And I wasn’t very invested in my study of the language initially, because the subjects
about which I was passionate were math and physics, at which I was very good, while French, with its
unfamiliar sounds and gendered nouns and pleonastic ne’s, seemed perversely illogical and therefore
extremely difficult. But le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît pas—the heart has its reasons,
which reason knows not, to borrow from Pascal. I eventually fell for the novels of Balzac, Stendhal, and
Proust. I visited France for the first time in the summer of 1968, in between my first and second years
of graduate school, and was fascinated by both the beauty of the place and the rather sinister tension in
the air in the wake of the events of that May. I resolved to return, but before I could, my draft board
decided to send me to Vietnam, and because I knew French, the Army assumed that I could also learn
Vietnamese. And then my time in the Army raised doubts about whether I wanted to spend the rest of
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Dav id Bellos, A rthur G oldhammer, and Ly dia Dav is on Translation : The N ew Yorker
my life doing algebraic topology, so, after finishing my doctorate and spending a couple of years
teaching, I moved to Paris to find out. Fortunately, like Julien Sorel, I had hedged my intellectual
investments, so my French was good enough to find work as a translator. Thirty-five years later it is
somewhat better, though still far from perfect. But as Nabokov once remarked, it’s a useful lesson in
humility to stumble daily over challenges that a six-year-old native speaker can meet with ease.
And Lydia Davis weighed in the other day, writing:
Maybe the simplest way to object to Larry Summers’s statement is to say what may be obvious but
bears repeating: each language (“around the world”) grows out of the culture that uses it, each culture is
different, each is rich in its own way; if we lose the language we lose the culture, if we don’t know the
language we don’t know the culture (from the inside), if we know even a few foreign languages we are
still not acquainted with the huge richness and variety of the rest of the world’s cultures, and if we know
no other languages but our own we are terribly isolated and impoverished.
Summers mentions the “substantial investment” necessary to speaking a foreign tongue: languages are
not effectively taught in most school curricula, and a great deal of money is wasted. Children pick up
foreign languages easily under the right circumstances, but I’d guess that most children in the U.S. do
not retain much of their years of instruction in foreign languages. So that is a complete waste and it
should be changed.
Though French is the language from which I’ve done the most translating, the first foreign language I
learned was German: I was put in a first-grade classroom in Austria and expected to pick up the
language. My teacher knew almost no English, but one or two of my classmates could speak English—
why, I don’t remember. Within a month, I was speaking, reading, writing, and playing in German. I’m
sure I was not exceptional, and that most seven-year-olds would be able to do the same. That was a
drastic “immersion method,” which couldn’t be duplicated easily here in the U.S., but a modified
immersion method would work.
As for French, I started learning it at age ten, when I entered a new school. I was tutored by the teacher,
a kind but old-school Frenchwoman of a certain age, to catch me up with the other students. We worked
from a slim little red primer (weight: 9 oz.; thickness: 1/2 inch ) with such lovely clear illustrations that
the images were adopted not long ago for the decorative paper wraps of a line of soaps by TokyoMilk
called French Lessons (as I discovered to my great surprise one day at a haircutting salon). Maybe it was
my happy experience with her, following after the earlier experience of the Austrian classroom, where,
fascinatingly, meaningless sounds gradually became meaningful, that infected me with a continuing desire
to understand, speak, and listen to other languages.
And I should add that, after all—something we are aware of most vividly before we understand the
meaning of another language—it is a set of sounds, it is a form of music. Each music is different. Not all
are equally mellifluous—despite my attachment to German, I’d have to say that, really, Raumschlüssel is
less beautiful to my ears than la chiave della camera—but, again, it is variety, and the rich
provocativeness of variety, that we lose if we give up foreign languages.
Here is a little example learned this morning from a cookbook, during a digression into the Italian culture:
the writer of the cookbook equated campanilismo with a form of “blowing one’s own trumpet”; though
the word was new to me, I could spot, and enjoy, the word campanile in it. Now I find, when I look it
up, that it signifies, more exactly, an attitude of local patriotism, attachment to one’s own region and
customs: my campanile is taller than yours. Would Larry Summers want us to give up learning such
beauties? And should he not abandon his own campanilismo?
Illustration by Laurie Rosenwald.
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Dav id Bellos, A rthur G oldhammer, and Ly dia Dav is on Translation : The N ew Yorker
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