On language margination and poetry, a text published for a world poetry forum held in Qinghai province, China, in August 2014 h

The voiceless

I come from a country scarred by linguistic frictions born when the British defeated the French in 1759: New France (nowadays the province of Quebec) became overnight a British possession. The country developed in two major languages, besides 66 indigenous ones, cruelly marginalized despite dating back to the time the white man had not set foot on American soil. Later, fate took me to Mexico, where alongside Spanish, many native languages give the country one of the world’s greatest linguistic diversity. Thus my experience with linguistic minority is a first-hand, very personal one.

One of the most moving testimony of linguistic diversity is indeed an ancient, albeit mythical one. The Bible has it that everyone spoke the same tongue. Mankind started building the city of Babel, featuring a sky-rocketing tower. God realized a single language would make people contemptuous, so to humble them, He confounded speech: nations stopped understanding each other and forsake the construction of the higher-than-God tower. It is estimated around 7,000 languages are spoken nowadays, although in 1887, Polish citizen Ludwik Zamenhof invented a language meant to be universal. This intent of repairing the Babel disaster failed, and Esperanto never prospered.

What does it mean, then, to live on the margin of a dominant culture? I clarify beforehand the words “marginal” and “dominant” only refer to numbers or power, never to intrinsic worth. Shameful are the days of the Conquest of America, when native languages were deemed babblings of non-rational people. As historian Olive Dickason explained in The myth of the Savage: “The missionaries soon discovered that the Amerindian languages were not simple or only partially developed, as was generally believed, but exactly the opposite. These ‘excellent systems’ were fully formed and complex in their structures, and in a manner that was seldom compatible with European patterns of thought. ‘The astonishing thing,’ [Jesuit missionary] Brébeuf wrote of the Huron, ‘is that all their words are universally conjugated ... we find ourselves hindered from getting them to say properly in their language, 'In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.' […] Later Bressani lamented that the mere sign of the cross had cost the mission a year of study. […] When the fathers wrote of the ‘poverty’ of Amerindian languages, they were attributing the difficulties they found in translating Christian concepts to supposed defects in those tongues. Another ‘defect’ was discovered in the lack of words to express commonplaces of France or Europe. But the same missionaries soon came to recognize the wealth of Amerindian languages […]: ‘They have so tiresome an abundance that I am almost led to believe that I shall remain poor all my life in their language,’ Charles Lalemant complained of the Montagnais. Brébeuf echoed those sentiments for the Huron when he wrote, ‘I shall have to go a long time to the school of the Savages, so prolific is their language.’

If we look closely at demographics and linguistic statistics, we find that, paradoxically, most humans live on the periphery of Western culture. The 407 million native speakers of Spanish, alongside 359 million native speakers of English, account for less than the 1559 million native speakers of Mandarin, Hindi and Arabic altogether. Although most of the world population is non-white, Western culture dominates publishing and cultural transfer worldwide. Economic and military dominance is the single most important factor in the uneven relationship between languages, but this delicate balance changes over time and space. The aura of languages, unfortunately, depends mainly on economics and concomitant political dominance; it has always been so, and Amerindian tongues illustrate that perfectly, although many “marginal” languages are incredibly metaphorical. Consider Haitian Creole, where a stepmother is called “mommy-not-mommy”. Or peninsular Mayan, where the verb “to like” does not exist as such, but refers to one of the five senses —taste, sight, touch, smell and taste. A Mayan would say “Did your eyes like Qinghai?” to ask if you appreciated the landscapes and monuments there. Inuktitut, spoken by the Inuits, has more than twenty words for “snow” according to color and texture.    

But how does linguistic dominance fit into the endeavors of poetry? While all literature rests on language, poetry is the literary genre most acutely conscious of the power of words. Poetry feeds on semantic displacements and musicality of speech. Without that game of deconstruction, there is no poetry, and all languages are essentially metaphorical. Poetry can be a tool of cultural identity where a language falls, due to historical circumstances, under the wardship of a dominant one, like French in Canada, Basque or Catalan in Spain, Estonian in the former Soviet Union. It is so because tongues are the most powerful aspect of ethnic belonging. Language is as far-reaching as religion or beliefs to define culture, because it circumscribes all thought processes. The dilemma of choosing to write in a minority language nationwide has little to do with identity, but is, fundamentally, related to diffusion. A poem written in Amazir will be read only in Southern Morocco. However, ethnic minorities in their own countries are usually bilingual, and they can solve this dilemma easily, having access to two languages. It is more complicated for people in monolithic national cultures using a “rare” language, Icelandic or Papiamento, for instance. Furthermore, poetry books easily allow bilingual edition. It is one bounty of poetry, and poets who choose to write in a little-spoken language should take advantage of that blessing. Isn’t poetry, anyway, already marginal? The guild of poets worldwide is smaller than the crowd of bonsai lovers or amateur ornithologists.

That brings me to close my argument with the matter of translation. Whatever shortcomings translation entails, there is no world literature without it. If we want to read Dostoyevsky, unless we are Russian, we must read him in translation. As a British poet writing in Gaelic says to whoever argues translations are like kissing through a veil: “It is much better than not kissing at all!”