By Kemal Kurt
Translated by Marilya Veteto
He steps right up close to me, halts, and says: "Show me your tongue."
I stick out my tongue, he reaches into his pocket, pulls out a jackknife, opens
it, and brings the blade all the way to my tongue. He says:, "Now we'll
cut off his tongue." Elias
Canetti, The Tongue Set Free
The children arrive eventually. Now they are really tired. They brush their teeth and go to bed. My unraveled skein of thoughts lies in disarray on the floor of the patio.
I am tired, too.
Just stay for a bit. Many are of the opinion that
a writer can and should only write in his mother tongue. Purist nonsense! The
language of the mothers is always a different one; weaning starts in school.
Did Beckett learn French from his mother? Nabokov wrote his linguistically brilliant
novel Lolita in English after he had emigrated to the United States
at the age of 41. Another Russian, Joseph Brodsky, began writing in English
shortly after his emigration to the USA; the gravest of sins for a poet. Today,
the former Yugoslav, Charles Simic, who had never spoken a word of English before
his sixtieth year of life, is a Nobel Laureate and is counted among the best
American poets. One of the most significant English novels of our century, Lord
Jim, was written by the Polish sailor, Joseph Conrad, who-by his own account-brought
his "English sentences out of the black night into daylight" like
a mine worker. The Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti, a Jew of Bulgarian descent
with a Turkish passport who was raised to be multilingual, described in his
childhood memoirs with the telling title The Tongue Set Free how he
began learning German at eight-the language in which he would spend his life
writing. After a long period living as a vagabond, the Romanian Panait Istrati
wrote his novels in French at the advice of his mentor Roman Rolland. Ivan and
Claire Goll swung back and forth between German and French. All these authors
did not learn their literary language, which for every writer begins as a foreign
language and must be acquired with laborious effort, from their mothers. A writer
has no mother tongue, no home. He is always en route.
There are authors, however, who have clung
to their mother tongue despite years in exile: Lion Feuchtwanger, Witold Gombrowicz,
Isaac Singer. The polyglot Paul Celan, who grew up a Jew in a Romanian-Ukrainian-German
culture, didn't believe in bilingualism in poetry and wrote not a single line
in French during his "Babylonian captivity" in Paris. Gertrude Stein,
who led a salon in Paris and consorted with famous artists such as Picasso and
Matisse, opined that one could have but one métier and one language:
"Writing is my métier, English is my language." She had not
a single French book in her bookshelf. Nonetheless she did not want to restrict
herself to one home." In her book Paris France, she wrote, "After
all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside
themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they
belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it
is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there."
Ultimately, it is a matter of personal preference
and intimate circumstances as to whether an author writes in his mother tongue
or in one learned later. To generalize here would be an unacceptable reduction
of facts into a simple formula.
The assertion that literature is only possible
in one's mother tongue loses its validity more and more in this era of mobility
and migrations. Immigrants from North Africa, India, Pakistan, from the Caribbean
and various African countries write in the language of their country of choice
rather than in their mother tongue. They are increasingly becoming accepted
as fully-fledged authors and are not infrequently honored with national prizes.
On my copy of Adah's Story by the Nigerian woman writer Buchi Emecheta
it says "Best of Young British Novelists 1983." The Algerian author
Tahar Ben Jelloun received the most prestigious literary prize in France, the
Prix Goncourt in 1988. This prize was [also] won by Amin Maalouf, a Lebanese
writer who has lived in Paris since 1976 and who writes in French and speaks
it with a heavy accent. In Great Britain a Nigerian, Ben Okri, received the
Booker Prize in 1991, which was awarded in 1992 to Michael Ondaatje from Sri
Lanka; in 1981 it was Salman Rushdie. Mahdi Sharifi and Hanif Kureishi have
established themselves as authors in France and England. When the Turkish woman
writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar won the city of Klagenfurt's Ingeborg Bachmann
Prize in 1992, it was a surprise for everyone and all but a scandal. The competence
of the jury came under question.
While the United States boasts of William Saroyan,
Derek Walcott and Amy Tan, Great Britain of Jean Rhys, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman
Rushdie, and France of Samuel Beckett, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Julien Green, Germany
has only the prime example of Adelbert von Chamisso. Born and raised the son
of a French family of nobility, the young Chamisso fled revolutionary France
with his parents for Berlin. Though he spoke German with an accent his whole
life, Chamisso is numbered among the most well-known German poets. His fanciful
novel The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl--in which the hero sells
his shadow and from then on is a societal pariah--is on every school's reading
list. The high symbolic value of the shadow gave rise to various interpretations.
In light of the life story of Chamisso, who as an artist and as a French emigrant
felt he was pressed into the role of the outsider, it is likely that the loss
of a shadow emblematizes the loss of his fatherland and his mother tongue.
The acceptance and reception of "authors of other mother tongues"
is much different in Germany than in France and England. Here there is no tradition
of this, for historically there is only one, already cited, example. The list
of foreign authors living in Germany and writing in German who have found a
broad readership begins with Chamisso, and it ends with Chamisso. In between:
nothing. In the past ten years many newly-arrived authors have written their
books in German. There is a hands-off approach to them, categories are invented
for them such as Guest-Worker Literature, Migrant Literature, Literature of
Victims, Literature of Commitment; those who are quite proper use the rather
cumbersome "Literature of German-language Authors of non-German Mother
Tongues" for it. Separate anthologies, separate publishing houses, separate
prizes and separate journals are the result. Critics do not acknowledge these
authors--whatever you want to call them, after all, you are a part of it. The
number of readers is small.
Authors of foreign extraction may express themselves regarding their existential
orientation and have to take care to fulfill the expectations that arise from
their choice of topic. Victimization is their appointed domain-and the folkloric,
that is, whatever the reader thinks of the other culture. The author must incessantly
emphasize his otherness, his foreignness. That is not normal. It is not normal
that an author only gets a chance if he can prove that he doesn't belong. A
colleague of Lebanese descent recounted once that his orientalistic stories
were well-received, his love poetry however was systematically rejected. Whoever
tries to bite the bullet and leap over his own shadow ends up like Schlemihl:
he loses it.
More and more authors of foreign descent are expected to bolster the oversights
of politics. The oeuvre is thus relegated to secondary status.
The fact that, unlike in England and France,
works are rarely widely publicized here is not due to a lack of creative potential;
there is no fertile soil for them. Germans stand behind their neighbors in regard
to concepts of freedom and above all, equality, but they also only gave a short
performance as a colonial power. They remained open to other cultures and peoples
and haven't learned to work with foreigners. In this country it is believed
that German-language literature can only be created by those who were born into
that language in order for it to be taken seriously-proof of a conservatism
of values and provincialism. Societal circumstances are reflected in cultural
enterprise; they presuppose one another. The unwritten laws of literary enterprise
do not much distinguish themselves from the law of imperial citizenship.
Germans jealously shield their language from the
touch of foreigners. At the slightest variation from the guidelines, fears of
foreign infiltration are awakened in the breast of the keepers of the Grail.
Though one welcomes--albeit somewhat stiffly and awkwardly--the enrichment of
one's culture, one maintains a policy of cultural hygiene. In matters of the
spirit, Germany remains a closed society, a society with a literary ghetto.
You sit in this ghetto and look out over the wall.
Outside they are celebrating. Since you do not have unlimited mastery of the
language, you are an onlooker at the party. You content yourself with a limited
portion of the language and you attempt to make the best of it. You think of
the ascetic Georges Perec, who voluntarily imposed upon himself severe constraints
in form, style and language in order to discover new authorial possibilities
which, according to him, lay hidden in the language. In his novel, La Disparition,
there is not a single occurrence of the letter “e” --the one most
used in French—over the course of 300 pages. In Zazie in the Métro,
Raymond Queneau gets by with simple dialogue and mock language. "You jabber,
you jabber, that's all you can do" he has the parrot Laverdure nag throughout
the book. The linguistic mutilations of Jandl are well known. These authors
do not draw on a Horn of Plenty; they operate with a fraction of the language.
My constraints are real constraints, my language
is never totally in compliance with me. But I am optimistic that something can
be written with it. I can filter while learning and sort-good things go into
the pot? The word "be-greifen" is a quite lovely word that I can understand
without a dictionary. I can I can see before me a hand extended from my brainpan
groping for meanings. It seems familiar: 'kavramak' in Turkish and 'to grasp'
in English work with the same image. But in none of the languages that I know
does anyone get 'a bear tied onto' him. I try to imagine it, but I don't succeed.
Equally unsuccessful am I at imagining "take someone on the grain"
or "building a Turk." Sayings without the force of an image will never
belong to my active vocabulary. "Denigrimprove," "transmogrify,"
"preliminary final result," "that slays me" - I can pick
and choose which words I want to become fond of, or prefer not to.
That may be just fine and dandy, but do you seriously think that you will stumble
upon a chunk of gold one day with your "Guest-Worker-German?" More
power to you! Every dog has its day. But how much is a chunk of gold worth,
and who makes that decision? What can a good text, a good book manage to do
in a society flooded with images and bombarded by all kinds of information?
Primo Levi made no secret of the fact that he had no belief whatsoever in the
revolutionary effect of the written word:
"It is a matter of practical observation that a book or a story, whether
its intentions be good or bad, is essentially an inert and innocuous object;
even in its most ignoble incarnations it can only cause scant harm, certainly
inferior to that produced by alcohol, smoking, or corporate stress."
That is reassuring, I can keep writing, keep
looking for my dog's day. Severe harm is not to be feared.
Stop smoking instead! And Levi goes on about the sustainability and the short
half-life of books:
"Their intrinsic weakness is aggravated by the fact that today all writing
is smothered in a few months by the mob of other writings which push up behind
it."
That is true. Anyone who has been to the Frankfurt
Book Fair has observed that there are more authors than readers.
Since it stands to reason that everyone has a turn in a democracy, there has
to be a rapid turnover. A book that makes a splash today is trash tomorrow.
Which is no guarantee of every book finding a reader. There are no longer any
literary criteria to decide the fate of a book. Can we rely on the judgement
of a secret wirepuller, an aged doyen of the literary scene who would put his
magnifying glass to his eye and--apologies to youth and femininity--would bend
over a manuscript and check it out for its saleability? Primo Levi says:
"Many precious books must have disappeared without leaving a trace, having
been defeated in the never-ending struggle between those who write and those
who prescribe how one should write."
It used to be the case--and in some places it
still is--that censors and judges were in the employ of church or state. If
things had gone their way, today we would have neither Madame Bovary
nor Lolita nor The Loyal Subject. These are books that have
won the battle. Of the losers we know nothing, simply nothing. Today the self-proclaimed
executioners of literature-critics, reviewers, publishers, and other literary
entities-are the ones who decide what literature is. They frequently confuse
hermetics with art, much as alchemy was confused with chemistry in the Middle
Ages, if they do not celebrate themselves by dint of connection to famous names.
Or they operate strategically and hide behind dark texts in order not to give
reason to doubt their authority. These, bereft of any and all esprit or intelligence,
are fragmentary and incoherent, of interest only to the publisher. The result
is that basic characteristics of a good text, clarity, sobriety, and precision
of language suffer and the narrative, as Günter Grass once lamented, have
gone out of fashion. Primo Levi does not think much of it:
"In my opinion one should not write in an obscure manner, because a piece
of writing has all the more value and all the more hope of diffusion and permanence,
the better it is understood and the less it lends itself to equivocal interpretations
… It is known that no author deeply understands what he has written and
all authors have had the opportunity of being astonished by the beautiful and
awful things that the critics have found in their works and that they did not
know they had put there … So he who writes the language of the heart can
turn out to be indecipherable, and it is then right to ask oneself what was
the purpose of his writing … It is up to the writer to make himself understood
by those who wish to understand him: it is his trade … For the rest, talking
to one’s fellowman in a language that he cannot understand may be the
bad habit of some revolutionaries, but it is not at all a revolutionary instrument:
it is on the contrary an ancient repressive artifice, known to all churches,
the typical vice of our political class, the foundation of all colonial empires.
It is a subtle way of imposing one’s rank.”
Primo Levi's quote brings us back to where we started: to language as an instrument
of dominion. Anyone who hides behind obscure language, anyone who expresses
himself incomprehensibly makes use of this instrument--in literature and in
daily life. You yourself have felt what it means not to be understood. Long
enough have you pretended to understand and nodded your head. You have suffered
enough from tyranny and the obscure words of those who swagger about. Your resource
against it: clarity.
Clarity, even if it costs me my shirt or my
head. Even if one equates clarity with a lack of art. Clear thoughts require
clear language. Then you can go on to play with text, to overlay the words with
multiple meanings. Then interpretation of a text is fun, if the flipside of
the word does not just give the writer but indeed every reader something, something
different, to find.
Thanks to its clear and unadorned language, the
poetry of Yunus Emres--the first great poet of Anatolia--is as alive today as
it was 700 years ago. His poetry sings its mystical experiences in the simple
syllable-counting couplets verses of folk tradition. In the book Wanderings
with Yunus Emre by the acclaimed Orientalist Annemarie Schimmel, there
is an anecdote from his life: children ask Yunus Emre to recite counting-out
rhymes. So he, off the cuff:
”I go up the old plum tree
Eating grapes while up high
Angry, the gardener spoke to me:
Eating those walnuts all of mine?”
The children are disappointed.
"That's not a nonsense rhyme!" they complain. The poet answers, again
in verse:
"Yunus he has said a word
like any other it is not
hidden from those mocking souls
is the meaning of the spot.”
And Yunus goes on:
"There are things, child, that one may not speak of … I could tell
you that the law is like a plum which has a hard stone at the core, and the
grape is the path of the dervishes, quite sweet and with few seeds, but the
nut, that is divine wisdom, which is difficult to attain. But once you have
found it, it is quite sweet and nutritious and like pure sweet oil … Do
you see that I could explain every verse to you--but why? Let the children have
their fun with it and the other people scratch their heads. I must go now.”
*********************
Sources:
Kurt, Kemal. “Die verlorene Zunge.“ Was ist die Mehrzahl von Heimat?
Reinbek
bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1995. 112-20.
Canetti, Elias. The Memoirs of Elias Canetti. Transl. Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999. 5.
Levi, Primo. “On Obscure Writing.” Other People’s Trades.
New York: Summit,
1989. 169-75. (no translator listed)
Stein, Gertrude. Paris, France. New York: Norton, 1996. 2.
<Kemal Kurt's Bio> <Marilya Veteto's Bio>
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