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Speaking in Tongues general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the authors
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Our Assessment:
B+ : enjoyable look at some interesting questions regarding language and translation See our review for fuller assessment.
From the Reviews: - Return to top of the page - The complete review's Review:
As authors J.M.Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos explain in their Introduction to Speaking in Tongues, this text: "was written over a period of months by two hands in a dialogue form".
While there is a back and forth, each in turn responding to the comments, observations, and arguments of the other, it is not the quick or immediate back and forth of in-person conversation.
Most of the entries are also longer -- a page or two at a time.
The goal of this project was an unusual one: to make El polaco the "original" text, in the sense that all further translations would proceed from the Spanish text, not the English. This goal was largely thwarted by pressures from the within the publishing industry, but the project allowed us to raise general questions about the secondary status of the translation relative to the primary or "original" text, and indeed about the secondary status of the translator relative to the primary status of the "originator," the author.In the chapter on 'Translating The Pole' Coetzee explains a bit more about the writing of the text -- and the various foreign publishers' refusal to translate from the Spanish version (intriguing not least because so much translation into other languages is still second-hand, most often via the English translation of the work). Indeed, the project -- and its successes and failure seem worth a book of their own, not just a chapter, as here ...... Dimópulos comes to these discussions as both translator -- of The Pole and numerous other works -- as well as "originator", as she has also written several works of fiction. Interestingly, Coetzee, though noting his relationship with a variety of languages, basically ignores his own translation-work, even though he has translated from both Afrikaans and Dutch (notably Wilma Stockenström's The Expedition to the Baobab Tree and Marcellus Emants' A Posthumous Confession). (There are lists of works 'Also by' both authors at the beginning of the book, with Dimópulos' arranged by: 'Fiction', 'Nonfiction', and 'Translation', while the Coetzee-lists only list his works of 'Fiction' and 'Nonfiction'.) The first chapter, 'The Mother Tongue', explores in particular 'the dual linguistic life' -- specifically when the 'mother tongue', the first or 'native' language learnt, is a 'minor' language, while a much of life is then lived in a 'major' -- much more widely spoken, often 'imperial' -- language, with Coetzee finding, for example, that: for many members of the world intelligentsia, the mother tongue is no longer the language in which they do their thinking; yet at the same time in the language in which they think there inheres an uneasy foreign feel.So also Coetzee describes his own path -- whereby already both his parents: "had their schooling in English, and learned to read and write English better than they read or wrote Afrikaans", and he became: "an 'English' writer in the sense that I wrote in the English language, though [...] I treated the language as if it were foreign to me". (So also then in discussing The Pole-project, he notes that one of his motivations was that: "I had reached a point in my life where I was seriously concerned about the English language as a global political force, and wished to emphasize my personal rupture with it".) The second chapter takes up the issue of 'Gender', noting differences between languages, notably that many languages have gender systems, with English less so than, for example, the Romance languages or German, while some are essentially genderless (the Turkic languages, Chinese, etc.). This makes for difficulties in translation, which the authors discuss, but they also consider what it means for languages to have gender -- and also whether an 'erasure of gender from language' is possible, and how it could be effected. The final chapter, 'Words' looks specifically at questions of (literary) translation -- beginning with Coetzee noting that he is helping prepare a novel by Olive Schreiner to be translated into Dutch -- first (shockingly ...) condensing it, before it goes to the translator ("The novel is very long -- too long for modern tastes"), then wondering as to how to treat the: "terms for Africans that African readers today find offensive" used by Schreiner. The issue of 'untranslatability -- of words or concepts in one language that have no equivalent in the one it is being translated into -- also comes up, with Coetzee posing the nice question (generally, as well as regarding translation): "If the word cannot be found, does it really exist ?" A slim book, Speaking in Tongues considers many interesting questions and offers much food for thought. Both Coetzee and Dimópulos bring interesting personal experience and opinions -- not least, from their efforts with The Pole -- to the conversation -- though there is certainly room for a great deal more (such as Coetzee speaking more of his own experiences, not as a translated author (he does a fair bit of that) but as translator of others' work). If largely surface-discussion, the engagement here is at least serious and considered; the book remains more starting-point than truly thorough, but is certainly good as such. - M.A.Orthofer, 1 July 2025 - Return to top of the page - Speaking in Tongues:
- Return to top of the page - John M. Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940. He has won many literary prizes, and was the 2003 Nobel laureate in literature. - Return to top of the page -
© 2025 the complete review
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