Is English a Monocrop?

For reasons both aesthetic and historic, the English language can flatten the literature of other nations, while at the same time expanding its audience many times over. For the translator, this creates a struggle. What might it look like to enshrine that struggle in the translation itself? 

In this conversation, the translators discuss the particular qualities and capacities of the languages they translate from and the challenges of replicating them in English.

Merve Emre: Daisy, will you read one of your other mixed metaphor poems, “English Is a Monocrop”?

Daisy Rockwell: Why yes, Merve, I’d love to.

English, the great monocrop, its roots on an island, its tentacles all around the world. An invasive species with no natural predator. English is the potato crops for McDonald’s french fries, the corn crops for corn oil and corn syrup. The soy crop for all manner of soy by-products. In America, Iowa is farm country. The small farms are mostly gone now, and the land is covered with endless fields of corn and soy. The corn and soy are sent away and processed and returned to the land in the form of I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-what-it-appears-to-be products—butter, milk, cream, sugar—all made of soy and corn. The British Empire spread the English monocrop initially, but the American Empire is the greatest expert on the export of the processed and the packaged, the canned and the bottled, the I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-real. On the island of the monocrop, we grow up surrounded by nothing but our own language. Flat, rippling fields of English, as far as the eye can see. Yes, there are small farms scattered about the landscape, along the coasts, primarily, that grow and nourish non-Englishes. But those are other. English crowds in on those crops and stifles them wherever possible. If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me. For all of us. New metaphor: a padded cell of monolingualism. Mixed metaphor: a cell padded by french fries, sealed shut by nondairy corn-and-soy-based butter substitutes. There are voices outside the cell (beyond the field?) but we can’t hear them. They don’t matter to us. Other languages are decorations for our speech. A word here, a phrase there. They are the sriracha on our french fries; the matcha powder in our soy milk. Is that what it means to translate into English? Are we mixing matcha lattes?

Emre: At the end of the last episode, Adam proposed that the work of a publisher or editor of translations is to expand the English language. That is a more optimistic vision of English than of English as a monocrop. Is translation just mixing matcha lattes?

Tsao: I would start with the premise that English is a monocrop. Is all the English we see and hear a monocrop? Or is there a very particular type of English that we’re talking about that is a monocrop? There are different types of English: Creole English, so-called pidgin English. Singapore has an English, Singlish, that is all its own. I wonder if we need to widen English to include those. English does have dominance market-wise, but is there room for different kinds of Englishes, not just from former British colonies, but from other places that are becoming colonized by English?

Emre: There’s a difference between an English of global neoliberalism and an English that’s aware of itself as a globally dominant language and allows for differences to emerge within it. Daisy, are you monocropping English in this poem?

Rockwell: I should talk about what inspired me to write this. I’ve been mentoring a lot of emerging translators of Hindi and Urdu, both formally and informally. All of them, with no exceptions, are bilingual. All of them have grown up in the subcontinent, and all of them are painfully aware of language loss and language diminishment. A lot of them are academically trained, and they’ve read lots of postcolonial translation theory about how translation does violence to the text. Yet they still want to translate. They come to me with severe anxiety about doing violence to the text.

What I try to teach them is that a translation can be a bridge back to languages, because there are a lot of people who are bilingual, who are mostly reading in English, but can read in the other languages. But they stop their education, often in tenth grade, in their mother tongues or in other non-English languages. I try to give them the tools to make their translation an invitation, to remind people that these languages are exciting, that the literature is exciting. One of the biggest problems for them is being nonliteral. That’s a basic thing anybody learns as they become a translator, you can’t just use the words on the page. But they fear that if they stray at all from the words on the page, then they’re erasing the original text.

I ran a workshop in Sri Lanka this summer with a group of nine emerging translators from India and Pakistan. I made them translate the same sentence again and again and again. Then I told them to put everything away, take out a blank piece of paper, close their eyes, imagine what happened in those three sentences and write it in English. They were horrified by this idea, because it entailed losing the language, losing the text. What they all found was that the text was still there in their heads. No matter what they did, they couldn’t lose the echo of the words in their heads. What they wrote on the piece of paper was much better than anything else that they had created, because they accessed a deeper vocabulary in English, a more interesting vocabulary. They were really shocked, because they have heard these terms, like “being faithful to the text” or “taking liberties with the text”—this gendered language that I hate. I forbid them from using this terminology. I said that instead of saying “taking liberty” with it, say “having a creative approach.” That’s what was in my mind when I wrote “English as a monocrop”—how many translators who have different types of Englishes feel like they’re steamrolling languages.

Freely: In the classroom, students have an idea that everything resides on the surface, on the page. One of the ways that Daniel Hahn and I got around that when we were teaching together a few years ago was to find a language that nobody in the room knew anything about: Greek. There’s a beautiful song, “Το περιγυάλι το κρυφό,” that is taken from the text of a famous poem, “Denial (Άρνηση).” We sang it to them and then had them write down what they heard. That was one of the ways that we tried to get them to understand how much of the emotional meaning and the artistic effect of a text comes out of sound. They were surprised how much they had understood of the poem when we read them the poem in its translation.

Emre: Daisy, you’ve unlocked a part of the project of your mixed-metaphor poems. The metaphors that you just drew our attention to—“doing violence” to the text or “erasing” it—are, for your purposes, imprecise and constraining. Part of the point of your mixed-metaphor poems is to offer different ways of thinking about the relationship between English and other languages. I’m curious if others have similar frustrations with the metaphors inherited from translation theory and postcolonial studies.

Tiang: A lot of the ways that we talk about translation evoke a mythic state of purity. But the reason I speak English is that Singapore was colonized by the British. I can’t undo that. I can’t translate from an imaginary place of cultural and linguistic purity. I can only proceed from the present. If we acknowledge the way languages and literatures come to us, through a complicated history of imperialism, then we have to translate from a place of reality, engaging with these circumstances.

One of the metaphors that I have trouble with is the bridge. I translate from Chinese to English, both of which you could say are my native languages. How could translation be a bridge, if it begins and ends in the same location? Translation, instead, is a way of harmonizing these divided parts of myself. A lot of what we’ve been hearing about the desire to write in different languages, the desire to translate in such a way as to be redemptive rather than violent, comes back to the question of how we can reconcile historical harms within the space of translation. How can we repair them, or at least deal with them constructively, rather than further perpetuating them?

Freely: I have learned a lot from my colleagues in translation studies. But “foreignizing” is what my students are terrified of doing. They don’t want to homogenize. But what meaning does that term have for somebody like me, who really doesn’t sit in any country comfortably because of the kind of life that I’ve had? What am I foreignizing to and from?

I like your destruction of the bridge, Jeremy. I’ve come to think of us as living in our own space and letting everything be there together, in all of the languages, and then taking them elsewhere, in one direction or the other. In my childhood years in Istanbul, it was rare for anybody in my circles to remain in one language for more than a few sentences. In those days, Greek and Armenian and Ladino and French were all around. You weren’t thought to be particularly clever if you had six languages, and many people would study in foreign schools, so they would have additional German, English, or Italian. I loved being in that place where you could travel between languages. If there’s a better word in another language, you take it for the time being. My idea of the perfect world has nothing to do with nationalism or any word that comes out of it.

Rockwell: I have not studied translation theory at all, partly because every time I open a book I’m confronted with a word like “foreignization,” or its counterpart, “domestication.” I was looking at the French translation of Tomb of Sand and discovered that the translator had translated “pakora” as “beignet.” I thought that was absurd. Some French translators told me, “Oh, they just translate everything as beignet.” Frank Wynne said, “If there’s anything that’s fried, they call it a beignet.” Domestication is when you make it very easy for the audience to understand what’s going on so they don’t get tripped up. Foreignization is when you leave in “pakora” instead of saying “small fried snack” or something like that.

It’s wrong, especially in the South Asian context where English is not a foreign language at all, unless you’re talking about some mythic white audience. When I was talking to these workshop students, I made them imagine audiences in different parts of the world who speak English, who are in colonized areas. I asked them to imagine those people reading their work to bring it a little bit further outside of their own experience.

Emre: Let me ask about two concrete examples that suggest the fallacy of purity. One is a book that is printed with a facing page translation, with the original language on one side and the English translation on the other. I’m curious how that textual setup either enhances or disrupts the myth of purity.

Tsao: I think that happened once to me. I was so terrified, because I imagined people looking line by line and saying, “No, that’s wrong.” But I recently finished a project for an Indonesian publisher—a thriller, a novella with facing page translation. They said that the purpose was so people could improve their English by reading side by side. That really affected the way I translated. I thought to myself, if I make one false move, all the shame will come back, like, “Oh my gosh, Tiffany is a horrible translator.”

Emre: Also, a bad teacher.

Tsao: Bad everything.

Rockwell: In a lot of the work I translate, there are characters constantly quoting famous lines of Urdu poetry. Urdu poetry is a completely different literary form than the realist or magic realist novel. I have a lot of readers who don’t read Hindi but read Urdu. So, they’re reading my translation of Hindi in English, but they would be quite annoyed if I just threw in my own little translation of this great poet. I will always put the transliteration of the original lines of poetry, and then I put my own feeble attempt at this monumental couplet that is well known all around the world. Like Tiffany said, you set yourself up for exposure, because everybody can compare line by line what horrible things you did. But on the other hand, I don’t have to mediate. The readers can just read the poem if they want.

Freely: Poets understand a lot of issues that us prose people don’t. I’m happy reading dual language if it’s poetry, because the poets involved understand that translation is interpretation. An ideal book like this would have one poem in the Greek or the German or the Spanish and have various poets translating  into the English and interpreting this one poem over several chapters. You really get a sense of how translation can be a creative act, but never a complete transliteration of everything you find in the original.

Virginia Jewiss: Let me add another image to expand or move away from the question of the bridge. It is the arm reaching across to touch. When I translate, I’m always trying to hold in my mind Caravaggio’s painting of Jerome translating the Bible, his arm stretching across his volumes to a skull, which is so clearly his own skull, and the sense of translation as moving back in time, but also somehow to a deeper self.

With that reference to Caravaggio and to Jerome, I want to go back to the question of facing-page translations. The one I have done recently is Dante’s Vita Nuova for Penguin Classics. I felt very constrained, on the one hand, by having that Italian there. Certainly I felt constrained by the fact that it was Dante, that it was a text that has been translated so many times. But in a more positive and optimistic way, I tried to bear in mind that this text would be used in the classroom as a way to invite students into a very difficult Italian. Reaching across the page like Jerome is something that a facing-page translation can do, especially for a text from the Middle Ages. Had I done the Vita Nuova for a different press, I think I might have come up with something in English that was different than if I were doing it in the context of a Penguin Classic that I knew would be used in classrooms.

Tsao: I love that idea of the hand, something dynamic, something reaching, rather than a static bridge. Especially with poetry, where there is so much to each word, to each line. It is just so important that it resonates in the other person’s heart. That is what translation is at the best of times. You can attain that same level of rapture, of wonderment, of despair.

Freely: You are also talking about a sacred text. Jhumpa Lahiri has just written a wonderful essay for the Cahier Series about co-translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses. What we see is that the arm very rarely reaches over from practicing translators to academics. Jhumpa is doing this work with an academic, and she’s full of anxiety and shame. She’s always talking about everybody knowing all the other translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and what to do about that, and why it has been so wonderful to have conversations with her co-translator about this. Are you always conscious of other translations that have come before you?

Jewiss: In the case of the Vita Nuova, yes, because it’s a text that I taught for so many years in courses on Italian literature in translation. It wasn’t so much that I consulted those translations for my own, but they were very much in the background. I felt so grateful to learn from so many other translations, but I was aware of my own desire to do something slightly new, while also not—and I say this with great reverence for Emily Wilson’s translations of Homer—bringing it into our world. Dante’s Vita Nuova is so steeped in the Middle Ages. We were talking about gender issues before. It’s very concerned with the distinction between a woman and a lady. Bringing that concept into our world today would gut the text. I felt partly constrained by the sacredness, but also buoyed by it, sustained by knowing that I was reaching back.

The Vita Nuova is a combination of prose and poetry, a relationship that I think Dante is trying to work out. We know where he goes with that—he goes to the world of epic poetry. The text is filled with scars, not just of Beatrice’s death, but of his own unsettledness or shame of how he’s going to fit into the pantheon of great poets. I tried to leave some of the discomfort that I see in the young poet himself. I was certainly aware of a translation I’d never taught, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s, which is always held up as the great translation. When you look at his poems, they’re beautiful, but they’re unteachable if your goal is to teach Dante. There are lots of Englishes that we can introduce to our readers, our students, our colleagues, and they’re all doing something wonderful.

I know we’re going to talk about the world of film and TV later, but in terms of breaking away from any monocrop of English, I think that we can see this happening in some of our most daring TV series. I’m thinking of The Wire, David Simon’s extraordinary series set in the city of Baltimore, where the English is very much the English of Baltimore in that moment. It was incomprehensible to many people, and Simon’s refusal to water it down, mediate it, clean it up, or purify it now stands as one of the great examples of having many Englishes present and presented to an audience.

Freely: I had to use subtitles to watch The Wire. But I want to go back to Emily Wilson, whose introduction to the Odyssey is one of the most wonderful essays on translation that I can think of. One of the things she says, which I hadn’t ever thought about, is that the Victorians were no closer to the Greeks than we are today.

Emre: Daisy, you told me yesterday that you’re translating what you described as “the Urdu Middlemarch.” I’m curious how the relative historical distance between the Greeks and the Victorians resonates in the case of Hindi and Urdu literature.

Rockwell: This goes back to the idea of purity too. The heroine of this book that I’m translating is not reading anything in Urdu. She’s reading Jane Austen, she’s reading Tolstoy, she’s reading various novels that were popular in the early twentieth century. It’s clear that the author wants to write that kind of novel, very wordy and poetic with lots about the majesty of nature and all of these kinds of things. Her original language was Pashto, not Urdu, so writing in Urdu is not a “pure” thing for her either. It’s more of a link language. There’s constant intertextuality. I ordered some of the books that the protagonist is reading, and when I opened them up, I realized, “Oh, this is what she wanted.” It’s a certain type of narrative style, and it helps me to rebuild it in that idiom. I’m not trying to make it new. I’m trying to do what she wanted to do. She didn’t write it in English, but maybe she would have liked to. Maybe she didn’t think she was up to the task.

Freely: I think we go back to the blinkers of nationalism. The assumption that I see in a lot of the Ph.D. dissertations I examine is that if you’re in Pakistan or Egypt or Lebanon, that is the sum total of your literary experience. I love the idea of considering the reading histories of the people I’m translating. One of the other women who made my pandemic lovely is Suat Derviş, a very unusual, posh Communist from the very early Republic. She was just crazy about Edgar Allan Poe, and so she had been steeped in Edgar Allan Poe’s books from the time she was thirteen. Then, when she became a Communist, she read a lot of social realism. Her work is a little clumsy, but it’s just so imaginative to combine gothic with social realism.

Tsao: In Indonesia, both Edgar Allan Poe and social realism were very important. Edgar Allan Poe for the current generation, and then social realism before they killed all of the Communists. People from Bloomington is set in Bloomington, Indiana, and even though it’s all in Indonesian, he localizes a lot of the phrases. You can tell he wants it to sound like small-town America is speaking. Even when his characters refer to each other, they use Indonesian phrases that wouldn’t be used in Indonesia. It’s because he wants the person to say, “Now, listen here, son.” Son is “anak muda,” “young child.” “Now, listen here, a young child.” At the beginning of Valkyrie with Tom Cruise, they can’t have him speaking German—or maybe he can’t put on a German accent—so there’s a German voice-over. Then all of a sudden, it morphs into Tom Cruise’s voice speaking as he’s writing a letter from wherever he is. People from Bloomington is like that. Budi Darma’s novel was all in Indonesian, but the characters had to be speaking a very idiomatic, small-town, American Midwestern English. That was more faithful to the spirit of the text than to keep the Indonesian flavor to it.

Rockwell: I’ve been translating, off and on, a romance and horror short-story writer from Urdu. She’s writing in the 1930s and 1940s, and loves Orientalism­. She likes the idea of the mysterious East. She’ll write sentences like, “An owl hooted, as they do on our mysterious Eastern nights.” The first time I saw that, I thought, “Did I misunderstand that?” I looked up every single word in the sentence, thinking I must have misunderstood it, but then I realized that she does this all the time. She thinks it’s cool. She’s incorporating it into her writing. Of course, it comes off very weird when you translate it back into English, because everybody that likes to read these translations thinks, “Oh, this is a cool sort of indigenous horror.” Yet she very much wants to incorporate Orientalist notions into her fiction.

Freely: What did you do?

Rockwell: I let her say it. I’ve never seen anything like it, but there must be other people who do this.

Tsao: Yeah, self-Orientalize.

Rockwell: It’s her choice, right?

Emre: How do you translate either self-exoticization or self-provincialization, and show that there’s actually a difference from regular old Orientalism?

Rockwell: With that particular example, I wanted to convey what she thought she was conveying. To make it sound like a mystery, it has to sound mysterious. You said you were just translating horror, right?

Tsao: A thriller.

Rockwell: When you’re translating genre, the most important thing is to make the text fit into that genre in your target language. The reader has to feel the frisson of terror even if it’s silly to you.

Freely: There’s the other question of translating passages that are offensive to our contemporary sensibilities. There is one example in Istanbul: Memories of a City, in which the narrator makes fun of cripples. I deferred to the editor at Knopf who then edited Orhan, and he took those sentences out. One of the advantages of working closely with him was we could decide together. He also decided in Snow that the hero was going into panics too much. There’s a wonderful word for it in Turkish, “telaş.” You can go into a “telaş” all the time. But he didn’t want Westerners to see his hero go into a panic so often, so we left some of them out.

Tsao: A similar issue came up with People from Bloomington, and I’m anticipating a similar issue with the novel by Pak Budi that I’m translating now, Olenka. There’s a part where a character is described as having “Jewish features.” In the context of when he was writing, it would not have been unusual. In the end, I said, “I defer to the editor’s opinion.” But I’ve read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Mrs. Dalloway’s daughter is described as having “Chinese eyes.” That these warts are visible enables postcolonial studies of these works. If we erase that, we also erase the criticism. We bowdlerize one, but not the other. Can we let the warts show? Is making everyone’s warts visible a form of equal cultural exchange?

Emre: We’re fine with the scars, but are we okay with the warts?

Tiang: I think it comes back to the idea of the monocrop. English is one of those crops that is so dominant, it keeps sending its seeds into neighboring fields. You can’t get away from that kind of cross-pollination. When a Chinese reader reads something in translation, they are less likely to take offense at something that might be offensive in English, whereas Anglophone readers often consider their values to be universal, which is how we get into the situation of having to cater to their sensibilities. I try to preserve the warts where I can, using paratextual methods such as the translator’s note to say, “I am aware that Western readers might consider this to be offensive, but here is how it would read differently in its original context.” That feels like a way of preserving the original sensibilities while acknowledging that we understand it might be received differently.

Freely: There was an interesting shift in my Orhan days, from the first novel I translated to the last, from Snow to The Museum of Innocence. There was a lot of intervention, to put it politely, a lot of pure Turkishness became involved in the negotiations. Thank god for the wonderful editor at Knopf, George Andreou. The Museum of Innocence is a novel that takes place in the center of the bourgeoisie in 1970s Istanbul, a world I know very, very well. I went to all those weddings. The novel is about Turkish society, even bourgeois, secular society, not having progressed much on the subject of women. George always said, “Because there’s residual racism, readers will accept a lot of very sexist attitudes from people on the other side of Turkey. They’ll say that it’s Eastern, and that they’re different. But now, because we’re with people who are presented as westernized and very sophisticated, they’re not going to make the same allowances for them. We can’t fumble a single line.” It was very interesting that he understood the racism, which was not quite articulated, in terms of the allowances made.

Rockwell: A big problem in Hindi literature is pejorative uses of skin color. We know many authors will describe somebody as being “black, black, black,” really overdoing it and then they’ll use a nickname like “kalu,” which means a black person. Some of those things I feel I have to tone down, because the history of talking about blackness in English is so strong and difficult to navigate. You don’t want your readers to say “What? Is this author really racist?” I tend to try to pull it back from the edge. Geetanjali said about the character called Kalu, “Why can’t you just call him ‘Blackie’?” Even though Indians are very aware of the history of slavery, they are not very aware of the sensitivity of language. If we let it stay the way it was, it would become a huge distraction.

Freely: This is when translation studies is a good place to go. There have been really wonderful conversations among many translation studies scholars and practicing translators about what to do in particular instances. The conversation means that they all have a critical understanding of the difficulties before they make the difficult choice, and that they’re not making that difficult choice alone.