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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 21.41-42 (2004): 177-193 The Writing of Elsewhere: Not why do I write, but where am I writing? The question of place is usually regarded as contingent, merely contingent, a circumstance that in no significant way impinges on the act of writing. The place of writing is of course contiguous to the writing-surface, page or screen; but it is not that place, nor that surface, that particularly concerns me in this place. For I am writing in the city of Copenhagen; the essay will dwell on Nigerian themes, and it will be sent to the editor in Canada. This English, the English of this essay’s theme and being, bears the marks of Britain’s faded influence. The concern here is with ‘writing back’, that discursive counter-flow that is held to be a triumph of the postcolonial: it is certainly a defining idiom of the postcolonial. What is involved in writing back, in sending a text from the colonies to the centre? Where is home, and how do we measure the distance across which we (or they) write? And what peripheries do we (or they) address? For one thing is certain: without distance, no writing. Writing marks time: its making must have preceded its reading. (Of speech, however, we must say that its making and its hearing are all but simultaneous. Speech orchestrates space: we turn to the speaker, and if the speaker is invisible we ask, puzzled: where is the voice coming from?) Yet writing is not secondary to speech: it neither derives from nor depends on speech; nor is it the default mode to be used only when distance makes speech ineffective. Writing marks space, and creates the very idea of distance. Nobody can be present as I write: this space, contiguous to the surface on which the text appears, is exclusive, mine alone. And what I write is to be read later, and elsewhere, after the sending, at diverse and indeterminable addresses. Writing makes distance. It makes distance possible, because it makes distance not only measurable but – simply – knowable. (Since the invention of parchment and other flexible and absorbent surfaces, writing has implied sending.) Without writing’s ability to traverse space, to represent the writing subject in a place outside that subject’s presence, we would have no evidence of an elsewhere (any place out of earshot). A letter received, marked by its place of writing, is the [end page 177] evidence; anything else is hearsay, and well-named thus. Without writing, then, no distance: in the absence of writing, of traces, the subject knows only proximity, no matter how far one travels. Yet writing – the very condition of distance – is deemed proximate if it is in one’s own language, if it is readable: and readily so, for what is thus accessible is said to be ‘ready to hand’. Reading can thereby give the illusion of proximity. That illusion is actively cultivated in nation-states within whose borders one language is spoken, and written, and within whose borders all communication, written or spoken in that language, is supposed normatively to circulate. Circulation is the model, for circulation implies containment. The identity of the nation-state is derived from the contained circulation of its own language. This essay (regardless of its own English) will be composed, edited and published in three states each of whose ‘own’ languages – Danish, Swedish, Dutch – is largely confined to circulation within that state’s borders. A nation’s ‘own language’ can thus give rise to the notion that a language might be one’s own, might even be owned. Owned not by the speaker or writer, but owned by the collective body of speakers and writers and readers that is formed by (and that forms) the nation. The concept of the national language, with a national literature in which it is best displayed, is inherently ethnic. What if a foreigner starts writing not in his (or her) but in my language? The English (whether ethnically or linguistically) have largely given up on resistance; postcolonial writing is hardly a new challenge to a national language that has had to take note of Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne and Longfellow. Nor was the appropriation of English writing by Americans of any great consequence to a national language that had already been ‘occupied’ or ‘adopted’ by the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish. Others have been writing in English for as long as the English have been, even though the protocols of the national model require us to say that, for example, Henryson wrote in ‘Middle Scots’. Whether ‘Middle Scots’ is a language distinct from Middle English is a matter for philological debate: in terms of readability the argument seems forced, for any English reader (that is, any reader of modern English) will find Henryson rather less opaque than the Middle English of Piers Plowman. This may be an instance more visible than usual of the alien and distant appearing misleadingly near and familiar. In all such discussions of what counts as English literature we are, on the side of inclusiveness, swayed unwittingly by our openness to whatever we can read; and, on the restrictive side, we are bedevilled by a simple confusion between English as the name of a language and the same modifier as the name of the nation: its borders are not those of the language. That confusion is compounded when ‘English’ modifies [end page 178] ‘literature’, and what’s not written in England (or Britain (including Ireland)) or by Englishmen (and women) is parcelled out to American or postcolonial interests. Those not in thrall to the seductions of ethnicity must insist that ‘English literature’ ought to include whatever’s written in English – whatever, and however imprecisely defined – ‘English’ might be. One is consoled by the assimilation of the non-English Joseph Conrad into English literature, but mystified also. Who in English literary studies pays attention to poems in English written by foreigners, even eminent ones such as Goethe? Who reads (studies?) those four poems in French that are included in the Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot? Are they to be found also, and perhaps more fittingly, in anthologies of French verse? Three of the most celebrated and ‘globally popular’ writers of the twentieth-century are Beckett, Nabokov and Borges: none of them fits into a national tradition. Borges wrote essays in English and displays everywhere his intimacy with the literary tradition of English; most of Beckett’s English works (including the famous plays) are translated from ‘his own’ French. Nabokov was writing novels in English while still living in exile in France, and before he had decided to move to the English-speaking world. Would we even have heard of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) had its author never lived in the United States and there made himself known by another novel written in English? Happily, the marginalization of such writers in the educational curriculum has not interfered with their broader popularity. Indeed, given the nationalist imperative in literary education, it may be supposed that such writers attract readers precisely because they offer an escape from the tedious dialectics of national identity, from the cumulative triumphalism of a national literary tradition. Will the French absorb into their tradition the Russian Victor Serge, who wrote his most important books in French? or the Czech Milan Kundera, whose later works (significantly less well-known than The Joke or The Unbearable Lightness of Being) are not translated from the Czech but exist only in French? The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz and the Russian Joseph Brodsky, having lived for many years in the anglophone world, wrote a number of poems in English. As far as I know, none of these has been studied in the context of modern English or American poetry, nor gathered in anthologies of such. The unfortunate naming of nations after languages (despite the prevalent assumption to the contrary) has led to the easy and sinister subsuming of the latter within the former. As if England existed before English; as if English had been created by England as an instrument of state. As if a language for writing were a birthright. [end page 179] Postcolonial thinking has done much to overturn the assumptions and axioms of nationalism. Yet insofar as, itself resisting assimilation to what it perceives as the centre, it is given special treatment, encouraged to keep its distance as ‘Postcolonial studies’ (or whatever), it leaves untouched and intact the ‘centre’ and the ‘core’ of ‘English literature’. Of the varieties of English literature written outside of Britain, only the American is commonly presented as a full-fledged ‘national literature’. English written in other nations – however incommensurate their histories, and the divergent status of English, whether spoken or written, in, say, Jamaica, Kenya, India, Singapore, New Zealand – tends to be lumped together as ‘postcolonial literature.’ All they have in common is the English language, and the oneness of that language, whether phonetically or functionally gauged, is hardly self-evident. Without such a shared inheritance, however, there would be nothing that these writings could be said to hold in common. To that extent, the postulate of the shared imperial language has been valuable in preventing (though never quite successfully) the formation of yet more national literary traditions. One unlikely and oblique result of the postcolonial debate has been the slowly dawning realization that in the nations of Europe most writing has been done (most, until very recently) not in the vernacular but in Latin. James Hankins, General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library, has recently written of ‘the lost continent of neo-Latin literature’. One marvels at the lack of attention paid in the past century or so to the Latin verse of Milton or Johnson (to name poets known for their English writings): the Latin verse of major English poets is implicitly judged to have contributed nothing significant to the English literary tradition. That most English poets up to c. 1800 (and a few thereafter) would have had their earliest practice as poets in the writing of Latin verse is a fact that has been most effectively suppressed. As for George Buchanan (1506-82) or Vincent Bourne (1695-1747) – once celebrated as major Latin poets – who knows now even their names? Who knows that the Latin words of the well-known Christmas carol ‘Adeste fideles’ are not medieval, but were composed by one John Francis Wade c. 1743? Why has writing in neo-Latin been so comprehensively ignored in modern literary studies, by classicists and comparativists alike? One explanation is that, at least in the Protestant nations, to write in Latin might have been considered a betrayal of the vernacular. Against that argument one must insist that Latin enjoyed prestige among humanists irrespective of their theology, and long after the Reformation. The forgetting of post-medieval Latin is of much more recent date: when the national literatures of Europe were being formed for school curricula, in the late 19th century, Latin was, it seems, expected to follow the same pattern, to satisfy the [end page 180] same criteria. And so the only Latin authors known today – only by name, perhaps, but still with familiar names: Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Catullus, Lucretius inter alia – happen all to have been Roman citizens. Thus the ideology of nationalism has retrospectively imposed its circumscriptions: Latin literature – like English today – is written in a language that knows no boundaries in space or indeed in time. (Someone somewhere is still composing verse in Latin.) The reduction to anomalous status of some of the greatest writers – whether in Latin or in the vernacular – has been part of the price exacted by national literary traditions. We should at any rate acknowledge that without paying that price – being dressed up in national costume – the modern vernaculars would not have made such extensive and enduring claims on the literature to be taught in schools and universities. This makes the acceptance into English literature of Josef Korzeniowski a compounded anomaly. One suspects that the process by which Conrad is granted the right of textual abode is the logic of the vocational monoglot. Or, as one would say, were the word not already in use, the logic of the mono-graph, of the one who writes in no more than one language. However many languages he may have spoken, Conrad wrote in none except English, and had had no thought of being a writer until he learnt English. This instance is unparalleled: Conrad should not be grouped with exiles who were already writers ‘in their own language’, such as Nabokov, Milosz or Brodsky. That logic, if we may so identify it, would also explain the disappearance of neo-Latin writers. Most of them wrote some works in the vernacular, and presumably had the capacity therefore to obey what seems to have become the unspoken law of literary worth, according to the makers of the national canon: the serious writer has only one language, his or her own. Moreover, born into and cultivating that one language, the writer’s task is to communicate with his or her own people (‘own people’ both ethnically and linguistically), those who can read their ‘own’ language, their ‘native tongue’. Hence arises the model of circulation, of literary texts moving within a single homogeneous sphere, from within the group of speakers and readers, addressed by one of them to all the others. Crucially, the figure of circulation dispenses with translation. Indeed, it turns translation into that which happens only between distinct languages, and between citizens or readers of different nations. Translation, rather than writing itself, becomes the marker of distance, and of difference. Classical Greek knows no translation; its entire corpus is made of texts that are, or claim to be composed in Greek (Lock 1999a). The idea of translation arises with those who come after, who live afar and whose language is marked by difference. Translation is itself a metaphorical [end page 181] understanding of the Latin word translatio that translates the Greek metaphora. It is for this reason, this historical contingency, that translation has no part in the theory of poetics that we have inherited from Aristotle. Translation studies form, at best, a subsidiary part of literary theory. And thus even literary theory finds itself haplessly inscribed in the national and the ethnic myth of literature circulating among like-minded and like-tongued readers. And only by contingency, by accidents of history or geography, do texts meet with readers who are other-tongued. Needing, so long as it is at home, no translation, literature becomes the expression of personal views, opinions, emotions, a forum for discussing family or tribal matters. Increasingly, over the past hundred years, philology itself has been rendered marginal and contingent: it would appear that there ought to be, within ‘one language’, no need for philology, because the function of language is to communicate. And thus English studies, rather than questioning these premises, has in recent years chosen to ignore those parts of English literature which are not immediately accessible to the English reader, from Beowulf to Spenser and, indeed, that philological playground, Finnegans Wake. And in order to enhance the appearance of accessibility and familiarity, the spelling of any old text will be subjected to ruthless and unmarked modernising, while the typeface and layout will be homogenized. The distance that writing makes, the traces of elsewhere that it cannot but leave, are everywhere covered up – ob-literated – by editors, in the reasonable (and of course commercially advisable) pursuit of readerly convenience. The scandal is that, even in so-called scholarly editions (in all but facsimiles of early printings), Shakespeare has hardly ever been presented as anything but our contemporary. Translation is expected to modernise: Dante is not put into early Middle English, nor Cervantes into Elizabethan prose, nor Homer into some putative ur-Germanic. New translations will always be required: translations grow obsolete and few regret that a particular translation (with the exception of the Authorized Version of the Bible) should need to be superseded. Translations may grow obsolete as translations, yet they lose nothing of their value as texts: this would account for the heated and fruitless confusion surrounding the Authorized Version. One still reads Pope’s Homer, or Dryden’s Virgil, or North’s Plutarch, not (as we might read Lattimore or Fitzgerald) in default of Latin or Greek but ‘for themselves’ (for these should not be thought of any less importance, as works of Dryden and Pope, than ‘Absalom and Achitophel’ or ‘The Rape of the Lock’) and what they tell us of the negotiations between English and the classical tongues. The contradiction ought to be obvious: we recognize the need constantly to make new translations of ‘foreign’ texts, while we assume that ‘our own’ literature should be accessible to ‘us’ as native speakers without recourse to philology. [end page 182] The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (France 2000) is a volume rich in recondite detail, showing us the underside of that carpet on which most of our knowledge may be said to rest. Yet it has its symptomatic lacuna. Attention is paid to every language from which significant translations into English have been made, from Albanian to Zulu. Old English is covered in a mere two pages. Middle English receives none: not one word. There is much on Chaucer’s role as translator, but no mention of Chaucer as a translated author: the name of Nevill Coghill does not appear. Again the fudge is apparent: literature in ‘our own language’ is supposed to be immediately ours: it defies the diachronic, it negates distance and difference. Yet Coghill’s translation of The Canterbury Tales has over the past fifty years outsold almost all other translations in the Penguin Classics series. Presumably not every one of its purchasers and readers has been a ‘foreigner’ with limited command of English. Speech is always (unless recorded) synchronic; if we cannot at once understand what is being said, and give assurance of such to the speaker, what is taking place is not speech – or not communication – but some sort of performance, or ritualized utterance. Writing, however, is necessarily diachronic; it gives measure to the distance by which writer is separated from reader, both spatially and temporally. To treat writing in English as an extended instrument, available to ‘the English-speaking people’ or even ‘peoples’, is to elide difference; distance becomes merely a contingency of history and Empire. Annotation in editions aimed for students is resolutely historical and biographical in its emphases: any trick will be deployed – first, to modernise the spelling and regularize the punctuation – rather than acknowledge that the language itself has changed: that English is not ‘one’ language. National identity, the sense of historical continuity, is predicated on the unity and continuity of the English language. Writing marks distance, creates difference, is the constitutive evidence of discontinuity. All writing demands translation, in the simplest sense because it expects to be read sometime other than at the time of writing and elsewhere than in the place of writing. The diachronic is unthinkable unless figured as a gap, over which the text can pass, though neither the writer nor the reader may do so. The reader as subject, like the writer, can know only this space, this time. While writing one anticipates the gap: the writer knows that the reader is elsewhere, and that this will be read at a later time. However, reading without acknowledging that gap is not uncommon and is, alas, forcefully encouraged by both editorial practice and critical convention. The gap, which is constitutive for writing, is treated as a mere contingency in reading. That, precisely, is the consequence of the logocentric fallacy, of the belief that what is written would, given other – and better – circumstances, have been spoken. [end page 183] To reckon all reading as demanding and involving translation (the governing argument of George Steiner’s After Babel (1975)) is to be vigilant of the gap. And it is to confront the foreignness of the text, any text, every text: foreign if in nought else than that it is written. Acknowledgement of that alone would suffice to dissolve the contract between nation and language: the study of literature would be at once de-tribalized. Reading would no longer concern our own selves, nor affirm our selves as privileged addressees. To create a thinking that transcends tribalism ‘demands the conscious transfer into one’s own sphere of something recognized as alien; in other words, it requires translation.’ Those words, and these, belong (albeit translated from the German) to Franz Rosenzweig: The historical moment of the birth of world literature, and hence of supernational consciousness, occurred ... with two events.... It came when two books, each the very foundation of its national literature, were first translated into another language. At just about the same time, a prisoner of war in Rome translated the Odyssey from Greek into Latin, and Jewish settlers in Alexandria translated the Book of their people into Greek. (Glatzer 1961, 272) Our culture pays scant attention to these events, for in its ideological commitments it needs to obscure the constitutive and inaugurative force of translation and junction. Ours is a culture still obsessed with origins and essences. How many educated people today have even heard of Livius Andronicus, by whose labours Homer was given to the Romans, and to the world? Until that liberating dispersal occurs, a text remains enclosed, contained within the community, serving the needs of the tribe, not the least of which is to promote the belief that their language is ‘their own’, self-contained, continuous, and transparent to members of the tribe. Only when a text is translated is one encouraged, or at least enabled to approach it as an alien object. For a text from long ago is, once translated, likely to be more accessible to foreigners than to ‘its own readers’. Translations continue to bring the classics ‘up to date’; which is to say, they acknowledge the gap, and its increasing distance, and they recognize the remedy as something other than the assimilation of the alien. In reading Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf we are made aware of the distance to the original: the translation provides us with a view. By contrast, modern English editions of (post-medieval) English classics contrive to mask the gap, to conceal the distance. Franz Rosenzweig was writing as a Jew in Germany; he was planning with Martin Buber to translate the Bible into German, to make a version [end page 184] that would both update and challenge Luther’s. Writing is seldom if ever at home; diaspora is its condition, most obviously so since the invention of printing. And where there is diaspora there is (there ought to be) a meeting with something else, a confronting of the alien and an acknowledgement of the impossibility of completely assimilating any text – if it is to remain as writing, as text. Writing – a text sent forth – seldom returns home, though a reply, another text, is always to be expected from elsewhere. A text that returns home because it fails to reach its destination is well named by the postal services as a dead letter. This writing, this essay on the problems of writing and translation is provoked by the story, or the sequence of English written in Nigeria. (Whose story? whose sequence?) Joyce Cary was the first writer to represent Nigerian pidgin, in passages of dialogue in Aissa Saved (1932). A brief example from Chapter 2: ‘Be quiet, dere. What you tink you doing? You tink dis a beer house?’ Cary’s most famous Nigerian novel, Mister Johnson, provides much more, also (and exclusively) in dialogue: ‘Oh, sah, I forget – perhaps I borrow two-tree shilling from Ma-aji – perhaps he take it from zungo money.’ Already, in his very first novel, Aissa Saved, Cary had identified the conventions and consequences of translation. When, in Chapter 52, a hymn is sung in Yoruba it is rendered in the text as translated into ‘standard English’: ‘When I look on the cross of wood But when they sing in ‘English’ (as we are told some of them do), their sung words appear thus: ‘All de tings I lak de mos In others’ words: when natives sing in Yoruba the hymn is assimilated to the reader’s English (our ‘native English’?), but when they ‘in English, sang’, their ‘English’, as written, is severely alienating to standard readers. Writing back thus involves what the translators into English of the Russian Formalist, Viktor Shklovsky, termed ‘defamiliarization’. The language itself is made strange in order that we English-readers should not suppose that their English is one with ours. The history of defamiliarizing English goes back a long way, through Mark Twain, Hardy and the Brontës to the Scots in the novels of Scott and the Irish accentings in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800); and to Shakespeare, in his rendering of both rustic speech and, in the history plays, of non-English speakers of English: Welsh, French, Irish and Scottish. (See Lock 1999b, 2000b, 2002, 2003, 2005b.) Hardly had English speech been standardised, in its London form, than non-standard forms are set forth to comic effect, as in Chaucer’s ‘Reeve’s Tale’ where this rhyme would have grated on the London ear: Aleyn spak first: ‘Al hayl, Symond, y-fayth! The note to the Riverside Chaucer informs us that ‘Chaucer clearly wished the language of the two clerks to sound Northern. It is apparently the first case of this kind of joking imitation of a dialect recorded in English literature.’ (Chaucer 1987, 850, note to line 4022) Hardly had English been standardised; hardly had English been written. For it is only with writing that we can take a measure of distance, and only in writing that we can inscribe the gap between one saying and another, our way of speaking and theirs. Yet ‘correct’ writing, insofar as it follows the rules of spelling, ignores the sounds of actual speech. Only when those sounds are to be foregrounded (another coinage owed to the translators of Russian Formalism) will words be ‘misspelled’. And only thus will regular spelling be put in question, and readers be challenged to justify their own ‘standard’ orthography, and pronunciation (Williamson & Lock 2003; Lock 2005a). For a colonial administrator such as Joyce Cary, the English spoken by the natives was worth recording and foregrounding; at first this must almost inevitably strike a comic note, but it is seldom put to merely comic purpose. The eponymous protagonists of Aissa Saved and Mister Johnson both meet violent deaths, and misspellings contribute only pathos: indeed, they may cease to be noted as markers of ‘deviant pronunciation’ and can be received merely as evidence of phonetic actualities. When, some twenty years after Aissa Saved, the first English [end page 186] novel written by a Nigerian was published, the novelist registers nothing of the oddity of the English spoken around him: there is no oddity there. (Oddity is registered only here, at a colonial distance.) Amos Tutuola misspells the word drunkard in the often ‘corrected’ title The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) or, perhaps, he allows the title to follow the narrator’s self-description. Yet in the entire book there are no other misspellings, not even within the dialogue. This might suggest that the story is being told ‘in translation’, and indeed Tutuola was often accused of ‘merely translating’ tribal folk-tales. Tutuola’s writing draws our attention not to non-standard orthography or deviant pronunciation but, instead, to the oddities of narrative conventions, and to specific syntactic features such as pronouns and their antecedents in standard English. The effect is – to a native English reader – more startling than any degree of deviant orthography. Carrying Death along a road, the narrator meets an old man: then he told me to carry him (Death) back to his house at once, and he (old man) hastily went back to his room. (Tutuola 1952, 15) The native use of pronouns (by ‘native’ meaning ‘our own’; by ‘our’ meaning educated Anglophones) is held up for someone else’s amusement by the Yoruba (?) narrator. Such reflection of spelling and syntax exposes the oddity in what had seemed normal, uncovers the tribal in what has been taken for the natural, the universal, the standard to which all should aspire. Ken Saro-Wiwa wrote ‘A Novel in Rotten English’ – Sozaboy (1985) – which is yet a great novel, and not only in African or postcolonial terms. All novels, we hastily insist, are rottenly written: so runs the argument to be derived from Bakhtin’s bemusement at the estimation of Dostoevsky as a supremely great novelist and yet a very mediocre writer of prose. Free indirect discourse observes neither the rules of prose nor the canons of style. (Lock 2001) One can go further, and allow that even prose can be rotten, and indeed might always be rotten; for the rot sets in with writing, with distance. That only English – of the European vernaculars – can be thought of as being rotten, or at any rate as having the potential to rot, is much to the credit of the postcolonial and its interrogations of British assumptions: one can hardly imagine an analogous novel advertising itself as written ‘en français pourri’. Rottenness is simply the acknowledgement of the gap that writing makes. Shakespeare wrote in rotten English, as should be obvious. Any text left unedited, unmodernised in spelling and typeface, might be labelled rotten. Some would leave such rotten texts unread; others might find themselves – as though for the very first time – reading. [end page 187] As an administrator in the Colonies, Joyce Cary was quite self-consciously writing for a readership ‘at home’ in Britain. Amos Tutuola seems to have had no particular readership in mind: that The Palm-Wine Drinkard was published by Faber & Faber would have astonished him, had he known anything of Faber’s reputation. Whether he had heard of Faber, or even of the director who had so admired Tutuola’s manuscript, T.S. Eliot, remains uncertain. Ken Saro-Wiwa was not ‘writing back’ at all: his own company published Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English, at home in Port Harcourt. Only nine years later did the book become easily available in Britain, and in the world outside Nigeria, as a volume in the Longman series of African Writers. Where do I publish? is a question of extreme pertinence in the postcolonial context (See Lock 2000a, Khozan & Lock 2001). It is easy to think of Nigerian literature as beginning with Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, and developing as a national literature: this is certainly the trajectory promoted within the Nigerian educational system. In such a narrative Amos Tutuola is a most awkward presence, for The Palm-Wine Drinkard was published some six years earlier than Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, while Joyce Cary belongs to the opposition, to the colonial power. In a number of essays (see ‘Writings elsewhere’) I have sought to outline some of the occluded threads in Nigerian fiction that might bind or loosely connect Cary, Tutuola, Achebe, Soyinka and Saro-Wiwa. These writers should be seen to form some pattern or constellation far more interesting than that of another ‘national literature’ parallel to that of ‘English’. Some of these texts are addressed to readers in England; one, Sozaboy, is addressed to readers of English living in Nigeria. My concern, and hence my understanding of the importance of linking these Nigerian writers, is that we should see them not as peripheral to ‘home’ – an exotic supplement – but as casting a light on ‘home’: on all our notions of home, whatever our distances from each other. For each writer brings to light some of the complacencies with which we read whatever’s written in English. Our complacencies can be quickly rehearsed: the assumption that our language, belonging to us, gives us unmediated and unproblematic access to all its texts; that whatever is written in English circulates ‘properly’ among English readers, and is contained within those limits; and, above all, our assumption that translation is an exotic supplement, of no more significance to ‘English literature’ than, say, a book written in English by a Nigerian. Only where there is acknowledgement of translation is there a thing so alien that it will not be domesticated: the most assimilative of translations cannot conceal that it is a translation. The alien is not within us, though it may be contiguous. [end page 188] While I write, the scribal surface (or the keyboard) is very close to me, within arm’s reach. But writing, once it has been sent beyond the writer’s reach or retrieval, confers distance, and disperses itself. To read Tutuola or Saro-Wiwa is to realize the distance in all one had thought one’s own: such writing brings home to us our alienation from all that’s written. What follows, and concludes this essay on writing, may seem to be about speaking. If so, it may be taken as a parable. Rosenzweig has intimated to us that translation alone can detribalize the sacred texts of a nation. He omits to mention (for it is not a translation) that episode in which the apostle Paul, having read two Greek words carved in stone – ‘I found an altar with this inscription’ (which cannot be rendered in English in less than four words: ‘to the unknown god’) – makes his address, in Greek, to the men of Athens on the hill of Mars (Acts of the Apostles, ch. 17). There is a sublime scope of deracination in Paul’s citation from the Greek poets, not ‘translating’ them, but appropriating them with transfiguring force: For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain This is presumably the most decisive quotation in western history: both a quotation itself and the transcription of an enunciated quotation. Here, in Arnoldian terms, the Hebraic enters into confluence with the Hellenic: the confluence is initiated not by translation (narrowly defined) but by that discursive integration and syntactic torsion that we call quotation. In Athens today, as in the capital of any nation, the story is all about origins: the origins of democracy, of free speech, of civic society. And origins aside, the story takes up essences, national characteristics, narratives of triumph and progress, and of hardships and injustice at the hands of others. The Areopagus is oddly neglected, hardly figuring on the tourist map of what’s to be noticed in and around the Acropolis. Thomas Hardy published in 1914 a poem, ‘In the British Museum’, that makes a point of noticing the unnoticed, of hearing the inaudible, and does so by ignoring origins and their narratives. Our theme is a stone supposed to be from the Hill of Mars; unlike the altar seen by Paul, this stone is blank, lacking any inscription. Now in the British Museum, the stone echoes the words spoken by two visitors. Our attention is drawn not to the glories of ancient Greece, but to certain sounds that might once have echoed from the stone. It is a poem whose lexical simplicity and tonal naiveté almost rivals the labourer’s litotic eloquence: [end page 189] ‘What do you see in that time-touched stone, ‘You look not quite as if you saw, ‘It is only the base of a pillar, they’ll tell you, — ‘I know no art, and I only view ‘Paul as he stood and preached beside it ‘Words that in all their intimate accents ‘I’m a labouring man, and know but little, Hardy anticipates Rosenzweig in overturning the prejudices of scholars for whom home and centre, nation and identity, are all to be predicated on origins. The labouring man knows that what matters is distance, and that without distance no voice can be cause of echo. This reader can’t help noticing that the entire poem is made of two quotations, yet neither is subordinated to the other: this poem has no narrator, nor single original source or voice. How is this possible, except in perfect confluence? Hardy [end page 190] has taken Rosenzweig’s argument one displacement further, for the making-place of Jewgreek or Greekjew has been moved, by fragmentation and appropriation, to the British Museum. There, at the heart of one self-satisfied empire, lies a stone detached from a wall; and a simple radical imagines the collision of two worlds, of two ways of thinking and speaking: and thus the transformation of a language that had served merely national or tribal functions into something that belongs no longer to its own, to its speaking owners. Almost contiguous to the British Museum is Russell Square in which, at number 24, Faber & Faber once had their offices. Walking by, one thinks inevitably of T.S. Eliot, and of many other distinguished poets in the English language. It was on a recent occasion given to me (though not exactly a labouring man) to recall that it was in those offices that Tutuola’s manuscript had been received: and from there The Palm-Wine Drinkard went forth, dispersing an extraordinary kind of English, the difficulties in reading which might prompt any witness to note that ‘you look not quite as if you saw, but as if you heard, parting your lips....’ (Another of our complacencies is to believe that silent reading is a skill acquired by education, and that voiced or sub-vocalic reading is the mark of a simpleton, one who knows but little, or nothing at all.) In Russell Square I could not help thinking of Amos Tutuola, perhaps because Faber’s old offices are now occupied by the School of Oriental and African Studies. And, in that recognition, not quite as if I saw – was it a heard recognition? – all London seemed (alluding to another of Tutuola’s titles) one great bush of ghosts. English literature, that had been my own, was revealed as alien, as standing in need of translation: on familiar ground, I surveyed a distance marked, shaped, wedged by writing. Proximity to the centre is no defence against the far-flung, those wide reflected words whose echoes are distanced (made distant that they might resound) in writing: even more durably, if less hauntingly, in texts than in stones. Where am I writing this? Off what surface might this text strike echoes? The surface of no wall or rock or screen is so obdurate or absorbent, so monumental, so entirely present to itself, as to be immune to echo. Writing creates distance, insists on the elsewhere, persists elsewhere, estranged. In reading we should seek the distance in whatever’s written – and honour that distance by keeping ours – that we might resist those complacencies that too often pass for reading: affirmations of the native, and other tribal consolations. [end page 191]
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