Abstract
In a letter written toward the end of his life, the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev remarked that a writer who did not write only in his mother tongue was a thief and a pig.1 Although Turgenev did not explain the epithets, it is not difficult to figure out what he meant. Since a language is a form of cultural property, a writer who uses words that do not belong to him is a thief; since his theft of the words of others entails the neglect of his own, he is a pig. As it happens, Turgenev wrote this letter in German. Even though his letters are often every bit as literary as his novels, the use of other languages in correspondence apparently did not count as an infraction against his mother tongue. Indeed, it is revealing that Turgenev, in spite of his mastery of several European languages and his many years of residence outside Russia, never seized the opportunity, or succumbed to the temptation, of writing fiction in a language other than Russian. Once, when a reviewer incorrectly stated that one of Turgenev’s novellas had been written originally in French, an offended Turgenev pointed out in flawless French—that he would never stoop to something so base.
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Notes
Ivan Turgenev and Ludwig Pietsch, Briefe aus den jahren 1864–1883, ed. Alfred Doren (Berlin: Im Propyläen Verlag, 1923), 147.
Uriel Weinreich, Languages in Contact (New York: Publications of the Linguistic Circle of New York, Number 1, 1953)
see also Joshua A. Fishman, Language Loyalty in the United States (The Hague: Mouton, 1966).
On the connection between language and nationalism, see Leonard Forster, The Poet’s Tongues: Multilingualism in Literature (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970)
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991). It is well to remember that language loyalty occurs also in non-Western cultures. In Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), Sumathi Ramaswamy studies this phenomenon apropos of Tamil, a Dravidian language spoken by several million people in India.
See Andrée Tabouret-Keller, “Language and Identity,” in The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, ed. Florian Coulmas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 315–326
also R. B. Page and Andrée Tabouret-Keller, Acts of Identity: Creole-based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Henry James, The American Scene (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 85.
Jacqueline Amati-Mehler, Simona Argentieri, and Jorge Canestri, The Babel of the Unconscious, trans. Jill Whitelaw-Cucco (1990; Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1993), 139, 153.
George Fletcher, Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 8.
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: The New Mestiza, 2d. ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999), 81.
James Clifford, Routes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 264.
On this point, see Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the “First” Emigration (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 37–51.
Steven Kellman, The Translingual Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), viii.
M. Grammont, as quoted in François Grosjean, Life with Two Languages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 142.
see also Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 87–114.
The phrase, transcribed as “Mod hed god hep,” appears in the Cancionero de Baena, a collection of several hundred poems by diverse authors compiled by Juan Alfonso de Baena around 1445. In the poem, which commemorates the birth of John II of Castile, his mother (Catherine of Lancaster) calls out for divine help in her native tongue while in the throes of childbirth. Also containing phrases in Latin and Arabic, the stanza in which Catherine’s plea appears is notable for its multilingualism: En boses mas baxas le oy decir: “¡Salue, Regina! ¡Saluadme, Señora!” e a las de vezes me paresçie oyr: Mod hedgod hep, alumbradm’agora.” E a guisa de dueña que deuota ora: “¡Quam bonus Deus!,” le oy rezar, e oyle a manera de apiadar: “Çayha bical habin al cabila mora.” See Cancionero de Juan Alfonso de Baena, ed. José María Azaceta (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1966), 413; also Emilio Lorenzo, Anglicismos hispánicos (Madrid: Gredos, 1996), 9.
James Bossard, “The Bilingual as a Person,” American Sociological Review, 10, no. 6 (1945): 699–709.
Paul Christophersen, Bilingualism (London: Methuen, 1948), 9–10. Compare Claudio Guillén’s observation: “In the literary field, international relations often mean relations that a writer maintains with himself” (The Challenge of Comparative Literature, trans. Cola Franzen [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993], 260).
Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years, 2d. ed. (San Francisco: South End Press, 2000), 54.
María Luisa Bombal, Obras completas, ed. Lucía Guerra (Buenos Aires: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1996), 317.
Judith Ortiz Cofer, Woman in Front of the Sun (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 29.
Rosario Ferré, “Writing in Between,” Hopscotch 1, no. 1 (1997): 109.
Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 28–29.
Edward Sapir, “The Status of Linguistics as a Science” (1929), in The Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality, ed. D. G. Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), 162.
Benjamin Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality, ed. J. B. Carroll (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1956), 213.
For recent assessments of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, see John A. Lucy, Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
John J. Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson, eds., Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (1896; New York: Dover, 1955), 104. I take the Bianciotti quotation from Amati-Mehler, Argentieri, and Canestri, The Babel of the Unconscious, 194.
Popularized by John Ferguson in the 1950s, the term “diglossia” originally referred to two dialects of the same language. Joshua Fishman extended the notion to apply to different languages rather than to varieties of the same language. The bibliography on diglossia is extensive; see Mauro Fernández, Diglossia: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1960–1990 (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1993).
For the so-called “Fishman extension,” see Joshua Fishman, “Bilingualism with and without Diglossia; Diglossia with and without Bilingualism,” Journal of Social Issues 23, no. 2 (1967): 29–38.
Edmundo Desnoes, “Nacer en español,” in An Other Tongue, ed. Alfred Arteaga (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 271.
Cristobal de Villalón, Antología de elogios de la lengua española, ed. Germán Bleiberg (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1951), 37. Villalón, a humanist poet and grammarian, died around 1559.
Juan Ramón Jiménez, Guerra en España (1936–1953) (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1985), 59.
Pedro Salinas, Cartas de viaje: 1912–1951, ed. Enric Bou (Valencia: PreTextos, 1996), 77.
Charles Simic, The Uncertain Certainty (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), 118.
Juan Marinello, Ensayos (La Habana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1977), 48. The quotations come from the essay “Americanismo y cubanismo literarios” (1932).
Walter Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 140.
Pedro Salinas, Poesías Completas (Barcelona: Barral, 1975), 644.
Juan de Valdés, Diázlogo de la lengua, ed. Oreste Macrí (Barcelona: Planeta, 1986), 8.
Rubén Darío, Los raros (1896; Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 1985), 21. Darío goes on to say that New Yorkers do not speak but “scream, moo, below, howl” (23).
See Roberto Ignacio Díaz, Unhomely Rooms: Foreign Tongues and Spanish American Literature (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002), 73–74.
Joseph Brodsky, “The Condition We Call Exile,” in Altogether Elsewhere, ed. Marc Robinson (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994), 3–11.
George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923; New York: Dover, 1955), 252.
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© 2003 Gustavo Pérez Firmat
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Firmat, G.P. (2003). Introduction. In: Tongue Ties. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980922_1
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