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And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there.
And they said to one another, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
And the LORD said, Behold, the people are one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
So the LORD scattered them abroad from there upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city.
Therefore is the name of it called Babel, because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from there did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
(Genesis 11.1–9)
THAT is, at least, one explanation for the division of the human race into four or six or eight thousand different and (for the most part) mutually incomprehensible “linguistic communities,” some living, some dying, some dead.
Since the Book of Genesis was written, linguistic scholars have come up with other ways to explain the multiplicity of human language. We now know all about Proto-Indo-European phonetics and consonantal shifts and glottal stops and deep structure and synchronic variation.
But the legend of Babel has endured, and its endurance, I believe, says something about human needs and human fears. The international journal of professional translators is called Babel. After Babel is the title of George Steiner's 1975 book on the nature of language and the problems of translation. In it, Steiner cites Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka as two modern authors who were haunted by the Babel legend, as he is, and by all that it implies about our second fall from grace and about the present state of our linguistic and ethical chaos.
To my mind, however, the most moving modern references to the Babel legend occur in the fictions of two of the great prose dreamers of our century: Elias Canetti, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981; and Jorge-Luis Borges, the Argentine metaphysician and fantasist.
“La biblioteca de Babel” ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941) is Borges's brilliantly cerebral refinement of the old story about a room filled with monkeys seated at typewriters— monkeys who end up, in the fullness of time, pecking out the complete works of Shakespeare:
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps an infinite, number of hexagonal galleries.… Five shelves correspond to each one fo the walls of each hexagon; each shelf contains thirty-two books of a uniform format; each book is made up of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines; each line of some eighty black letters.…
Everything [which can be expressed, in all languages] is there: the minute history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the Library, a demonstration of the falsehood of the true catalogue, the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the commentary on the commentary of this Gospel, the veridical account of your death, a version of each book in all languages, the interpolation of every book in all books.
(79–83)
Of course, human beings can make sense of only, say, one in a trillion of these books, so that Borges's great hypothetical library is to us totally useless: in effect, a Babel.
In his poem “Compass” (as translated by Richard Wilbur), Borges writes:
All things are words of some strange tongue, in thrall
To Someone, Something, who both day and night
Proceeds in endless gibberish to write
The history of the world. In that dark scrawl
Rome is set down, and Carthage, I, you, all,
And this my being which escapes me quite,
My anguished life that's cryptic, recondite,
And garbled in the tongues of Babel's fall.
(qtd. in Steiner 68)
The best-known novel of Elias Canetti, a Bulgarian who wrote in German, is usually identified in English by the Spanish title Auto-da-fé , but its first American translation was called The Tower of Babel. The alternative title refers to the tall, tottering piles of books the hero obsessively builds out of his own precious library of Babel (a library that is burned in the end) and to the book's underlying themes of linguistic chaos and the total breakdown of human communication. “I realized,” Canetti writes, “that there is no greater illusion than the view that language is a means of communication between people. Rarely does anything penetrate into the mind of another person, and when this does take place, it is something incorrect.” In his first book of aphorisms, he offers the ultimate gloss to his own deeply troubling novel:
The fact that there are different languages is the most sinister fact in the world. It means that there are different names for the same things. All linguistics hides the striving to reduce all languages back to one. The tale of the Tower of Babel is the tale of the second Fall of Man. After losing their innocence and eternal life, human beings wanted to grow artificially to the heavens. First they had tasted of the wrong tree, now they had mastered its ways and grew straight up. In return, they lost what they had managed to retain after the First Fall: the unity of names. ( Human Province 7 )
Behind the Tower of Babel legend die two ideas that I would like to consider here: first, that there once was, and in an ideal world would still be, a single and universal tongue. And second, that the slivered multiplicity of human languages is an evil and unfortunate thing, a punishment for overweening human pride, the source of chaos, confusion, and mortal enmity among the human residents of this cursed planet.
The ideal of a single world language, in ages past or to come, is as old as the Book of Genesis and as current as the daily-growing hegemony of English. A great deal of Gnostic and cabalistic cerebration was dedicated to reconstructing the language that existed before the Tower of Babel collapsed, the language that God spoke to Adam and that Adam in turn used to name all the animals.
Latin, for several centuries, played the role of a “universal” language, at least among Christian European elites, both religious and secular. Nor did its reign entirely end with the coming of new world empires. The parliament of Hungary carried on its deliberations in Latin right up to World War I. The land we call Switzerland, the French la Suisse , and the Italians Svizzera still officially calls itself Helvetia, just as Caesar called it. Latin remains the official language of one sovereign state, albeit a rather small one.
Latin—like French and English and like Spanish and Portuguese later on—was spread around the world not because of its natural superiority over native languages, its greater linguistic flexibility or capaciousness, or the sublimity of its literature but by conquest: by the determined building of a global empire. In De civitate Dei , Augustine wrote, “The Imperial City [by which he means Rome] has endeavored to impose on subject nations not only her yoke, but her language, as a bond of peace… but how many great wars, how much slaughter and bloodshed have provided this unity?” (qtd. in Fishman 128).
Since Rome, other imperial cities—London and Paris, Madrid and Lisbon, Amsterdam and Berlin, Moscow and Peking, Djakarta and Manila (perhaps even Washington) —have endeavored to impose their yokes and their languages on subject nations (or provinces or ethnic groups)— often bringing the wars, slaughter, and bloodshed that Augustine decried.
Modern sociolinguistics sometimes appears to be primarily a plea on behalf of imperiled minority languages and against the flattening oppression of the prestigious, imperialist tongues, which, I presume, are what most of us have studied. Scholars regard the thousands of less spoken languages around the world as precious and endangered species, like spotted owls or snails darters threatened by loggers or land developers. Insofar as language is culture, they argue, when you obliterate a language, even a dialect—whether by national fiat, by universal education in a single tongue, by economic incentives, or by the ubiquity of monolingual broadcasting—you wipe out a culture: Hawaiian, Cornish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Breton, Irish, Sicilian, Catalan, Frisian, Friulian, the twenty-seven Mayan tongues of Guatemala, and all the lost languages of the native North Americans. The dominant world languages, in the minds of many linguistic scholars today, seem little more then vehicles of ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and racist oppression.
The other side of the Tower of Babel argument, however, holds that this rich diversity of languages is an evil and unfortunate thing—a divine curse, in fact. In one sense, at least, the authors of Genesis 11 were right when they suggested that the splintering of the imagined single, primordial tongue would lead to confusion, chaos, and hatred in the human race.
Against many of the imperialist efforts—conscious or unconscious—to crush native languages have been mounted proud, bitter, nationalist campaigns to preserve and defend the so-called mother tongue: witness, for example, the persistence of Welsh and Irish, the politically dictated resurgence of Swahili, even the “cultural-maintenance” case made for bilingual education in this country.
The hostility between French and English speakers in Québec and between Flemings and Walloons in Belgium, the rancorous linguistic divisions in Sri Lanka, the war between Malay-speaking and Tamil-speaking Indonesians, the scorn of many Germans or Great Russians for people who speak Yiddish or Polish—these antagonisms are not only battles over language; they grow out of distinctive racial and religious identities, centuries of enmity, whole complexes of warring values. Of all these differences, however, language (along with race) is the most vivid and tangible symbol and perhaps (along with race) the thing easiest to despise in someone else. As many observers have pointed out, the current splintering of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia along linguistic lines, as well as the insistent nationalism of ethnic groups throughout Eastern Europe, is only following the historical rule. The “unity” enforced by forty-five to seventy-four years of Communism was the unnatural exception.
Few people any longer believe in the linguistic theory of a divine Big Bang on the plain of Shinar. Even so, many of us, pressed by a religious belief in the superanimal soul or a secular belief in human equality or a desire for world peace; still profess or assert a common humanity. We long for the pre-Babel world.
But a living truth lies in that legend. Our minds are shaped, our attitudes formed, by the cultures within which we were raised, within which we live; and language is both the most important component of those cultures and the source of our symbols for all the others.
As foreign language majors graduating from an American university, you now “know,” more or less fluently, at least two languages, that puts you on a level with millions of Africans and Indians, who have to deal with two languages every day, but slightly behind most high school graduates of Switzerland, Singapore, Denmark, Malaysia, and Luxembourg, who know three. Familiarity with four European languages—English, French, Italian, and German—is almost taken for granted by scholars, curators, impresarios, and performers in the international worlds of art and classical music with which I deal. I have had friends, students, and colleagues who could read and speak six, seven, even eight. The music critic Andrew Porter defiantly sprinkles his New Yorker reviews with untranslated bits of half a dozen languages. George Steiner insists he was born knowing three. “So far as I am aware,” he claims, “I possess equal currency in English, French, and German. I speak and write them with indistinguishable ease. I dream with equal verbal density and linguistic-symbolic provocation in all three” (115). Bully for George.
Looming over me is the shadow of Czeslaw Milosz, of Berkeley's Slavic department, who gave the commencement address here in 1989. Winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, Milosz reads at least a dozen languages, including Latin and Greek, or so I would judge from reading his works and their interviews he has given. And yet he asserts, “My mother tongue, work in my mother tongue is for me the most important thing in my life.…My own country [i.e., Poland, or Polish-speaking Lithuania] and my one language—what is a poet who has no longer a language of his own?”
For most of us, though, there are limits: human limits of energy, time, mental capacity. Crawling up the first slopes of a new language, once you're past puberty—eleven is supposed to be the turning point—is bloody hard work. After two, three, four years of agonizing over flash cards and audiotapes and lists of irregular verb forms and exceptions to exceptions to rules and 2,001 idioms that are probably already passé, you land in a country where the language you got all those A's in is native, and where you discover to your horror that you can understand abut one sentence in three rapidly slurred by the locals in your first pension. After three, six, twelve months in the country you find you're finally beginning to get some of the jokes, catch the political asides in the morning paper; you “casually” begin to abbreviate and drop syllables, substitute impersonals for pronouns, trendily break the rules you were taught in school ( no one ever says ne before pas anymore!). You can almost hold your own—at least listening —in a lively conversation, without having to ask everyone to slow down, enunciate, and stop using subjunctives.
So now, at twenty-two or twenty-five, you're semi-bilingual, like any Dutch or Danish three-year-old. But surely you need at least four or five languages to get a decent fix on the world you live in. French, Italian, and German, along with English and Latin, are still regarded by most of us—perhaps in ignorance—as the richest literary languages. The value of Spanish in California—now one-quarter Latino, with the proportion growing—goes without saying. The priest-diplomats of the Vatican are required to speak Italian, English, Spanish, and French and to read Latin. And René Etiemble has argued, I am told, that the Western European and American concept of the world we live in will remain artificial and obsolete if we don't at least try to learn one of the major languages outside our private game park: Russian, say, or Arabic, or Hindi, or Chinese.
OK. English, then, let us say—and at least three other languages: a sort of Swiss, or Singaporean, ideal. Since no one offered most of us (unless we chose our parents unusually well) the opportunity to reach this goal either at home or in kindergarten through high school, this ideal requires, at the least, six years of hard work.
Is it worth it? Most Americans—and most British, for that matter—don't think so. We remain the two most defiantly monolingual major nations on earth. Only in the United States, I read somewhere, can one still graduate from high school or earn a college degree without ever having studied a foreign language.
Nor do things really seem to be changing much, despite occasional claims to the contrary. Just twenty years ago, at Berkeley, there were 974 undergraduate majors in the ten foreign language departments represented here today; in 1980, there were 770; last year, 733. Undergraduate enrollments on this campus in French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, and Spanish classes all dropped by more than fifty percent between 1965 and 1970 and—except for Spanish—have never recovered.
Why are you language majors so out of step? Why do you so disagree with your fellow Americans, your fellow English speakers around the globe, who presume that they need only hire translators or native speakers as they wait for the other four billion people in the world to pull up their socks and learn English? Ninety-six percent of the important scientific and academic writing around the world is now published first in English. It is the number two world language (after Mandarin), the only truly universal lingua franca in human history, the “foreign” language most educated people elsewhere want or are obliged to learn. It's an official language in at least forty-three countries (all of them former British or American colonies), the source of most translated works, and—for the moment, at least—the dominant language of economic power. Who needs anything else? As H.L. Mencken notoriously (and, of course, ironically) said, “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for me.”
Have you all studied non-English languages in order to make money? I doubt it. If that were your goal, you'd probably have studied Japanese. In any case, when business executives in this country are interviewed about the supposedly urgent need for foreign languages in international trade, they usually insist that they'd rather hire solid, monolingual American MBAs and engineers, and if necessary give them crash courses at Berlitz or some $1,000-a-week total-immersion culture camp, than risk trying to make a decent executive or engineer out of a wimpy, artsy-fartsy foreign language major.
Have you gone to all this trouble, then, in order to read great literature (or, for that matter, lesser literature) as it was written? Of course you have. Like so many other Anglophones-born, I still have to read Homer and Euripides, Tolstoy and Chekhov, through the fogged lenses of inadequate translators. All my life I've been seeing sometimes even reviewing, performances of Ibsen's and Strindberg's plays and blaming the authors for the awkward and stilted English that directors and actors had somehow to overcome. I often liked what I read or what I saw onstage. But it wasn't what the authors wrote, and I didn't even know enough to know what I was missing.
A third reason for all your work may be a desire to travel through the vast non-English-speaking world and feel at home wherever you are. Nowadays, this world encompasses not just Europe and Latin America and Southeast Asia and the former colonies of France but also San Jose and San Diego, Monterey Park and Stockton, El Paso and Miami. And not just so you can read street signs or sit in cafés and understand the gossip you overhear.
But all these reasons for mastering second and third languages are still based on the presumption that the Babel incident was unfortunate, that in an ideal monolingual world you could make a killing selling T-shirts in Tokyo or read Tolstoy and Baudelaire or travel to Indonesia or Portugal, understanding and being understood. The reason I sincerely believe that the world is a better place because of the Babel incident—which is to say, because human beings speak such a phenomenal variety of languages—is that each new language we learn requires us to reshape the paths and channels of our brain, to readjust the focus of our vision of the world.
I become a different person when I am making non-English noises, thinking non-English thoughts. Something happens to the inside of my head when I start using inflected nouns and verbs, which frees me to move words all over my sentences and to play games with disjunctive orders and disappearing pronouns. Whole new concepts of class and status and politesse rise up within me when I have to start choosing among forms of address unknown in English. Inanimate objects suddenly take on a sexual identity, or are importantly capitalized. I can lose myself —or others—in impersonal passives. Suddenly I own more of the past, care about Brazil or the Ivory Coast.
Whisper love words in Swedish, and you gain a new identity. Weep over Violetta and Alfredo without supertitles, and you are beginning to know what it means to be Italian. Imagine, if you can, first the chanteuse, then the whole crowd in Rick's café in Casablanca, standing up to drown out the hated Nazis by singing
Come, children of the Motherland,
The day of glory has arrived!
Against us the bloody flag
Of tyranny is lifted up! [repeat]
Listen to the ferocious soldiers
Bellowing in the fields;
They are coming right into our arms
To butcher our comrades and our sons.
to arms, citizens! Form your batallions!
March on, march on—
Let the impure blood
Fill up our trenches!
It doesn't have quite the same effect, does it? But in French, somehow—for all Rouget de l'Isle's grisly, chauvinist 1793 rhetoric, the “Marseillaise” does work; it still does. In the movie, at least, or at a July Fourteenth street party in Paris, it breaks me up. In the 1950s and 1960s, General de Gaulle admitted that he patterned the syntax and rhythms of this public addresses after the royal funeral orations of the seventeenth-century courtier-bishop Jacques-Benigne Bossuet. Rendered into English, de Gaulle's speeches look fatuous, inflated, pompous, and archaic, and no doubt they led many in the United States and England to think that the speaker was also. In French —at least at the time—they sounded to me simply like very good French.
People who write bout the impossibility of translation defy you to find foreign equivalents for words like the English home , the French foyer , the Dutch gezelligheid , the German gemütlich. Writing in the New York Times a few years ago, two distinguished professional translators—one American, the other Russian—each listed in turn words and phrases in the other's language that simply could not be rendered in their own: the Russian kommunalka, vozhd, gosudarstvo, vlasti, toska, dusha, normalno ; the American take care, have fun (the title of the article is “Why You'll Never Have Fun in Russian”), make love, privacy, efficiency, challenge (Lourie and Mikhalev).
My own favorite instance of practical, everyday cultural untranslatability lies in the wonderful, essentially meaningless syllables by which Italians keep the ineffable music of their speaking going even when their mind are in neutral, pausing between ideas. Any born Italian (and it is worth trying to master this trick, in order to feel Italian) can maintain a seamless flow of liquid noise just by breathing out, between real words, sounds like cioé, così, va bene?, dunque, vedi, infatto, veramente, non so, no lo so, allora, insomma, poi, si, effitavamente, practicamente, communque, chissa?, ma, no?, forse, quindi, ecco, se vuole, un po, direi, diciamo, anche, be', ti ripeto, credo, dico, quardi, é vero?, appunto, come ho detto, capisce?, e infatti, questo!, figurarsi, per così dire, secondo me, a mio avviso, eccettera, eccettera. It may seem as if the speakers are using these fillers, these interjections—with accompanying gestures—to show you that they are taking thought, or are concerned about you, or are self-effacing, or are clarifying, summing up, or whatever. They're not. They're just filling empty air, making voluble music out of talk. Learn Italian, and you can do it too. All we tongue-tied Americans have are mmmm, like, well, and y'know.
The ultimate defense of multilingualism, I believe—and thus my primary reason for thanking the Lord for his shattering, disunifying act at the Tower of Babel—is not economic or literary or touristic but, in the widest, wildest, deepest sense, cerebral and imaginative. With each new language we move into, begin to feel at home in, begin to understand and use without having to translate laboriously out of our native tongue, without having to take conscious thought about declensions and conjugations and rules, the world we dwell in grows more multiple, more various, capacious, and large. And I cannot imagine a life situation more desirable than that.
The author is Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. This article is based on his address at the commencement ceremony often foreign language departments at Berkeley on 17 May 1991.
Borges, Jorge-Luis. Ficciones. Buenos Aires, 1956. Trans. Anthony Kerrigan. New York: Grove, 1962.
Canetti, Elias. Die Blendung. Vienna, 1935. Trans. V. Wedgwood as Auto-da-fé. London, 1946. Trans. as The Tower of Babel. New York, 1947.
———. The Human Province. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Seabury, 1978. Trans. of Die Provinz des Menschen: Aufzeichnungen 1942–1972. Munich, 1973.
Czarenecka, Eva, and Aleksander Fiut. Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz. Trans Richard Lourie. New York: Harbrace, 1987.
Fishman, Joshua A. The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival: Perspectives on Language and Ethnicity. New York: Mouton, 1985.
Lourie, Richard, and Aleksei Mikhalev. “Why You'll Never Have Fun in Russian.” New York times Book Review 18 June 1989: 1.
Milosz, Czeslaw. Native Realm. 1958. Trans. Catherine S. Leach. Garden City: Doubleday, 1968.
Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975.
© 1992 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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