I, Monoglot. I, Polyxenic.

Letters June 2024

Its all BAR BAR BAR BAR BAR BAR! ~ Greek idea of the barbaric

Its all Greek to me!

For Shay Hill , who asked me for an unpopular opinion.

I constantly here the push to learn second languages to gain the experience of reading the original. I studied classical Greek and Latin in undergraduate and there were advantages to getting close to the original. I see many that claim this is the only true reading of a text and that translations have little value or are flawed. I would like to make some points on this topic.

I have read authors who write, in Castilian, Spanish, French, Swedish, Czech, Latin, Greek(classical, Koine and Modern), Hebrew, Yidish, Norse, Italian, English (old, middle) , Polish, Arabic, Sumerian, Acadian, Sanskrit, Hindu, German, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Hungarian, Turkish, Aramaic, et al. I have enough Latin to struggle with church Latin and my Greek is gone. I could spend lifetimes trying to learn these languages and not have any time to read in them. So post undergraduate studies I moved into reading as a monoglot. I can read widely in English translation. You can access far more books as a monoglot than a polyglot and no-one is a omniglot (not even Nassim Taleb). So if you are a polyglot by all means read in the languages you already read, and if you love the study of language again by all means expand your language base.

Yet if you are only reading in the original than you have truly limited what you can read. My point is I am better in touch with people who read across cultures, the polyxenic rather than polyglotic. My wife and several others I know have English as a second langrage, while they conduct business and read technical things, they prefer their native language to English as they get tired of translating and thinking in two langages, I am discussing people who are considered to be fluent. Also second language speaker have told me that even with fluency they feel their second language to be weaker than their primary language. I have lost my Greek because it was too hard to maintain for the benefit. I can read 60 lines a minute in English while I was at a 90 lines an hour at my best in Greek, most of us are very inefficient in a second language, the proponents of polygloty are by far the very few who were raised as polyglot and may be just better at language than the majority. I would embrace the polyxenic approach to books in your native languages via translation for languages you do not speak. If you are an academic and need the original to hand you may want to learn the language.

I am not as good a translator as Richmond Latimore, Robert Fagels, Natasha Wimmer, or Edith Grossman etc. I do not come close to them in value of the prose and poetry that they can convey and the amount of time they will spend translating. Emily Wilson’s translation Odyssey was a five year labor of love and EFFORT. It seems to be folly to commit to translating better the very best. Wimmer’s translation of 2666, is some of the best prose written in English, and it does capture what Bolano wanted to convey. I would invest time with a good or several parallel translations of a book rather than trying to learn to muddle through several hundred pages of my own poor translation. I do not have the bandwidth for even reading the simpler text of the new testament and go with the Doughy Reims translation of the Latin of St. Jerome. Good translators will give you a more accurate text than a common translation and also specialize in the language translated. I would rather read 2666 over almost any novel in English.

The polyglot, Milan Kundera worked hard and would even struggle with publishers to ensure translations were improved if not to his satisfaction (to read him you need both Czech and French). Kundera moved to the original lingua franca so that more Europeans could read him and so that he only had to think in one language, as well he had access to better translation into English.

I am not oppose to studying language, but the inefficiency described above show that being a polyglot may limit your ability to be polyxenic. I hold more value on Polyxenia, and no one should be ashamed to read in translation.

I greatly benefit from the lingua francs of English as my language, and I greatly encourage as a second language English as it is very versatile and has the most works translated into it. I also understand that vast quantities of texts are not translated, but again how many can you access with one additional language is the cost to consider.

Note I enjoy many a performance in languages other than English, I love the sound of Opera, and music sung in countless languages, but in that case comprehension of the language may not be the main motivator…