The Fall of Language in the Age of English
by Minae Mizumura,
translated by Mari Yoshihara & Juliet Winters Carpenter
First posted November 2015
I cannot believe how many semicolons are in this review; or can I?
I edited this quite heavily. It seemed overly ornate and weirdly vague. It still has that vibe but it feels more readable to me now. The original is still up at goodreads, typos and all. ☮
Language is a constant source of delight. Imagine overhearing the statement, “Tupac’s gone, but I’m still here.” Powerful. But is it a mournful paean to the fragility of life? A bold claim about the speaker’s self-worth? It may have been a mantra, warding off existential breakdown. Or perhaps it was meant as a crow of triumph, sheer bravado in the face of a downed rival!
When I expand the details to let you know that I heard it from a rather shabby looking older man in a Manhattan-bound subway car, the potential world-lines collapse into a singular function. “Meaningless, if off-putting, public transit babble.” Some may seek to imbue the soft touch of folksy wisdom to the phase—seek to glean true insight from the words—like it was a koan wrapped in commuter hours, spoken by a zen master. This type of mystification is not localized to our particular culture:
The ideology of national language would later have it that a humble peasant who tilled the soil and did not know what “democracy” meant even in Japanese was held up as the true sage, possessing a kid of wisdom that the educated could not possibly attain. This jaundiced view of higher education was possible only for those Japanese who could take for granted the existence of the Japanese language as it is today, who came late enough to be blissfully ignorant of how their language and literature developed.
When applied externally, idealized simplicity can become blinding and dangerous. “Out of the mouth of babes” and all that, until you find a way to reverse-engineer clever parts of other social systems into one-off lucky bits and infantilize an entire civilization. It’s a simple and insidious way of cutting down other cultures while attempting to appear to be rational. This was a concept I hadn’t encountered until The Argumentative Indian:
In this pre-selected ‘East-West’ contrast, meetings are organized, as it were, between Aristotle and Euclid on the one hand, and the wise and contented Indian peasants on the other. This is not, of course, an uninteresting exercise, but it is not pre-eminently a better way of understanding the ‘East-West’ cultural contrast than by arranging meetings between, say, Aryabhata (the mathematician) and Kautilya (the political economist) on the one hand, and happily determined Visigoths on the other.
This imbalance—where the pinnacle of Western thought is brought to bear against the simple enlightenment of the exotic peasantry—is egocentrism and privilege laid bare.
Similar but more subtle is the privilege that I never recognized and that most people reading this will likely never acknowledge is one of language:
Those whose mother tongue is English often are unaware that when they are writing in their own language, they are in fact writing in a universal language. They are unaware of what they would be deprived of if they were writing in a nonuniversal language—beyond the sheer number of readers. To apply the phrase I used in the talk I gave in Paris, they are not condemned to reflect on language in the way the rest of us are.
It is hard to admit that English readers and writers have a leg-up in a global society that places English at the forefront of international communications; that you, a writer of English, has potential connections numbering in the billions rather the hundreds of thousands or even millions that delineate someone that was born into a less global language. You could write in English, or you could write in your native language. If a book does well enough in its native language, the “default” version of the text might end up as English regardless of your desire.
A translated text can create a cacophony of voices that don’t flow in the same direction—what comes from the author and what from the translator? The Fall of Language in the Age of English is not an exception to this; in fact, such an intense focus on language and translation made me more aware of the gap that stood between me and the author of the original text: “Once we left the college town behind, tall buildings disappeared and modest, two-story houses typical of the American countryside took their place, lit by the white morning light.”
Is “modest” the adjective a woman living in Tokyo would choose to describe a two-story home, or is that a cultural holdover from the translator? A few pages later: “What I got was not a suite but a room, and not even a very spacious room at that, considering this was the American Midwest and not Tokyo.”
There is a certain the distance that the physical words impose upon the reader; not because these phrases are contradictory— because they are not—but because there is space for me to ponder from whom they originated. Perhaps a transliteration would have brought homey or quaint rather than modest, or perhaps the casual cultural cliché of modest American home was intended for immerse effect; whatever the case, I was constantly reminded this was originally a Japanese text.
Which is a great thing. Close attention to the text—constant engagement with the language itself rather than just the concepts the text is attempting to explain—is what it means to actually read a book. When a book (the history of Coleco, if you’re curious) I wanted to support on a crowdfunding website mentioned that it would only unlock the French language edition—the author’s native tongue—as a third-round stretch goal, I thought of Fall of Language and the primacy of English in the stream of commerce. When the Oxford English Dictionary selected an emoji for word of the year, I thought of Fall of Language and the primacy of phoneticism in Western culture:
Social Darwinism, which saw Western civilization as the pinnacle of human evolution, was applied to writing systems as well, suggesting that human writing evolved from ideograms to phonograms. Among the varieties of phonograms, syllabaries like hiragana and katakana that combine a consonant and a vowel in one letter were considered less evolved...
Chinese characters, by exemplifying ideograms, went blatantly against such phoneticism. Though regarded as more evolved than Egyptian hieroglyphs, they came to symbolize the backwardness of East Asia, crystallized in China’s defeat in the Opium Wars.
English is a language of cooptation, amalgamation, and theft—it makes almost no sense at a base level, and it would be hell to learn as an adult. Adding pictures—ideograms—back into the fold is just another step in our linguistic evolution; as simple written communications increase via text messaging, it seems it will only continue to increase. Adopting unpronounceable—non-phonetic—symbols into our written language is a break with the lockstep that English has held with phoneticism for hundreds of years. Take that, outdated and painfully racist concept of Social Darwinism!
During my week with Fall of Language, it inserted itself into my interpretation of almost everything that happened around me. Whether the cause of my enchantment was the original writing in Japanese or the translator’s skill—likely both—the words are dense but never clunky, and the core concept always stays within viewing distance:
The fall of language is set into motion when such people begin to take more seriously what they read in English. It is set in motion when, for example, they turn to English-language media to learn about critical international events--they may or may not be conscious of the Anglophone bias there--and use the media of their own country only to find out the results of home sports games or follow home celebrity gossip.
It is set into motion when they hurry to order a heavyweight English-language book attracting media attention before it comes out in translation, while neglecting fine books written in their own language. Finally, it is set into motion when, because they have gradually become accustomed to making light of what is written in their own language, bilinguals start taking their own country’s literature less seriously than literature written in English--especially the classics of English literature, which are evolving into the universal canon.
A vicious cycle then begins. The more palpable this trend becomes, the more non-English writers would feel that writing in their own language will not reach the readers they are aiming for. Without a trusted readership, those writers would have less and less incentive to write in their own language, and there would be fewer and fewer texts worth reading in that language.
The Fall of Language in the Age of English stands as an exemplar of the type of thinking that may be lost in a global community dominated by English; its existence proves its thesis elegantly.