SPEAKING IN TONGUES

An evocative conversation between the Nobel Prize–winning novelist and his translator.

Coetzee has long been admired for his sinewy prose, his uncompromising humanism, and his immense sensitivity to the nuances of language in everyday life. This short book records a dialogue between Coetzee and his Spanish translator, Dimópulos, in which they range widely over such questions as these: Does language represent the world, or does it create that world? If we grow up multilingual, do we see the world in different ways? How do languages with grammatical gender organize the world? Should we try to neutralize gender in our own writing and speaking? The stimulus for the dialogue is the publication of Coetzee’s novel, The Pole. That book told the story of an elderly Polish pianist who has a relationship with a Spanish woman whom he meets as his host at a concert in Spain. Coetzee wanted the book to convey a linguistic as well as a musical world. His idea was to have the book, originally written in English, published first in Spanish and then, to use the Spanish version as the base text for all future translations (including the published English version). This move prompts the conversation about how English-language publishing largely controls world literature. More books, they note, are translated from English into other languages than the reverse—a fact they attribute to the Anglo-American resistance to what’s going on in the world outside their purview. They also make the point that world literature splits not just into English and non-English, but into north and south. The Southern Hemisphere, they intuit, lives among languages differently from the Northern. These issues will compel many American readers to reassess the politics of translation and their own literary and linguistic imperialism. Fans of Coetzee will also find a refreshing colloquialism to this book and a respite from his recent judgmentalism about animal rights, Western power, and public institutions.

You could read this book in an hour. You could think about it for the rest of your life.