German intellectuals at the end of the 18th century, feeling that their language lacked the literary richness of French or English or Spanish or Italian, decided that this very lack of history, of allusions and resonances embedded in the language, made it the ideal—almost transparent—language for translation. German could become a kind of Central Station for the best of the literature of the world, traveling into German and then out into the other languages. And where the other European languages had previously only translated Latin or classical Greek, or each other, the Germans looked first to the unexplored territories of Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit. (The unexplored territories of their literatures, it must be emphasized—the Germans themselves were barely a nation and had no economic interests in those countries.) And, as is often the case, translation revitalized—in this case, vitalized—their own literature, creating the great age of German Romanticism.
A similar thing happened with American poetry in the first decades of the 20th century. Feeling provincial, feeling that their national poetry had no history—of the great exceptions, Emily Dickinson was as yet undiscovered and Walt Whitman was seen, however incorrectly, as too regional and too rhetorical—many American writers moved to Europe and believed that the reading and translation of various foreign poetries were the path to their own poetry, both as a way to discover new forms of writing and to insert themselves onto the world stage. This turned out to be completely true. The first book of modern poetry in English was a translation of Chinese classical poetry—Ezra Pound’s Cathay—and Chinese classical poetry—both understood and misunderstood—was to remain an essential influence on nearly all the American poets of the 20th century (as, curiously, it was not in Britain or in other Western languages). Simultaneously, the poets were reading and translating the unrestored fragments of classical Greek, the medieval Provençal troubadours, Dante and Cavalcanti from the Italian, Anglo-Saxon, as well as their European contemporaries. Moreover, they were reading through their own English language tradition, rescuing poets who had been completely forgotten—it seems incredible now—such as John Donne and the Metaphysicals, rereading the Elizabethans, and so on. The result, once again, was a great age: American modernism.
Literature always moves in its own, sometimes mysterious, underground channels. Pound’s reading—or “invention,” as T.S. Eliot called it—of Chinese poetry led him to the creation of a new movement in the proliferation of movements at the beginning of the century: Imagism, which emphasized the stripping away of 19th century poetic rhetoric in favor of precision, concision, concreteness. His famous manifesto, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” was avidly read in Poetry magazine by a young Chinese student, Hu Shi, who happened to be studying in the US. Hu Shi went on to write his own, nearly identical manifesto, which would become the rallying cry of a new literature for the new China, one stream in the nationalistic and anti-imperial May Fourth Movement of 1919. In other words, Hu Shi found in America what Ezra Pound had found in China.
This launched a movement of Chinese modernist poetry in the 1920s and 30s, which was, in turn, nourished by translation, mainly from the French and Spanish. (Amazingly, the first translations of García Lorca into any language were done in Chinese by the poet Dai Wangshu.) After the revolution in 1949, these modernists were no longer permitted to publish their own poems, but their translations of European poets with the proper political credentials could continue to circulate—even though such surrealist poets as Lorca, Éluard, or Aragon were hardly writing in the mandated social realist mode. In the late 70s, after the Cultural Revolution, a group of young poets centered around the samizdat magazine Jintian (Today)—a group misleadingly known in the West as the Misty Poets, though “obscure” would be a less faithful and more accurate translation—invented their own modernist, anti-social realist, subjective, and impressionistic poetry, completely unaware of the banned Chinese poets who had preceeded them, but under the influence of the translations those same poets had written. Their poems became the expressions of the new youth consciousness for the Democracy Wall movement in 1979 and ten years later in Tiananmen Square—much like rock & roll was to the Western youth movements of the 1960s.
Literature moves through underground channels. Perhaps the best example is that, today, in the US, many classes in creative writing in poetry require their students to write a poem in a Malaysian form: the pantun (called “pantoum” in English). Victor Hugo introduced it into French poetry in 1829—having found it in the writings of an Asian scholar named Ernest Fouinet—and it was then picked up by Baudelaire and Leconte de Lisle and other Parnassians, and from there traveled into English and the rather drippy fin de siècle poets whom Pound hated, such as Austin Dobson. It was revived by John Ashbery in the 1950s, and then spread to countless other American poets.
Literature moves through its own channels, and only occasionally are those channels caused by, or are a microcosm of, the larger channels of imperialism or political conquest, as has now become a cliché. The British interest in Indian literature, and the discovery of Sanskrit and the family of Indo-European languages, indeed begins with William Jones, an official of the East India Company (which Malaysia remembers all too well!) but by the 19th century, for example, at the height of the British Empire, all of the professors of Sanskrit in England were German. The haiku mania that swept the European languages in the 1910s and 1920s—and was as important to their poetries as classical Chinese was to American poetry—owes something to the opening of trade at the end of the 19th century and the subsequent rage for all things Japanese, but is not the result of Western conquest: Japan was no colony. To take one example, the haiku is introduced into Spanish by a Mexican, José Juan Tablada, who lived in Japan for many years and then wrote haiku, not about Japanese cherry blossoms, but very Mexican flora and fauna. The result—and what world literature ultimately means—is that if you or I write a haiku today, we are not only following a long Japanese tradition, but also a modern tradition that includes Tablada and García Lorca and various French poets and Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” and countless others outside of Japan. The guiding spirit of poems about the American wilderness by Kenneth Rexroth or Gary Snyder is not an American—Thoreau at Walden Pond—but Li Bai and others up in the mountains in the Tang Dynasty.
Latin America is another case in point: During the century of overt American imperialism, more or less from the 1850s to the 1950s, there was almost no Latin American literature published in the US. This only changed around 1960, after the Cuban revolution, when American imperialism became much more covert. Conversely, with a few exceptions, Latin American writers, until recent decades, turned to France—and not their colonizer Spain—for inspiration.
And, to continue this ping-pong game: The Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan novelist, Miguel Ángel Asturias, known for his folkloric invocations of his country’s indigenous past and present, first began thinking about that reality in Paris, after reading the work of French ethnologists and archeologists. Octavio Paz’s deep interest in Mexico’s pre-Columbian past was similarly spurred on in Paris by his encounters with the Surrealists. And in Paris, too, was where the founders of the Négritude movement, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, discovered the work of the German Leo Frobenius, who spent thirty years roaming Africa, amassing notes on hundreds of thousands of file cards; who published twelve volumes of African folktales and, among many other books, an enormous cultural atlas that compared the artworks and everyday objects of scores of cultures; and who believed, long before Leakey, that humanity had originated in Africa, and that there was, in deep history, what he called a “Eurafric” civilization. Senghor wrote: “No one did more than Frobenius to reveal Africa to the world and the Africans to themselves.” (On another front, Apollinaire took Picasso and Matisse to see Frobenius’ collection of African masks, which transformed their work, and much of Frobenius’ thoughts on culture filter into Pound’s writings.)
In Latin America, the great exceptions of its general indifference to US literature were primarily Eliot’s The Waste Land, which was a worldwide phenomenon, and, curiously, a minor novel by William Faulkner, The Wild Palms, which was translated by Borges. Faulkner was decisive for, among many others, García Márquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude, in turn, is surely the most influential novel of the second half of the 20th century—though it’s doubtful that it’s a product of Colombian hegemony. In the 1960s, the translations of Latin American poetry by Neruda, Paz, Vallejo, Parra, and others were enormously important in US poetry. Then, beginning in the 1990s, there was a generation of Latin American poets enamored with the US poets who had begun in the 1960s under the influence of the Latin American poets. All of these little histories I’ve been repeating are like the Sufi parable: the man who travels for years in search of a treasure, only to discover that the treasure was buried under a tree in his backyard all along. Literature travels far to discover what is closest.
The 20th century was undoubtedly the Age of American Imperialism, but was it also actually the age of American cultural hegemony? Until fairly recently, the most popular movies in the world came, not from Hollywood, but from Bollywood and Hong Kong. (The first truly international movie star was Bruce Lee.) The most popular television shows were Brazilian and Mexican telenovelas. Chinese friends my age are experts on Mexican movies from the 1940s: in the 50s and 60s, before the Cultural Revolution, Soviet and, of course, Hollywood movies were banned and the Mexican movies were cheap to import. (And during the Cultural Revolution they watched Albanian movies.) And so it goes . . . “Hegemony,” especially as used in academia, is an easy catch-all, but once one moves out of politics and economics, it begins to lose meaning. Culture has always been far more complex.
The case of Faulkner’s otherwise forgotten novel Wild Palms in Latin America is not unusual: writers or works that are little appreciated in their own countries often have great success or influence abroad. They are not “lost in translation,” as that tiresome cliché goes, but better. Translation theorists like to attribute this to political agendas or the reinforcement of stereotypes: Southeast Asian novels must have lots of coconuts . . . But this seems to me only occasionally true. (Obviously, during the Cold War, the West was more excited to read Solzhenitsyn’s accounts of the Gulag than they would have been to read a Soviet novel extolling boiler-plate production.) It is more often the case that the writer or the work, which may be unremarkable in its original language, nevertheless brings something to the literature of the translation-language which it never had before—and which, of course, in the end, is the reason why books are translated at all. They tell us something we don’t know, and which leads us to discover ourselves. (Conversely, there are also works that are indeed “lost in translation,” not because of the supposed impossibility of bringing literature from one language to another, but because what was radical or transformative in one national literature—let’s say the first poet to write in so-called “free verse”—may be all too familiar in another national literature or in the context of what is already known about the literatures of the world.)
World literature is neither monolithic nor hegemonic. It has no Coca-Cola (which, bizarrely—considering we don’t even know what it is made from—was the extraordinary invention of a food that appealed to the taste of absolutely every culture on earth). World literature is a complex network of certain works that travel to certain cultures at certain times. Much of it is not the result of some larger agenda, but of pure chance: a writer discovers a book in a used bookstore; one writer happens to meet another abroad; and so on. Some of these books and writers become enormously popular in many places or in only a few places; some never catch on; some wax and wane in popularity: yesterday’s phenomenon becomes today’s footnote to the history of literature. Which, after all, is as it should be. There is no fixed “canon”: tastes change as cultures change. Today’s masterpiece was very often forgotten and out of print for long periods of time: in the US alone, this includes such books as Moby-Dick, Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady, and The Great Gatsby.
World literature is usually considered as the complex of literatures nourishing each other across national boundaries, but it is also very much the story of a dominant language and literature revitalized by the other languages and literatures within that country—from what is usually called the margins to the center, from the outside in.
The first anthology of poetry anywhere in the world was the Chinese Shi Jing (The Book of Songs or the Book of Odes) legendarily compiled by Confucius around 500 все. This was a collection consisting almost entirely of folk songs, reputedly collected so that the emperor could find out what the people were thinking. Until modern times, its influence on Chinese literary poetry has been immeasurable—and expertise in it was even required for bureaucrats to pass the official state exams for advancement. Similarly, throughout Chinese history—and particularly in the Tang Dynasty, the greatest age of Chinese poetry— the new ways of writing poetry, the new forms, usually came from folk songs. (As I understand it, this is also the case in Malaysia with the pantun and other forms, moving from the oral to written literature.) And going back again to German Romanticism, part of its project was not only discovering the literatures of remote places, but also a literature that had never been written down that was flourishing at home: not only folk songs, but the stories—later mislabeled “fairy tales”—that were assiduously collected and transcribed by the Brothers Grimm. García Marquez used to say—though it wasn’t completely true—that A Hundred Years of Solitude was just the stories his grandmother told him.
The title of this talk—since I was asked to give a title before I had written a word–is “New Trade Routes of the Word,” and, in part, it is precisely here—among languages within a nation, and from oral to written—where there are some extremely interesting new developments. Throughout modernism there have been “literary” writers—and I use “literary” merely as shorthand for writers who write it down and publish it—who have been inspired by oral traditions. But their knowledge of these traditions, unless they grew up with them at home, has come almost entirely from the work of ethnographers. The European Dadaists and Surrealists are obvious examples, and in the US in the 1960s there was a movement known as “ethnopoetics,” which transformed literal anthropological translations into American avant-gardist poems, often with very little knowledge of their context culturally or within their original poetics. But the impulse in all these cases was worthy: an opening up of the possibilities of what poetry could be.
What is new in various parts of the world is that speakers of indigenous languages are receiving university educations in the dominant language of their nation, studying the literatures of the world. Then, rather than writing in the dominant language, as was previously the case, they are choosing to write in their original language. The result is a fascinating conjunction of oral traditions with modernism. In Mexico—the country I know best—which has dozens of indigenous languages spoken by millions, there is already an impressive network of poets and fiction writers writing in these Native American languages, along with literary magazines and publishers and radio programs. Various writers have already achieved both national and international reputations. (Although, it must be said, often through their own Spanish translations of their work.) It’s a new hybrid form: instead of Picasso inspired by Dogon masks, a Dogon maskmaker is inspired by Picasso.
Of course, the problem of negotiating between one’s local audience and a much larger audience is a circular question not limited to writers coming out of an oral tradition. How much do you explain? (Do you describe a local food or just use the name for it?) I was interested to read, just before coming here, Kulleh Grasi’s book, Tell Me, Kenyalang, translated by festival co-director Pauline Fan, which incorporates various languages, imagery, and practices from Grasi’s home in Sarawak—and Fan’s decision to leave many words and phrases from the indigenous languages untranslated but annotated, recreating what the reading experience would be to someone who only knows Malay. It is fascinating that Grasi—and there may well be others, I just happen to have read his book—that Grasi in Malaysia is mirroring what is also the case in Mexico and various parts of Latin America today.
That kind of connection seems to me to be part of what may be a future map of world literature. Since the 18th century, most of the trade routes of the word have been East-West or North-South—that is, the East or the South informing the West, and the West informing the East and the South. But we are now, with globalized communication and mass migration—as I need hardly repeat—moving into a far more decentralized world, one where the European countries and the United States will be, and to some extent already are, merely nations among nations, their capitals no longer the only cultural capitals.
India is an interesting example. Until very recently, almost all the writers in English—Arundhati Roy was a notable exception—lived in the West. But there is a new generation of writers who are staying in India, and there is now an active literary scene of magazines and publishers—mainly in Delhi, but also in Calcutta, Bombay, Bangalore. It’s also telling that these younger writers are discovering and translating the important literary writers who write in the various regional languages. (It was not so long ago that Salman Rushdie scandalously and ignorantly declared that the only good writing in India was written in English.)
The point is that for, say, the young Malaysian writers in English at this festival, their potential network of writers, readers, and publishers is, or will be, as vital in Delhi as it is in London or New York. (And vice versa: the network of young Indian writers will extend to Kuala Lumpur.) With it comes an understanding of what is happening to English, which is a mirror of what is happening in the world: globalization has also given rise to ardent nationalism and regionalism sometimes for the good culturally, but in most cases for the bad politically. With English, on the one hand, there is the monolithic lingua franca, which we might call “Starbucks English.” But on the other hand, it is evolving into many languages, similar to the way Latin turned into the various Romance languages. Someone from Jamaica and someone from Wales and someone from India would hardly be able to understand one another in conversation. Moreover, unlike Arabic—which has a universal, classical, written language and many generally mutually incomprehensible national spoken variations—what is new is that many writers are choosing to write, not in universal English, but in their regional versions.
It seems to me perfectly obvious that, say, Malaysian writers have as much—not necessarily more than, but as much—to say to and learn from writers elsewhere in Asia or in Africa or in Latin America as they do from writers in the West. The whole history of literature is the story of new ways of writing, new ways of telling stories and new forms of poetry, coming from abroad, coming from new people—the immigrants, writing in the new language—and coming from the so-called margins of any given society.
The obstacle in the South and parts of the East, of course, has always been a postcolonial mentality and the sense of being somehow second-class. I come from supposedly the richest and most powerful nation on earth. But its riches are almost entirely concentrated at the top of the pyramid. To take one example, according to the UN statistics on infant mortality, ranked from best to worst, Malaysia is #40, but the US, where they say the streets are paved with gold, is #38. In the US, over 40 million people live in poverty and another 100 million live in what is called “near poverty”—together equaling one third of the country. And as for power, the current administration in the United States has proven how shallow and now eroding that power and influence have become. To put it another way, most Americans are themselves second-class citizens of the world, not at all that dissimilar to those of postcolonial countries.
The European and later the American centrality in the world was, after all, a phenomenon of a few centuries. (Before the Industrial Revolution, the two largest economies in the world were China and India.) That centrality is waning and waning rapidly, but consciousness moves slowly until it has a jolt—a jolt that often comes from writers, who have always been at the vanguard of the radical changes in how we see the world. Contrary to Auden’s famous dictum, poetry does indeed make things happen, though in oblique and intangible ways. Or, as William Carlos Williams said, “A new line is a new mind.”
It is too facile to proclaim the sinking of the West or the North and the rising of the East or the South. Rather, one needs to imagine a culturally multidirectional world, one that will exist—that already exists—within the dire, unitary and potentially unifying, planetary consequences of climate change. One of the greatest American poems oddly celebrates the simultaneous opening of the Suez Canal and the completion of the American Transcontinental Railway in 1869: Walt Whitman’s “Passage to India.” It is a physical passage to India but, as Whitman writes, “more than a passage to India.” The trade routes of the word are indeed changing and it’s unpredictable where they’ll lead. But as Whitman writes: “hoist instantly the anchor! . . . shake out every sail!” and “steer for the deep waters only.”
