A couple of years ago we rented a beautiful apartment in London, a large flat where we must have stayed four or five times. It was perfectly comfortable and perfectly private, and the location, directly behind the British Museum, was ideal for visits to theaters and museums. It was decorated in the taste of a refined gay man of my parents’ generation. It had good Chinese porcelain, carefully chosen oriental rugs, witty French prints. It also contained the kind of photographs which, in that mysterious way, have grown dated without becoming quite old — gently pushed, by an accumulation of tiny changes, into the past. Some minute evolution in eyewear, some invisible reformulation of lipstick, some arcane improvement in cameras, betrayed their age. They did not look ancient. But though I couldn’t say exactly why, I knew that the pretty young bride was now middle-aged, and that a lot of the jolly middle-aged folks at Angkor Wat were now dead.
I also knew, as soon as I walked inside, that the house belonged to an American. I saw this by the shapes and colors of the books on the hallway shelves. It had never occurred to me that American books from the middle part of the twentieth century had such a specific appearance. Few had dust jackets. Their bindings came in serious colors: rusted reds, navy blues, vomity greens. Some were bound in something that looked like floral wallpaper, and that must have looked lovely when fresh; but few made the strenuous effort to be attractive that later books would. Their type was generously spaced. Their paper was sturdy, made of crushed rags.
I was unprepared for them to strike such a chord. Even before I saw the titles or the authors, I knew exactly what this library was. These were the books that my grandparents had on their shelves. In our world of painless communication and cheap travel, it was rare to see something that made my fatherland feel so distant. Here were the tastes and interests of Americans two generations removed from me, people I had known as a child: the people who came into the world around the turn of the twentieth century, and left it at its close. These were the books they had read at school, when they were young, and kept all their lives, even when moving across the ocean. They were too precious to give away — but not valuable enough to sell, not valuable enough for the kids, if there were kids, to keep. Most could be found for a few dollars in online bookstores. It was a miracle that such a collection had survived.
During my first week in the flat, I foreswore friends in order to pick through it. There was something about it that I wanted to understand. As I went along shelf after shelf, I felt an upswelling of emotion, suddenly close to people I thought I had finished mourning years before. Perhaps for the last time, I was a boy spending the night in my grandmother’s house. I wanted to chronicle it, catalog it, before it disappeared forever.
I noted its specifically national focus: overwhelmingly American. The only foreign country that was well represented was England, which was not, in literary terms, a foreign country. The American classics began with the great founders of our nationality: Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation. There were some nineteenth-century books, including a Life and Character of Stephen Decatur, published in Middletown, Connecticut in 1821; and M. Sears’ The American Politician, published in Boston in 1842, containing portraits of all the presidents “from Washington to Tyler.” Most of the books were fairly common, or had been: two volumes of Bancroft’s History of the United States, and parts of a series called “American Statesmen,” which included Lincoln but also Lewis Cass and Thomas Hart Benton, this latter written by no one less than Theodore Roosevelt, who also wrote another volume about Oliver Cromwell. There were books about Charles Francis Adams and Seward and Sumner; Mark Twain at Your Fingertips; Mencken’s The American Language. There was a selection of books about California: Cable Car Days in San Francisco; Oscar Lewis’ The Big Four, about the railroad barons; and a book from the dawn of the twentieth century called The Wild Flowers of California by Mary Elizabeth Parsons. There were works by Stephen Crane and Walt Whitman, Melville’s White Jacket and Bret Harte’s Luck of Roaring Camp; Our Old Home by Hawthorne and Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams; The Titan by Theodore Dreiser and Lorenzo in Taos by Mabel Dodge Luhan; Frank Norris’ The Pit and Edna Ferber’s Giant and Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again and Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady. There were seven volumes of the writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, and six of the Works of Edgar A. Poe.
Of the British and the Irish, the usual authors were represented. George Eliot, Sterne, Defoe; several volumes of Evelyn Waugh, The Real Bernard Shaw, books by Virginia Woolf, The Gothic Revival by Kenneth Clark, Revolt in the Desert by T.E. Lawrence. There was Tinker’s Boswell beside an illustrated Life of Samuel Johnson in a couple of dusty boxes. There was a large multivolume set of Dickens, Morley’s Life of Gladstone, Travels with a Donkey by Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters of James Joyce, Byron’s Poetical Works, Alec Waugh’s Hot Countries, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, De Quincey’s Works, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, Sir Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon Bonaparte. And there was a smattering of foreign books, mostly French, alongside some Russian classics and some books from and about antiquity, in translation. There was Napoleon’s Correspondence with King Joseph, Eve Curie’s Madame Curie, Balzac, Marmontel, Molière, Dumas, Hugo, Rabelais, and ten volumes of The Complete Writings of Alfred de Musset.
I include this list as a record of something once so common that it would not have been noticed, much less documented: the library of the literate middle-class American, born around the turn of the twentieth century. The books themselves, individually, were not strange; it was the collection, representing the idea of a library shared by every educated person, that had disappeared as utterly as the readers of Bret Harte or Morley’s Life of Gladstone. The culture that connected people of my generation was popular television and music, and the consumeristic emphasis on newness meant that nothing lasted long. I noticed when I traveled that bookstores were as crammed with seasonal novelties as shoe stores; and used bookstores — this has been one of the saddest developments of my lifetime — had mostly disappeared.
As I perused these books, the feeling of going back into a past — my own, my culture’s — filled me with a sense of reverence for an ancestral world. Even the kinds of books, like the multivolume sets, spoke of some other age. Were they expensive — like a Christmas present, something you might have to save up for — or cheap, cheaper than the individual books? I remembered them displayed, like encyclopedias, in the homes of my childhood. Now I only ever saw them at the very top of the shelves of second-hand bookstores, dirty — because rarely touched — and dirt cheap. They were too handsome to toss. But did any bookseller expect to find a taker for those seven volumes of Whittier? It was easy to imagine that an author might once have dreamed of having his career crowned in such a way. Now these sets were dust traps. Where would one begin to read such a thing? Who, now, would bother?
“It’ll last another ten years,” a friend, a rare books dealer in New York, once said to me. He had made a career selling the archives of authors to American research libraries. These libraries thrilled me. I worked in one as an undergraduate, and was dazzled by the range of its collections, the sum of the efforts of centuries of American bibliophiles. These libraries were a great collective work, our cathedrals, our monasteries. But the era of archives was over, he thought. Part of this was due to the passage of paper. Researchers of the future would not have the pleasure of rustling letters, or the ability to see the scary way a once-neat handwriting starts to unravel during a painful breakup, or as a writer grows old. There would be no more envelopes with postage stamps from exotic lands — no more finding, caught between the pages, the stray hairs of a great poet. Activity that had once been the province of paper had moved onscreen.
Books, he said, were disappearing.
Books had always disappeared, in a different way, as they passed from literature into the history of literature. Their life cycle, if they last long enough to have one, begins with a first reader. It is exciting to read writing that is not yet a book, a possible book from the future. If this writing is published, there will be a moment of publication, when a book’s destiny is unknown. We know most books will be ignored; only the lucky ones will be embraced and attacked, interpreted and misinterpreted and translated, reprinted and revised and reviled. During this process, the book is contemporary, part of what people are talking about — the current life of the culture. This life eventually winds down, and as a book has a first reader, it has a last one, too: the last person who picks it up and reads it as an artifact from his own time. When this last person puts it down, it belongs to the past.
But that is not the end. Now comes the first person who reads a book from the past, the first who looks through it in order to see another age. In this guise — as a reference, a school requirement, an object of study — its life can be far longer than its flash of contemporary relevance. It joins a culture that connects people to something bigger than themselves, that gives them a sense of where they came from. And they keep that culture alive because it defines their sensibility and helps them to understand it. This is why time burnishes the greatest works. Yet their beauty will change. It will come to require a key — as a poem by Virgil, immediately comprehensible to any Roman, requires years of careful study by those for whom Latin is not a natural language, and for whom the religion of Rome is a quaint mythology. As centuries pass, that knowledge becomes available only to those willing to dedicate years to acquiring it. I did not know anyone who naturally understood the world that produced a Greek statue or a painting by Jan van Eyck. But I had known plenty of people who had read Theodore Dreiser or Thomas Wolfe when “everyone” was reading them — before they had been handed over to antiquarians and graduate students. There is no one alive who remembers them that way now.
I noted the information I was finding about the men to whom this library had belonged. The older was Ney Lannes MacMinn. There was a book, Riley Child-Rhymes with Hoosier Pictures, which seemed to have been kept to remember an Indiana childhood. There was a date, August 7, 1922, and a place, Hammond, Indiana. I thought he must have been about to leave home then, perhaps for college, since another date follows: January 14, 1923, Champaign, Illinois. He was, however, a bit older, as I learn from the single internet page with any information about him, from Northwestern University.
He was born in Brockway, a dot on the map of western Pennsylvania, in 1894. He studied at Westminster College, further to the west, near the Ohio border. He served with the United States Army for two years in World War I, and remained in France to study at the University of Toulouse. Upon his return to the United States, he completed a master’s degree at the University of Illinois, and then went to Northwestern, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1928. His archive, at Northwestern, ranges from 1924 to 1994, “with the bulk of the material from 1941-1967,” the year he died. This entire archive fits in a single box.
Online, I find one photo of MacMinn. It is a news photo, for sale for nine dollars. He is in a study. He is not wearing a tie, and the jacket of his suit hangs, rumpled, on the back of his chair. On the shelves and table, books and papers are piled in a way that suggests frenzied thought. The room and the attire suggest that the photographer has snapped him in the heat of some great scholarly endeavor; he had not had the time to fix his clothes, put on his jacket, make his office more presentable. His face is timid, almost haunted. He is hunched in his chair — as if aware of the self-consciousness of this pose — as if crushed by the library and what it seemed to expect of him — by the photo and the role it asked him to play. There is a handwritten caption on the back:
This American professor of Philosophy has chosen a housboat on the seine to live and pursue his work: A learned 70 year old American, professor Ney Lannes Macminn became aquinted with France as a combattant in 1914-1918, and then as a student at the Faculte de Toulouse. He always retained a certain nostalgia for it so after receiving a doctorate in philosophy in England, he bought a house boat in Holland and went to sttle in Paris on the Seine where his boat is moored near the Concorde. A specialist in social questions and especially of the great English Phlosopher of the 16th century Thomas Morus, he is preparing a large work on the relations between the Utopias of the 16th century. Professor Ney Lannes Macminn in the library installed inside his houseboat and which contains 6,000 volumes and precios manuscripts.
From photo and caption, a dream emerges, and a life story. A war sweeps a bookish small-town kid to Europe. We do not know what he saw in that war. But we know that he retained a “certain nostalgia” for France. For forty years, semester after semester, Midwestern winter after Midwestern winter, as his first students were themselves starting to grow old, he cherished a dream of taking up the life that he had glimpsed. The brief Northwestern biography said that he had been married and divorced twice. I had the strong feeling that he was gay. There was a note from the archive description: “The correspondence, spanning the years 1939-1967, is primarily between MacMinn and Macklin B. DeNictolis, a former student and close friend of MacMinn’s.” Perhaps there had been a boy in Toulouse; perhaps you could live in France as you couldn’t in Illinois. He dreamed of going back, bringing those six thousand volumes, writing his large work, mooring his boat “near the Concorde.” And then, on that boat, he would discover that it was too late. Such a dream was bound to be disappointed; I imagine I see that awareness in the photograph. He died three years later, the work unwritten.
I do not know how the library I saw, which had nothing like six thousand volumes, reached its next proprietor. On the internet, which contains almost no information about him, I find that Carson Kohle was born in 1932 in Ventura County, California, and died in London in 2011. I cannot find any pictures of him, and wonder at how someone who lived in central London in 2011 could be so absent from the internet. He seems to have been a businessman, and though I assume the slightly aged family pictures show relatives, there are no names besides his. His taste was outstanding. He had a penchant for exotic travel, and in his time — he was born fourteen years before my parents — travel was far easier than in MacMinn’s. His books reflect that easy time. The old canon expanded to include works from all over the world: A Survey of Zairian Art, Woolf in Ceylon, Chronicle of the Chinese Emperors, L’art du Mexique ancien, Art & Architecture of Cambodia.
When I left MacMinn’s books in the purgatory between the rare and the out-of-date, the antique and the merely old, I turned, with relief, to these bright illustrated volumes. MacMinn’s books witnessed a single tradition; Kohle’s, the moment when that tradition burst into a wider world, preparing for the Great Expansion of which I was a part. It was like seeing an old museum add a wing for Asian or Pre-Columbian art. Such an addition would complete a view of the world. It would assert a cosmopolitan ideal that felt natural to me. It was a globalized culture, but when viewed alongside MacMinn’s library, it seemed firmly anchored within a specific national culture. And you needed a national culture before you could generate, or create, an interest in the cultures of other nations.
I have spent decades translating books and advocating for international culture. I am proud of this work, especially my part in bringing Clarice Lispector from Portuguese into English. This project, sustained over decades, corrected an injustice: she now stands in her rightful place among the great writers of the twentieth century. Yet even while I was doing this work, I was growing more skeptical of my assumption that an international culture can exist, at least more than superficially; of the idea of the museum with expanding wings.
I did much of this work in the Netherlands. During my many years living there, I marveled at two things. The first was how well, how easily, how nearly accentlessly the Dutch spoke English. For English speakers, used to thinking of speaking a foreign language as something like a superpower, the assumption that everyone could and should speak at least a couple of languages seemed dazzlingly superior. At the same time, I marveled that, though fluent in our language, the Dutch always sounded, when talking about the United States, like people offering insights into the affairs of a celebrity known only from glossy magazines. (“I can’t believe Jennifer Aniston is dating a guy who clearly doesn’t deserve her.”) They explained our country to us with an overfamiliarity, a shallowness, that annoyed Americans in the Netherlands. We were frequently forced to endure denunciations of racism, the Second Amendment, or the Electoral College, as if, until the Dutch had come along to explain them, these were things Americans had never noticed. I doubt that Omanis or Sri Lankans were schooled about their own societies as often, or as thoroughly, as we were. And this illusion of intimacy was made possible by a knowledge of our language.
Those conversations, and their relentless superficiality, revealed that knowing how to speak and understand a language — which children master before kindergarten — was only the tiniest part of knowing a language, which even native speakers rarely achieve. I shudder to think what percentage of Americans can consistently write and speak without errors of grammar or spelling. (I shudder even more to think that this number is higher in the United States than in most other countries.) Yet grammar and spelling are only the surface. Imagine a newspaper, written in perfectly correct English, that covers the culture, sports, economics, and current events of Oman, written for an Omani audience. You could read it. But you would miss a lot.
My Dutch neighbors would always be missing something about us. And I would always be missing something about them. Indeed, the deeper I went into languages, the more I bumped up against an immovable barrier: that intuitive feel for the resonances in a word — a question of music, of something you felt physically, in your ear. Even without complicated vocabulary or poetic turns of phrase, words sound different in different languages. The most straightforward English sentence sounded entirely different when turned into Dutch, to which English is closely related. This mystery suggested something besides the complaint that translation is difficult — and something besides the cliché, which made me impatient, that something is “lost in translation.” After all, something, namely a new book, is also gained in translation. Even the limited access that translation provides is preferable to no access at all.
The push for translation has been a central part of the literary culture of our time. Like the new wing for Asian or African art, this was something I cheered. But it rests on presuppositions, as I slowly started to understand, that have not been adequately examined.
It is not easy to learn your own language. French kids had French class; Dutch kids took Dutch. I, like every American child, was taught English every day until I graduated from high school. I learned spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, grammar. I learned something else, too, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Learning how to read and write meant being brought into a community, inducted into a tradition. By learning what people around me mean by the words they used, I was being prepared for citizenship within the culture into which I was born. I would not be like those people reading an Omani newspaper, seeing effects without being able connect them to causes.
This preparation demanded years. It was an immersive training for immersion. It had a ritual aspect, and it taught a sense of community, the value of a collective experience, of “we.” We were being instructed in filial piety. To see oneself as a son or daughter is to understand that one has emerged, inevitably and inalterably, from a specific time and place; and by connecting the speakers of a language with those who lived before, my teachers were preparing us to play a modest part in the great collective work of our particular tradition.
This tradition existed in sharp opposition to another aspect of our culture, whose values were derived from the fashion and music industries, from popular television and our never-ending election “cycles.” The basis of the consumerist society was the illusion of uninfluenced individual liberty and choice. The study of grammar, however, revealed that we did not have choices in some basic matters. It revealed structures so deeply embedded that we were unaware that they were structures. Unless a teacher points it out, it would never occur to an English-speaker that our sentences use a subject-verb-object order — and that such a structure, so inevitable to us, would be unnatural to the speakers of many other languages. And as we study Shakespeare, for example, we learn that so many of the words we use to structure our interior lives are the product of a single long-dead writer. Thoughts we assume are our own move in grooves set down centuries before us and make our minds different from those of people who speak another language.
I came to think of a language as an old city. When I first came to Holland, I was struck by the Amsterdam canals, perfectly preserved relics of the days of Rembrandt, miraculously handed down to us from a distant Golden Age. But as I grew more familiar with the city, I realized that I had been tricked into thinking that the city was a perfectly intact Baroque relic. When I examined it house by house, I found buildings in dozens of completely unrelated styles: neoclassicism, Jugendstil, postmodernism, rococo, brutalism. Yet none of these novelties — and some were wildly extravagant — disrupted the general impression of unchanging, venerable age. I became fascinated by the question of how this coherence was maintained.
I concluded that the style did not matter as much as the restrictions imposed on any building here. Every builder was bound by a series of rules, some of which seemed obvious and some of which did not. Climate, for instance: Amsterdam’s location in a northern marshland. Geology, which placed a layer of sandstone beneath a shallow skin of water. History, which laid down the streets, dug the canals, divvied up the lots. Economics, which made land too expensive to permit large projects. Politics, which forbade certain constructions. Any building had to adapt to these limits, no matter what façade you put on it. The result was a near-perfect visual harmony.
I came to think of a book as a house, and of a literature as an old city. The products of millions of anonymous hands, both a city and a literature contained an enormous range of constructions, and had room for an astonishing diversity; but they also emerged in a specific place, under specific conditions, and imposed — invisibly, invariably — a series of views on their inhabitants. Like a city, a literature took its character from the continuous encounter of young people with a tradition. Their responses added to it, like new houses in an old city. It was this chain that distinguished a city from a collection of houses, a literature from a collection of books. It seemed urgent to understand the foundations upon which our city — our language — was built. Literature told us what our words meant, who and what we were.
“Whoever writes in Brazil today is raising a house, brick by brick, and this is a humble and stirring human destiny,” wrote Clarice Lispector in 1971, using another architectural metaphor. “We are hungry to know about ourselves, with great urgency, because we need ourselves more than we need others.” In Brazil, there were many reasons for this urgency. One was historical. Unlike the English, Spanish, or French colonizers, the Portuguese forbade printing from 1500, when they first arrived, until 1808 — three hundred and eight years of forced cultural dependency. The nation had been starved of its own literature, and this explained part of the hunger, the great urgency, that Lispector described: the need “to use a Brazilian language inside a Brazilian reality.”
This was an older story. In one form or another, many countries shared a history of colonization or censorship. In recent years, however, a new threat had emerged that was different from the old attacks on languages and their literatures. This was the threat of English, the threat from English, the imperial language, all the more insidious because it looked so attractive. For billions of non-writers, English was the language of education and economic advancement. For writers, English held out the promise of a truly international readership. To be published in English meant joining the broader conversation to which artists aspire. It also meant the prospect of a financial independence unavailable to writers who could only sell their books in a single small country.
English was so useful, it offered so many possibilities, and it was precisely this usefulness that threatened even languages protected by rich and populous states: this was the argument of the Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura in The Fall of Language in the Age of English. The book reflects on her unusual life story. Owing to her father’s work, she moved to New York at twelve, then stayed in the United States for twenty years, all the way through graduate school. This meant that when she embarked on a writing career, she had the luxury, which almost no other Japanese writer shared, of being able to choose English. But she didn’t. She rejected a language spoken “everywhere” in favor of a language spoken in a single nation. Japanese had millions of readers, but nowhere near as many as English.
Mizumura had made a brave choice, a choice with integrity, one that required a certain stubbornness. The promise of English was the allure of “universality,” but it also had the unintended effect of downgrading every other language to “local” status. Why be local when you can be universal? My partner, a Dutch novelist, had his early books translated into English, and this, for any Dutch writer, was the opportunity of a lifetime. It meant escaping the country-and-a-half where Dutch is spoken in order to be read all around the world — in the English-speaking countries and in lots of others, too, since an editor at a publishing house in Paris or São Paulo or Tokyo who cannot read your work in Dutch can read it in English. For a while, he was published all over the world. But despite excellent reviews the books sold indifferently, and eventually they stopped being translated.
This was more demoralizing than if the possibility had never existed in the first place. In earlier times, it hadn’t. With only the rarest exceptions, Dutch, Brazilians, and Japanese built houses in their own cities, never expecting to be read beyond their own countries. Now the possibility of projection was dangled in front of writers, from novelists to poets to the authors of self-help books. In recent years we have seen writers outside English become global phenomena: Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Haruki Murakami. But such a literary life, the popularity owed to translation, began to seem a little fake to me. And when I read Mizumura I found myself agreeing that, strictly speaking, literary universality does not exist. The books I loved were, after all, about something, not everything. But even in practical and commercial terms, the prominence of English created more losers than winners, favoring, like so many other forms of globalization, a handful of instantly recognizable and inoffensive brands.
I was never “against translation.” I spent more time studying languages than almost anyone I knew — aware that even the most dogged student could never master more than a handful, and dependent on translators to read the classics of those languages that I would never be able to learn more than superficially. I will probably never learn enough Russian or Greek, say, to be able to read the books in those languages without which no person could really consider himself educated. But I didn’t read foreign books in order to consider myself educated. I read them because I liked them. And because I could: either I had studied the language or publishers and translators had made them available to me. For years, I read more in foreign languages or in translation than in English. I probably still do.
But my reading reflected scholarly interests — in Brazilian literature, for example — that were not easily generalized to a broader English-speaking public. It was hard enough to find readers for even authors of unquestionable canonical status. It took twenty years of work to bring Clarice Lispector into English. This meant translation in the sense of “Englishing,” as well as in the Latin sense of bringing something across. This is the work of proselytization. It meant, in this case, spending five years writing a critical biography. It means everything that goes into publishing a translated book once the text is ready, from making sure that it is attractively designed to making sure that it gets sent out to influential people to making sure it gets reviewed to making sure it gets into bookstores to getting blurbs, writing introductions, giving interviews, speaking at universities, assisting theatrical productions, sending and answering thousands of emails. Not everyone has the time or the ability or the interest to do this. As a profession, after all, translating is even less lucrative than writing. But I never thought of it as a profession; I thought of it as a labor of love.
Yet in the twenty years since I began working on Clarice Lispector, the rhetoric around translation changed. From something that belonged to the field of scholarship or to art or to love, it started to become a kind of obligation. The increasing dominance of English made people like me feel that we ought to do something to counteract an unjust situation of which we were the apparent beneficiaries. English had come to appear as an unearned and inherited “privilege,” like certain skin colors or class origins or sexual orientations, and it was an important part of the sensibility of my generation to foreswear such privileges, to work to reverse them. I myself imagined that my work with Lispector was a way of resisting the dominance of English. For those who did not want literature to become another corporate monoculture, the privilege of English was a source of guilt — a moral affront, even, that accounted for the stridency which surrounded discussions of translation in the English-speaking world.
In those discussions, no one questioned the basic goodness of translation. It was good for the authors translated, who gained access to a readership they would otherwise have lacked. It was good for us — mostly meaning educated, middle-class American and British readers. Without translated literature, we would be doomed to provincialism. Even worse: the provincial refusal to publish, to buy, or to read foreign books was in fact a kind of chauvinism, a high but still very low variety of xenophobia. (I was never sure who was actually refusing.) For these reasons, the bookshelves of my generation were far more international than those of our grandparents, the kinds of bookshelves that I found in London. At least in our tastes, we were principled cosmopolitans.
Many of these books were, of course, marvelous — books we would have hated to be without. And those of us who advocated for translation saw ourselves as the heirs to a movement of broadening the canon, expanding it, as our parents’ generation had fought to include works by certain artists, particularly women and African-Americans, who had been excluded by old prejudices. That movement had been accused of undermining the idea of a common heritage. It was true that, in some quarters, the “canon” was spoken of with a sneer. But that was never the intention of the people I knew who had dedicated themselves to reform and expansion in this area. We simply wanted to make more books available to more people. And over the years this movement brought to light all sorts of fine overlooked works.
Yet reading books like Mizumura’s made me wonder if we had looked at this work — at translation generally — too uncritically. The emphasis on success in English that Mizumura lamented meant a transfer of critical power to people outside a writer’s own language. I knew what she meant, because, through my work on Clarice, I had inadvertently become one of those people. My efforts had earned her global prominence and had earned me the love of many Brazilians. I had not “discovered” her — she had been venerated in her own country for years by the time I came along — but it was true that my biography, and then the series of translations I published, brought her a new level of international recognition. She was, for example, the first Brazilian on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. For me, it was exciting to see a labor of love — carried out in obscurity, and at great expense, over many years — rewarded with such affection. For Brazilians, it was exciting to see one of their own so warmly applauded abroad, and this success brought her a new level of recognition within her own country. At the same time, I was well aware that I had brought her into the imperial language, and that I would not have received a fraction of this gratitude if I had brought her into Dutch, French, or Japanese.
Was that right? I knew from conversations with writers around the world that the prospect of success in English was distorting the way people received their own language. As more and more books were translated, the judgment of a few faraway “gatekeepers” was elevated above the judgment of the readers of one’s own language. It was nice to enjoy critical success in São Paulo or Tokyo or Amsterdam, but if the possibility existed for success in New York, then “local” success, success in one’s own language, was no longer enough. One’s book was placed in the hands of foreigners, for whose interest one was grateful; but they could never replace the healthy critical culture, the thoroughly knowledgeable culture, the deeply racinated culture, that intellectual and artistic life requires.
On our end, the English-speaking end, it was important to remember the distinction between cosmopolitanism and dilettantism. We were people for whom it was common to eat a different cuisine every night of the week — Thai on Monday, Italian on Tuesday. A wide-ranging taste in food was a central aspect of our sensibility, and a penchant for travel — we were better traveled than any other generation in history — had committed us to tourism, which is a meager way of acquiring knowledge. Tourism is not only an itinerary, it is also a cognitive state. And visiting foreign countries is not the same as dipping into foreign literature, in which so much understanding depends on years of difficult and sustained scholarship. The deeper you sustain that scholarship, the more you appreciate how many works really could not be translated. You cannot have the building without the whole city.
Even within a language, cultural differences can be difficult to bridge. Any American who has lived in Britain, any Briton who has lived in America, knows that a shared language is no guarantee of understanding. We comprehend each other’s words, but we know how little this can mean in practice: without having lived in Britain, Americans rarely understand the jokes on British television, for example. Was translation creating a simulacrum of a common language? I became skeptical that even closely related cultures — say, Britain and America — could ever really understand one another. I became skeptical even that they need to. What they need is to respect one another.
“We need ourselves more than we need others,” Clarice Lispector wrote. Could an English-speaker say the same?
Much of my life has taken place within a certain English dialect. It was my mind, my home. And it seemed inclusive. You did not need to belong to a particular race or tribe in order to speak it. It was the vehicle for the diversity seen in the great English-speaking cities, where people of different backgrounds lived together more in harmony in than conflict. Yet it was also the vehicle for gentrification, for homogenization — for condos and branding and duty-free stores and management consulting. Like the internet, it was “universal,” prized precisely because it seemed free of any connection with any one place or people. That was fine for those whose interest in the language was chiefly transactional. But for us to view our own language as a neutral medium, denuded of its particularity and uncoupled from its history and culture, was to risk turning our own city into an airport mall, stripped of vitality or personality, a space without past or future, where business is conducted in the most inert and boiled-down form of English. This is a place where everyone is only passing through, and a language that exists only in the present tense.
This denatured language, this nondescript space, was appropriate for an age of globalized capitalism — for a time of generalized forgetting, an era when the past had lost its authority. When I saw that library in London, I thought of a change that my professor friends were always warning about: their students knew so much less, had read so much less, than students did five or ten years ago. It was easy to dismiss this as the whingeing of the middle-aged, but I had heard it from enough different people in enough different places that it came to seem plausible. It always reminded me of a sentence from an interview I once read, I don’t remember with whom, but I did remember the phrase, and especially the italics. His students, someone said, had never heard of Carol Burnett — “and they never will.”
As a Brazilian or a Japanese would have felt a pang at sacrificing their cultural heritage, so, too, did I. To see that library was to see something that was impossible to reduce to a neutral, indistinct, universal language. It was so specific: this culture, not that culture; a particular culture; my culture. Ours was one of the oldest continually written literatures in the world, an uninterrupted stream that goes back beyond even Beowulf. But if our books are no longer read, if that tradition is not kept alive, then the great river of our language — the White Nile of Britain and the Blue Nile of America and all their smaller tributaries — will be reduced to a drool of tweets and ads. A city cannot paint itself, collect its own trash, restore its own cathedrals, and neither can a cultural tradition maintain itself: people need to maintain it. Yet that cultural maintenance, that literary education, has passed out of fashion, even out of legitimacy, and it is not likely to return. The books that made up my tradition are no longer read — and they never will be again.
When speaking of the substance of that education, it was easy to quibble about texts — Beowulf ? — and lose sight of the goal. This was to teach people how to read, and how to understand what they read. Easy to describe, this goal was difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to reach. The reading that was taught by the old education demanded a protracted and intense focus, a wariness of sheer novelty, that is at odds with nearly everything in contemporary culture; and so, without the authority of the past, we have been delivered to the tyranny of opinion, and all of us now live in the disinformation age.
The evidence is everywhere that native speakers of English no longer understand their own language, and no longer bother to try. They no longer require of it anything more than practical communication; as in the rest of their lives, they demand of their language mainly efficiency and informality and velocity. And if this is the case with our own language, how much could we understand of anyone else’s? And how, absent years of dedicated scholarship, could books from other contexts be read or understood? Much advocacy of translation relied on the idea that it was enough to bring a foreign text into our language, and serious readers would do the hard work of diving deeply. But one risk of emphasizing works in translation was never spoken: that a smattering of Polish or Yoruba or Chinese books would be playing into the same vogue for novelty, for passing sensations and transient enthusiasms — for multicultural sanctimony — that was undermining every other area of our cultural and social life.
There is nothing wrong with reading a book from a culture that one does not know well, but I do not understand the insistence that in itself this is a positive good. It depends on the book; it depends on the reader. And it strikes me that, after years of following these debates, I rarely heard a justification beyond “diversity”: an unanswerable concept that dispensed with other justifications — artistic, scientific, scholarly, spiritual — for translation. It was harmless to enjoy Swedish crime novels or Elena Ferrante, but such enjoyment no more implied a familiarity with Scandinavian or Italian literature than enjoying Mexican food denotes a familiarity with Mexican culture.
Translation without context can be a form of consumerism, of tokenism, of — dare I say it? — “cultural appropriation.” The real problem with “cultural appropriation” is that it does not appropriate deeply enough. Clarice Lispector called Brazilians “fake cosmopolitans,” and the term seems uncomfortably appropriate to us: people forever dipping in and out of cultures they hardly understand. By expanding into too many other worlds, we have sacrificed depth in our own, and cut ourselves off from what was particular, and profound, about us.
Translation — not the thing but the unquestioned emphasis on its virtue — started to feel to me like another philistinism masquerading as worldliness: another part of the infrastructure. The way we read, the way we engage with the world, resembles the ways we travel: journeys that, though distant in terms of mileage, were almost always inside our own class. As Chesterton observed, travel narrows the mind.
During my years in Europe and Latin America, I realized that most contemporary books that ended up being translated were written by the people whom “we” felt comfortable with. These were the people who lived in the neighborhood we would choose to live in if we lived in Bogotá or Budapest, the class of people, shaped by the infrastructure, who shared our tastes, politics, and cultural interests. I started to become sure that a book from or about Paris, Texas, would have been far more instructive to people like us than a book from or about Paris, France. Frequent-flying is no proof against provincialism, as anyone who has ever observed frequent flyers knows.
It took me a long time to realize this. It took me a long time to grasp that reading international literature might make one less cultured, less educated. When I found the library in London, I saw why it would be pointless for people with such a shaky sense of their own culture to try to engage with others. Instead of deepening our understanding of our tradition, we had opted for engagement with people who, though from other places, were in so many ways just like us — not least in their detachment from their own culture. This was why Mizumura seemed so radical to me. She had made a choice that nobody I knew had made.
For her, English was a threat. Most advocates for translation in the English-speaking world agree. But as I looked at those volumes, I began to wonder if the culture that threatened other languages was hollowing out English, too. That culture goes by many disparaging names. It was called “corporate,” “capitalist,” “neoliberal”; it was taught as “Business English.” It was the vehicle of the infrastructure, for the most basic communication: for checking into a hotel, sending an email, participating in a sales conference. It makes no claim to tell you who or what you are. It is a language that calls for an app, not a library.
I felt it as a loss the way I regretted the loss of other sensibilities: the way I regretted that other once-distinct groups to which I belonged, gay people, for example, or Texas people, had been absorbed by the globalized monoculture. This was the feeling that Mizumura described in seeing Japan reduced to just another satrapy of the empire, its culture — because it is not conducted in English — second-rate almost by definition. Since English is our natural language, it is a bit harder for us to see that this universal language, so convenient for us, is becoming thin and bland and insecure, or how “Business English,” the lifeless argot of transactionalism, is seeping into real English.
Another reason for the erosion of our literary tradition, for the passage of those books into obscurity, was that we started to regard our own culture with increasing wariness. Behind the movement in favor of translation was a feeling of failure that had been creeping up on us. When I was younger, it seemed harmless enough to indulge in performative guilt about the dominance of English. Constant atonement for sins we had not ourselves committed was, after all, a salient characteristic of our culture, and often enough yet another expression of our comfort and security. It was an expression, too, of the belief in philanthropy that colored so many of our interactions with people from different backgrounds. Translation was a form of atonement for being exempted from the increasingly universal requirement to learn English.
As I grew older, the movement for translation started to express something else. Many of us who grew up in triumphant America experienced, as we entered middle age, a loss of confidence in the culture that raised us. We felt despairing about political reform. We were embarrassed by the condescension of our philanthropy, and appalled by the empire that we stood to inherit. We started to see our language as a force that, like our armies and corporations, swept everything before it. Like other great languages, English was the product of a great empire; and some embraced translation as a form of resistance to that empire, to a culture we felt was ill — a culture that, in some fundamental way, had failed.
Maybe it had. There was no doubt that there was a lot in our collective past that was shameful — though how this made us different from every other nation was never clear to me. What was clear was that feeling ourselves to be the worst was — like feeling ourselves to be the best — characteristic of our particular form of national narcissism. And I thought that, if we were going to turn our backs on our patrimony, we ought to do it consciously. We ought, at the very least, to know what that culture was, what it had been
