Living in language

I hope I say what I mean

I like talking. That’s something anyone who has spent more than five minutes with me knows. It’s been said to me kindly, it’s been said cruelly, it’s been written in the middle of school reports as two bald words with no further elaboration. A month after starting to send out newsletters where I essentially chat freely about what’s on my mind, it’s probably not a surprise to read that, either. I think liking to talk with people is an extension of enjoying learning, of enjoying reading, of enjoying words. I like to know what people think, and what people think about what people think.

I’ve been thinking a lot about words over the past few months. I’ve been reading the poetry of Menna Elfyn - well, mainly, I’ve been reading her poems in translation within her bilingual collections. She’s published a number of Welsh/English bilingual collections of her poetry, and spoken at length about the act of translation. She’s in favour of it for a number of reasons; she enjoys its ability to draw more readers towards Welsh, in the hope they might afterwards learn the language; she enjoys the vitality it gives her poems, re-interpreting words which she considered to be finished with; she enjoys the way that translators see her images, the ideas that come out of their reading of her words that she couldn’t see herself. This last conception of translation was the most interesting to me when I came across an article where she mentions it. The idea that her words have generated meanings which she did not intend, but nonetheless is happy to see, made me think again about what translation does and the ability it has, not to mis-translate - as divergences from original texts are so often positioned - but to expand upon the words and ideas it has to work with. Translation is re-writing, re-imagining, a craft in itself. For this reason I was particularly attuned to the gravity of the news last week that the British Museum used Yilin Wang’s translations of Qiu Jin’s poetry in their ‘China’s Hidden Century’ exhibition without permission or accreditation, as though the English words simply came into being through a mechanical miracle (there’s a reason you can’t rely on Google Translate).

As a monolingual speaker, and at times a blunt one at that, I’ve not often thought of translation impacting my own speech. I say what I mean and I mean what I say. I was interested, though, by another of Elfyn’s positions. Welsh-language poetry is a male-dominated field, and Elfyn has said on multiple occasions that writing in the tradition was a ‘lonely’ act. She was the first poet writing in Welsh to write about miscarriage, an experience which is detailed in her first bilingual collection Eucalyptus; a collection that was viewed by some Welsh-language activists as a ‘betrayal’, since her poems were accessible to English-speakers at the same moment as Welsh speakers. Elfyn doesn’t take the same approach. Since the Welsh language, to her mind, didn’t properly accommodate women to begin with, she needed to invent: something she allows her translators ‘freedom’ to do too.

Elfyn cites Adrienne Rich as an influence on her poetry and political consciousness, and though Rich has been criticised after her death for her condoning of transphobic ideas, I think that her texts can be read in a way that encompass the experience of all marginalised genders and identities, transgender people included. Rich argues that because society has historically been overwhelmingly patriarchal, it’s difficult to write from a marginalised position. If you are oppressed by institutions which speak your language, it’s hard to feel like that language wants you to express yourself in it; it’s hard to know whether popular metaphors and allegories, words for feelings, properly speak to what you’re experiencing. This idea of accommodation and dispossession of language isn’t just Rich’s or Elfyn’s, and there are countless philosophers - including for my interests, obviously, Derrida - who talk about the same thing.

Though mine and Elfyn’s mother tongues are not the same - and she speaks English far more fluently and poetically than I have ever been able to speak Welsh - I see myself in her poems, particularly when my eyes flit across both pages and I compare the words she uses with her poet-translators’. When reading either poem, it’s difficult not to take a glance at its neighbour on the other page. When I do that, I see clearly that choosing the right words to say is never a final act. Words can be substituted, again and again; what I’ve always viewed as final words on a page, particularly within the constraints of a poem, suddenly jump into action, never stable and always open to another word taking their place. When I start to recognise that language can move like this, the worry of saying the right thing and being properly accommodated seems to melt away a little. Suddenly, translation becomes a path to saying more, sometimes through saying less. Breaking the rules, bending the words.

I doubt I’ll ever write bilingually, even though I would like to improve my language skills to get to a point where I could try, one day. For now, I’ll keep talking. And talking, and talking…