Cities in Translation: Intersections of language and memory 2011013422, 9780415471510, 9780415471527, 9780203802885

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Cities in Translation

“This is a beautifully written, illuminating and luminous book. Simon journeys through different cities, opening up new vistas from past and present, showing the fundamental importance of languages in shaping cultural, geographical and historical space. I shall never look at a city in the same way again after reading this insightful work.” Susan Bassnett, University of Warwick, UK, author of Translation Studies, Routledge “As translation studies scholars move from the universal to the particular, from the global to the local, Sherry Simon’s Cities in Translation furthers that trend, turning from the nation to the city as a geographic space for investigation. This book will appeal to students of translation first and foremost, but be forewarned that it will challenge traditional definitions and concepts. It will also appeal to literary scholars, social scientists, semioticians, art and architecture historians, urban and community planners, and, especially, literary and cultural studies scholars.” Edwin Gentzler, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA, author of Translation and Identity in the Americas, Routledge

All cities are multilingual, but there are some where language relations have a special importance. These are cities where more than one historically rooted language community lays claim to the territory of the city. This book focuses on four such linguistically divided cities: Calcutta, Trieste, Barcelona, and Montreal. As opposed to cities where communities are divided by violence or war, these cities offer the possibility of creative interaction across competing languages and this book examines the dynamics of translation in its many forms. By focusing on a category of cities which has received little attention, this study contributes to our understanding of the kinds of language relations that sustain the diversity of urban life. Illustrated with photos and maps, Cities in Translation is both an engaging read for a wide-ranging audience and an important text in advancing theory and methodology in translation studies. Sherry Simon is Professor in the Department of French Studies at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.

New Perspectives in Translation Studies Series editor

Michael Cronin holds a Personal Chair in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Dublin City University

The New Perspectives in Translation Studies series aims to address the changing needs in translation studies. The series features works by leading scholars in the field, on emerging and up to date topics in the discipline. Key features of the titles in the series are accessibility, relevance and innovation. These lively and highly readable texts provide an exploration into various areas of the field for undergraduate and postgraduate students of translation studies and cultural studies. Forthcoming: Translation and the Internet Michael Cronin

Cities in Translation Intersections of language and memory

Sherry Simon

First published 2012 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2012 Sherry Simon The right of Sherry Simon to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Simon, Sherry. Cities in translation : intersections of language and memory / Sherry Simon.   p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   1. Translating and interpreting -- Methodology. 2. Multilingualism.   I. Title.   P306.2.S663 2011   306.44’6--dc22   2011013422 ISBN: 978-0-415-47151-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-47152-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-80288-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Bookcraft Ltd, Stroud, Gloucestershire

For Eleanor And for little Avi, already a polyglot citizen of several cities

Contents

List of figures Note on terminology Acknowledgements Preface 1 Introduction: turning up the volume of translation in the city

viii x xi xv 1

2 Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city

21

3 Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border

56

4 Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation

88

5 Montreal’s third space

117

6 Language landscapes and memory

151

Notes Bibliography Index

161 173 189

List of figures

0.1 St Sophia Cathedral in Turkish Nicosia 0.2 Sign at the border in Nicosia 2.1, 2.2 Maps of comparative population density in Calcutta, 1825 2.3 Kalighat image 2.4 Page from Lebedeff’s The Disguise 2.5 Page from Lebedeff’s Grammar 2.6 Toru Dutt, with her sister Aru 2.7 James Long at forty-nine 2.8 The Town Hall of Calcutta 2.9 Bankimchandra Chatterjee 3.1 Maximilian’s castle, Trieste 3.2 Italo Svevo, with cigarette 3.3 Side view of the Trieste Synagogue 3.4 The Trieste Asylum 3.5 Poster of the Caffè San Marco 4.1 Statue of Colometa, the heroine of Rodoreda’s Plaça del Diamant 4.2 The characteristic chamfered corners of Cerdà’s Eixample 4.3, 4.4 Passatges in Barcelona 4.5 “Ravalejar”, a poster in the Raval 5.1 The Simcha sign 5.2 The three modernities of Montreal 5.3 Paul-Émile Borduas, 1951 5.4 A group portrait of the Automatistes, 1947 5.5 The title page of the manifesto, Refus global, 1948 5.6 Portrait of Ida Maza, the “jolie laide”, by the painter Sam Borenstein (1945) 5.7 Painter Marian Scott

xvi xviii 24–5 28 33 34 37 41 48 49 64 70 72 80 84 89 97 98–9 116 118 125 127 128 129 133 137

List of figures  ix 5.8

Marian Scott’s 1939 evocation of a Montreal outdoor staircase 5.9 The cover of Melekh Ravitch’s translation into Yiddish of Kafka’s The Trial 5.10 Regard sur le fleuve by Lisette Lemieux (1992) 6.1 Bruegel’s 1563 “Tower of Babel”, known as the Vienna version 6.2, 6.3 The Translator Mosque in Istanbul

138 142 149 152 155

Note on terminology

Naming is contentious in the cities I discuss. My choices generally reflect contemporary usage, favouring Catalan in Barcelona, French in Montreal – therefore Eixample and not Ensanche, le boulevard Saint-Laurent and not Saint Lawrence boulevard. But I am not always consistent: I prefer the unaccented Montreal, which remains current in English. Because I am discussing the nineteenth-century city, I feel obliged to use Calcutta rather than today’s name, Kolkata. Unless otherwise attributed, translations are mine.

Acknowledgements

The list of cities in this book might look like an itinerary, and, it is true, travel was part of the pleasure of writing. I would like to thank friends and colleagues in “my cities” for their always hospitable welcome and encouragement. In Kolkata, thanks must go to Ananda Lal, to Sukanta and Supriya Chaudhuri and to Nilanjana Deb. In Barcelona, thanks to Victor Obiols, Elena Vilallonga, Montserrat Bacardí, Pilar Godayol, Isabel Núñez and Robert Davidson, and especially warm recognition to Nuria d’Asprer for the inspiration of her passages. In Trieste I am grateful to Katia Pizzi, Elvio Guagnini, Sergia Adamo and Tatiana Rojc. In Nicosia I enjoyed the invaluable company of Stavros Karayannis and Stephanos Stephanides. I continued travelling at home: to know a city means entering into conversation with the scholars who have enriched its history and identity, and among these writers I would especially like to mention Claudio Magris and John McCourt for Trieste and Swati Chattopadhyay for Calcutta. A number of colleagues kindly offered observations on various chapters. I offer sincere appreciation to Barbara Agnese, Michaela Wolf, Chandrani Chatterjee, Pilar Godayol, Reine Meylaerts, and Paul St-Pierre for their generous, helpful and well-timed comments. I am truly grateful to Matteo Colombi who responded to an email out of the blue with a thoughtful and well-informed discussion. Thanks to Matt Soar for the Simcha sign and to Kathy Mezei for advice and conversation. Over the years I have run up debts to Vanamala Viswanatha and to GJV Prasad and Kamala. With sadness I acknowledge in memoriam Meenakshi and Sujit Mukherjee and Barbara Godard. I have benefitted from several invitations to present this material and wish to thank Professor Van Kelly at the University of Kansas and Reine Meylaerts who received me in Leuven as CETRA Chair Professor. At Concordia University, I am grateful to my colleagues for their support, and especially to Ollivier Dyens, to Louise Dandurand and to Judith Woodsworth for their encouragement. I was the very lucky and very appreciative recipient of a Killam Fellowship, administered by the Canada Council for the Arts. I could not have completed this bulky project without the precious research time provided by this Fellowship and I thank the Killam Trustees for their continued support of the humanities. Grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC)

xii  Acknowledgements have been essential to my research activities over the years. SSHRC has been the source of continued support for my projects on the multilingual city and the research group “Zones de tension”, funded by the FQRSC – Simon Harel, Catherine Leclerc, Roxanne Rimstead, Pierre Ouellet and Domenic Beneventi – provided stimulating intellectual companionship. I offer thanks to the staff of Interlibrary loans at Concordia University who tracked down books from libraries around the world; I benefitted from the extensive holdings of Robarts Library at the University of Toronto. Permission to quote the English version of “The Web” by Borges kindly granted by Alastair Reid. Louisa Semlyen and Sophie Jaques at Routledge were wonderfully encouraging and truly a pleasure to work with throughout, and I am grateful and delighted that my friend Michael Cronin could welcome me into his new Routledge series. Research assistant Sophie Cardinal-Corriveau helped out during the initial stages of research and Marie Leconte arrived from the heavens to magically resolve all my difficulties at the end. Robbie Schwartzwald has been a constant and generous friend, and a much-valued reader. As always, my mother was an important presence in my life through the writing of this book, as were Noémi, Moussa, Avi and David K. Having Tobie as a roommate was a special treat. Eleanor shared my cities with me, tracked down essential clues, provided her unfailing ear and remained enthusiastic throughout. She is my best guide.

Which of my cities am I doomed to die in? Geneva, where revelation reached me from Virgil and Tacitus (certainly not from Calvin)? Montevideo, where Luis Melián Lafinur, blind and heavy with years, died among the archives of that impartial history of Uruguay he never wrote? Nara, where in a Japanese inn I slept on the floor and dreamed the terrible image of the Buddha I had touched without seeing but saw in my dream? Buenos Aires, where I verge on being a foreigner? Austin, Texas, where my mother and I in the autumn of ’61 discovered America? What language am I doomed to die in? The Spanish my ancestors used to call for the charge, or to play truco?

The English of the Bible my grandmother read from at the edges of the desert? What time will it happen? In the dove-coloured twilight when colour drains away, or in the twilight of the crow when night abstracts and simplifies all visible things? Or at an inconsequential moment— two in the afternoon? These questions are digressions that stem not from fear but from impatient hope. They form part of the fateful web of cause and effect that no man can foresee, nor any god. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Web”, translated by Alastair Reid, Oases, Canongate, 1997. Borges died in Geneva.

Preface Under the sign of Hermes

The area known as the Dead Zone in Nicosia covers a few desolate blocks of rusting barbed wire and pockmarked houses. Walking towards the checkpoint which controls access across the city, I find myself on a street called Hermes. The ironies of finding the Greek god here in Cyprus are all too evident. The messenger god was revered for his help in all kinds of boundary-crossings. Yet the street I am walking on in Nicosia, known as “the last divided capital in Europe”, is more like an impasse which has for an entire generation cut the city into two non-communicating entities. Learning the history of the street provides more irony. Hermes Street was a recent creation, built during the 1880s by the British administrators of Cyprus over the river that once flowed through the city but which had become polluted and noxious. Hermes Street became a major commercial axis and a trading zone bringing together the diverse populations of the city. As the capital of a Mediterranean island occupied by a succession of rulers, from the Lusignan kings and the Venetians to the Ottomans and the British, Nicosia has always been a place of cultural mixtures and overlays, the most striking visual representation being the former Gothic cathedral of St Sophia with minarets. But in 1974, with the stroke of a United Nations pencil, the busy and cosmopolitan Hermes Street was turned into a political boundary, a portion of the Green Line separating Greek from Turkish Cyprus. The transition from place of contact to place of separation is not as contradictory as it might seem. It is precisely the fact that this street was a thoroughfare open to everyone that made it a candidate for a line of separation. Because the area was never firmly imprinted with one single ethnic identity, it belonged to neither side. And so, according to the logic of the political rivalries of the time, the most diverse and convivial territory would become the “deadened” border zone. This is a perverse kind of thinking that suits Hermes. Hermes is the mythical overlord of crossroads. For centuries he stood as a physical presence at crucial crossing points. “Herms” were initially heaps of stones used to indicate boundaries. The Greeks and Romans turned these heaps into forms of statuary, the heads and torsos of a god (usually Hermes but also Dionysios) standing on a tapered pediment. Hermes is therefore the god of

Source: Author

Figure 0.1 Minarets were added to the thirteenth-century cathedral of St Sophia after the Ottomans took the city in 1570. This is a rare example of a Gothic structure converted into a mosque.

Preface  xvii both separation and connection: he protects boundaries but through his magical powers also provides safe passage for travellers. Since the opening of checkpoints in 2004 allowing access across the city, Hermes is able to exercise both facets of his powers. The location and role of Hermes Street remind me of a similarly notable street in my own city. Le boulevard Saint-Laurent in Montreal has for centuries been both contact zone and line of division in urban territory which has seen its own share of political turmoil. Montreal stands a half-world away from the ancient trading routes and rivalries of this part of the globe, but the tensions of the 1960s and early 1970s could have led to violence and partition. And so walking this Mediterranean version of a distant North American street, I experience Nicosia as the catastrophe which Montreal might have become. Nicosia’s landscape of ruins recalls the fragility of all cities, the ways in which their mixtures are vulnerable and provisional. But Montreal is also in my mind because of another feature of this walk. As I move from south to north, the language changes. Nicosia, like Montreal, is traversed by a linguistic faultline. There is an important difference, however. While the language divides of Montreal are continually being redefined, becoming ever more porous as identities are reinterpreted, the linguistic geography of Nicosia is cruelly immobile. A solid barrier separates Turkish from Greek, as surely as it puts distance between the sumptuous ancient stone market and caravanserai in the north and the modern concrete buildings of the south. Nicosia – like other cities which have been afflicted with internal borders – is an aberration in the evolution of urban form: rather than being surrounded by a wall designed to protect the community from outside threats, the city is divided by a partition which separates the community against itself. What kind of exchange is possible across a line which restricts mobility? The power of translation is a theme deeply embedded in Cyprus’s history. Just over the border on the Turkish side one can visit the home of Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios, the legendary Christian dragoman who represented the Ottoman Empire in Cyprus from 1779 to 1809. A street bears his name and his mansion is one of the most impressive residential buildings left from the Ottoman era. Modern-day translators recall Cyprus’s heritage as a meeting place in the Mediterranean, and as a place where learning was preserved and promoted through translation. Today in cultural centres on both sides of the divide, artists and writers meet to perpetuate the translating tradition of their city and their island – and to revive the memory of a Cypriot culture that had created an in-between language (distinctively Cypriot forms of Greek and Turkish) and an in-between identity. Despite the bell-jar of political pressure, they struggle to maintain lines of transmission, to reanimate the texts and memories of a time when languages could move freely across the territory. Standing on the boundary between the Greek and Turkish sectors, Hermes defines Nicosia as a space where effective translation might again become possible. Messenger and trickster, trader and thief, Hermes is also

xviii  Preface

Source: Author

Figure 0.2  The unenviable fate of Nicosia.

a hermeneut: an inquiring mind, an interpreter of texts and a mediator across languages. His special role is to remind us that these activities of understanding and interpretation are tied to the cultural reality of place. By highlighting the interrelations of language and space that sustain urban life, Hermes provides the defining terms for the pages to come. The magic of the trickster god defines the intersection as a place of danger but also of cross-fertilization, a place where new worlds of expression might be imagined. *  *  * In a story by the Mexican writer Juan Villoro, a taxi driver in Mexico City, D.F. (Distrito Federal), fresh from a visit to Chicago, tries to describe its wonders to a passenger. The only way he finds to do this is to “translate” one city into the other. And so the Estadio Azteca was where the Chicago Bears played football, the Paseo de la Reforma was called the Magnificent Mile and Chapultepec Park didn’t have swans but wild geese from Canada. The Zocalo was surrounded by Italian pizzerias and the Iglesia de Santo Domingo was a synagogue. “His words constructed a fabulous city: Chicago, D.F (Distrito Federal) … spectral, a superimposed map” (Villoro 2009).

Preface  xix Villoro’s taxi driver seems to believe that we have limited imaginations, that we are really able to know only one city, and that all others will be a simple reflection of the first. But perhaps this idea is sustained by another – that there is a deep logic that links some cities to each other, a logic that creates connections which are not immediately perceptible. These affinities define a common structure and spirit. Cities that exhibit the seams and sutures of history have a kind of family resemblance, all situated on a continuum marked by extremes of mood and intensity – places like Czernowitz, Vilnius, Istanbul or New Orleans, where languages correspond to successive and often overlapping historical periods, like Nicosia, Beirut or Mostar, where a past of relative conviviality has been replaced by a present of political claims and counterclaims, or like Brussels, Barcelona, Montreal, Dakar, Trieste and Manila, where languages continue to greet and confront one another on common terrain. Perhaps, like Villoro’s taxi driver, I too am caught in a circuit of replication – on the lookout for copies and variants of the particular urban experience so characteristic of Montreal, the mixture of tension and attraction, nostalgia and fear, that suffuses life along language divides. This book is my own “spectral, superimposed map”, with Montreal the underlay over which I trace the outlines of new language geographies. Like the taxi driver, I know that the shapes won’t entirely match up, and that the translations cannot be exact. But it is the shared sensibility I’m after, the similar topographies of language and their power to mark the urban landscape.

1 Introduction Turning up the volume of translation in the city

“Hail to the hood!” is Doris Sommer’s salute to the Brooklyn immigrant neighbourhood where she grew up. What she learned there, she realizes, were lessons that continue to serve her well as both a citizen and a scholar. Growing up “between streets named after a Dutch Amboy and a Zionist Herzl now seems like an objective correlative for the double focus and double talk we developed there”. The constant movement between languages meant that meanings were afloat and unsettled, lost somewhere in the puntos suspendidos “between the two gravitational points of home and host languages” (Sommer 2003: vii). Sommer has been one of the most convincing advocates of plurilingualism as a positive force in the life of cities. While bilingualism is most often studied and valued for the benefits it gives to the individual, she argues in Bilingual Aesthetics for its collective and civic benefits. The friction of languages in public places is a good thing: acts of communication that slow down communication are “democracy’s most effective speech-acts” (Sommer in Sollors 1998: 298). Accents, code-switching and translation are to be valued for the ways in which they draw attention to the complexities of difference, for the ways in which they interrupt the self-sufficiencies of “mono” cultures. This book begins with an enthusiastic endorsement of Sommer’s premise: that individuals – and cities – benefit from negotiating among languages and the cultural memories they convey. Like Sommer I argue that to understand cities it is important to listen to them. Much of the abundant literature in recent decades has emphasized the visual aspects of urban life. And yet the audible surface of languages, each city’s signature blend of dialects and accents, is an equally crucial element of urban reality. Just as “seeing” the buildings and streets of an urban aggregation is crucial to understanding its history, its organization into neighbourhoods, its systems of circulation, so “hearing” introduces the observer into layers of social, economic and cultural complexity. The waves of languages that flow into one another provide the listener with a rich sensory surface. They merge with particular intensity in contact zones like Sommer’s immigrant neighbourhood. These are border areas, sometimes unmistakeably public sites of interaction such as the noisy streets of polyglot neighbourhoods, sometimes more hidden

2  Introduction: turning up the volume pockets of dialogue, such as publishing houses, theatres, translation agencies, or software research firms. For Sommer, these zones are to be cultivated as places of exchange between people and ideas. Her childhood neighbourhood with its language insecurities and bilingual aesthetics becomes a model for a new kind of citizenship, one which resists assimilation to a norm of undemanding and trouble-free communication. Double languages on urban terrain are a source of promise, says Sommer, not an encumbrance. But although my arguments are aligned with Sommer’s, my emphasis is somewhat different. To understand how languages interact and converse with one another, I focus on the puntos suspendidos, the areas of negotiation, the spaces where connections are created through translation. I’m less interested in the way individuals juggle with multiple codes and polyglot identities than I am in translators who ensure the transfer and circulation of ideas. The concerns are similar but the avenue of exploration is different. To speak of the multilingual city is to call up an image of simultaneous, parallel conversations taking place across urban terrain. To invoke the translational city is to look for areas of incorporation and convergence, the channelling of parallel streams of language into a generalized discussion. Translators are the agents of this process, carrying ideas across urban space into a single public arena and initiating new forms of dialogue. My translators are citizens of specific cities, and their activities are made possible by the distinctive histories and language arrangements of these places. The fact that Sommer’s experiences are focused on New York sustains her arguments in important ways. New York is exuberantly multilingual, but no one would contest the fact that English is the dominant language, the single gateway to social promotion. In New York, bilingual aesthetics – as defined by Sommer – are oppositional; they challenge indifference to language issues and they draw attention to minority languages in their daily struggle against the weight of the majority. The effect of her campaign would not be the same in places like Montreal, Brussels, Barcelona or Dakar, for instance, where there is more than one strong ‘home’ language, and where there is nothing quite so simple as the home–host, insider–outsider divide that Sommer describes. Sommer’s puntos suspendidos would not find themselves in the same places or express the same tensions as the points de suspension or the ellipses that punctuate the history of conversations elsewhere. There are no monolingual cities: all are sites of encounter and gathering, and languages are part of the mix. But central to my project is the idea that each city imposes its own patterns of interaction and these emerge out of their spaces and their own narrative pasts. Contact, transfer and circulation among languages are determined by the demographics, institutional arrangements and imaginative histories of urban life. The cultural meanings of these transactions emerge through already ongoing conversations and aesthetic traditions. For the Barcelona architect Manuel de Solà-Morales, the single most salient feature of the urban landscape is the street corner. In contrast to the popular image of today’s urban reality as endless movement and flow, Solà-Morales insists rather on the “difference and friction,

Introduction: turning up the volume  3 of forced or fortuitous agreement, of permanent tension and conflict” which comes to life in processes of interaction and exchange. And so the city’s corners, its junctions and interchanges, also articulate the circulation of languages (Solà-Morales 2004: 133).

Double entendre No cities better illustrate these tensions, better exhibit their “corners”, than those I call “dual cities”. The special character of these cities lies in the presence of two historically rooted language communities who feel a sense of entitlement to the same territory. Each language is supported by institutions of similar authority – universities, writers’ associations, publishing houses, governmental recognition. Both communities are “insiders” – original or longstanding presences. One might want to call such cities bilingual, but the term is misleading on several counts. Languages that share the same terrain rarely participate in a peaceful and egalitarian conversation: their separate institutions are wary of one another, aggressive in their need for self-protection, continually laying claim to areas of culture they consider vulnerable. Even official bilingualism often provides a surface appearance of language equality which masks a more conflictual reality of competing and hierarchical languages. And additional languages often play a significant intermediate role in addition to the two main languages. These cities are not bilingual: they are translational. This term more adequately accounts for the range of relations which sustain the urban imagination – relations that include indifference and negation as well as engagement and creative interference. Movement across languages is marked by the special intensity that comes from a shared history, a common territory and the situation of contending rights. Successful negotiation across these commonalities and differences becomes the very condition of civic coexistence. But at the same time, translations are rarely neutral events in a placid field of encounter, rather they are events which sustain or transform social and literary interrelations. Linguistically divided or dual cities have their origins in conquest, when a stronger language group comes to occupy or impinge upon a pre-existent language – which may itself have displaced another before it. Empires are especially effective creators of dual cities: administrative or settler colonies impose an imperial language which carries with it values of power and cultural prestige. Tensions might ebb for long centuries, only to surge under the influence of new political dynamics where the cultural memory of language is reactivated. Attention turns to these divided spaces most often when skirmishes between competing ideologies flare up, or, most dramatically, when, as in Nicosia, Jerusalem, Sarajevo, or Beirut, they become sites of human suffering through civil war or partition. But less attention has been given to duality when it is not in a state of crisis – and when the precarious balance between language communities might offer other kinds of lessons. Cultural interactions can well be at odds with political rivalries.

4  Introduction: turning up the volume And Richard Sennett reminds us that difference is not the problem: indeed civility is born in the recognition of difference, and the promise of urban life is that its diversity be a source of “mutual strength rather than a source of mutual estrangement and civic bitterness” (Sennett 2005: 1). Here the example of Kafka’s Prague is especially apt. When I read Scott Spector’s Prague Territories, a literary portrait of Kafka’s city, I was struck by pervasive images of spatial and linguistic division. In the late nineteenth century, the once-German Prague was becoming Czech, and its German speakers were undergoing a crisis of self-perception as they found their cultural territory shrinking. While they had once felt themselves to be members of the cultural and administrative elite, at the centre of the Germanic cultural world, they suddenly discovered themselves isolated on an island within a sea of Czech speakers. The Prague circle writers, including Kafka, sensed that they were “precariously suspended between territories, with no firm ground beneath their feet” (Spector 2000: 20), writing in a language that was increasingly distant from the experience of the Czech majority. Spector’s portrait of Prague struck a chord and seemed to anticipate the changes that would mark a city such as Montreal in the 1960s. In both cases, the increasing demographic, political and cultural importance of the emerging nation (Czech, Québécois) was displacing the traditional holders of power. The language of hegemony was moving from that of a cosmopolitan vehicular language (German, English) to a nationally connoted vernacular (Czech, French). Even the battles over the language of education and over street signage sounded the same. Yet Kafka’s Prague was the site of a signal moment of literary modernism. Kafka’s writing, as many commentators have argued (Robin, Robert, Deleuze and Guattari, Spector), was inspired by the frictions of languages in his city – his literary German a reflection of the insularity of the German minority, his desires ignited by the Czech he heard around him. Kafka’s deterritorialized “paper” German reflected the insecurities of the Prague German community as well as Kafka’s genius for inventing a language strange to itself. The precarious belongings of this community also gave birth to a culture of mediation, a community of translators who innovated both through acts of transmission and recreation. I observed a similar culture of mediation in Montreal. In Translating Montreal (Simon 2006), I also noted the ways in which mediators between English and French crossed language lines from the 1940s to the present, both sustaining and transforming cultural relations. While Montreal has produced no single literary figure comparable to Kafka, the linguistic tensions and rivalries have had similarly stimulating effects. And so one might question what seem to be commonsense truths about the linguistically divided city – a site whose divides strain the very idea of city-ness. The examples of Prague and Montreal suggest that divided cultural space can be the source of a broad spectrum of language interactions and cultural mediations – encounters whose outcomes are not predictable. Duality contributes to the special character of daily life, gives it a

Introduction: turning up the volume  5 sensibility often tinged with tension. The impact of language frictions on sidewalk encounters or commercial transactions is unavoidable. The relentless contact of languages on street corners puts cultural memory on a loop, constantly replaying the dramas of conquest and ressentiment. But dissonance and friction between languages can also open onto more productive areas of exchange where cultural memories engage with one another. The conversation between codes and values results in distinctive forms of modernity. Dual cities are propitious terrain for the encounters of modernity, their double languages offering almost guaranteed moments of “corner” experiences, where memories will meet at odd angles. Zones of linguistic dispossession or insecurity have a special role to play in the emergence of modernist literature. For Claudio Magris, the situation of Trieste as a Habsburg city on the edge of empire, in a zone of linguistic insecurity, created a sensibility and an aesthetic tradition shaped by a suspicion of absolute values. Magris and others, such as Lothar Baier (1997), have shown how Trieste and the cities of Habsburg Mitteleuropa were privileged crucibles of modernist consciousness. For these authors, as for Walter Mignolo, “bilanguaging” opens onto a way of life between languages – a mode of critique and an avenue toward aesthetic and political processes of transformation (Mignolo 2000: 265). The idea that urban space has special powers over the imagination owes much to several traditions of thought. On the one hand the social theory of figures as diverse as Max Weber, Georg Simmel and Jane Jacobs sees the city as “a set of social structures that encourage social individuality and innovation” (Weber in Sennett 1969: 6), understands the positive and productive role of the stranger (Sennett 1969) and celebrates the civic benefits of the “sidewalk ballet” of daily interactions (Jacobs 1961: 50–4). A more literary version of the city’s powers to set off sensory stimulations is found in Baudelaire’s appeal to the random events of the street to provoke moments of illumination. His “technique” of “tripping over words like paving stones, bumping into long-imagined lines of poetry” (“Trébuchant sur les mots comme sur les pavés/Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés”, “Le Soleil”)1 received a literal echo in Proust’s use of the same paving stone as an entrance point into the infinite territories of memory. Freud and Benjamin are not far behind as the artist wanders along the sidewalk, attentive to apparitions of the uncanny, odd juxtapositions of words and images, the déclic that will give birth to a new idea – “looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call ‘modernity’, for want of a better term to express the idea in question” (Baudelaire, cited in Habermas 1987: 10).2 This quest has inspired a long line of writers, from the Surrealists to the Situationists, from Régine Robin and Georges Perec to Paul Auster, for whom urban density acts as a dispositif, a device, for producing innovative forms of expression. Walter Benjamin anticipated the entry of the translator onto the urban scene when he saw the arc of the nineteenth-century shopping arcade as the form of a literal translation – its curve of iron and glass a replica of language’s structure and transparency (Benjamin 1969: 79). The translator

6  Introduction: turning up the volume pinpoints the dissonances between concepts and reproduces the uneven fit between ideas and styles. The thresholds translators negotiate include disparities in scale (the move upwards to a dominant, cosmopolitan language or downwards towards an emerging national vernacular) but also in time. In the colonial context, for example, translation must bridge the differing temporalities and rhythms of daily life and its literary representation (Guha 2008). But translation must also negotiate landscapes of disaster, and take into account the realities of absence. For Alexis Nouss (2010), the forced displacements of history make Paul Celan the emblematic translator of his home city of Czernowitz, marked by its history of language effacement. The translator emerges as a full participant in the stories of modernity that are enacted across urban space – modernity understood as an awareness of the plurality of codes, a thinking with and through translation, a continual testing of the limits of expression. Translators are flâneurs of a special sort, adding language as another layer of dissonance to the clash of histories and narratives on offer in the streets and passageways. Their trajectories across the city and the circulation of language traffic become the material of cultural history. Mediators are essential figures on the urban landscape, as Michel de Certeau reminds us. As intermediaries, shifters, connecting agents, translators and dispatchers, they are the “anonymous heroes” of communication, making “social space more habitable” (Certeau 1983: 11). Because the actual production of translated texts usually takes place in the removes of private space, we do not often visualize the work of translation or the travels that sustain it. That is why it is necessary to draw portraits of significant individuals who have played this role, to see them gathering information and making connections, moving across language zones, putting languages and texts into circulation, initiating encounters, “[t]ranslations arriving like messages”, says Seamus Heaney (Heaney 1986: 14). The translators I study all incorporate translation into a broad cultural project, and their activities often exceed the definition of conventional language transfer. They stand for a culture of mediation, the “middle ground” defined by Scott Spector (2000) where translational tensions reflect the forces on the ground. My investigation of the translational culture of four cities, Calcutta (1800–80), Trieste (1850–1918) Barcelona (1975–2000) and Montreal (1940–2000), will display patterns of interaction that are distinct, and yet will all highlight moments of creative interaction which invoke the idea of the modern.

Translation as critique One of the lessons to be learned from dual cities has to do with the kinds of translation which are practiced there. Cities are the sites of complex geographies, where “faraway events” mix with “proximate fears” (Appadurai 2006: 100), where intimacies or strangeness can prevail among neighbours. And so translation must be concerned not only with the distant but with the “local, the nearby, the proximate, the micro”, categories which challenge the traditionally bounded spaces of nation and national language (Cronin

Introduction: turning up the volume  7 2009: 4). Multilingual contexts put pressure on the traditional vocabulary of transfer and its concepts of source and destination. Communities which have had a longstanding relationship inhabit the same landscape and follow similar rhythms of daily life. Facing one another across the space of the city, they are not “foreign” and so translation can no longer be configured only as a link between a familiar and a foreign culture, between a local original and a distant destination, between one monolingual community and another (Meylaerts 2006, Rampton 2000). The Other remains within constant earshot. The shared understandings of this coexistence change the meaning of translation from a gesture of benevolence to a process through which a common civility is negotiated. Circulation has become a central unifying concept in the study of the cultural life of cities (Straw 2010: 4).3 “Cities become marked and differentiated in their capacity to receive and absorb influences, by the manner in which they act as nodes, or clusters, within the circulation of modernizing forces” (Straw 2010: 5). What moves? People, ideas, money, traffic, waste through sewage systems, underground rivers, gossip and rumour. All these different kinds of objects and commodities circulate in complex patterns of overlay, some random, some following pre-established pathways. Yet in the discussions of circulation in today’s city, and indeed in most of the influential writing in urban studies since the 1980s, language has been strikingly absent. Authors such as David Harvey (2006), Saskia Sassen (1991), Edward Soja (2000), Alan Blum (2003), Richard Sennett (2005) and Iain Chambers (1990) have made the city the focus of issues of democracy and community, focusing on cities as a privileged arena for the expression of citizenship – and as the focus of engagement and belonging. Language, itself an essential instrument and domain of the public, the medium through which public discussion takes place, is simply taken for granted. Despite the sensory evidence of multilingualism in today’s cities, the proliferation of scripts on storefronts, the shouted conversations on cellphones, there has been little more than casual reference to language as a vehicle of urban cultural memory, or of translation as a key in the creation of meaningful spaces of contact and civic participation. There is little sustained discussion of language and language interactions as a feature of a city’s identity. This “oversight” is particularly striking as cities face the challenge of promoting translation practices that will ensure urban cohesion. Translation is the key to citizenship, to the incorporation of languages into the public sphere. This means seeing multilingual, multi-ethnic urban space as a translation space, where the focus is not on multiplicity but on interaction. Understanding urban space as a translation zone restores language to the picture and offers a corrective to the deafness of much current urban theory. For Alan Blum, the imaginaire or self-image of a city includes the ways in which difference is recognized and maintained “as a feature of its routine problem-solving” (Blum 2003: 40). An urban imaginary, writes Andreas Huyssen, marks the way citizens view their city as a site of continuities, traditions and conflicts, and is an “embodied material fact … What we think about a city and how

8  Introduction: turning up the volume we perceive it informs the ways we act within it” (Huyssen 2008: 3). Clearly language, as “the primary social bond … and a stock exchange of meanings that carry over from previous states of the code, which are newly introduced, negotiated, withdrawn, and overhauled” (Resina 2008: 143) has pride of place in that imaginaire. The dual city sharpens awareness of mediation. Spaces of circulation are not empty avenues of delivery. Spaces are themselves affected by the movement of exchange – the transmission of ideas leaves traces, and movement across the city changes the urban landscape. As Cohen and Dever showed in their study of the cross-Channel travels of the eighteenth-century novel (2002), the space of transmission is crowded with activities, with overlapping activities of reading, imitation and translation which were crucial to the development of the genre (Cohen and Dever 2002: 3). Translation studies as well has become increasingly attentive to the underlying cultural, economic and political disparities that act on activities of mediation. An enlarged view of translation (Tymoczko 2007) takes account of the broad range of linkages enacted by translation, their differing affects and shapes. Such an enlarged understanding of translation includes acts of mediation which are not language transfer in the conventional sense, but are more broadly practices of writing that take place at the crossroads. It also recognizes that for translation to be fully engaged in the forces of its historical moment it cannot remain an automatically friendly word. And so translations must be understood as cultural artefacts which embody situations of rivalry and tension as well as the desire for interconnection. Translation as critique therefore involves a broadening of the considerations that account for the outcomes of translation. What is a faithful translator and what is the equivalence that the translator seeks? Like Naomi Seidman, I believe that equivalence is a phantom hiding some idea of a cultural norm: “The very phantasm of the faithful translator both obscures and hints at the degree to which the equivalence of a source text and its translation is a matter of faith rather than evidence, ideology rather than technique – inevitably, given the aporia that structures translation” (Seidman 2006: 31). In the broad analysis of Christian–Jewish translation relations that she explores in her book, Faithful Renderings, Seidman seeks out narratives that show the ways in which translation “cannot be separated from the material, political, cultural or historical circumstances of its production, that it in fact represents an unfolding of these conditions” (Seidman 2006: 9). I too favour narratives that explain the why of translation, stories that explain the reasons for crossing language boundaries. How does the activity of translation nourish the work, the life, the city? I will be particularly attentive to the idea of translational writing: the zones where creative writing and translation mesh. My stories will be of translators who stretched the sense of this exchange, connecting it to the social forces at work in their city. Such stories are not mere “epiphenomena to the true stuff of translation” but “valuable information” on the relationship between source and target texts (Seidman 2006:9) and the

Introduction: turning up the volume  9 asymmetries and complications which arise at “particularly rich and dense intersections” between traditions. The unfolding of conditions in the dual city will similarly highlight the rich and dense intersections on divided grounds.

At the crossroads Colonial cities, with their evident spatial and linguistic separations, most closely fit what I have defined as the dual city. Both Calcutta and Montreal bear the imprint of colonialism, which drew stark lines across their territory, conjoining languages of differing authority. Colonialism is at the origin of the global city (King 1990), where new connections arise across the linguistic lines, introducing the complex cultural negotiations which will characterize the postcolonial. The paradoxes of Hermes play to the full here, presenting the image of a collectivity at odds with itself. But duality as I investigate it is not restricted to the spatial grid of colonialism. The dualities of Trieste and Barcelona represent more diffuse forms of language occupation. The German presence in Trieste was more administrative and cultural than territorial, yet the influence of German was pervasive. Similarly, Spanish and Catalan do not divide Barcelona physically in half, and yet the competition between these languages is at the heart of Barcelona life. Both Trieste and Barcelona are situated in border zones, and have become the centres of economic and cultural regions which have regained power in the context of the new Europe. Why these cities and not others? By choosing examples from different time periods and continents, yet with patterns similar enough to allow comparison, I hope to open a discussion which will extend to a broad range of urban situations of translation.4 What all four cities share is the experience of cultural shifts which are enabled and instrumentalized by translation. Historical circumstances have given birth to double linguistic regimes, where each language is sustained by similar institutional structures. The city provides the conditions of possibility for a certain kind of translational writing – and is at the same time influenced and shaped by the translations which result. It is important to recall that duality is used here to refer to specific moments in city life, rather than to an abstract typology of cities. As language relations are never static, duality is not a permanent feature. The history of most double cities ends with the progressive disappearance of the weaker side, through attrition, through force or through an imposed political “resolution”. Indian independence in 1947 diminished the raw tensions of duality in Calcutta, as did the Redemption of Trieste by Italy in 1918. But must one of the languages inevitably cancel the other out? This question is central to my study and to my preoccupations as a city dweller. Montreal and Barcelona are both concerned by the outcome of language competition – both being the home of national/regional languages in daily friction with official federal languages. One wonders how long the double pronunciations of their names will continue to be heard (Montreal and Montréal,

10  Introduction: turning up the volume Barcelona with a lisped c versus the sibilant c). How can language coexistence be maintained where unequal forces are at play, where conflictual histories are in daily conversation, and yet where difference has become a native feature of the urban landscape? What conditions could favour a situation where cohabitation might outlast the rivalries written into their situations of contact? I have not imposed one single grid of analysis on all four cities, but tried to convey through a variety of sources the texture and contradictions of a city’s language life, the meanings and sensibilities conveyed by everyday transactions and by memory. My strategy has been to seek out the translators whose work seemed most broadly illustrative of the dynamics at play in their cities. But these translations take on different forms, and for each city I have considered a variety of enactments of the role of the translator. This strategy allows me to claim Italo Svevo, the Triestine writer, as a translator whose creative integration of the German sensibility set Italian literature on a new course. “Reading in German, writing in Italian” was a common pattern for Triestine writers of the Habsburg period, who proposed practices of literary cosmopolitanism anchored in the diverse spaces of their city. Whether in the tram or on foot, Svevo absorbed the landscape and sounds of a nineteenth-century metropolis situated on the faultline between zones of influence. Trieste has been recognized as a character in Svevo’s novels, as a fierce presence which brings into play moral and aesthetic questions. Svevo is therefore a “translational writer”, whose city is, more than a backdrop, a condition of possibility for his writing. Similarly, the translations of James Long were a product of Calcutta. The maverick missionary was a relentless walker who knew Calcutta’s every street and laneway. Long was an unconventional clergyman, and his efforts to convert the Hindu populace of Calcutta to Christianity were secondary to his interests in the Bengali language and print culture. He promoted the translation of English-language novels into Bengali and devised original methods of hawking them. His long hours spent in the streets of Calcutta were crucial to his familiarity with Bengali culture, and he was exceptional in his at-homeness in all parts of the city. Like the other translators I will study in this volume, Long contributed to the cultural élan that would propel the vernacular literatures forward. His special affinity for Calcutta, his knowledge of its history and his concern for its inhabitants, have made him a hero of modern Bengal – although his implication in the British colonial enterprise makes his heritage ambiguous. Bankimchandra Chatterjee is also an unconventional translator, as the author of the first novels in the Bengali language. Bankim is celebrated as a translator of himself – having recognized the failure of his first literary attempts in English, and having understood that his particular genius was to be realized as a translator of the novel form itself into Bengali. Like many of the other luminaries of the period known as the Bengali Renaissance, Bankim successfully negotiated the passage from English to Bengali, carrying his new reading public with him. No author better represents the pivotal

Introduction: turning up the volume  11 moment which will see the emergence of a confident Bengali literary and cultural nationalism. Across their very different cultural contexts, Italo Svevo and Bankim invoke similar processes of literary production: they use elements of their “reading” culture to set into motion new models of writing. But self-translation takes on a stronger and more literal meaning in a context such as Barcelona, where the closeness of the two languages, Catalan and Castilian, introduces the risks and benefits of a generalized inter-traffic. Self-translation is a fact of Barcelona literary life, in a context which is sui generis. The distortions of the cracked mirror are best actualized in the self-translations of a writer like Carme Riera, for whom Barcelona provides a rich canvas of cultural conflict as well as two strong literary traditions. As a professor of Castilian literature, and a postmodern novelist in Catalan for whom the themes of the double are foundational, Riera is a forceful exponent of the imaginative heritage of her city. Her work takes on additional resonance against the parodic version of translation introduced by Juan Marsé. Like Barcelona, the divides of Montreal foster forms of deviant and unfinished translation. But unlike Barcelona, Montreal has not produced a culture of self-translation. Writer-translators express themselves in one language only, although they often draw on the “other” side of town for inspiration. Such is the case of the poet and singer Leonard Cohen, perhaps the best-known Montrealer on the international scene. He was shaped by the separate modernities of Montreal, his immersion in both Jewish and Anglo-Canadian influences as well as his awareness of the growing power of francophone culture. His creative trajectory speaks of the appropriations and reroutings of Montreal’s work of modernity.

Third languages and third spaces While I have so far been drawing the picture of cities defined by a fundamental, single language rift, I must adjust this image to make clear that duality is always engaged with the broader tensions of cosmopolitanism and diasporic flows. All dual cities are also multilingual. This was as true for the nineteenth-century cities of Trieste and Calcutta as it is for today’s Barcelona and Montreal. In many cases a third language plays a powerful, symbolic role. In Trieste, Slovene has been a constant third presence in relation to German and Italian – and with the disappearance of German after 1918 has become the second language in Trieste, making Trieste, in some ways, a city of serial dualities. In Barcelona, English is today becoming a significant third presence along with Spanish and Catalan. And in Montreal, Yiddish has played an important historic role, while Spanish, Arabic and other diasporic languages today nourish literary sensibilities. Third spaces, as we will see in the discussion in individual chapters, also play an important role in the imaginative geography of dual cities. To adopt the city as the frame for studying language interactions is to emphasize the ways in which the values of exchange are tied to place. Language interactions

12  Introduction: turning up the volume are sometimes imprinted on urban structures, as in the passatges or pasajes of Barcelona, which cut secret byways through the heart of the urban fabric, amplifying the translational nature of the city. These rogue spaces challenge the polarities, and operate as pockets of resistance to duality – introducing mixed languages that confuse normative regimes of translation. Montreal has its traditional immigrant districts around the boulevard Saint-Laurent, Calcutta its “grey zone”. Barcelona’s “Raval” has played the role of the unruly quarter, and is today a site of proliferating languages. And Trieste’s “Cittavecchia”, its neighbourhood of brothels and the former Jewish ghetto, was the festering sore which the Fascist regime decided to eliminate in the 1930s. These third spaces have an important role in the self-perception of dual cities, but their function as reservoirs of disorder can change over time. Third spaces can play two fundamentally different roles: they either represent a space which is exceptional, which stands apart from the normalized dynamics of the city and confirms the mutually exclusive identities by which groups define themselves; or they come to define an identity which destabilizes the old certainties, and stands for the growing hybridity and plurilingualism of the city as a whole. Barcelona’s Raval and Montreal’s immigrant neighbourhoods are gradually moving from the first function to the second. Despite the presence of multiple languages in what I refer to as the dual city, despite the growing power of third spaces, the central narrative is dominated by a struggle between two languages, and the conflict between them takes top billing. Sometimes the narrative of duality has outlasted the sociodemographic realities which saw it emerge, and persists as a myth beyond its real pertinence. The duality becomes “old history”, a clash of memories that is unable to conscript new players, a story that newcomers consider irrelevant. Numbers are not always relevant. Many United States cities have very significant Spanish-speaking populations, yet none would argue that Spanish enjoys the prestige or legitimacy of English. Yet with only ten per cent of the population, German continued to enjoy the status of a dominant language in Kafka’s Prague. Duality, in other words, has a lot to do with ideology and with the powers that compete for authority over the city. Languages and identities do not line up. Teresa Solana notes that at union demonstrations in Barcelona, the chants might be shouted in Spanish, but the banners are written in Catalan (Solana 2006a: 407). Dualities inevitably crumble when codes become contaminated with one another, or when languages splinter into variants along lines of class, for instance. And so although my focus is on the translation between two central languages, the languages themselves are inevitably constructs shaped by history. Literary Bengali is a language under construction in nineteenth-century Calcutta, and literary Italian is a highly idealized and, according to Svevo’s character Zeno, a foreign language in Trieste. To characterize the impetus of a dialogue which cannot be neutral, I suggest that the cultural force of transactions across the city can be considered to constitute forms of distancing or of furthering, that is, they will serve to maintain the distances across communities or they will engage in

Introduction: turning up the volume  13 a dynamic of interchange and innovation. These two forms of interaction frame the effects of translation in the dual city, and in the final section of this introduction I will expand on the meaning of these terms.

Distancing It would be misleading to suggest that the dual city provokes a constant state of interested interaction. Language communities turn their backs on one another, as they aggressively cultivate their distinctiveness. Claudio Magris has described the intellectual communities of Trieste in the 1890s as all looking outwards from Trieste to their “imaginary national homelands” (cited in McCourt 2000: 51). Ackbar Abbas quotes the governor of Hong Kong from 1925 to 1930, Sir Cecil Clementi, as remarking on the paradox of the mixed population of the island crossing paths each day and yet “moving in different worlds” with no real understanding of the mode of life or ways of thought of the other (Abbas 1997: 113–14). The colonial situation, with its racial hierarchies, makes such distance and indifference exceptionally rigid. Each community has its own codes – cultivating its own network of intellectual references, its own models of aesthetic success. The novelist Hugh MacLennan’s characterization of Montreal as a place of “two solitudes” (the phrase borrowed from Rilke) was a brilliantly successful epithet. Applied to the city even today, it describes the sense of isolation which each half felt in relation to the other. It was for many decades possible to live in Montreal without being obliged to cross into the territory of the other, and until the 1960s it required no small courage to venture out of what Mavis Gallant called the “mossy ponds” of one’s own parochial landscape. A striking expression of this separation was the situation in Montreal in the 1940s, when the presence of three vibrant modernist literary movements was driven by entirely separate sources of inspiration, and addressed to entirely separate publics. Members of each group greeted one another with deferential distance, the French-Canadian community treating the poet A.M. Klein as the representative of an exotic “race”, the poet F.R. Scott exalting Anne Hébert as the poet of a superior and alien sensibility. Here translation reveals its paradoxical nature as the “bridge” that separates as much as it joins. Translation can deepen a sense of otherness, reifying the categories of knowledge production. Distancing relegates individual works to their ‘national’ origins. This is the “metaphysics of communication” criticized by Naoki Sakai, according to which the world remains mapped in categories classified in national terms and the translator configured as an exception (Sakai 2006: 71). In this context, mediation is a technique aimed at managing difference but not disturbing the categories from which these differences issue. Translation is an act of polite acknowledgement, scarcely disturbing the self-enclosed assurance of each group. This is a small step away from indifference, or gestures of politeness which involve no real engagement – and in fact heighten the sense of distance between cultures.

14  Introduction: turning up the volume Translations undertaken in situations of conflict are inevitably framed as a process of distancing. Literary translation, for instance, will cease to be a vehicle for fruitful intercultural dialogue, and will become an arena of struggle between political and ideological viewpoints. The considerations of translators, editors and publishers in the selection, translation and publication of literary works will no longer be purely literary; they will be primarily political and ideological, whether the purpose of the translation is to advance the cause of peace and understanding between the peoples concerned, or whether it is to “know one’s enemy”. Kayyal 2004: 53 As Mahmoud Kayyal has argued in the context of Hebrew–Arabic translation, the integrity of the translated text, the stylistics, the presence of the source language into the translated text – all these will “express the ideology under whose influence the translators work” (Kayyal 2004: 53). This does not mean that the translations are ineffective or futile. It simply means that the context in which they are produced is an overwhelming influence on the way they are received. And so for instance, over and above the literary value of the work itself, it would be hard to ignore the circumstances under which translations of poetry from Arabic, by Ibis Editions, on “the seam” of the divided Jerusalem are undertaken. There is a necessary acknowledgement of the divides out of which they emerge, and of the exceptional nature of translators as go-betweens. There is a tragic form of distancing – and this is translation which marks the relation to a language which has been suppressed or annihilated. In their beautifully written and exhaustively documented study of the central European city of Czernowitz (2010), Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer recall the mix of languages which for many decades was the hallmark of this city. Examining photographs from the 1930s, the authors try to imagine which language the men and women are speaking as they stride confidently down the main street. Would it have been Romanian, the language of the nation which took over the city in 1918, or German, the language of the former Habsburg rulers, or Yiddish, the language spoken by part of the city’s Jewish population? Accompanying their parents in 1998 on a first return visit since the Second World War, they note that the cosmopolitan appearance of the 1930s, so prominent in the photographs, has been effaced. The ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity of store signs, shop names, placards and advertising billboards – in Romanian, German, Polish or Ukrainian – has disappeared (Hirsch and Spitzer 2010: 56). The “Café de l’Europe” and the “Café Habsburg” have become ghostly presences in a city where informal trade and barter among Ukrainians are the most prevalent forms of commerce. Although the structures of the city are the same, the meaning and function of the urban spaces have been transformed – just as the languages that linked them to centres of cultural authority (the German place names and

Introduction: turning up the volume  15 streets, echoing the Ring and the parks of Vienna) have been replaced. The fact that their parents continue to refer to the city’s German street names – although the Herrengasse had long ago become the Romanian Strada Iancu Flondor, then the Ukrainian Olga Kobylyanska – underlines the fact that the city remains a mental construct, experienced and interpreted through language. The ghostliness of forgotten or proscribed languages is rendered with real pathos in Stefan Chwin’s novel Death in Danzig (2004) where the scholar Hanemann, stranded in the newly Polish city of Gdansk after the Second World War, stands in for the German of Kleist and the Romantic poets. The sick and feeble poet cannot leave the city along with the rest of the Germanspeaking population at the end of the war, and so he becomes a relic in a landscape reclaimed by Polish. The power of German has now come to an end, destroyed by Nazism, as cities all across Eastern Europe jettison their German names in favour of new national appellations. What does the name of a city stand for? Names are fragile ciphers for dramatically changing realities: sequential (Calcutta/Kolkata) or synchronous self-appellations (Montreal/Montréal, Brussel/Bruxelles), reminders of a past life (Ost-Berlin) or of past glory (Constantinople). “A linguistic continuum is as important to a city’s identity as continuity in space”, writes Joan Ramon Resina. “Straßburg/Strasbourg, Danzig/ Gdansk, Königsberg/Kaliningrad, Brün/Brno, Perpinyà/Perpignan. Do these names designate the same city?” (Resina 2008: 143). Czernowitz has gone through three name changes – the Romanian Tcernauti and the Ukrainian Cernowitsi. “A city with three names or three cities with the same name?” asks Alexis Nouss. Rather, “An urban palimpsest like Freud’s drawing of the unconscious” (Nouss 2010: 83). And indeed the poetry of Czernowitz’s most famous citizen, Paul Celan, replicates the overlays and simultaneous temporalities of his city. Sometimes the path of the translator across the city is a forced displacement. The exemplary identification of the poet-translator Paul Celan (1920–70) with his city, Czernowitz, and the sequence of his displacements across Europe, is the somber illustration. Celan is a poet whose language is as thoroughly informed by translation as was his first city. “Poetry and translation form a single process of writing” (Nouss 2010: 19). But the mood of this translation is linked to takeover and effacement. Alexis Nouss has described Celan’s poetry as fully expressing the force of translation as dislocation and estrangement. Celan writes in a German which has been made strange – a language which issues from the Holocaust, as it is a product of Celan’s multilingualism, his Yiddish, Romanian, French or Russian. “In the same language Celan creates another language”, writes Nouss, and translation becomes the model of the displacement which creates the poetic word. In Celan’s poetry, the German language is shaped by other languages – and in this way distance, absence and loss become a mode of enunciation. The German language has survived, but it is now a “meta-German”, a “counter-language” (Nouss 2010: 38), a creation of “uber-setzung”, a

16  Introduction: turning up the volume passage to the other side of history, leaving the pure and uncorrupted mother language behind (Nouss 2010: 41). This extreme form of distancing can be called memorialization: the translated word standing as a monument to a disappeared source language. This is a one-way process, the language of a former reality being transported to a new home. This has been the case most notably for Yiddish in Eastern Europe, a language annihilated. Distancing is not, therefore, purely an aesthetic choice, but the response to a history that translation cannot overcome.

Furthering: the dual city as modernist machine But dual cities can also provoke moments of encounter across urban terrain – movements which broadly define the direction of modernity and which are forms of furthering. John Felstiner used the term “furthering” to explain how his task of translating Neruda and Celan had expanded and spilled over into a variety of writing activities that included criticism and biography. I use the term to encompass the productive effects and engagements of translation – the ways in which translation works against indifference, distancing and memorialization. Furthering involves what Edith Grossman calls the “revivifying and expansive effect” of translation. Literary translation infuses a language with influences, alterations and combinations that would not have been possible without the presence of translated foreign literary styles and perceptions, the material significance and heft of literature that lies outside the territory of the purely monolingual. Grossman 2010: 16 Among the examples of such exchanges is the connection between William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Someone once called Faulkner the best-known Latin American writer in English, a description that may be more than mere witticism. He seems to have inherited and then transferred into English the expansive Cervantean style that has had so profound an influence, both positive and negative, on all subsequent Spanish-language writers. Grossman 2010: 215 By drawing attention to the way that translations of Faulkner were crucial to the literary imagination of Marquez, Grossman, like Borges before her, points to the ways that translation acts as a trigger, setting off literary movements and introducing innovative styles. “Translation plays an inimitable, essential part in the expansion of literary horizons through multilingual fertilization. A worldwide community of writers would be inconceivable without it” (Grossman 2010: 22). In other words,

Introduction: turning up the volume  17 translation makes for a broadening of horizons, affecting not only readers but also writers. “The more a language embraces infusions and transfusions of new elements and foreign turns of phrase, the larger, more forceful and more flexible it becomes as an expressive medium” (Grossman 2010: 23). Furthering involves practices that draw literary traditions into a “mutual becoming” – not only expanding their imaginative sweep and enriching their horizons, but also of literally expanding the number of works on bookshelves, adding to the repertoire of expression, augmenting the coverage of the language (Casanova 2004). This dynamic is especially relevant for a language tradition perceived as minor or marginal to a more central tradition. In processes of furthering, translators are no longer the “exceptions” that enable distancing. The space of translation becomes an increasingly generalized position, available to both translators and writers. So more unruly and less-policed processes of exchange take over from conventional transfer. These are the writing forms of a “translational culture”, forms of self-translation, for example, which arise out of the displacements of immigration and diasporic culture, or out of the double consciousness imposed by forced dialogues between the global and the local, the margins and the metropolitan centres. The border zones of plurilingual cities are privileged sites for furthering, whether these practices are inspired by the experimental crossovers of Chicano literature in the United States or the deviant translations of Montreal’s contact zones. As an expression of a broad dynamic of modernization, furthering plays a significant role in literary revivals. Those nineteenth-century movements which became known as national revivals or Renaissances make significant demands on translation to rehabilitate and stimulate national literatures. The Czech Renaissance, the Finnish, the Breton, the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish, the Catalan, were moments when new national languages were revived and relegitimated. Like the early modern period for which they are named, these Renaissances exhibit features of “intensive intertextuality, a concern for imitation and aemulatio, and an intensive multifaceted and generative use of translation” (Coldiron 2003: 113). The fact that these Renaissances most often took place in cities was recognized by the Irish writer Colm Toibin when he drew a comparison between the Renaissances of nineteenth-century Calcutta, Dublin and Barcelona, all port cities subjugated by colonial forces and housing two languages, and animated by what he calls “a persuasive idea” – the dream that a modern culture can be shaped out of a dream of the past – or the illusion of a future. Appealing to an older culture that had prevailed before the coming of the conquerors, they transformed this dream of the past into the basis of a progressive and modernist politics. “Thus the Catalan architects would use Romanesque motifs and also steel frames; thus the Irish Literary Renaissance would use modern theatrical skills or modern idioms with constant references to Ireland’s heroic past. So too Bengali intellectuals used the printing press, Marxist

18  Introduction: turning up the volume philosophy, and any European and American influences – including, after 1930, film – they deemed worthy of their attention, to bring back to life what was, in their dreams, an oral and rural culture” (Toibin 2004: 55–7). For Toibin, the cultures created in these cities were both backward- and forward-looking, using myth and earlier forms of language as resources for a “renewed” literary idiom. But in all these cities too there was interaction between the colonial cultures and the struggling, emergent culture. The doubleness of the cities allowed for productive effects. Although the term Renaissance comes freighted with assumptions of European dominance and linear progress, I use it to underline the complex temporalities that define the co-presence of cultures in the city and the dynamic link between them. The productive interaction which led to the introduction of the novel in Indian languages is a translational event (Chatterjee, C. 2010) situated principally in Calcutta. This moment represents a particularly dramatic instance of “furthering” – one which illustrates the simultaneous gesture of appropriation, collusion and critique that is enacted through the conflictual history of colonialism. (See also Selim and Levy in Baker 2010, for their demonstration of the productive work of translation in the Arab and Japanese contexts.) The legacy of the Catalan Renaissance continues to animate the cultural life of Barcelona, defining translation into Catalan as a means of energizing the language. In the dual city, then, one of the strongest impulses which translation serves is that of cultural renewal. This operation of renewal is also impelled by a drive towards territorial reconquest, the linguistic conversion of urban space. The theme of translation in the service of “the modern” will be present in all four cities to be studied. In all four cases, a vernacular language is nourished by translation from the vehicular language – in ways that promote the national language and create cultural forms distinctive to the life of the city. The writers and translators who serve as guides in this study practice language crossings associated broadly speaking with movements of literary modernization. The confrontation of languages results in entanglements which are both conflictual and productive. If modernity means that the very terms of knowledge or the values of aesthetics are revealed to be positional, then linguistically divided cities are privileged sites for the modern. Ideas and trends eye one another across the city, assess their belatedness, vie for timeliness. The stories I tell in the following chapters are not systematic or exhaustive portraits of each city; they highlight moments revealing of the cultural dynamics at work. As in my Translating Montreal, I am focusing on episodes of translation which, following Rosenwald (2008), reflect the socio-political tensions which sustain the city’s literary interrelations. Each of the sites to be studied – colonial Calcutta, Habsburg Trieste, Barcelona and Montreal – has been the scene of an intense translational culture. In each of them, the presence of two strong identities was a source of political friction and cultural interconnections; a vehicular language cohabits with a vernacular,

Introduction: turning up the volume  19 and history blows in the direction of the vernacular. Each chapter, then, will show how translation can be a key to the culture of the dual city, its uneasy mix of distancing and furthering. Chapter 1 shows colonial Calcutta to be a place of rigorous separation and intense interconnections. While the theatre translations of Herasim Lebedeff at the turn of the nineteenth century did not leave enduring traces, his experiments were vivid symptoms of the more fluid relations of the city at this time. The translations of Toru Dutt, James Long and Bankimchandra Chatterjee reflect the dynamics of the “Renaissance city”, as they were enacted and as they were interpreted by the Bengali nationalist narrative. These dynamics shape the flow of translations, ascribing to Bengali the plusvalue of a reinvigorated national language and the power to create new genres. But these transactions also expose the insecure identities of those who inhabit the mediating spaces of colonialism. Chapter 2 turns the well-known novelist Italo Svevo into the lesser known Svevo the translator. This chapter brings into audibility the German language of Habsburg Trieste, placing Trieste firmly in the constellation of Habsburg cities of which it was a member – and defining the prevailing mode of interlingual relations as “reading in German, writing in Italian”. Svevo crafted an original novelistic voice against the battling language loyalties of his city. By calling up two scenes of translation that take place in Svevo’s novels, I draw out some of the paradoxes of a place whose translational life was sometimes celebrated, sometimes suppressed. Chapter 3 explores Barcelona, where the two languages of daily life, Catalan and Spanish, create unusual forms of self-translation. The deformed mirrors of Barcelona’s double identity mean that the city will always be out of kilter, off balance. Two writers and self-translators who convincingly illustrate the high stakes of self-translation, and demonstrate the creative possibilities of these deformations are Juan Marsé and Carme Riera. Their fictions add unusual chapters to the history of translations which have contributed to the language life of Barcelona. Chapter 4 is devoted to my home city, Montreal, the place where this enquiry began. The divided spaces and languages of Montreal long defined a space of mutual indifference. Recent decades have seen the beginnings of a translational culture which has brought into conversation the separate histories of Montreal, and in particular has created links among the three separate movements of modernity which lived side by side in the 1940s. This chapter expands on my previous work, in particular by more fully discussing the role of the third space in the dual city. After the Second World War Montreal experienced an enhanced sense of cosmopolitanism, and the 1940s saw the contemporaneous flowering of three strong modernist movements, in English, French and Yiddish. The realities of the third space reflect back onto the dialogue between Montreal’s competing languages and identities, showing how identities and interconnections evolve. Where once this space was a strictly contained realm of exception, today it is spilling over into the rest of the city, scrambling and destabilizing the geographies of

20  Introduction: turning up the volume identity, multiplying the many languages of Montreal’s diasporic communities. Today’s third space defines Montreal as a place of incomplete and sometimes deviant forms of exchange. In dual cities, translators are privileged informants, guides to the connections of cultural history. In listening to them, I hope to turn up the volume of the language scenes being played out in cities today.

2 Nineteenth-century Calcutta Renaissance city

O what a dream of dreams I had one night! I could hear Binu crying out in fright, “Come quickly and you’ll see a startling sight: Our city’s rushing in a headlong flight” … Thousands of people with Calcutta plead, “Now stop this madness, where will all this lead?” The city hurtles on and pays no heed, Its walls and pillars dance with drunken speed … Then at some sound my dream came to a pause To find Calcutta where it always was. R. Tagore, from “The Runaway City” in Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Writings for Children, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri, 2002, trans. Sukhendu Ray

KaliKatha, via Bypass (2002)1 begins with its main character, Kishore Babu, jaywalking across a main thoroughfare of Calcutta (Kolkata). “Unmindful of the speeding cars, fuming buses and minibuses, blaring horns and screeching brakes, Kishore Babu was seen crossing the busy Lansdowne Road in Calcutta – right from the middle – in front of the city’s newest and swankiest restaurant, the Golden Harvest” (Saraogi 2002: 2). What makes this act significant will become evident as the novel by Alka Saraogi progresses. Kishore has been an unscrupulous businessman and a tyrant for his family. After a heart operation, he is suddenly a new man, and jaywalking is a symptom of his changed life. Instead of endlessly bypassing the essentials, he will cut through to the core of his existence. The novel will also reveal the historical implications of Kishore’s “rebirth”. Kishore Babu is a member of the Marwari community, a group occupying a special position in Calcutta history and in its urban space. Arriving in Calcutta from Rajasthan mainly in the early nineteenth century, the Marwaris became valued bankers and merchants who collaborated with the British and in some

22  Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city cases acquired great wealth (Hardgrove 2002). They were intermediaries between Calcutta’s European and Indian communities, continuing to speak Hindi, and appropriately living in the intermediate zone of the city, sometimes known as “Greytown”.2 Crossing the street “right from the middle” comes to describe Kishore’s renewed consciousness of his place in history, and of the many divisions which Calcutta suffered from colonial times through to Famine and Partition. His emergence into a new life can also be understood as a parodic reference to the Bengali Renaissance – that period of intellectual ebullience which marked Calcutta in the nineteenth century. Saraogi’s images of division and passage echo those of an earlier, internationally renowned novel about Calcutta, Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988). Ghosh’s title refers to the catastrophes of history that have marked the city, the lines that were drawn between communities and the divisions that separated Calcutta from sister cities like Dhaka. Ghosh’s young Calcuttan narrator is obsessed with the images and memories of Partition as well as by his sense that London and Dhaka, mirror cities to Calcutta, represent parts of a history that he yearns to regain. Completion will come only from being able to reach imaginatively across the divisions of his own city, “to a place where there was no border between oneself and one’s image in the mirror” (Ghosh 1988: 29), to the worlds which were once there and which have left shadow realities behind.

Black Town/White Town The novels of Saraogi and Ghosh show how images of division and crossing continue to stimulate the imagination of Calcutta’s writers. Though it has been many decades since the Black Town and the White Town housed distinct and separate populations, the colonial configuration of the city has left an enduring imprint. For Sukanta Chaudhuri, it has shaped a mental disposition, the persistent sense that there are “two Kolkatas: one a centre of power, activity and high finance, but with no umbilical link to the Kolkata that provides a social and cultural space for the Bengali psyche” (Chaudhuri, S. n.d.). This “mental division” underscored the geographical division between the north and south parts of town. This evocation of Calcutta as a place of incommensurable realities is faithful to portraits of the nineteenth-century city. This was a site of separate and competing knowledges riven by the divides of language. The social division overriding all others, the divide between Europeans and Indians, was given concrete geographical expression: “A straight line, drawn from the Howrah Bridge to the east end of Park Street, divided the city in two bodies of very different character”, according to E. Richards in 1914, the engineer appointed by the Calcutta Improvement Trust to draw up a plan for rebuilding Calcutta. North and east of that line was “a city mass that contained the best and worst of Indian residential quarters, and housed the bulk of the population of Calcutta”; to the south and west, arranged along wide roads and around Dalhousie Square, lay “the chief business houses of

Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city  23 the British, the sterling banks, the seats of government, public offices and the leading hotels of Calcutta”. Although there were areas like the “grey zone” where mixed populations, Muslims and other groups gathered, although Calcutta was from the start a cosmopolitan and polyglot city, the distinction between north and south was clearly marked by community and language (cited by Ray 1979: 6).3 That these divides would foster a vast enterprise of translation is a given. Commerce and administration, missionary activity and the rule of law, would require translation, and so too would emerging forms of cultural expression. From its earliest days as a city created by the East India Company, Calcutta was marked by structures of mediation – as the banyans and dewans who played a double role as economic and linguistic mediators became the landed property owners of the Black Town (Banerjee 1989: 23). Fort William was a training centre for language learning in a wide variety of languages, including Arabic, Hindustani, Persian, Sanskrit, Bengali, Marathi and even Chinese. It was not only commerce and administration that required mediators. Calcutta became a world-renowned centre of scientific knowledge – and historians of science emphasize the role of “go-betweens” in the urban practices of “constructing and managing new forms of knowledge – in geography, cartography, history, linguistics and ethnology” (Raj 2009: 106–16).4 But it is in relation to what has come to be called the Bengali Renaissance that the translational culture of colonial Calcutta reveals itself most fully. For Amit Chaudhuri, the rich array of cultural forms produced during this period are an expression of “one of the most profound and creative crossfertilizations between two different cultures in the modern age” (Chaudhuri, A. 2001: 3; Sarkar, Sus. 2002). This long period (generally considered to begin with the social reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1775–1833) and end with Rabindranath Tagore at mid-career (1861–1941), therefore extending broadly from the 1830s to the end of the nineteenth century, saw the flourishing of religious and social thought and a renewal of forms in literature, architecture and visual arts. Language interactions nourished every area of scholarly and artistic activity, from poetry and the novel to the theatre, press and popular culture, visual arts, religion, philosophy, and social thought – and a series of remarkable individuals marked the emergent Bengali culture through their interactions with a host of languages, but primarily with English and also with Sanskrit. This generalized program of exchange made for a culture of translation, where mediation impinged on a wide range of activities, making the translator a polymorphous figure. Though freighted with references to the European early modern period, the Renaissance (not translated but transliterated into Indian languages and pronounced “Rinasa”) has become a key element in the Bengali national narrative, setting words afloat in a stream heading for a final home in Bengali. This narrative defines the history of the city as the progressive reclaiming of divided territory. The idea of the Renaissance, and its legacy of debate, will frame this chapter. The Renaissance will stand for the productive nature of translation,

Figure 2.1

Figure 2.2 Source: From Keya Dasgupta, “The Mapping of Calcutta”, Texts of Power, ed. Partha Chatterjee, University of Minnesota Press, 1995, 146–7. Reproduced with the kind permission of University of Minnesota Press.

Figures 2.1 and 2.2 These maps illustrate the striking contrast, in 1825, between the broad avenues and large residences of the European side, and the density of the Indian parts of town.

26  Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city its capacity to generate new forms and genres, its power as a specific historical form of furthering. Traffic from one side of the physical and conceptual spaces of Calcutta to the other is not a simple transference of terms, not the re-expression in another language of pre-existing ideas and styles, but a process which sees the emergence of new forms of expression in Bengali thought. The encounter between White and Black sides of town quickly became a process of intertraffic and transformation, involving interaction across languages and temporalities, between contemporary English and Bengali cultural forms but also with pre-existing Indian practices and with Sanskrit. Sanskrit was an important player in the dynamic of the Renaissance, but its links to Bengali were mediated by powerful connections with European languages. The European Orientalists turned the study of Sanskrit into a scientific practice, made to conform to the new philological standards. Max Müller could declare that the knowledge of learned Bengalis was more likely to “mislead their pupils than to guide them in a truly historical direction”, and so Sanskrit was reintroduced to Bengal in terms dominated by the European philology, which set the standards for correct translation (Dodson 2007: 51–2; Chaudhuri, N. 1999: 195). The long period of intense interaction called the Bengali Renaissance indeed strains all definitions of what translation can be, and makes translation a privileged point of entry into the cultural life of colonial Calcutta. The figure of Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1838–94) will introduce us to the importance of genre as the unit of translation in the Renaissance city (Chatterjee, C. 2010). But before we reach Bankim as the ultimately successful translator according to the narrative of cultural nationalism, as the pivot who swings Bengali culture confidently in the direction of modernity, I begin with sketches of failed, untimely or ambiguous translation – on the one hand Herasim Lebedeff’s (1749–1817) early experiments in hybrid languages and James Long’s (1814–87) influential, ideologically-driven attempts to promote the Bengali language through translation. Along the way I will mention Toru Dutt’s (1856–77) ventures into translation from French as an avenue not travelled. Lebedeff, Long and Bankim are all translators into Bengali, and represent a progression towards the increasing confidence of the Bengali language. All three translate into Bengali, but their separate cultural and political agendas give differing meanings to the movement into Bengali, and introduce their own set of risks and gains across Calcutta’s language lines. They also introduce lines of fracture into the very terms “English” and “Bengali” – showing the social groups represented by these terms to be themselves divided by gender, class and caste. The dialogue between the city’s major partners, highlighted in the narrative of colonization and the subsequent national struggle, at the same time silenced voices which did not find their place in this national drama – in particular those of the Muslims of Calcutta. The apparent duality of the city’s shape and languages turns out to be both powerful and deceptive, at every turn interrupted by third terms that complicate the pattern of domination and exchange.

Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city  27

Uncanny city Though the Renaissance took place mainly in Calcutta, the urban dimensions of this intellectual movement were long neglected.5 One exception is Partha Chatterjee’s evocation of the look and feel of central Calcutta in 1880. Calcutta was the “city of palaces”, a colonial capital planned to display the wealth and power of a proud mercantile empire on its ascent. Its broad avenues and grand buildings were designed in the late eighteenth century to demonstrate the political authority of the élites. Chatterjee describes the few blocks where, placed strategically within easy proximity to one other, stood the major institutions of power and knowledge, including the Indian Museum, the Asiatic Society, the Central Telegraph Office, the High Court, the Survey-General of India, and the Office of the Commissioner of Police. He marvels at the coherence of a policy of urban planning which places citadels of science next to administrative centres, making transparent the solidarity between British institutions of learning and policing. The connections between colonial knowledge and colonial power are clearly displayed “and yet confined within a carefully protected zone of physical exclusiveness” (Chatterjee, P. 1995: 8). Chatterjee goes on to show how this careful placement of buildings would be ruined by the unpredicted turns of history. Modernity’s journey in colonial India would spill over the embankments of the White city, to proliferate in the native quarters ... Energized by the desires and strategies of entirely different political agencies, the intellectual project of modernity found new sustenance in those densely populated parts; and in the process it took on completely new forms. Chatterjee, P. 1995: 8 This image of the unruly “spillover” of the intellectual project of modernity into the precincts of the Black Town brings into view the physical passage of people and ideas across the spaces of Calcutta, contrasting the broad avenues where administrative power was concentrated with the narrow laneways of the non-British neighbourhoods. And it sets up a discussion of modernity as a piercing of boundaries, a process of surprising reversals and the emergence of new forms. If Partha Chatterjee’s image of a “spillover” literally defines Calcutta as a place where knowledge flows, Swati Chattopadhyay’s notion of the uncanny puts the city of competing imaginaries on edge. Calcutta’s spaces were not only physical sites but locations from which representations of the city issued. And so the doubleness of the space gave rise to a doubleness of representation. Two separate structures of power and knowledge underlay ideas of Calcutta, rendering the city “uncanny” in the uneven fit between the two (Chattopadhyay, S. 2005: 3). For Chattopadhyay, translation across these separate meaning systems can only lead to “improper constructs”. These constructs drew together not only languages but also forms of visual art – as

28  Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city was the case for the powerful Kalighat paintings, with their combination of Eastern and Western forms and themes. These are especially striking representations of the kinds of intermixings which were taking place in all aspects of Bengali daily life. The blending of traditional popular art forms and satirical commentaries on the Westernized habits of Bengali babus speaks of the intensity of mediations during this period. Tapati Guha-Thakurta’s classic study of these and other developments in Bengali visual art describes the shaping of new definitions of art and taste and the emergence of truly hybrid forms of expression. Calcutta provided not only the site of production but also the themes for this open and malleable type of expression: the scandals and excesses of Calcutta life were the lively sources from which these imaginative fusions issued (Guha-Thakurta 1992). For Chattopadhyay, translation cannot be a “transparent transaction that simply substitutes one sign for another” (Chattopadhyay, S. 2005: 145). There is no single ground that guarantees equivalence between “the modern forms and techniques of governance instituted by colonial authority … and the nationalist ‘literary, artistic, spatial’ ambitions cultivated by the Bengali community” (6). Inevitably, the terrain was uneven and indeed “under construction”, as the edifice of colonial knowledge was being raised (146). And so the results of interactions would reflect

Source: Author

Figure 2.3 Many Kalighat images satirized Western affectations adopted by Bengalis. To sit on a chair meant to adopt European ways.

Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city  29 these aporetic conditions, producing constructs which would “insert new meaning into the milieu” (146). Entire libraries of scholarship have been devoted to deciphering and evaluating the “new meanings” introduced by translation during this constitutive period of Indian history. Whose interests were served by the social and intellectual exchanges of nineteenth-century Bengal and who dictated their terms? The arguments have followed the course of historical events and ideological trends, from the combative nationalism of the independence struggle and its neutralization of internal differences in the all-out effort to oust the British, to later movements more critical of nationalism – post-independence Marxism, subaltern studies, and postcolonialism which insisted on a more heterogeneous vision of Bengali society where class differences, gender and minorities (particularly Muslims) were recognized (Sarkar 1998: 100, Banerjee 1989, Chatterjee, P. 1998: 6–26). Assessments of the work of translation followed these trends, and also varied according to the direction of interactions. Translation into English is understood as a sign of colonial subjugation and as a privileged instrument of Orientalism when it is shown, for instance, that the work of Sir William Jones imposes categories of Western thought on an ancient culture, elevating ancient texts of religion and law above the unruly present and using them as a standard against which their unworthy contemporaries would be judged. As a strategy of containment, translation fixed colonized cultures, “making them seem static and unchanging rather than historically constructed” (Niranjana 1992: 3). These Orientalist translations would conform in large part to what I have called distancing, because they emphasize the differences between Oriental and Western, ancient and modern – and allow only the accredited expert to be a translator. By contrast, translation into Bengali is shown to activate the levers of cultural nationalism, by manipulating and reworking the texts of authority (Trivedi 1995 and 2000; Chatterjee, C. 2010). And so translations into Bengali often participate in a dynamic of furthering. Rather than a technique whose results are predictable and univocal, translation encompasses a broad range of interventions and mediations, contributing to a weave of linkages. Even during the early period of the Renaissance, translation practices reflect a mixity of goals that defies any sort of easy polarization. For instance, Rosinka Chaudhuri notes that even the most nationalist verses, such as Rangalal’s lines in Padmini Upakhyan: “Who wants to live without freedom, who wants to live?” were “shadows” of Thomas Moore’s Irish melody: “From life without freedom/Oh! Who would not fly”. “Bengali nationalism thus was openly and unabashedly using the coloniser’s language to pillory his rule, in a manner unacceptable to later linguistic chauvinists” (Chaudhuri, R. 2006: 267).6 In the same way, the languages themselves are subject to changing valuations. If the very fact of writing in English – by Indians – was long considered a betrayal of authenticity, there is recent acknowledgement of “the contribution of English-language texts to the formation of a Bengali or Indian modernity” – in particular the texts of the early Calcutta poets,

30  Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city Henry Meredith Parker, Michael Madhusudan Datta and Henry Derozio (Chaudhuri, R. 2008: lxv). Invoking Amit Chaudhuri’s reminder that the Renaissance is a “habit of mind” that cannot be dismissed despite its controversial cultural baggage,7 we will put the term to work in the following pages to stand for the productive movement sweeping across the city, and contributing to a discourse of modernization. My aim is to bring substance and texture to the idea of the city in translation, gathering together portraits of cultural mediators to provide a fresh view of Calcutta. Though the characters I introduce are familiar to literary or political history, their role in a history of translation has not been noted. This new focus shifts and reorients the archive, making visible the course of transactions across urban space. Most of the translations discussed here are towards Bengali, confirming the direction of the Renaissance. But in each case passage across the city is entangled in complexities of what Roland Barthes called the ideology of form, that is, the meanings that are inevitably attached to historical states of language.

The precursor: Lebedeff and the polyglot city A musician, translator and adventurer, Herasim Stepanovich Lebedeff arrived in Calcutta in 1787, threw himself into the study of Sanskrit and Bengali, and became involved in the theatre. In 1795, he was responsible for producing the first Western-style play in Bengali, adapting Richard Jodrell’s The Disguise, a comedy in three acts into a pastiche of Bengali and Hindustani dialects.8 The acting was supplemented by songs in both languages sung to the accompaniment of an orchestra made up of Indian and European instruments and performed in a house that he had rented and converted into a theatre (The Bengallie Theatre, number 25, Doomtoolah Lane) (Chatterjee, S. 2007: 27). Lebedeff’s idea of translating European theatre into Bengali was unheard of. No such performance had ever been undertaken in a city where English-language theatre and traditional Bengali jatra existed in separate spheres. In the course of five years and with the help of my teachers I succeeded in translating two English dramas into Bengali, one of which I had the honour of staging twice under my direction and in a theatre of my own construction with Bengali actors of both the sexes, thus entertaining the European and Asiatic inhabitants alike. No European had hitherto been able to produce anything of the kind in Calcutta. Lebedeff 1988: 11 Nevertheless, in 1797 Lebedeff was drummed out of town. Had it not been for Lebedeff’s own account of this enterprise in response to his detractors, this important episode in Calcutta history might well have been forgotten (Kemp 1958: 123). 9

Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city  31 The reasons that make Lebedeff especially interesting have to do not only with his creative turn of mind, his entrepreneurial spirit and the prescience of his representations of Bengali on a proscenium stage, but with his attitudes as a translator and linguist. Lebedeff was a serious student of language, and published a Grammar of the Pure and Mixed East Indian Dialects (1801) in London on his way back to Russia from Calcutta. In both his Grammar and his translation, he turned his attention to a variety of language called “Bazaar Hindustani”, also known as “Moors” or “Moorish”, referring to the mixed forms resulting from the contact between Europeans and Indian languages. Bernard Cohn shows how both Hindustani and Moors were very vague terms, made to refer in the early nineteenth century to the language of those the British were called upon to command. The early grammars devoted to that language were illustrated mainly by dialogues composed exclusively of commands by masters to servants (Cohn 1996: 16–56). Lebedeff was unusual in being interested in this language for reasons other than commanding, and – in marked contrast to the grammars of Hindustani that were produced before his – Lebedeff invents dialogues in the final section of his Grammar that are cordial exchanges on daily subjects such as the education of children, geography, buying and selling, going for a walk or taking a journey. Lebedeff shows scholarly interest for this contact language at a time when “serious” linguists were turning exclusively to Sanskrit. Though the important linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterji wrote in 1963 that Lebedeff’s Grammar was not creditable in its description of Bengali, he emphasized in contrast that the book did have considerable historical value in relation to the “Bazar [sic] Hindustani as it was used by Bengalis and others in Calcutta, particularly in their dealings with Europeans. As a contribution to the study of Bazar Hindustani which is the real lingua franca of Aryan-speaking India, this book will have its proper place” (Chatterji, S. in Lebedeff 1988: xxviii). Lebedeff’s use of Bazaar Hindustani in his theatrical productions would have been an evident source of humour. In fact, Lebedeff alternated languages in his version of The Disguise, from Act I which is “entirely Bengalese” to Act II whose first scene is in Moors. In an expanded version of the play, he wanted to offer another scene in English. Both of the plays Lebedeff translated were farces and Lebedeff was looking for humour that would appeal to Indians. To compose the most effective text, he counted on both his own observations (“having observed that the Indians preferred mimicry and drollery to plain grave solid sense, however purely expressed”) and on empirical research (“When my translation was finished, I invited several learned pundits, who perused the work very attentively; and I then had the opportunity of observing those sentences which appeared to them most pleasing, and which most excited emotion”) (Lebedeff 1801: vi). In his Grammar, he reproduced a page illustrating the actual translation process, which involved lining up the text in three parallel columns, using three different scripts, Bengali, Russian and English. But Lebedeff’s work included adaptation as well. He rewrote a good deal of the script, changing the geographical location from Spain to India, and turning the stock characters into Indian versions: watchmen,

32  Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city disreputable characters, thieves and, of course, the great favourite: lawyers (Chatterjee, S. 2007: 29). He added pantomime and new humorous dialogue. According to contemporary accounts, the Calcuttans liked the heroine, the daughter of a wealthy family in Lucknow, who followed her love to their city, disguised herself as a man and took the initiative in winning him from the arms of another woman (Nair in Lebedeff, 1988: i–xx). Both plots turned on arranged marriages, minor intrigues and a young woman getting the better of her lover (Kemp 1958: 172–3). This portrayal of women would have been entirely new for Bengali audiences, and indeed the very presence of female actors was a novelty, as women were not permitted onto the Bengali stage until much later in the nineteenth century. A portrait is taking shape, then, of Lebedeff as a talented practioner of contact forms. He is considered to be the first musician to have played Indian melodies on Western musical instruments, and the accompaniment to his plays was music composed by Lebedeff himself with lyrics borrowed from the Bengali poet Bharatchandra Ray. He used traditional stage decoration, decorating the floor reserved for staging scenes with painting according to the Bengali taste. Using traditional Hindu patterns, “the stage was decorated with red-and-yellow religious motifs” and advertized in the Calcutta Gazette as the “New Theatre in the Doomtullah Decorated in the Bengalee Style” (cited in Solomon 1994: 325). For Kemp, The mixed European and Indian audience that gathered to attend his theatrical venture must have been one of the first occasions when these two socially exclusive communities met for common entertainment and instruction, apart from the private entertainment of individually invited guests, when the host usually tried to impress his guest or to adapt his national customs to suit the occasion. Kemp 1958: 137 Lebedeff’s Doomtoolah theatre represents an atypical moment in the colonial exchange. Lebedeff was not British and so perhaps more available to possibilities of communications not explored by the colonizers. His attitude would have meshed with the more relaxed hybrid cultural practices chosen by the “White Mughals”, for instance, described by William Dalrymple (Dalrymple 2002). Dalrymple tells the story of the powerful pro-Muslim attractions of some British administrators, mainly in Hyderabad, attractions which were transformed into “nativized” lifestyles that were not considered inconsistent with the exercise of colonial authority. Some elements of this more tolerant general atmosphere might well have prevailed in the early years of nineteenth-century Calcutta. A strong indication of this hybridity lies in Lebedeff’s translation, as well as in his Grammar. Following motivations that were partly artistic, partly scholarly, and no doubt partly entrepreneurial, Lebedeff explored terrains of translation that had not been considered before. Lebedeff’s expulsion from Calcutta remains unexplained: he was perhaps suspected of being a spy, or he may

Source: The British Library

Figure 2.4 Lebedeff’s 1795 production of The Disguise was hybrid in many regards, mixing European and Bengali stock characters, Western and Eastern musical instruments and elements of stage design.

Source: The British Library

Figure 2.5 Lebedeff’s Grammar is mainly remembered today for its study of Bazaar Hindustani.

Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city  35 have been the victim of rivals jealous of the commercial success of his theatrical ventures. Lebedeff later became a cultural hero, admired for the prescience of a first step undertaken in 1795 which would culminate in the birth of the Bengali national theatre (Chatterjee, S. 2007: 24). His interest in the “contact language” of his times would identify him as attentive to the precise inflexions of the spoken language, the mixed linguistic codes of the Calcutta streets, echoing his use of mixed and hybrid forms in music and stage design. These in turn point to a period of colonial history which was in some ways less rigorous in its policies of segregation, still open to possibilities of religious, cultural and political adaptation, of passage across the spaces of the city, before the Sepoy Rebellion in 1857 would put an end to such flexibility, and harden attitudes, boundaries and categories. Lebedeff’s activities fall perfectly into the portrait of the “knowledge intermediary” during the early period of contact in Calcutta (1770–1820) described with elegance and scholarly sweep by Simon Schaffer and Kapil Raj (2009). The vast enterprise of mediations in the “brokered city”, mobilizing both Asian and European go-betweens, resulted not only in the production of translations but in the creation of knowledges which “could not have existed independently of each other, nor elsewhere than in this contact zone” (Raj 2009: 134). Raj argues that the monumental discoveries of the Orientalist William Jones would have been impossible outside of the Calcutta milieu (Raj 2001: 98). The contacts of daily life, Raj advances, prepared the terrain for Jones’ understanding of the interconnections between languages and religious traditions. Nevertheless, the lot of go-betweens was a “precarious one” (Raj 2009: 146) and Lebedeff’s expulsion from Calcutta is a clear reflection of this reality. In contrast to banyans, who combined commercial and linguistic knowledge and gained huge power from it, go-betweens like Lebedeff and the even more intrepid William Bolts (Schaffer 2009: xxxv) were considered threats and handled summarily by the East India Company. “Described variously as interloper, adventurer and ‘German nabob’, Bolts worked successively from the 1760s as a diamond dealer in Lisbon, a Calcutta book-keeper, an opium trader in Benares and, after peremptory expulsion from Bengal by the East India Company’s officials, a Grub Street hack back in London.” He launched a series of vast commercial projects, combining “cunning mediations, strenuous patronage, long-range trade and visionary projects” (Schaffer 2009: xxxv). Lebedeff had a less spectacular career than Bolts, and was more a scholar than a fortune-hunter, but, like Bolts, Lebedeff found himself on the wrong side of the powerful East India Company and was forced to abandon a linguistic experiment which might have left enduring traces in the city. The early years of Calcutta were shaped by trading circuits that were intensely multilingual. The transactions that were evoked in the scholarly work of Kapil Raj are given vivid fictional characterization in Amitav Ghosh’s novel, Sea of Poppies (2008). The novel is set in a polyglot Calcutta in 1838, the scene for two transnational dramas being enacted at the time – the opium wars with China and the forced recruitment of indentured

36  Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city labourers from Calcutta to Mauritius. Language is an important feature of the novel. Both the city of Calcutta and vessel which will transport the migrants, the Ibis, assemble polyglot communities who speak pidgins as well as comically mangled forms of English. Ghosh reconstructs these idioms through historical research, using not only Sir Henry Yule’s Hobson-Jobson, the celebrated nineteenth-century dictionary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, but also the more obscure 1811 English and Hindustani naval dictionary of sea terms. The result is an imaginative evocation of the contact languages which issued from this mercantile centre, most spectacularly in the particular language of Indian sailors, the “lascars”. One of the central characters in the novel is Paulette Lambert, a young French girl who was brought up in Calcutta as the ward of a prosperous judge. The starring role of the Frenchwoman, daughter of a botanist, is especially significant, as it reflects the presence of the French in a city where the influence of colonial cultures other than British would decline steadily through the course of the nineteenth century. Links to languages other than English, Bengali and Sanskrit are not easy to configure into the Indian colonial debate. And there is no doubt that Ghosh’s choice of a Frenchwoman is a deliberate attempt to restore some of the heterogeneity of Calcutta’s intellectual and social life. It is in this same context that it would be appropriate to introduce the translation work of Toru Dutt (1856–77), who is in some ways a figure similar to Pauline Lambert, though born some fifty years later. Dutt was not of French parentage, but her attachment to French culture was strong, and she devoted much of her very short life to creating links between the French and Bengali worlds. It was upon her return to Calcutta from Europe in 1873 that Dutt completed A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields (1876) – a collection of 165 translations from French romantic poetry, which would bring her, not yet 20 years old, literary fame in England. Dutt elicited tremendous admiration, was called one of the most astonishing women that ever lived and was compared to Sappho and Emily Brontë, George Sand and George Eliot. Dutt not only translated from French but also wrote a novel in French, Le journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers (Paris, Didier 1879).10 Nevertheless, she led a very sheltered life in Calcutta upon her return from Europe, enjoying none of the freedom to roam the streets that would be so much a part of the Calcutta life of James Long, as we will see, and complaining in a letter to her friend Mary Martin that “We do not go much into society now. The Bengali reunions are always for men. Wives and daughters and all women-kind are confined to the house, under lock and key, à la lettre, and Europeans are generally supercilious and look down on Bengalis”. Dutt adds that she does not visit anyone, and that her ways would be considered “infra dig, unladylike, immodest” by others, that it is only in her country residence of Baugmaree that she can be herself “without fear of any peering and scandalized neighbour, staring in surprise and contempt at my ‘strange manlike ways’” (cited by G.J.V. Prasad in Dutt 2005: xvi).

Source: The Life and Letters of Toru Dutt, Harihar Das, Oxford University Press, 1921

Figure 2.6 Toru Dutt, standing, with her sister Aru. Aru helped Toru with the translations from French. Both would suffer early deaths.

38  Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city Dutt’s isolation from the Calcutta world was compensated by the very active literary activities of her family. Her later reputation in India was largely founded on the Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (London, Kegan Paul 1882) which she published posthumously (Lootens 2006). The translations, it was assumed, were simply a detour for Dutt on her road towards finding an authentic means of expression – and they are not included, for instance, in the 2006 Collected Prose and Poetry (Lokugé in Dutt 2006). Sheaf is generally invoked as the occasion for the miraculous attention that she received from the English critic Edmund Gosse, who immediately spread the news of the gifted poet (Lokugé in Dutt 2006: xxv). Sheaf deserves attention, however, as a remarkable project not only in the Indian but in the European context. In a period where translations could be cavalierly naturalizing, as Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat (1859) or, by contrast, literalist as Robert Browning’s Agamemnon (1877), there was no obvious model for translation. An anthology similar to Dutt’s, entitled Echoes from French Poets, was published in London in 1870 by Henry Curwen and includes many of the same poets as Dutt chose: Baudelaire, Musset, Lamartine, Chenier, Gautier, Beranger, Dupont, Parny – but it has far fewer poems, no notes, and is dominated by the relentless drive of cheery rhymed couplets. The only enterprise that resembles Dutt’s in its magnitude and attempt to embrace an entire tradition would seem to be that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Dante and his Circle (1861). In her notes, surprisingly, Dutt makes few conventional comments on translation, and avoids the usual disclaimers. Her comments are erudite and entertaining, introducing the poets and providing critical comments. There is a strong intelligence playing throughout the volume, in the translations as well as the comments. Dutt’s mode is to anglicize the poem, to give it English rhyme schemes, but to stay quite close to pattern and meaning. She steers a middle course. Her notes clearly indicate that she assumes an Indian readership, using expressions like ‘Babu’ and including an example of Sanskrit in Devanagiri script. And so Toru Dutt stands on the Calcutta scene, much like Lebedeff, as a figure who intiated connections that would be neglected as the well-worn patterns of colonial exchange took over. The meaning of the connection to France was often limited to its ideological function as “not-English”. Harish Trivedi, for example, characterizes Premchand’s translation of Anatole France in 1923 quite simply as a deliberate attempt to sidestep Englishlanguage political and literary hegemony (Trivedi 1997). As a woman, a translator from French, and a brilliant poet and novelist who died very young, Toru Dutt has occupied a marginal position in the narrative of Bengali literature. But, with other “rediscovered” women writers and translators, she is achieving recognition for the sheer ambition of her writing projects. Dutt’s passage through translation is one that has often been taken by women writers as a way into a writing career – and research will no doubt continue to unearth such contributions by women writers in Bengal. The fact that Dutt enjoyed instant success in Europe for her anthology and that several of her translated poems were reprinted in other anthologies is a

Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city  39 mark of unusual recognition. Dutt’s French connections stand for paths not taken across the divided city of Calcutta, for cultural references not integrated into the increasingly solid core of Bengali nationalism, for linkages that do not align with the religious and gender identities of the main players in the Bengali Renaissance.

James Long (1814–87) and the power of adaptation Unlike Lebedeff and Toru Dutt, James Long was not a marginal figure but a larger-than-life character who assumed considerable prominence in Calcutta life. The nature of this prominence, however, reveals some of the contradictions that traversed Calcutta society during his time. James Long’s celebrity originated in his trial in 1861 before a British judge. The event was attended by a capacity crowd, and when the feisty missionary was condemned to spend a month in a Calcutta jail, he became an instant hero. He is still celebrated today by Bengalis, and one hundred years after his death the West Bengal government named a major road in the south of the city after him. James Long did not, as charged, translate the play Nil Darpan (1860) from the Bengali of Dinabandhu Mitra. The play was an attack on the cruel practices of indigo planters in Bengal, graphically dramatizing the plight of a landowner’s family and the peasants of Lower Bengal through scenes of violence. The powerful association of indigo planters had brought charges against Long who had signed a favourable preface to the published translation to the play. Like other missionaries at the time in India, James Long was a supporter of the Bengali peasantry and was known for his outspoken opposition to the planters. That he had not actually translated the play seemed to be irrelevant to the judge, and Long was found guilty. The judge clearly favoured the interests of the planters over the righteous anger of the missionary, in spite of the evidence. In fact the judge was responding to pressure by the British government in the face of widespread peasant grievances in 1861, and, as these events closely followed on the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, the government was eager to react decisively against this discontent. The authorities did not seem interested in prosecuting the author of the play, Dinabandhu Mitra, a civil servant, good friend of Bankimchandra and powerful dramatist, nor did they seek out the real translator who turns out to have been the celebrated poet Michael M. Datta. Long’s role was limited to excising what he considered to be the “coarser” parts of the play and adding a preface. But while Long may have suffered the indignity of condemnation, and a somewhat uncomfortable month spent in the Calcutta jail (July–August 1861), in the end he was the clear winner. The Bengali community was solidly on his side, and he dined out on his favourable reputation among Bengalis for years to follow. (See Oddie 1999: 101–42; see also Kling 1966, Guha 1974, Rao 1992, and Chatterjee 2007.) That Long is best known for a controversy over translation is fitting. He spent much of his almost thirty years in Bengal involved in encouraging

40  Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city literacy and education in the vernacular – and promoting translations into Bengali, although this aspect of his career has been much less discussed than the very public Nil Darpan affair. Long was a brilliant and creative thinker, a sensitive observer and a prodigious writer. He was also an active participant in public affairs, and helped establish many associations of learning in Calcutta including the Bengal Social Science Association, founded with Mary Carpenter in late 1867. He brought his curiosity to all aspects of Bengali life – but he gave special attention to the role of language.11 The one biography devoted to Long (Oddie 1999) sympathetically follows the wide arc of his career, but devotes relatively little space to his activities related to translation. Reading many of Long’s articles on Bengali life and culture, it is difficult to remember that he remained a Protestant missionary. He never gave up his project of converting the Hindus, and he kept up his associations with committees dedicated to that cause. And yet, there is such sympathy for the Bengali people and culture in Long’s writings that it seems difficult to believe that he was bent on converting them to an alien system of thought. In fact, he did not feel that he was doing that. Long’s philosophy was syncretistic and his brand of Christian evangelism tilted towards cultural adaptation. He considered it was possible to bring the essence of Christianity to India without imposing the English language or European cultural conceptions on it. Convinced that Christian belief could put on Oriental dress, his hope was that in the future the Church in India would be turned over to native bishops and that European missions in the country would disappear, being “mere scaffolding” to be taken down when the time was ripe (Oddie 1999: 81). This attitude towards adaptation prevailed as well in Long’s understanding of the power of translated literature to influence the Bengali readership. By 1849 he had made up his mind that the best way for Bengalis to become Christians was through the promotion of the Bengali language, and so he became an advocate for vernacular learning. His methods of translation were congruent with his goals: translations toward Bengali were to be accessible to the greatest number and therefore involved adaptation. By transferring the moral content of European literature into images and forms familiar to Bengalis, he hoped to promote Christian values. As a defender of the Bengali language and promoter of scholarship in Bengal, as a proponent of social reform and a defender of Bengali peasants against the abuses of the indigo growers, Long participated in the spirit of the Renaissance. He was very much a citizen of Calcutta: his familiarity with the city was at the root of many of his social and intellectual projects, and he believed that translation towards Bengali was necessary in all areas of intellectual, cultural and religious life. Born in Ireland, Long settled in Calcutta at the age of 26 and lived there (with a brief absence) until he left India in 1872. His Irish origins may certainly account for the distance he took from British positions and attitudes towards the Bengalis (Oddie 1999: 16–17). He came to know the city intimately – first as an outdoor preacher, then as a door-to-door canvasser. By the end of 1846, Long claimed he had

Source: G. A. Oddie (1999), Missionaries, Rebellion and Proto-Nationalism. James Long of Bengal 1814–87, from the CMS photographic collection.

Figure 2.7 James Long was passionately involved in the civic and intellectual life of Calcutta.

42  Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city traversed over 600 lanes and gullies in Calcutta and had generally been well received (Oddie 1999: 33). And in 1849, he stated that he had visited almost every Bengali home in the city, a claim which, if true, was an extraordinary accomplishment and all the more significant in view of prevailing racial attitudes and the fact that so many other Europeans tended to restrict contact with the local Bengali population (Oddie 1999: 33). Later he developed new methods of spreading the publications of the Vernacular Literature Society, through door-to-door hawking. And he was the first to encourage women to become hawkers – with remarkable results, apparently, because a woman could guarantee the chasteness of the material (Schwarz 2000: 581). As the years progressed Long gradually abandoned his missionary activities in favour of his intellectual interests, principally the vernacular press and social issues. Remarkably, after the death of his wife, he took up lodgings in “the Native part of the town” (Oddie 1999: 186), sharing a house with the Bengali Christian Rev. K.M. Banerjea in the centre of the Muslim quarter of Calcutta. For his biographer Oddie, “This ‘shifting of camps’ during a period when the European and Bengali communities were clearly and sharply polarized was the logical outcome of a gradual change in Long’s sense of where he belonged” (186). He organized evenings in his home where Bengalis and British would mingle (147). This physical positioning in the city was emblematic of Long’s unusual career as an intermediary. Long’s enthusiasm for Calcutta was reflected in a wide range of writings about the city – some of his research taking the form of “antiquarian rambles … in search of ghosts of our departed days” (Long 1974: 8). This interest in the past was complemented by his much more original investigations into the fabric and sensory texture of Calcutta – as vividly expressed in his Five hundred questions on subjects requiring investigation in the social condition of natives of India (1865). This remarkable pamphlet adopts the vocabulary of today’s sociologist to enquire into “the social life of the natives of India and their folkore, a species of knowledge not to be found exclusively in books, but mainly in the memories and traditions of the people” (Long 1865). Calcutta has a prominent place in this enquiry, which really does consist of 500 questions, grouped alphabetically, beginning with the aboriginals, the agricultural classes, astrology and witchcraft, beggars and vagrants, and on through an imaginative list of questions: What are the street cries used by hawkers or sellers, what are the subjects and favourite times for conversation, what is discussed in the zenana, what is the effect on conversation of the absence of female society, and then onto criminals, diseases, doctors, dress, education, festivals, food, language, law, the native press, the importance of manuscript literature and the book trade, proverbs, readers, riddles and ghost stories, servants, travelling vehicles … and so on. The chapter on Calcutta, in ways that echo Amitav Ghosh’s novel, Sea of Poppies, emphasizes the multilingualism of the city and the sheer variety and diversity of its inhabitants, bearers from Orissa, horse sellers from Kabul, and boatmen from Chittagong (Long 1865: 7–9). He wonders about the birth place, numbers and occupations of Afghans, Armenians, Chinese, East

Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city  43 Indians (referring to Eurasians) Feringhees, Greeks, Jains, Jews, Moguls, Musulmans, Parsees and Portuguese, asks whether women fly kites, questions the effects of emigration to Mauritius and the West Indies (28) and wonders to what type of European character the Bengalis are closest – to the English, or German, French or Italian? Is suicide common in India? Is there real tenderness to animals? And he delves into his day-to-day knowledge of Calcutta life by adding a category of questions related to misunderstandings between English and Indians (30–1). Long’s curiosity and aptitude for research are most spectacularly demonstrated in his work on what was known as the “native press”. In his walks around the city, he became aware of the large amounts of vernacular literature produced in the neighbourhood of Battala. His interest was not entirely scientific: as a missionary he was anxious to know what the Bengali public was actually reading. He convinced the British government and in particular the Chief Magistrate of Calcutta that the British should be aware of what was being published in Bengali and he was then called upon to draw up catalogues of Bengali publications. Long’s report on Bengali publishing (Returns) was considered exemplary and, at the request of the Commissioners of the Paris Exhibition of 1867, he compiled a descriptive catalogue of vernacular books and pamphlets which the Government of India was collecting for the exhibition (Darnton 2002: 152).12 For his enquiry, Long apparently read or at least skimmed through every shred of Bengali printed material from 1857. Thanks to his command of the language and his work as editor of the monthly journal of the Vernacular Literature Society, he had acquired a remarkable knowledge of Bengali literature. The book historian Robert Darnton was amazed by Long’s accomplishments – the sheer number of books he had identified and read, his understanding of the elements that went into the production and distribution of Bengali popular literature and his sympathetic readings of the works. “He inspected every Bengali printing shop in Calcutta twice during his yearlong investigation. He bought every book from 1857 that he could find in the bookshops scattered through the city’s ‘native quarters.’ He tabulated prices and pressruns, followed peddlers on their rounds, eavesdropped on oral readings, interviewed authors, and scoured records for information about reading habits in the past” (Darnton 2002: 240–1). Not content to study the books only, he followed their distribution through the countryside and studied reading practices – such as those of the kathaks or readers hired to recite or chant certain works, sometimes reciting from memory passages from the Ramayana, Raghuvansa, or Mahabharata (Long 1859: lvi). Long demonstrated deep knowledge of the vernacular literature, its contexts and its uses – for instance, the pervasive importance of almanacs, the satirical functions of printed plays, the popularity of songbooks. But at the same time Long was judgmental about standards of decency. He was critical of the popular theatrical jatras, which he called “filthy”, comparing them to Punch and Judy shows, or to the penny theatres in London (xlviii).

44  Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city There is a direct link between Long’s studies of the native press and his involvement in the Vernacular Literature Society (or Bangla Anubadok Samiti, Bengali Translators’ Society). Long joined the VLS in 1852, soon after its foundation in 1851 (Oddie 1999: 84) and took a leading role, editing its monthly journal (Darnton 2002: 241). The object of the society, which included government and missionary representatives as well as some of the most important Indian literary figures of the day, was to “call into existence a popular literature in the language of Bengal” (Long 1859: xxvii) in large part by publishing translations into Bengali. From the start, the Vernacular Literature Society had clear guidelines as to the kind of translations that were considered suitable. In order to share with the mass of the “native population, ‘the stores of valuable information which are in the possession of their rulers’”, without obliging them to learn English (lv–lvi), translations would be provided. But “mere translation” would not suffice. Every possible use must be made of what we already find in their literature and associations – consistently with our object of communicating truth … With this view, therefore, all works issued by the Committee will be carefully adapted with reference to the actual condition of the native mind, its character and associations. Pratt, cited by Long 1859: xxvii Though the source of the preceding quotation was a certain H. Pratt, the ideas advanced clearly belong to James Long. He was steadfast in advocating adaptation as the means through which English-language literature be rendered in Bengali. In his Returns, Long includes a separate chapter entitled “Translations require adaptation”, where he argues that translations from English to Bengali require visual as well as metaphorical adaptation, making it necessary “to drop many English illustrations unintelligible to a native, substituting for illustrations drawn from the oak, the daisey, etc. ones derived from the rich resources of the Poets of Bengal” (Long 1859: chapter 21). But adaptation was not an end in itself. Long understood adaptation as a process inscribed in a series of stages which begins in imitation and ends in original writing. He saw developments in India as mirroring the stages of development which had occurred in Europe, where translations had been a strong stimulant. India was re-enacting this history of translation which had begun with the rise of vernacular literatures in Russia, England and France. These had been strongly affected by translation and imitation of foreign models, necessarily so, says Long, “for men must get new ideas before they can mould them”. After free and adapted translation, comes original composition. While Bengal was, during the eighteenth century, “chiefly a translation from the Sanscrit not the Persian, this half century translations have been chiefly from the English” (Long 1859: xviii). His hope was that the adaptations produced by the VLS would be a step resulting in original compositions by Bengali authors. The VLS attempted to recruit the best Bengali writers to translate

Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city  45 and adapt their works into Bengali, awarding an annual prize for the best written Bengali works (Schwarz 2000: 575). And in fact, the VLS translations, as Swapan Chakravorty shows, were influential in fostering more appropriate standards of Bengali prose style, working against the artificial and deliberately “high” registers that had characterized the “missionary prose” created at Serampore. This artificial prose had by the 1870s created an idiom “permeated with Christian propriety and divested of its earthy, peasant sensibility” (Schwarz, quoting S. Banerjee 1989: 573, Chakravorty 2005: 213). The policy of the VLS, as explained by Edward Roer in his 1853 translation of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare was to avoid this artificial idiom and choose a more popular register (Chakravorty 2005: 208–13). The checklist of European literary texts translated into Bengali (1850– 1900) compiled by Chandrani Chatterjee lists some 150 volumes in the categories only of fiction and drama – to which one could add the many Bible translations, and translations in the area of science, biography, political analysis, and so forth which would also have appeared (Chatterjee, C. 2010, Appendix). Among the works of fiction published by the VLS were Robinson Crusoe, Paul and Virginia, Parley’s Wonders of History, Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, Percey’s Anecdotes, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling, Wild Swans, The Tinder Box, Chinese Nightingale and Story of a Mother, Indian Romance, Four Winds and Elizabeth or the Exiles of Siberia (Long 1855: vii). These works were not explicitly religious, but it was felt that they imparted values that were implicitly Christian (Schwarz 2000: 579). Long’s emphatic policy of adaptation was applied to Biblical translations as well as fiction. In his book-length work entitled Scripture Truth in Oriental Dress (1871),13 he illustrated what he meant by adaptation. In a series of short sections, Long discusses themes and sayings in the Bible, interweaving equivalents from Bangla and other Indian languages, establishing a commonality of “oriental” thought between the Bible and other Eastern cultures. In his preface, Long established the two prongs of his argument. “All Orientals are fond of apologue, fables, and figurative language, and love to clothe ethical and religious truth in the graceful and pleasing drapery of metaphor”; and second: “The Bible as an oriental book is imbued with this spirit, as is exemplified in the lyrical odes of the Psalms, the proverbial writings of Solomon, the dramas of Job, and Solomon’s song”. This commonality of “wisdom literature” across Oriental cultures meant that the Bible could be presented as a familiar extension of the known world to potential converts, without need for any particular historical or theological knowledge. The missionary milieu might have been rife with sectarian debate, (see Oddie 1999: 87–8) but Long sidestepped doctrinal issues, choosing to focus only on those areas of knowledge that were common to Biblical culture and what he called “native experience”. The idiosyncratic avenue taken by Long was one of the “ad hoc” strategies adopted by nineteenth-century European missionaries, who, “seem to have experimented with different strategies and

46  Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city linguistic usages rather than arrived at effective frameworks with which to understand language and translation in the Indian context” (Israel 2010: 99). It was generally assumed – against what seems today like incontrovertible contrary evidence – that the Bible was a culturally transparent text that could be transferred into any Indian language without difficulty or loss (Israel 2010: 99). Nevertheless, the choice of terms was controversial, “The general opinion among the missionaries was that ‘Christian thoughts cannot buy ready-made clothes at Hindu stores’” (Hephzibah in Baker 2010: 177), especially as Indian languages were saturated with Hindu, polytheistic thinking. Neither Long nor his housemate of his later years, K.M. Banerjea (1813–81) shared these fears. A former student of the poet Henry Derozio and prominent convert to Christianity, Banerjea in his Arian Witness claimed “that the fundamental principles of the Gospels were recognized and acknowledged, both in theory and practice, by their ancestors the Brahminical Arians of India” (Banerjea 1875: 10), and he established parallels between the Hebrew and Sanskrit languages, and between practices like sacrifice and priesthood. In the same way, Long compared the Song of Songs to devotional writings of the East, emphasizing the “same mystic and impassioned style” (Sugirtharajah 2005: 107). Long’s positions made him vulnerable to charges of syncretism and of being a “dissident reader” of the Bible (137). Long’s hermeneutical aim was to reposition the Bible as an Eastern book. He avoided forms of translation which would widen the distance between Hinduism and Christianity, choosing sites and formulations which stressed equivalence on the basis of immediately accessible common spaces of traditional images and sayings, and therefore masking the distances and hierarchies that separated the traditions. This position allowed for a counter-factual and simplistic equivalence between the ancient Biblical culture of the Near East and the culture of India. How is one to make sense of the many contradictions of Long’s personality and position within Calcutta society? An innovative thinker, he was progressive in his attitudes toward Bengali society, critical of oppressive British practices (like those of the indigo planters) and active in founding institutions of scholarship. Yet Long worked within the framework of colonial administration and the missionary establishment, and never fell out of favour with the British authorities – despite his month in a British jail. His extraordinary research on the Bengali book trade remains today a precious source of information on a world otherwise undocumented, and yet this work was presented to the British authorities as the necessary basis of the surveillance of Bengali cultural and political activity, inspired by the mutiny of 1857 (Long 1859: xxv).14 Through his efforts as a scholar and as a promoter of translations, Long marked the terrain of Bengali culture and enriched the Bengali language – at a time when the prestige of scholarship was clearly linked to Sanskrit. While encouraging literary production in the vernacular, Long shows translation to be a process which involves triage and control. His

Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city  47 missionary work promoted translation into Bengali, as did his work with the Vernacular Literature Society – enriching the Bengali language and helping provide Bengali with the publishing infrastructure and linguistic tools that would serve its development. Yet, this work was undertaken with the goal of imposing Christian values on Bengali culture. Robert Darnton could conclude, no doubt with reason, that “Despite his sympathies … Long wrote as an agent of imperialism, Anglo-Indian style – that is, the liberal variety, which extended from James Mill to John Morley and which celebrated the printed word as a civilizing force” (Darnton 2002: 241). But because of his ambiguous position both “with” and “against” the British colonial authorities, because of the multiple positions from which he acted upon the intellectual life of Calcutta, the effects of Long’s work cannot be easily categorized or evaluated. Long occupied a distinctive “middle ground” within city territory and traced his own distinctive pathways of translation.

Bankimchandra: translating genre Town Hall is one of Calcutta’s most grandiose buildings, with its dramatically tall colonnaded white portico. Today the building houses the museum of the city of Calcutta, appropriately enough, because many of the events recounted in the museum actually took place in the building. Town Hall was first built as a showpiece for British society but it became a traditional meeting place for Bengali nationalist gatherings as the freedom movement gained momentum (Chattopadhyay, B. 1998: 53–60). Crowds gathered there in 1904 to oppose Partition, Tagore’s patriotic songs were first sung there, and a civic reception was held there for Tagore in 1931 on the occasion of his 70th birthday. The influence of literature on the nationalist movement is prominent in the museum displays, and one entire room is devoted to the great men [sic] of the Bengali Renaissance. In the grouping of lifesize figures, one illuminated statue dominates the others, and this figure is Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1838–94).15 The image of a giant fits: Bankim remains a towering figure in the story of Indian culture. He was a brilliant writer and activist, and a major influence on the course of Indian literary life and cultural nationalism. He was also a “textbook embodiment” of the cultural pressures operating during the period of the Bengali Renaissance. An enthusiastic student of English literature as well as an avid reader of Sanskrit, an apparently loyal civil servant articulate about the benefits of British rule who was also an early apostle of militant Hindu nationalism, a champion of individual freedom as well as an upholder of social orthodoxy, Bankim cannot be explained away by any of the convenient binary polarities of traditional modernity or East–West values through which nineteenth-century India has often been perceived. Mukherjee, M. 1993: 79

48  Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city

Source: B. Chattopadhyay, The Town Hall of Calcutta: A Short History, Calcutta: A Homage Trust, 1998

Figure 2.8 The legendary Town Hall of Calcutta, built by the British as a showpiece for the “city of palaces”, then the site of many nationalist rallies. Today it houses the museum of the city of Kolkata.

Bankim never challenged the supremacy of British rule in India and expressed his firm belief in the country’s prosperity under the British. Yet he has become the most important Bengali literary nationalist of the period. Bankim is especially celebrated as the father of the Indian novel. And this is where he becomes a crucial vector of Renaissance-like effects. Bankim is credited with introducing a seismic shift into Bengali culture by creating the novel form in a language in which it had not existed before. While many forms of mythic literature were available before him, while a first novel in Bengali had already been penned, while a range of subgenres of early narrative prose (mainly satirical sketches) already existed (Herder 2004), Bankim gave the novel its place in Bengali literature. To give Bankim the paternity of a new genre is to follow Foucault’s broad definition of authorship as including not only individual works but also

Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city  49

Source: Author

Figure 2.9 The giant Bankimchandra Chatterjee, surrounded by other luminaries of the Bengali Renaissance.

forms of discourse. Marx and Freud, Foucault argues, wrote books which also provided the genetic coding for many more works. Their work, in other words, was productive, providing the discursive tools for producing discourse recognizable as Marxist or Freudian. The circumstances which oversaw the introduction of prose fiction into Bengali and then Indian language culture were of a similar nature. The materials and procedures were transferred from English novels (Sir Walter Scott being an obvious model) to Bankim and then onward. This is not to say that Bankim did not also draw on available cultural material available within Bengali culture. Such influences have been increasingly documented, in relation particularly to pre-existing forms of romance and melodrama – much as they were noted in the case of the British novel around the figure of Daniel Defoe. M. Mukherjee speaks of the “plural heritage” of the novel, “the multiplicity of determinants – both indigenous and derived from other cultures – that overlapped, interacted, and fused to make the shaping of this literary form a tangled and unique process in India” (Mukherjee, M. 2006: 596). These include the epic tradition of India, storytelling styles that can be traced back to Arabic and Persian sources, and the interwoven strains of history and fantasy. They also include the written narrative forms which emerged out of the Battala popular literature traditions as

50  Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city well as translations like the 1835 translation of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and 1836 Bengali rendering of Rasselas, Biblical and Shakespeare translations, as well as VLS translations like Robinson Crusoe (1853) and Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1853, 1856, 1857 and 1858) (Chatterjee, C. 2010: 118). Bengali translations catered to the taste for romance and melodrama, as in Kamulkumari (1884) the Bengali adaptation of Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1819). The novel is a shortened version, a romance that leaves out much of the description and authorial comment and concentrates on the action (Mitra 1998: 40). There is an interwovenness in the relation between imported cultural products and the local response, between translation and writing. “The massive importing of the British novel into India, its extensive translation into Indian languages, and the subsequent birth of the novel in Indian languages is a process whose importance is crucial to understanding mechanisms of cultural transfer and emergence” (Joshi 2002: 53). The pervasive presence of book culture in Calcutta made Calcutta a particularly rich crucible for such interchange. As the number of imported English books increased between 1850 and 1880, so did publishing in Indian languages (Joshi 2002: 144). The availability of translations into Bengali created “ripples of reaction that would lead to the emergence of the Bengali novel … an entire discourse regarding human beings, nature, religion and society being translated” (Chatterjee, C. 2010: 123). An important aspect of the translational birth of the novel has to do with the creative trajectory of Bankim himself. Bankim first tried his hand at novel-writing in English. Rajmohan’s Wife (1865) was unsuccessful, critics agree, because it could not settle on a coherent narrative voice, because the Indian social and imaginative world collided with the narrative idiom. It hesitated between realism and fantasy. The skeletons of the forms upon which it was based were clearly visible: the realistic modes of the British novel, the standard features (dungeons, fear) of the Gothic novel and the concern with transgressive love and female heroines characteristic of the European tradition (Mukherjee, M. preface to Chatterji, B. 1996). The prose of the novel is deliberate and ponderous – strikingly so, says Amitav Ghosh, as he shows how “supple, light-handed, effective” Bankim’s letter-writing style in English was. Sisir Kumar Das speaks of a “false start”, full of “linguistic ambivalence” (Das 1984: 20–1).16 In short, Rajmohan’s Wife failed because Bankim did not know for whom he was writing. Only when he translated himself into Bengali would the elements fall into place. But the “falling into place”, such as it was, was only possible, according to Ghosh, because Bankim had the courage to displace himself. The failed passage through English was a necessary act of distancing, which eventually allowed Bankim to lay claim to the rhetoric of location, of place “to mount a springboard that would allow him to vault the gap between two entirely different conventions of narrative” (Ghosh 2002: 303). What makes the novel different from the traditions of story-writing that belong to the more ancient Indian traditions for Ghosh is that the novel is a work of locatedness, a structure of words which fits

Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city  51 into, emerges out of, a specific place. And in order to locate himself through prose, Bankim had to begin with an act of dislocation (303). The difficulty of defining Bankim’s position on both social and aesthetic issues has been underlined by many critics and indeed the most substantial study of Bankim’s prose, by Sudipta Kaviraj, focuses on the figure of “liminality” – his characters always on the threshold of transgression and yet held in by the constraints of the social order, carried away by the “turbulence of desire” and constrained by the “stability of social norms” (Kaviraj 1995: 15–16). Yet “place” remained a problematic notion for Bankim. What was the “place” of Bengali prose and how did that prose locate itself in the present of the city?17 The difficulties of equating place and language are exemplified by the absence of equivalents between English and Bengali in their configuration of public space. Perfect equivalence is made impossible, explains Chattopadhyay, by the entanglement of conceptions in different-meaning networks. One such difficulty is the notion of “public space”. For the British, modes of representation had to do with taking control of the space of the city through modern techniques of mapping, surveying, depicting and writing which were used to govern the city. For the Bengalis, in contrast, “There was no pre-defined public space in the nineteenth century to step into. The term ‘public space’ does not simply refer to residual space outside home, but to this ‘outside’ as a carefully meditated physical and social construction” (Chattopadhyay 2005: 227). On both sides of the divide, building patterns and domestic spaces were continually altered to fit changing desires, the broad well-ventilated living spaces of the British residences, the “amply fenestrated envelope” of residences in North Calcutta that “coincided with the new desire of the city’s growing middle class to keep an open window to the happenings on the street” (203). Physical public spaces like bazaars, streets, ghats, parks, theatres, temples and places of worship, libraries, educational institutions, cafés, teashops, Town Hall – these offered different modes of access and differing views of what being in public meant in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Calcutta. These differences are reflected in terminology, for instance the Bengali words used to denote “public” (prakashye (in public), prakashya sthan (public place); janasadharan or sarbasadharan (the public as a collectivity)) were nineteenth-century inventions to accommodate the notion of a political public (227). Issues of public space would become heavily ideologized as nationalist writings promoted the separation of the “pure self” from the polluting aspect of the material world dictated by colonial rule (150). And so the idea of the “public sphere” or of “public space” in Calcutta in the nineteenth century was by no means a given or an accomplished fact transferred from Europe to colonial territory. The relation of words to material culture became, according to Swati Chattopadhyay, a master trope for the changes affecting Bengali and Calcutta culture. The terms for this discourse were laid out in Kalikata Kamalalaya (1823), a didactic text by Bhavanicharan Bandopadhyay which is considered an important precursor to the novel in Bangla. In the text a

52  Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city city dweller responds to the worried concerns of a villager about the city way of life. Foreign words are one of the central issues in the dialogue. The villager is disturbed by them and worried about possible contamination. But the city dweller argues that as long as these foreign words are not used when performing religious duties, there is no such threat. And so the “foreign” word takes its place as an acceptable tool towards a “new way of being” (Chattopadhyay 2005: 145). Kaliprasanna Sinha’s satirical classic Hutom Pyanchar Naksha (Tales of the Owl) (1861) is roughly contemporaneous to Bankim’s first novels, but stands in stark contrast to them. Sinha’s book is a direct response to Calcutta’s linguistic particularities and rhythms. “It is through parody and through the playful punning of the vernacular that the city is ‘translated’” (Guha 2008: 346). Though Sinha’s satire with its “racy colloquialism” was an immediate and enduring success with Bengali readers, it waited more than a century for translation into English.18 Yet Sinha’s satire also carries traces of intertextual influence – not from Scott but from Charles Dickens’ Sketches by Boz (Guha 2008: 335). This example of a notoriously language- and culture-bound artefact contrasts with the readily translatable nature of Bankim’s novels, which were abundantly translated into the other languages of India, setting off the production of novels in many other regional languages. Bankim was able to situate his own dilemma of placement against the background of the most broad temporalities – the cultural crises which marked the flow of world history. Like James Long, Bankim understood the course of literary history to be marked by periods of imitation that would inevitably progress towards original production. When Bankim was accused of servile imitation of the West, he argued that imitation was the law of progress, and that no civilization could advance without borrowing. [W]hat literature, save that of Greece, has ever been independent and original in its youth? ... Horace himself, the most spontaneous and genuine of all the Latin poets, entertained no higher idea of originality than to make it consist in the importation of a new form of poetry from Greece … And when Europe woke again from the long sleep which followed on the dissolution of the Roman Empire, it was on the translation and imitation of Greek and Latin authors that its energies were employed … Bagal 1998: 124 This quotation shows Bankim’s sensitivity towards the overlapping temporalities of literature. Aware that he was living in a period of significant cultural shift, he embraced imported cultural forms. And by the end of the century, the novel was the most popular form of print-medium entertainment in at least eight major languages in India (Mukherjee, M. 2000: 8). To Bankim belongs the special moment of the birth of the Indian novel, a moment when the translational impulse moved to the very centre of cultural life.

Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city  53 To understand the creation of the novel in Bengali as the translation of a genre allows us to define the Renaissance as a process of cultural transformation, where translation becomes “the matière première of the imagination” (Steiner 1975: 247). The Renaissance stands for a moment when “translation, far from being a secondary activity, became a primary one, exerting a shaping force on the intellectual life of the age” (Chatterjee, C. 2010: 4). The novel is not the only literary form which is transferred in this way. The epic too was reshaped through the work of Michael Mahasudhan Datta, just as the sonnet was introduced to Bengali poetry. The mixed languages employed by Michael Mahasudhan Datta point to similar dramas of liminality, and he would surely have acquired a stature similar to Bankim’s had he not suffered an early death. He played a role in the theatre equivalent to that of Bankim for the novel – and renewed the epic form (Chatterjee, C. 2010).19 The intellectual transformations of the period 1850–1900 in Bengal can best be analyzed as a rich case study of “generic” translation – where “epic”, “sonnet” and “novel” come into existence in the Bengali language through forms of furthering. Translation is an essential prism through which the manifold transformations of the colonial encounter in nineteenth-century Bengal can be studied, not only as “a power game between the colonizer and the colonized” but as process of “cultural translation instrumental in the creation of an epitome of literary tradition in colonial Bengal” (Chatterjee, C. 2010: 30). As a model of civic space where the presence of two meaning systems resulted in the emergence of “improper constructs”, new and durable cultural forms, Calcutta earns its title of Renaissance city.

Calcutta becomes Kolkata The uneven temporalities and weighted exchanges of the nineteenth-century city continue to resonate through the new language dispositions of today’s city, just as they animate debate in postcolonial theory. A work like Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000) can be read as an attempt to rethink the central tensions of the Bengali Renaissance, and to propose translation as a foundational category of critique. There was a time, writes Chakrabarty, when “the process of translating diverse forms, practices, and understandings of life into universalist political-theoretical categories of deeply European origin seemed to most social scientists an unproblematic proposition”. The origins of analytical categories, such as capital, were not questioned, as they were assumed to “have transcended the fragment of European history in which it may have originated”. The actual process of conversion was left unexamined. What is needed, he argues, is unrelenting attention to the “partly opaque relationship we call ‘difference’”, the “translucence and not transparency” that must be made visible in the passages between non-Western histories and European thought (Chakrabarty 2000: 18). And so what translation produces is not equivalence but difference, and

54  Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city the project of intellectual history is to restore to visibility the uneven ground which prepares this result. Today’s Kolkata conserves something of the spatial configuration of its colonial past. The grand structures of former colonial power still dominate the central area, and the north end remains a distinctive labyrinth of streets and bazaars, out of which rises here and there a gracious mansion whose splendid proportions recall the lifestyle of its earlier owners. Swapan Chakravorty describes today’s north as yet a maze of chaotic bazaars, run-down theatres with mismatched domes, unappetizing brothels, job printers working on treadle machines, night markets selling used clothes, dreary offices of jatra troupes who make old music and melodrama out of new themes (including Bush and Saddam) on makeshift stages, marching bands on hire that mix fake bassoons with authentic bagpipes, shops for musical instruments such as the sehnai and the sarangi that no one wants to buy, quaint houses of worship built by nineteenth-century religious benefactors and radicals, the earliest academic institutions and libraries, ruined houses with the crest of Queen Victoria moulded on wooden doors, the decayed pretence of chipped stained glass or a forsaken fountain featuring Neptune and his seahorses, eating houses that live more on memory than custom. Forgotten forms of life cling to north Calcutta with the tenacity of the city’s banyan trees, which strike root in concrete pavement, rusted water pipes, and crumbling parapets. Chakravorty 2007 The Tagore mansion rises out of these “forgotten forms of life”, calling up the atmosphere of the Bengali Renaissance and especially the feeling of a novel like Tagore’s Gora – the first novel of ideas in India and one which is richly linked to the interior spaces of Calcutta homes. The Nobel Prize that Tagore (1861–1941) won in 1913 can be considered the endpoint of the Bengali Renaissance, but it is a somewhat ironic end considering that the prize was given for what many consider a falsifying translation of his own Gitanjali. Sujit Mukherjee calls Tagore’s translation a form of perjury, a rendering of his poetry that distances itself from the Bengali original and offers the kind of diaphanous mysticism that Westerners expected from the East. “Everything that is complex or intense in the original has been skipped over, and large portions have been sacrificed, for the sake of simple rendering” (Mukherjee, S. 1994: 107). Tagore translated the Gitanjali on board ship while travelling from India to England for the first time (Merrill in Classe 2000: 706), projecting his poetry into a world he had not yet met. Tagore knew that he had “falsified his own coin”, admitting to his English translator Edward Thompson in 1921 that “In my translations I timidly avoid all difficulties, which has the effect of making them smooth and thin … When I began this career of falsifying my own coins I did it in play. Now I am becoming frightened of its enormity and am willing to make a confession of my misdeeds”

Nineteenth-century Calcutta: Renaissance city  55 (cited by Trivedi 2000: 460). Tagore was not the only one responsible for the falsifying, however. The editors and promoters of Tagore’s poetry in English also played their part. W.B. Yeats, in particular, helped to “sell” the image of the mystic to the West by editing the manuscript and writing a preface. And so, as Amartya Sen comments, while Tagore remains a deeply relevant and many-sided thinker in India and Bangladesh, he has become a “repetititive and remote spiritualist” in the West (Sen in Hallengren 2004: 184). One could consider Tagore’s self-translations as a special kind of furthering, an attempt to adapt his poetry to the taste of Yeats and his circle. This is an inversion (from Bengali into English) of Bankim’s influential turn to Bengali. The international dimensions of Tagore’s career mark his work as different from Bankim’s, yet both writers were swept up in and deeply marked by the crosscurrents of Calcutta. The falsifications of Tagore are yet another turn in the story of translations as they play out across the divides of Calcutta. There is a special intensity to traffic across these divides. From the abortive performances by Lebedeff and the precocious exploits of Toru Dutt to the more mainstream and influential transactions enabled by James Long and Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Calcutta can be represented as a network of colliding and intersecting impulses. All the transactions in this chapter bear the imprint of the colonial encounter, and the pressures of the colonial situation account for the force of effects. The translations have a performative dimension; they act on their milieu. Lebedeff’s theatrical productions called into being a new kind of mixed audience for theatre, Dutt brought French culture and political ideals into conversation with Bengal. Both Long and Bankim, in very different ways, contributed to shaping the Bengali language. To the narratives told here could be added countless others, which together will more clearly adumbrate a portrait of “polarities and convergences, seclusion and cross-currents of change” (Guha Thakurta in Chaudhuri 1990: 146), of translations that challenge or promote language norms, that deflect or redirect the flow of language traffic, and whose finalities are to be discovered in the unfolding interpretations of cultural history. To move from colonial Calcutta to Habsburg Trieste is not only to cross the globe, but to investigate different regimes of spatiality and patterns of domination, to move from a colonial situation to the domain of empire. The culture of mediation in Trieste is distinguished by a number of anomalies – including the persistence of Italian in a city which had been under Austrian rule for four centuries. As in Calcutta, however, Trieste’s middle ground is inhabited by a large and varied cast of characters, and their itineraries trace out a singular narrative of the city.

3 Habsburg Trieste Anxiety at the border

However old, Svevo’s heroes still think themselves unprepared for the serious business of living. Edouard Roditi

On the morning of 23 May 1914, Zeno Cosini set out from his family villa, already looking forward to the coffee he would have on his return. A few minutes into his daily walk, he stumbled into a ragtag band of Austrian soldiers – and the beginning of a world war. As he was now on the wrong side of enemy lines, he had no choice but to head back to Trieste. Zeno never got his longed-for coffee. His wife remained on the Italian side, taking refuge in the interior, and Zeno was separated from his family for the duration of the war. That Italo Svevo (1861–1928) chose to end his ironic and intimate novel, La coscienza di Zeno (1923) (Zeno’s Conscience), with this reference to the onset of war in 1914 was an unusual decision. Despite the fact that he lived through one of the most politically charged periods of Trieste’s history, and himself participated in acts of resistance against the Austrians, Italo Svevo seldom referred to political events in his fiction. Daily life in Trieste was saturated with political significance – during the first years of the century even the brand of matches used by smokers would identify their sympathies.1 Hotels and cafés were identified by their political allegiance. Trieste may have resounded with the shouts of rioting in favour of Italian independence or to the noise of bombs set off in public places, Svevo’s writings focused instead on the tortuous meanderings of the bourgeois mind. Although this final episode of the novel has familiar Zeno-like touches, like the thwarted desire for coffee, the tone shifts, bringing Svevo’s comic story to a surprising, apocalyptic end. The battle lines that Svevo inadvertently crossed became the deadly Italian front in the First World War. The zone of conflict between the Italians and the Austrians,2 marked by horrific trench warfare, took place along a faultline that for centuries marked the encounter of three great cultural identities – German, Italian and Slav. Trieste lies precisely at this junction, where the northeastern tip of the Adriatic joins the upper edge of the Balkan peninsula, and where the Italian cultural zones of the coast meet the historic zones of

Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border  57 Habsburg and Slavic influence. While the city that Svevo knew had once benefitted from this convergence, becoming a great cosmopolitan and polyglot emporium, the effects were disastrous when Trieste became a flashpoint in both world wars. Cities flourish on sites that are places of encounter – where rivers converge, where mountains slope towards the sea, where populations meet to trade. But the original tensions of such sites never dissolve entirely. “Incontri” can easily turn into “scontri”, as Italian neatly suggests. Cities like Trieste stand on territory that will readily splinter along ancient fracture lines.

A geography of language Geography is laden with cultural meaning in Trieste. The city faces the sea, embedded in the coastal area that was once part of the Venetian sphere of influence extending into Dalmatia – a zone of Italian culture. But behind the city rise the limestone cliffs of the Carso, the rugged terrain of the Slovene population – a zone of Slavic culture. The city fathers of Trieste threw in their lot with a third cultural domain when, in order to escape the domination of the Venetians, they chose political subjection to Vienna in the fifteenth century. For four hundred years Trieste was a historical anomaly – a city politically and economically Austrian, but culturally Italian. The city’s special relationship with Vienna gave it powers equivalent to that of a region (“città immediata”3) and – with the economic boom and spectacular population increase in the nineteenth century – a strong sense of its unusual identity. For many, Trieste was “Trieste nazione”, a quasi-national entity, and during the acrid nationalist debates of the early 1900s some suggested that Trieste might become its own republic to be called the “Repubblica di San Giusto” (Minca 2009a: 259). All these factors make Trieste a city with formidable shaping powers. The city even today casts an aura. Legendary for the rich literary culture it nurtured (including writers James Joyce, Italo Svevo and Umberto Saba), for the exuberant mixture of peoples who gathered there, and later for its position as an outpost during the Cold War,4 Trieste has become something of a cult city, a “landscape of the mind …, a sound chamber of memory where streets, corners, squares and banks have all acquired symbolical meaning” (Pizzi 2001: 60). Beginning in the 1930s, a literature of memoirs and essays spun a web of myth around its past, promoting an often nostalgic idea of Triestinità. Language and language politics were crucial to the history of Trieste, as they were in all Habsburg cities in the late nineteenth century. “Language was the supreme issue of the monarchy”, writes Charles Maier (Maier 1999: 32).5 Until 1918, German was the expression of political and commercial authority, the language which every cultivated or ambitious Triestino would have to master. Slovene and Croatian, by contrast, were relegated to the marginal spaces of domestic and menial labour, and, under Fascism, literally forced underground as proscribed languages. Tuscan was the language of a

58  Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border nation and a culture which was being constructed through the nineteenth century as the lost motherland of the Triestines. By contrast, Triestino was the true language of everyday citizenship, the universally spoken vernacular, uniting and welcoming the many immigrant populations of the nineteenth century (Minca 2009b: 269–70). The extent to which each of these languages expressed what came to be known as an ethnic identity changed as the nineteenth century progressed, as vehicular languages or lingua francas turned into languages more clearly redefined as national, for Italian from about 1848 onwards, for Slovene from 1870 onwards.6 While the city over the centuries had successfully resisted the efforts by Austria to impose Germanization as language policy in the city, Trieste served as a gateway for the entry of German ideas and cultural forms into Italy. My focus in this chapter will be on Italo Svevo as a mediator between the Italian and German cultural zones. Following tradition, I will argue that Svevo’s fiction is the product of the liminality and the cultural tensions of his city. Svevo’s sensibility and career have much to do with a city that was marginal, modern and European, “its geographical alienation an emblematic climate for the homeless, weightless, bourgeois, superfluous man relentlessly portrayed in modern literature as politically useless, socially decadent and psychologically anxious” (Lebowitz 1978: 2). But where I turn the discussion in a somewhat new direction is by considering Svevo as a translator, by placing him in the company of other cultural mediators, and by calling into visibility the scenes of translation which sustain Triestine writing. Svevo’s fiction becomes a zone of mediation between the Italian language and Mitteleuropean concepts of subjectivity, challenging the Italian narrative tradition while allying itself with the powerful new forms of thought that would define European modernity. I will attempt to reconstruct some of the language-work that informs the writing of Italo Svevo and his city, and in particular to call up the forgotten sounds of German, once so powerful in lands throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Despite its geographical distance from most Habsburg cities, and despite the unique situation of the competing historical claims of Italian, Trieste and its language dynamics are best understood when placed within the broad constellation of Habsburg cities. Trieste, the fourth largest of these cities in the nineteenth century, shared the tension between an imperial tongue and a national language. These frictions produced a culture of mediation whose effects were decisive for the development of a modern, urban sensibility. This chapter will propose, after Calcutta, a new configuration of the linguistically divided city. The German language existed in Trieste more like a cultural and administrative overlay than as a resident tongue, and so the pattern of spatial division so germane to Calcutta and to the colonial city does not apply here. Yet the cultural influence of German was pervasive, by contrast with Slovene, which was geographically present and statistically important as the daily language of the large Slavic population, but had little literary interaction with Italian. It is the paradox of these distances and proximities that makes the literary culture of Trieste a source of unending

Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border  59 fascination – and which is most fruitfully explored through the inventions of a writer whose psyche reflected the complex divides of his city.

The polyglot city Joseph Cary’s capsule history divides the story of Trieste into three phases. Trieste I refers to “the small walled acropolis-cum-harbor that managed to persist under all sorts of economic, political, and military pressures from the second century B.C. up to the beginning of the eighteenth century”. Trieste II begins with the founding of the Habsburg free port in 1719, “the great Habsburg port-emporium lasting from the mid-eighteenth to the beginning of the twentieth-century”, and finally, III, “the Italian Trieste as established first with the dissolution of Austria-Hungary at the end of the First World War and then as reaffirmed – though now severely shorn of its neighbor territories in Istria and on the Carso – following Italy’s defeat in the Second” (Cary 1993: 41–2). Trieste II, from 1719 until 1918, is the period that is of most interest to studies of Trieste’s language interactions. This Trieste has often been invoked as a cosmopolitan mélange, its astonishingly diverse population crowding its streets during the boom years of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Language was a serious matter, Italian philology for instance – as championed by Domenico Rossetti – became a rich mine of history to be exploited in order to establish the pedigree of the city. The promotion of Italian stood in direct opposition to the Austrian policy of Germanization, and was a keen source of irritation to the Austrians. A sense of this ongoing friction is given in a rare allusion to politics in Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities. The year is 1913. Count Leinsdorf, a doddering bureaucrat, complains to the novel’s hero Ulrich that the “Austrian city of Trieste has been hiring only Italians, subjects of the King of Italy, in its civil service, to make a point that their allegiance is to Italy, not us”. On the Habsburg monarch’s birthday, no flags fly except on official Austrian buildings. On the King of Italy’s birthday, every clerk wears a flower in his buttonhole. Though this behaviour angers the Austrians, they are afraid to make a move which would unite the Slovenes and the Italians against them. Leinsdorf satisfies himself by reading Ulrich a long and convoluted statement emphasizing the enforcement of legalities and access to Austrian citizenship only for lawabiding employees, but Ulrich hears only official bluster. “Don’t you think, sir, on the basis of this last point, that in the last analysis this leaves things pretty much where they have always been?” (Musil 1995: 912–14). Musil corroborates the views of those who understood that in Trieste as elsewhere throughout its empire, the Habsburg regime often lacked both the will and the means to confront and transform different national cultures, retreating instead into an uneasy policy that combined accommodation with elements of divide and rule. This lack of direction was even more pronounced in Trieste where, in the interest of economic advantage, successive governments showed themselves willing to concede considerable latitude to the

60  Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border city’s commercial communities. More than once the Austrians were forced to defer to the collective will of the communities in the city – and back down (Waley 2009). The German language nevertheless was spoken widely among the Italian professional and business classes. German-language instruction was compulsory in all schools and any parent who wished their children to have a career in the Austrian empire had to send them to a German school. The fact that there was no university in Trieste meant that most Triestines went to Vienna or Graz for their higher education. German cultural societies and sport associations, newspapers, bookshops and reading circles were active in the city, beginning as early as 1719 (Magris 1976: 32, Campanile 2006: 154, Schachter 2000: 8). But language was also fun, as James Joyce discovered. The newspaper called Il Poliglotta, founded in 1902 by James Joyce’s Berlitz boss Almidano Artifoni, published articles written in Italian, English, German, French and Spanish. The pro-Italian satirical weekly La Coda del Diavolo also liked to use a variety of languages mixed together in a playful linguistic pot pourri that anticipated the exploded language of Finnegans Wake. “It published articles and letters written in Italianized Slav, Triestinized German and Frenchified Friulan” (McCourt 2000: 51).7 Triestines also showed a burst of enthusiasm for Esperanto around 1910, an enthusiasm parodied by Joyce when he has Bloom dream of Esperanto at the same time as he dreams of New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile. Three acres and a cow for all children of nature … All parks open to the public day and night. Electric dishscrubbers. Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy must now cease. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence, bonuses for all, esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood … Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state. Ulysses quoted in McCourt 2000: 73–4 Enthusiasm for Esperanto would make sense in a city ringing with languages, and where the messianic dreams of socialism were also an active ferment. There are few echoes of this brouhaha in what has become a largely Italian-speaking city today and in particular there are few echoes of the German language. Once the Austrians were noisily booted out of Trieste on the official day of Triestine Redemption in 1918 (a day described in his usual ironic manner by Svevo in The Hoax, as we shall see), the administrative presence of German disappeared.8 However, awareness and involvement with the broad realm of German-language culture and ideas remained. Because many Triestines were educated in Austria, they were familiar with the latest ideas of Weininger, Ibsen, Strindberg, Wagner and Freud and were the first Italians to be introduced to the ideas of Germanlanguage modernity (Schachter 2000: 11). The forms of engagement across the language border were multiform, and created a space of mediation which has yet to be fully explored. And so, before moving to Svevo, it

Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border  61 would be appropriate to mention some of the members of Trieste’s particularly illustrious “middle ground”. The list of the prominent actors and activities of mediation range from the writings of polyglot and cosmopolitan essayists Giorgio Voghera, Bobi Bazlen, Silvio Benco, Giani Stuparich and Scipio Slataper and later Claudio Magris, to the careers of influential translators Alberto Spaini and Ervino Pocar and to an unusually large community of women writers and translators. Of all these writers, Bobi Bazlen (1902–65) was the most mysterious, an enigmatic figure and a quintessential mediator who played an incalculable role in introducing modern ideas to Trieste by creating and maintaining contacts among writers and literary figures (Campanile 2006: 154, Lunzer 2009: 249–58). Bazlen translated writers and thinkers from German and was influential in making Mitteleuropa a focus of interest in Italian literature – notably by planning a program of publications which was later realized in part by the Adelphi publishing house. He appears as the object of a quest in novelist Daniele del Guidice’s Lo stadio di Wimbledon (1983) a writer who is famous although he has published no original work of his own.9 Bazlen nourished the very Borgesian desire to write only footnotes. Pocar (1892–1981) and Spaini (1892–1975) were especially well-known for their long and prolific careers as translators of German literature into Italian. While Pocar (originally from Gorizia) was a heroic figure in Italian letters, during his long career translating or overseeing the translation of more than 300 works from German into Italian (Macor 1997, Lunzer 2009), it is Alberto Spaini who is the quintessential Triestine mediator. He was not only a prolific translator but also an essayist with a profound sense of Triestine identity, his “selfportrait” of Trieste imbued with the history and spirit of the city. He was the first translator of Kafka into Italian – translating The Trial in 1933 (Pocar later re-translated the novel as part of a program by Mondadori to publish the complete and definitive works), and adding a short introduction in which he offered sickness as the key to Kafka’s symbolism (a very Triestine and Svevian reflection, as we will see). He continued to translate novels and theatre, including Brecht and Döblin. His was a deep and continuous involvement with German culture and literature, so that both his own writing and his translations were, according to the critic Bruno Maier “born from the same imperative to understand and to communicate a vast consciousness of the world of European culture” (afterword to Spaini 2002).10 Most of the figures mentioned above, including Spaini, were also in their early years contributors to the Florentine journal La Voce, through which Triestine intellectuals widened the boundaries of Italian culture thanks to their knowledge of German-language authors unknown in Italy. “Ben vengano quindi in tutte le forme i traduttori” (Welcome, then, to translators of all kinds) wrote Slataper in the pages of La Voce in 1912 (Senardi 2007: 116). Back home in Trieste, James Joyce took this traffic of idiom and theme to its most extreme point with his Finnegans Wake, in which forms of German figure prominently. The Wake was conceived and incubated in

62  Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border the polyglot atmosphere of Trieste (McCourt 2000: 55), and Joyce would take from his Triestine years a deep resistance to the nationalist obligation for linguistic purity and the joys of capitulation to an exuberant polylingualism. This portrait of the city as a site of mediation must include the translations undertaken by many cultivated and often erudite Triestine women especially before the First World War. John McCourt recalls the special reputation of Triestine women as highly educated and independent. “They studied music, often attended university (in Vienna, Graz, or Florence); they spoke, in addition to Triestino, at least three languages (Italian, German, and English or French), and were usually widely read” (McCourt 2000: 199). One of these women was Amalia Popper (1891–1967), who was a private student and then long-time friend of Joyce’s and perhaps even his lover. Popper translated five stories from The Dubliners in 1935 under the title Araby published by Carlo Moscheni in Trieste in 1935, and appended to this translation the first elements of Joyce’s biography to appear in Italian. A touching portrait of a lively and ambitious Triestine woman and her dreams of emancipation is given in Giani Stuparich’s Un anno di scuola (A Year of School), (1929). Following the example of her sister who lived an independent life in Vienna, Edda Marty becomes the first woman to enter a prestigious Ginnasio. Between Vienna and Trieste, a German father and a Slav mother, Edda flowers in rich cultural terrain – although the future looms dark with the menace of war. This portrait of a lively and independent young girl finds echoes in the experiences of numerous women writers of Trieste, though their history has only begun to be explored (see especially Curci and Ziani 1993 and Pizzi 2001), despite the huge literature which is devoted to other aspects of the literary history of the city. Trieste enjoyed a “true flowering” of women’s writing (Pellegrini 2004: 137) compared to Italy. On the Austro-Hungarian model, women in Trieste enjoyed relative emancipation and sustained access to higher education; they were active as journalists and writers although often relegated to the margins of the literary establishment – writing dialect novels or popular women’s fiction. Numerous periodicals were published for a female audience (Pellegrini 2004: 138). Writers such as Elsa Krückel Germani, Estella Paalen Wondrich, Moritz Horst (pseudonym of Anna Jahn), Maria Schmitzhausen, Luigi di San Giusto (pseudonym of Luisa Macina Gervasio) and Carolina Luzzatto were active in this milieu. Among the translators were Emma Conti Luzzatto, who translated Heine, and Clelia Gioseffi Trampus, who translated a number of German Romantic poets (Curci and Ziani 1993: 205–7). Slovenian women participated in the progressive journals Edinost and Slovenka, although few traces are left in the archives of Trieste (Pellegrini 2004: 152). Among the many prominent “femmes de lettres” who played an active part in Triestine literary life were Delia Benco, whose accomplishment as a novelist (Ieri 1937) was only part of her many literary activities, Anita Pittoni (1901–82) (see Pizzi 2001) and Willy Dias (pseudonym

Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border  63 for Fortuna Morpurgo,1872–1956). Dias was one of the most popular women writers to emerge out of the Triestine milieu and in 1946, at the age of 73, was elected as a Communist to the Italian Parliament (Curci and Ziani 1993: 286). By contrast, Haydée (Ida Finzi, 1867–1946), the other wildly popular Triestine woman novelist, a journalist and a fervent patriot, turned to Fascism. Language mediations were also concretized in the city space of Trieste through architecture. Perhaps because they were unsuccessful in making German the language of Triestine daily life, the Austrians were all the more vigorous in filling the city with Habsburg architecture. And this imposing built legacy, as the backdrop to today’s Italian city, continues to make for a particularly rich sensory dissonance. Architecture in the late Empire was indeed considered a sort of language,11 whose objective was to create an idiom common to all parts of the imperial territory. “To live in any one of these [Habsburg] centers was never to dwell just in that city alone” (Maier 1999: 25). Repeated design elements like the massive rusticated stones for banks and public buildings, the ochre colourings and repetitive decorative elements of theatres, concert halls, opera houses, courthouses, museums and universities, served to imprint all Habsburg cities with the same distinctive building patterns (Blau 1999: 15). Trieste’s massive downtown buildings exude the stolid self-confidence of Habsburg structures across Central and Eastern Europe.12 This solidarity reinforced the linkages created through networks of industry and finance, and through the large and intricate imperial bureaucracy. The castle designed in part by the young Archduke Maximilian himself at Miramare between 1856 and 1860, at the edge of the city, is an unusual Habsburg monument. It is a light and airy structure, advancing out into the Adriatic like a ship. It was at Miramare that Maximilian received the Mexican delegation which invited him to become the head of their country. Maximilian was wrong to accept the crown of Mexico and he died as a result. But Maximilian became a popular romantic hero, painted by Manet and grieved to madness by his wife Carlotta, and his castle represents less a monument to the certainties of empire than a reminder of the way the Habsburg ship finally foundered on the rocks of nationalism. Trieste’s visual aspect reinforced the paradoxes of its cultural identity – its outward allegiance to the empire, its inner nationalist aspirations. The play of attraction and resistance between the cultural prestige of German and the patriotic aspirations of the national language made for a pattern which expressed itself in similar ways in the entire range of Habsburg cities, from Lemberg and Czernowitz, to Budapest and Prague.13 All these cities produced literatures of mediation whose rich realities have only begun to be explored. A brief digression via one of these cities, Prague, will highlight the complexities of these cultures of mediation, and trace out the particular shape of Trieste against the broad template of the Habsburg city.

64  Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border

Source: Author

Figure 3.1 The Archduke Maximilian was a sailor and loved Trieste, the only seaport of the Empire. He helped to design the castle, outfitting one of the rooms as a ship’s cabin.

Meanwhile, in Prague Among Habsburg cities of the nineteenth century there is not only an architectural air de famille but also a linguistic family resemblance. But once this broad common pattern is established, one must inevitably confront a dizzying swirl of changing language and ethnic arrangements, which vary over space and time, and became the contested bases for increasingly bitter claims and counterclaims. The position of German, in particular, changes radically. Until well after 1850 cities in Bohemia, Moravia, Slovenia-Carniola, Hungary, Transylvania, Galicia and Bukovina were not only oriented toward Vienna but were also almost all German in language as well as culture. They were thus enclaves and administrative centres, separated by their urban culture as well as language from the surrounding Magyar, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian or Romanian rural peasantry. Blau 1999: 13

Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border  65 Both Prague and Budapest had mainly German-speaking populations until 1848 (Janik and Toulmin 1973: 49). Prague had been almost purely German in the early nineteenth century and Budapest more than 50 per cent German in 1850 (Blau 1999: 14). But while Budapest very quickly Magyarized as a result of industrialization and migration to the cities as well as the establishment of the Dual Monarchy in 1867, with relatively little animosity,14 the corresponding Czech revival in Prague was the cause of considerable tension and German-language culture (though representing only 10 per cent of the population) continued to exert a disproportionate influence (Lukacs 1988: 101–2 and Spector 2000). The cultural-linguistic situation of late nineteenth-century Prague was that of a strikingly divided city. Previously almost exclusively German, it now had a strong Czech majority. For centuries the Czechs and Germans had lived in Prague as two separate entities, and a kind of social code had prohibited them from establishing any meaningful contact: in the cities the Germans were the ruling class, while Czechs were the rural population lacking a developed middle class. But even after this social pattern was broken down at the time of the industrial revolution and the Czechs established themselves in relatively large numbers in the professional and cultural sections, there was little interaction between the two nations. Bock 1978: 239–40 The Charles University was divided into two separate institutions – one Czech, the other German; the National Theatre produced Czech plays and Czech operas, while the German theatre produced its own program. Prague did not become an important centre of German letters until the end of the nineteenth century, precisely at the time when German numerical and political strength in Prague started to wane under the impact of the Czech national revival (Bock 1978: 240). The reversal occurred roughly between 1880 and 1910, and the German-language community of Prague underwent a transformation in self-perception in response to the growth of Czech nationalism. Once having considered themselves at the centre of a universalist and hegemonic German high culture, by 1910 the community became aware that German-speaking (and largely Jewish) Prague was in fact an “island”. Its high standard of German, proudly maintained despite its isolation from German-language centres, now began to look like an artificial, “paper” tongue (Spector 2000: 20). The writers of Kafka’s generation had an acute sense of themselves as living between identities and languages. This transitional state was experienced not only metaphorically but literally, through the cultural topography of Prague itself (x). And from these uniquely charged spaces, and the overlapping layers of identity that “trapped the young Prague German-speaking Jews between identities inside and outside of the power structure” came the creative moment of the Prague Circle. The symptoms of a culture in

66  Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border transition between identities became elements which fostered a culture of modernity (5). Translation came to figure prominently during this period as a movement of mediation between Czech and German letters.15 This was a literature of the “middle ground”, one where German speakers, often Jews, sought to make links with the vital Czech Renaissance. These mediators introduced modern Czech culture to the world: the commitment to translating, mediating production of, or simply calling attention to new Czech works of art, music and literature was widespread among Prague German-speaking Jewish writers … so that this aspect of their activity seems inseparable from their own work. Spector 2000: 210 Most prominent among these was Max Brod (1884–1968), who is credited with the “discovery” not only of the composer Janáček but also of Hašek, author of The Good Soldier Schweik (211). Janáček’s opera Jenůfa, first performed in 1904, received its Prague premiere in 1916, with a German libretto by Max Brod and triumphed at the Vienna Court Opera in German (Wolff 2006: 684). The polyglot consciousness that was at the origin of these works was a source of considerable difficulty for translation. Janáček’s investment in the tonal cadences and speech melodies of Czech made any translation automatically questionable, since it was the Czech language itself that the composer wanted heard. Janáček was fascinated with what he called “speech melody”, a person’s unique expression at a certain time and setting with all its attendant drama. Janáček recorded these speech melodies in his notebooks, noting the age and sex of the speaker, the general atmosphere where the words were uttered, and the unique pitches, intonations, which for him “contained the deepest truth” (Christiansen 2004: 242). Janáček’s passion for Czech was enhanced by the strong German presence in his native city of Brno, making him especially sensitive to the contrasting forms of expression (262). And so the successful translation of his work would be a mystery to Janáček who wrote that “It is what has not been translated from the Czech that has triumphed: speech melody, the seat of the emotional furnace” (Christiansen 2004: 242). Brod also launched Hašek’s brilliant novel Schweik through his translation – this time from Czech slang into Prague German. Max Brod’s role as a brilliant scout and promoter of literary talent was well-seconded by his abilities as a translator. Rarely has a mediator been so effective in determining the direction of modernity’s course through Europe. Indeed, the entire extent of Brod’s influence on European literature has yet to be brought to light. Brod’s interest in translation began early and he collaborated with Felix Weltsch on a philosophical tract Anschauung und Begriff: Grundzüge eines Systems der Begriffsbildung (1913) in which translatability is defined (as it will be by Roman Jakobson) according to genre. Scientific concepts

Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border  67 can be “carried over” but the poetic text can only be “recomposed” (“nachgedichtet”) (Spector 2000: 212).16 Mediation from German into Czech is represented by a most appealing and tragic figure of Prague history – Milena Jesenská (1896–1944). Milena has become best known as the first translator of Kafka into Czech, as well as one of Kafka’s most important correspondents. She translated many works of European literature into Czech, and was also a prominent journalist and cultural activist. She was imprisoned by the Nazis and died in Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944. Kafka’s renewed interest in the Czech language was strongly linked to his intense relationship with Milena. And so Milena’s double role as translator and as amorous link to the familiar-strange Czech language nourished Kafka’s sensibility, his fantasies and his famous ambivalence, while translation became for Milena herself a significant means of expression. But a culture of mediation is also a culture of linguistic unease. In their study of another Habsburg city, Czernowitz, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer invoke the idea of “Deutschtum”, the persistence of a strong identification on the part of many Czernowitz inhabitants in the interwar period with the world of German-language culture, despite the fact that the city was Romanian. This identification enabled these citizens who had lived on the very edge of the Habsburg world to view themselves as European and cosmopolitan, and to continue to cultivate a literary culture in German. But linguistic insecurity was an inevitable element of this sensibility as Czernowitz writers struggled with the standards of distant German-speaking centres. This anxiety steered the writers of Czernowitz in two directions: towards an outmoded and overblown rhetoric, a sign of conformity to a perceived ideal of writing which was in fact dépassé – or towards an experimental avantgarde seeking deviant and original forms of expression (Hirsch and Spitzer 2010: 89–98). Though he was a member of a community which was much closer to the centre of German culture, Kafka too showed signs of linguistic unease. Kafka’s German was called a “paper German”, marked both by its Prague particularities and by Kafka’s longtime bureaucratic activities – which coloured his prose with administrative turns of phrase. This linguistic unease is also a factor in the writing of Italo Svevo, who was the most illustrious writer of his city as Kafka was of Prague. More than one critic has compared the stiff pedestrian prose of Svevo’s novels with Kafka’s deterritorialized German, both unhomely and artificial idioms of a changing Mitteleuropa, both the products of professional activities which involved bureaucratic forms of communication (Robinson 2006: 264). Like Kafka, Svevo lived in a linguistically divided city, whose literature emerged from the language negotiations of “the middle ground”. Both writers had to contend with the anxiety of language distress (as did, we recall, Bankimchandra Chatterjee in Calcutta). In the portrait I have drawn, Prague joins Trieste as a site of mediation.17 The double themes of mediation and language insecurity mark the literary

68  Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border landscapes of both cities, and show that Trieste participated not only in the commercial and administrative networks of Habsburg cities but also in their experiences of language dissonance. The affinity of Triestine writers like Alberto Spaini to Kafka, almost reaching the status of a cult, could be explained by the “common mental structures” experienced by the citizens of provincial cities under the power of the monarchy (Lunzer 2009: 125). The ironic and self-referential use of language is a defining element of the Mitteleuropean literary sensibility, a kind of Sprachskepsis – a fundamental mistrust of transparent language (Gatt-Rutter 1988: 23). Kafka’s legendary difficulty of allying himself with any particular language finds important echoes in Svevo, who had no “natural” literary language. Tuscan for Svevo was neither the language of his education (German) nor the language of his daily life (Triestino). All three of these languages played a part in the translational nature of his work. To explore now the ways in which mediation is enacted in Svevo’s fiction, the ways in which these transactions nourish his literary life, I turn to two “scenes of translation” – the first from Svevo’s first novel Una vita (A Life) (1892) and the second from his last completed story, “Una burla riuscita” (The Hoax) (1926).

Scene one: the library. Reading in German, writing in Italian The first scene of translation takes place in the Biblioteca Civica (the Civic Library) of Trieste. Una vita follows the progress of the young clerk Alfonso Nitti as he arrives in the city, takes up his post as a clerk in a bank, and works out the strategies that will move him upwards in his social and employment life. Like Svevo’s other characters, Alfonso is “tormented with an intense lust for self-improvement, spiritual or social, for education, wisdom or learning that will better them or their positions” (Roditi 1944: 346). He is aware that his conversation is lacking in wit, for instance. His rival Macario is far more verbally adept than he is, and Nitti is justifiably afraid that Macario will succeed in conquering Annetta, the bank manager’s daughter. To improve his Italian, Alfonso reads Tommaseo’s book of synonyms and uses this book to help poor Lucia, the daughter of his landlords, to study the Italian language. One of their language lessons focuses on the difference between the words “abandon” and “leave” (Svevo 1963: 79) – a distinction that will play out in the lives of both Lucia and Alfonso. Alfonso is partly sympathetic to and partly disdainful of Lucia who ends up being jilted by the cad she becomes involved with. But Alfonso is in fact the one who is most grievously abandoned. He deceives himself into thinking that he has broken off his relationship with Annetta, but he is finally destroyed by the realization that she has abandoned him. Alfonso’s evenings spent in the library of the Biblioteca Civica find him participating in the wave of Italian cultural enthusiasm initiated by the historian and humanist Domenico Rossetti. Alfonso reads learned philological journals dealing with such issues as the authenticity of Petrarch’s letters. “He plunged into reading an Italian bibliographical journal. He felt

Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border  69 that language was not obeying him and that he must go in for reading more Italian. For about an hour he read spontaneously and attentively … a discussion about the authenticity of some of Petrarch’s letters. When he paused he felt satisfied …” (Svevo 1963: 79). It is not difficult to see the relation between these evenings in the library and Svevo’s own experience as a writer struggling to master the Italian language. “Hostile Italian critics claimed that Svevo wrote Italian like a foreign language and was for that reason better read in translation and better appreciated by foreigners” (Gatt-Rutter in Classe 2000: 1360). Umberto Saba’s taunt that Svevo would have done better to write in good German rather than bad Italian, testifies to these lingering feelings of suspicion.18 Language was one of the most important obstacles to acceptance of Svevo’s work, and debates about his syntax and the impurities of his narrative diction were long at the centre of “the Svevo case”. The ambiguities around correct language are encased in a larger issue, that of “his role as a master who worked with an antiliterary style and temper that had at last found its time” (Lebowitz 1978:186). Svevo had long been reluctant to call himself a writer or a man of letters, and indeed became a kind of “antiliterary curiosity” whose style clashed with the tired rhetoric of “anachronistic Dannunzians and purists, of failed Manzonians” (186). But there were real language issues too. Giorgio Voghera, in his Gli anni della psicanalisi is one of the few to give a direct report of Svevo’s use of German in everyday speech. He thought in Triestino, but when it came to discussions of his own artistic creation (questions related to relationships and psychological motivation) he mixed into his Triestino expressions, terms, idioms and sentences from German. It wasn’t easy for him to translate this mixture into Italian, a language he did not master perfectly Voghera 1995: 4619 Detailed analysis of Svevo’s language as well as his own revisions of his manuscripts on the part of several critics has shown some interference from German, although in some cases this interference might have occurred rather as a result of influence from the Triestino dialect (Maier 1987: 171–97, Benevento 1977, Vanvolsem 1994). But these linguistic “errors” were compounded by the fact that Svevo’s plain prose was unfamiliar to the Italian tradition – and perceived negatively as showing a lack of mastery. It is not surprising then that Svevo was pleased to learn about other writers – like Dostoyevsky – whose diction was also censured by critics (Lebowitz 1978: 194). Svevo’s “defective” Italian prose and rich network of intellectual references are symptoms of his involvement in the German-speaking world and of the decidedly Habsburg face of his city. They also in many ways reflect the portrait of the Jewish citizen of the empire, who was, as Fritz Mauthner suggests, “automatically, a polyglot … I do not understand how a Jew born in a Slavic area of Austria could not find himself compelled into linguistic

Source: Author

Figure 3.2 Some joker has appropriately added Svevo’s eternal last cigarette to this poster painted on a wall beside the Museo Civico in Trieste.

Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border  71 studies”, writes Fritz Mauthner, who himself became a famous linguist. Any Jew would learn three languages at once: German as the language of the officials, of education, literature, and its offshoots; Czech as the language of the peasants and servant girls, and as the historical language of the glorious Kingdom of Bohemia; a little Hebrew as the holy language of the Old Testament and as the basis of that vulgarized German [Yiddish] which he heard spoken by Jewish junk dealers, but occasionally also by very well-dressed Jewish merchants in his environment, or even by his relatives … from Mauthner, Erinnerungen, 1918, cited in Blau: 1999: 47 This portrait also summarizes Svevo’s experience (with Italian substituted for Czech), his father having been Yiddish-speaking, Svevo himself having gone to Hebrew school as a child, then to German school in Bavaria, and growing up speaking both standard Italian and Triestino. Svevo’s hybrid pen name echoes the dissonance of his birth name of Ettore Schmitz – and the names he gives to some of his characters, including Zeno’s nemesis Guido Speier. That Svevo’s language situation is described as specifically Jewish was not always a standard feature of Svevo criticism. The extent of Svevo’s integration into the Jewish community has only recently been re-emphasized – following Svevo’s own down-playing of his Judaism, and the commentaries of his wife under whose influence Svevo converted to Catholicism (see Schachter 2000: 37–64, Camerino 2002: 129–44). But Svevo’s activities as a cultural mediator conform well to the portrait of the Triestine Jew. Lois Dubin’s classic study of the Trieste “Port Jews” explains the remarkable circumstances which early established Trieste as a city where Jews were welcome, and where there were virtually no limits on the economic activities exercised by Jews. The prominence of the Jewish community in modern Trieste, before the persecutions of Fascism, can be measured by the imposing size and startling modernity of the synagogue built in 1912 by the Triestine architects Ruggero and Berlam. The Triestine Jewish community became a model of enlightened Jewry for the Habsburgs, and it played an important role in mediating between Italian and German culture. “It was the Jews of Trieste and of nearby Gradisca and Gorizia who, by virtue of their location ‘on the German–Italian frontier’ and of their dual identity as politically Habsburg and culturally Italian, served as conduits and mediators between the Jewries of Ashkenazic central Europe and of Italy” (Dubin 1999: 120). Like the rest of the population, the Jews objected at the end of eighteenth century to the Austrian Germanization policies, refusing the adoption of German names in solidarity with the Italian population. “The Triestine Jewish protest against the adoption of German names was clearly based not upon allegiance to a Jewish tongue or a desire for insularity, but rather upon the Jews’ customary use of Italian” (98).

72  Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border Even the significant number of German-speaking immigrants who came to Trieste in the nineteenth century largely adopted Italian names, and indeed they were later forced to do so in the 1930s by the Italian Fascists – one example being the notorious apostate Chief Rabbi of Trieste Zoller who changed his name to Zolli (236).20 The importance of the library to Svevo’s character Nitti becomes evident against the backdrop of Triestine and specifically Jewish Triestine multilingualism. But Alfonso’s auto-didactic activities in the library were not limited to language learning – and here is the moment when translation comes more explicitly into play. On one of the evenings when Alfonso was studying at the Biblioteca Civica, he had an epiphany. “He had found his path! He would lay the foundations of modern Italian philosophy by translating a good German work and at the same time writing an original work of his own” (Svevo 1963: 78). We learn that the translation was never in fact carried out, but Alfonso did begin the preface to the essay whose title was to be The Moral Idea in the Modern World. “This work was to have no practical intention, which seemed to him quite new for Italian philosophy. His goal was purely theoretical and his idea was to show that the only basis for a moral idea in the world was the good of the community” (Svevo 1963: 78).

Source: Author

Figure 3.3 The Trieste Synagogue, dedicated in 1912, is one of the largest in Europe and today far too large for Trieste’s Jewish population which fell from some 5000 in 1922 to a few hundred after the Second World War.

Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border  73 Alfonso’s project which involves both translation from German and original writing in Italian is again an apt representation of Svevo’s own practice as a writer and thinker – and takes on particular significance when Trieste is defined as the “gateway” of German thought into Italian. Many Triestines were readers of German thinkers and integrated these ideas into their work. Slataper’s Il mio Carso is greatly indebted to a first-hand reading of Nietzsche, reviving the literary genre of a German romantic fable that was a mixture of allegorical, artistic and popular fables; he translated Giuditta by Hebbel and published his doctoral thesis on Ibsen (Camerino 2008: 105–6). The Stuparich brothers contributed their knowledge of Schiller, Nietzsche, Novalis, Tieck, Kleist and Heine. Umberto Saba introduced themes from Heine that were unusual in Italian lyric poetry during the first decades of the twentieth century, and is also indebted to Nietzsche for an emphasis on pain as an unshakable moral force (Magris 1976: 110). Svevo’s well-known passion for Schopenhauer pervades his best-known novel, Zeno’s Conscience and so it seems appropriate that Svevo would have his first hero immersed not only in Italian humanism but also in German philosophy. That Svevo suggests that Nitti might “renovate” Italian thought through translation from the German is an accurate reflection of the way Svevo was himself translating German philosophy into his writing and of the understanding – today quite taken for granted – of Svevo’s oeuvre as standing squarely and unequivocally within the broad European tradition of Kafka, Musil and Schnitzler. The question of Svevo’s literary identity and relationship to the Italian tradition was for many years a source of lively debate, parallel to the language question (Lebowitz 1978: 191). How was Svevo an “Italian” writer and how was he a “European” or a “Mitteleuropean” one? Language, as we have seen, was just one strand of this discussion, which extended more broadly into the area of literary and philosophical influences. One of the very first English-language essays to place Svevo on the European side was the essayist and translator Edouard Roditi in 1944. Rather than placing Svevo in the tradition of late Italian regional realism, or in the general category of postwar European literature (Proust, Joyce), Roditi argued that “It might prove more profitable and conclusive to place Svevo in a context of Austrian literature and compare him to those Austrian novelists whose culture was not strictly German and who often wrote in one or the other of the many languages spoken within the polyglot empire” (Roditi 1944: 345). Roditi mentioned Schnitzler, Robert Musil and Franz Kafka, in particular. “It seems as if the empire, though not always strong enough to impose one language on all its subjects, yet diffused a common Austrian culture among the various peoples within its boundaries” (345). Roditi points in particular to the “prosy” nature of Svevo’s work, his use of technical terms, and his use of a kind of elevated jargon used by the bourgeoisie that subconsciously parodies a previous style. An overcoat “condizionata in quanto a colore” (conditioned as to colour) is an example of this kind of commercially-tinted language, and Roditi links

74  Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border this mannerism to Kafka and his combination of fantasy and matter of fact language. “[H]is language, far from being the literary Tuscan of classical idealists or the colourful dialect of the realists or Veristi, is rather the sophisticated and nerveless jargon of the educated Triestine bourgeoisie that spoke Italian neither as a literary nor as a national language, but as a convenient and easy affectation of local patriotism” (345). The society that he describes is not typically Italian; his characters illustrate many qualities and faults of the Austrian bourgeoisie. Characters picked from the people are described as speaking Triestine or Friulian dialect, mixtures of Italian and Croatian, and the “buon vecchio” does not wish to teach the “bella fanciulla” correct Italian, when he decides to educate her, but German (Roditi 1944: 345). This last remark refers to a later work, “The Old Man and the Beautiful Girl”, in which, as in his early Una vita, Svevo again links language with social advancement but also with tactics of seduction. In his efforts to seduce a young woman tram driver,21 the old man advises her that she should learn German if she wishes to improve her chances of finding a better job. Of course, he is prepared to offer her these lessons, and so, from his earliest novel to his latest, language shows itself to be an important element of Svevo’s seduction tactics. Roditi’s evaluation stands up these many decades later, in particular after the recent detailed research into Svevo’s education in Segnitz, Bavaria (Hensel and Gatt-Rutter 1996) has revealed the extent to which he was a reader of German authors – the German classics as well as Shakespeare in German translation. The personality and political ideas of his teacher Samuel Spier also emerge as important influences. The extent of Svevo’s actual reading in German cannot be assessed with certainty. There are many indications that Svevo had an extraordinary knowledge of mostly German texts, and not only literary ones, from Central Europe, and it is for this reason that “the loss of the novelist’s private library, which was destroyed during World War II, cannot be sufficiently regretted” (Camerino 2008: 97). Svevo read the controversial works of Weininger in German “well before the First World War” and “most likely, it was right after the war that Svevo read Kafka’s first stories, doing so at a time when Kafka was unknown in Italy” (Camerino 2008: 97). It is known that Svevo was planning a study of Kafka when he died. Svevo’s early favourites were Goethe and Schiller, and Shakespeare in German translation, but his permanent favourite was Schopenhauer – from whose work, according to his wife, he would readily quote from memory (Livia Veneziani Svevo 1989: 19). Svevo’s enthusiasm for German-language culture extended to music, and he was from the start a great admirer of Wagner. He attended performances of the Ring Cycle, and became the first in Trieste to write about Wagner, in the Indipendente (Schachter 2000). The episode in Svevo’s second novel, Senilità, where Emilio takes his sister Amalia to hear Wagner, is a key episode in the narrative, the music heightening the turbulence of both their emotions – though Emilio feels he is the only one of the two to understand

Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border  75 Wagner and the “magnificent resonant wave [that] expressed all of human destiny” (Svevo 2001: 132). The episode points to the fact that Trieste was one of the cities where the cult of Wagner was most profoundly rooted – the Ring cycle was performed there in its entirety in 1883 (Schachter 2000: 10). As much as music, theatre (Nestroy, Schiller and Grillparzer in particular) was an especially visible aspect of German urban culture in the city. “The audience was in no way exclusively Austrian; the Italian public also welcomed opportunities to extend its scope of cultural life. Those who did not understand German were helped with impromptu translations by the bilingual audience” (Campanile 2006: 155). German translations of Russian writers but also Ibsen reached the Triestine public well before they were available in Italian translation, and bilingual literary journals like Adria included literary texts by German-speaking authors in Italian, while Italian literary journals like La Favilla and La Rivista printed translations of German texts (156). These links to the German language were clear indications of the prevailing mode of “reading in German”. But what of the link to “writing in Italian”? While the translation project that Alfonso conceived in the Biblioteca Civica was not realized in the course of the novel, a different version of this project did take place much later in Svevo’s own life. Around 1918, Svevo and his nephew, the doctor Aurelio Finzi, translated Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams into Italian (Stasi 2008: xv). No trace of the manuscript exists, but several sources make reference to the project and to the fact that it was carried out at least in part. Was this the work of philosophy that would transform Italian thinking? In fact Svevo himself acknowledged that he treated Freud more as a philosopher than as a therapist. He refers to Freud as well as others when he says: “It is the artist’s destiny to be inspired by a philosopher whom he does not perfectly understand, and the philosopher’s destiny not to understand the very artist he inspired … The intimate relationship between the artist and the philosopher is like that of a legal marriage, because like husband and wife, they don’t really understand each other and yet produce fine children” (cited by Roazen 2005: xv). That Svevo is indebted to Freud for the structure and premise of La coscienza di Zeno cannot be doubted. And the novel is surely one of the first – if not the first – novel to use the relationship between the analyst and the patient as its structuring principle. Svevo in fact expected credit as the individual who had introduced psychoanalysis into Italian culture. He sent a copy of La coscienza di Zeno to both Freud and Edoardo Weiss, the prominent Triestine psychoanalyst and early acolyte of Freud.22 When Weiss dismissed the novel, telling him it had nothing to do with psychoanalytic theory, and when Freud failed to acknowledge the novel, he was disappointed, for he had fantasized a response from the great Austrian doctor: “It would have been a great day if Freud had telegraphed me: ‘Thank you for having introduced psychoanalysis into Italian culture’. What would Svevo not have given to have received Freud’s testimonial to Arthur Schnitzler … ” (Lebowitz 1978: 29).

76  Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border Svevo throughout his life was obsessed with illness, and psychoanalysis was only one facet of his obsessive interest in techniques of healing, mental and physical. Zeno’s less than respectful attitude towards Dr. S. in the novel was also an extension of Svevo’s longstanding mistrust of doctors, who frequently appear in his novels as unsympathetic characters. The idea of “health” was not only physical but metaphysical as well, and Svevo showed himself a disciple of Schopenhauer in linking disease – and diseases of the will in particular – with concepts of the self and self-consciousness. These preoccupations were widely shared at the turn of the century. By virtue of his awareness of German-language culture, Svevo would have known of the German concern with the will and abulia (weakness of the will) (Cowan 2008). And so Svevo would have been familiar with the more popularized versions of will-power therapy that circulated at the start of the twentieth century. Nerves and nervousness were a metaphor that linked physical and cultural states, and were invoked to describe the perceived crisis of European society at this time. In particular, German-language discourse was saturated with projects for the overcoming of fin de siècle nervousness – associated with passivity, anxiety, pessimism and abulia, through the development of will power. Svevo works and reworks these questions throughout his novels and stories – casting a characteristically complex and ironic gaze on the questions of will power and art, in particular in response to Schopenhauer’s powerful understanding of the will as being devoid of rationality or intellect. Svevo’s Schopenhauer was not the philosopher of pessimism, but of intense self-consciousness, revealing the paradox of the will as a non-intellectual force and promoting art as an instrument of knowledge (Gatt-Rutter 1988: 68–9). While Schopenhauer’s influence is very clear in early works like Una vita (Nay in Cepach 2008: 46–7), both Freud and Schopenhauer continue to be important influences, illuminating the impediments to transparency in self-analysis, the impossibilities of acceding to the inner self and knowing its true essence, or identifying the irrational and impenetrable nature of the will. And indeed, in some ways, however, Svevo’s “discovery” of Freud was a validation of earlier impulses. As Teresa de Lauretis comments, It is a fact that Svevo became acquainted with the works of Freud around 1910, after his first two novels were written … And the recurrence in those works of all the “Freudian” motifs later to be included in Zeno’s Confessions only confirms Freud’s claim that Sophocles and Shakespeare had conceived Oedipus before he did … de Lauretis 1972: 96 Self-revealing dreams occur in Senilità (Amalia’s dreams), as well as a generalized atmosphere of sensual repression sublimated through art or good works. And so the ideas already manifest in the first two novels ultimately found scientific support in the discoveries of Freud. Triestine culture was especially receptive to psychoanalysis. Freud visited the city three times, in 1876, 1895 and 1904, but the longest time he spent

Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border  77 there was as a medical student doing research on eels at the Zoologische Station (Ricci 1995: 48–51). Though Freud had little personal impact in the city, his ideas took root early on. By calling his memoirs Gli anni della psicanalisi (The Years of Psychoanalysis), Giorgio Voghera shows how the atmosphere of the city was suffused with Freudian ideas and how the principal actors of Triestine literary life gave their own personal interpretations to these ideas. For Voghera, the two most important Freudians were Umberto Saba and Edoardo Weiss. The latter had not only been personally analyzed by Freud but was himself a therapist and influential translator of psychoanalytic theory in Italy. While Svevo and his nephew may have had the idea of translating Freud, it was Weiss who took the matter professionally in hand – producing Italian versions of several of Freud’s works (including Freud’s Introductory Lectures in 1921–2 as Introduzione allo studio della psicoanalisi and Totem and Taboo) and translating Freudian concepts in the form of an important work Elementi di psicoanalisi (1931) the significance of which has been recognized as foundational for the Italian tradition of psychoanalysis (Roazen 2005: xiv, Weiss 1985). As the first official translator of Freud, Weiss was faced with the dilemmas of finding an adequate vocabulary in Italian (Weiss 1985: xv) and Voghera claimed that there was no one in Weiss’ circle who didn’t offer suggestions – although whether he accepted them or not is unknown. Saba was certainly a consultant, as he was in analysis during this time. In the first pages of his introduction to his translation, Weiss has to find an equivalent for the German “es” which in English became the “id”. How to name, asks Weiss, the author of a dream? Who dreams? To say “I have dreamt” does not correspond to reality: the formulation should rather be something like “Mi venne fatto a sognare”: “It has come to me to dream”. But this sentence has no subject. In German, the passive sentence does have a subject, as in “Es träumt mir”, and therefore “das Es” is the most appropriate term, in preference to the English “id” or the French “soi” which Weiss dismisses as totally erroneous (Weiss 1985: 13). (Weiss’ terminology seems to have remained largely current in Italian psychoanalysis (Accerboni in Weiss 1985: xiii).) One wonders if Weiss would have made this choice had he not been a Triestine. This “es” would remind his readers of the German origin of psychoanalysis, as well as the syntactic structure which is lacking in Italian. Weiss clearly oriented the reception of psychoanalysis in Italy through his translations, as well as through his institutional positions as founder of the Società psicoanalitica italiana and the professional journal Rivista italiana di psicoanalisi. Weiss was forced to leave Italy in 1938 with the adoption of Mussolini’s Racial Laws, and access to his work was prohibited during the Fascist period (Bazlen 1970: 155). The testimonies of Giorgio Voghera, Roberto Bazlen, Umberto Saba and Edoardo Weiss show that Svevo’s enthusiasm for Freud’s ideas were in no way unusual in the Triestine milieu. Many of the members of the Triestine intelligentsia were involved in “translating” Freud in one way or another. What was particular about Svevo’s approach to Freud? Svevo half-seriously

78  Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border and half-playfully adopted the form of the psychoanalytic confession as the framing device of his La coscienza di Zeno, turning it to his own ends. As in his previous dealings with the medical profession, Svevo proves skeptical of medical knowledge and ends up by questioning the competence, in this case, of the analyst. In this act of rebellion Svevo introduces another kind of translation into his relationship with psychoanalysis. This is what happens. Towards the end of the novel, Svevo’s character Zeno confesses to his psychoanalyst, who has requested the account that makes up the novel itself, that everything he, the narrator, has written is “a lie” because it was written in a “foreign” language – Tuscan. Triestino is Zeno’s real language; Tuscan is a formal and alien language for which he must have recourse to the dictionary. And as one naturally avoids using the dictionary, Zeno explains, he has used only the words that came to him spontaneously – thus limiting the range of ideas and emotions he could discuss. This declaration has two effects. On the one hand, Zeno is undermining his testimony, questioning the truth of everything that he has written up until that point. On the other hand, Zeno is also attempting to take control of the psychoanalytic process and prevent the doctor from producing an interpretation which would be authoritative. By undercutting his own testimony, Zeno is taking over. The doctor puts too much faith in those damned confessions of mine, which he won’t return to me so I can revise them. Good heavens! He studied only medicine and therefore doesn’t know what it means to write in Italian for those of us who speak the dialect and can’t write it. A confession in writing is always a lie. With our every Tuscan word, we lie! Svevo 2001: 404 Is this a true declaration of linguistic incompetence or a typically perverse flourish on the part of an unreliable narrator and a recalcitrant patient? Svevo the author could surely have avoided this problem of “inauthenticity” had he chosen to conform to the model of the conventional psychoanalytic session, and use as his structuring device not a written memoir but a series of live oral sessions conducted, say, in Triestino. Orthodox psychoanalysis and especially more recent Lacanian versions of the talking cure – with emphasis on the materiality of the signifier – insist that the cure be undertaken in the patient’s native language, so that word associations are entirely spontaneous and the language flow is natural. But Svevo had no intention of writing dialect literature; for Svevo “literature” was always to be written in standard Tuscan. It is no accident, however, that the question of a natural or seamless vehicle of expression is written into Zeno’s quest, as it was written into Svevo’s own literary career. In order to produce literature, Svevo was obliged to write in Tuscan – and therefore in some sense to translate himself out of Triestino and into what would be his new literary idiom. To be a Triestine, Svevo is saying, means that one is necessarily between languages. The linguistic inadequacies of the Triestines inevitably lead to such a result,

Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border  79 because “by predilection, we recount all the things for which we have the words at hand … This is exactly how we choose, from our life, the episodes to underline. Obviously our life would have an entirely different aspect if it were told in our dialect” (404). The irony of the discussion is compounded by Zeno’s awareness that even Triestino would not yield access to an authentic, unmediated self. As a disciple of both Schopenhauer and Freud, Zeno knows that there is no transparent self to reveal, at least not consciously. Any self-revelatory narrative will be mediated through layers of language and discourse. But with this avowal he reveals Trieste’s particular language dilemmas as having had a part in the authorship of the narrative. That psychoanalysis should be the perspective through which the rifts of Triestine linguistic identity are most potently revealed is fitting. The novel expresses its Triestinità at an astonishing number of levels. Linguistic discomfort, the sense of being between languages, retroactively suffuses the novel. Strata of language take the form of a palimpsest reminiscent of Freud’s own topography of the mind: the underground id (Triestino), the surface ego (Tuscan) and the superego (German). Zeno’s flouting of the psychoanalyst’s authority (his counter-transference?) reveals these layers as a condition that complicates communication, that prohibits the authoritative translation of a disordered flow of thought into an idiom of mastery. The linguistic ground of Trieste reveals itself yet to be a space of translation. The modern hero is not only, as we saw, “politically useless, socially decadent and psychologically anxious” (Lebowitz 1978: 2), he is also linguistically fractured. Subjectivity is not a source of truth but an infinitely vast terrain of investigation. The recognition that the speaking subject does not control his language, does not “own” his thoughts, is what makes Zeno such a compelling narrator. He is as interested as the reader in the wanderings of his mind, as curious to know what comes next. It is coincidental – though appropriate – that Trieste would later be the site of another renewal in psychiatric practice, this time through the interventions of Franco Basaglia (1924–80). Basaglia was a charismatic proponent of anti-psychiatry, who after closing the asylum in Gorizia moved to Trieste in 1973 to introduce practices of de-institutionalization. The structure he found there was not a medieval institution but a relatively new building in the vernacular Italian style, built by the architect Lodovico Braidotti in 1908 as a reflection of both irredentist sympathies and the influence of progressive Viennese architects like Otto Wagner who were revolutionizing the look of asylums through sleek and inviting designs (Topp 2007: 742).23 The Asylum was yet another materialization of Trieste’s liminal position in relation to German-language ideas and styles.

Scene two: the hoax The Hoax takes place on the last day of the war, the very day when Trieste was liberated from Austria and “redeemed” by Italy, 3 November 1918.24 The “hero” and butt of the hoax is an aging and self-absorbed author, Mario

80  Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border

Souce: Photograph by Biagio Padovan. Property of the phototeca Civici musei di storia ed arte di Trieste, inv. n. cmsa_f_002975, and reproduced with kind permission.

Figure 3.4 The Trieste Asylum was built as a series of Italian Renaissance-style villas in 1908 by Lodovico Braidotti, a Trieste-based architect who had studied in Vienna.

Samigli (the pen name that Svevo used early in his life). His so-called friend, a travelling salesman named Enrico Gaia, has tricked him into thinking that his novel – published many years previously in Italy and long ago forgotten – has suddenly become of great interest to a major Viennese publisher. Gaia chooses the day of the Austrian defeat to spring his hoax on Samigli. Who do you think I saw in the crowd of the celebrations? Why, the representative of that Viennese publisher, Westermann. I got near him, just to tease him; he doesn’t know a word of Italian, but he was shouting with the rest. He wasn’t the least annoyed; he at once began talking about you. He asked how you stood with your publisher in regard to that old novel of yours, Youth ... Svevo 1930: 31 The encounter takes place in a city that has been turned “upside-down”. There had never been in the world such a crowd as there was between Vienna and Trieste at that moment. It swarmed all over the few trains

Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border  81 which were running, and flowed along the main roads in one long, uninterrupted stream, consisting of a retreating army and masses of middleclass people who were either emigrating or rushing to be repatriated, like a nameless herd of beasts driven by fire or hunger. Svevo 1930: 32 Was Westermann’s representative one of those caught up in this herd of beasts? Samigli is suddenly tormented by the disorder of the city. He who is a true citizen of Trieste, celebrating the Redemption of the city, is seized by the panic of those who are fleeing or expelled. What if his hope for fame were being driven away? Gaia reassures Samigli that Westermann’s agent has not disappeared (he has Italian nationality because he was born in Istria), and a meeting is arranged for the signing of a contract for the German edition of the novel. This meeting involves a scene of translation. The negotiations between the German-speaking agent of Westermann (an impostor), Gaia and Samigli are described several times as a babel of tongues. All of it is false – the contract, the identity of the agent, and the negotiations. Samigli misinterprets every aspect of the transaction, including the strange body-language of the agent – who holds himself stiff or trembles rather than burst outright into laughter. Conversation with Westermann’s representative takes place in German, with translation by the hoaxer. According to the contract, Westermann was to pay Mario 200,000 kronen, and for this sum he acquired rights of translation all over the world. Here to translate means to deceive or to mislead. Samigli’s pursuit of literary fame was fuelled by his own talent for self-deception, which is perfectly mimicked by the false scene of translation. For months Samigli waited for the contract to be respected, but finally learned the truth. Ironically, because of the devaluation of Austrian currency, the deposit of a bank draft which was part of the negotiations would earn Samigli a good profit. And so, though his ego was bruised, Samigli actually profited financially from the hoax. Samigli’s capacity for self-deception is closely linked to his abilities and his motivation as a writer. One of the most striking examples of his capacities for self-serving ratiocination occurs at the onset of the war. The Austrian Council of War has imposed a régime of strict censorship. As one of the few Triestine writers left in the city, Samigli feels that he has at last become an object of interest – to the censors. This idea of a captive audience re-ignites his interest in writing. But concerned lest the authorities sense his anti-Austrian position, he turned to fables, as a way of coding his message. He is agitated by a combination of terror and hope: will his work be read by the authorities (he hopes so!), will they punish him for it? (he hopes not!). In fact, as one might have suspected, literature was of no concern at all to the military authorities, but still Samigli credits the Austrians with stimulating his writing career. “His literary progress he owed to the police, who showed no sign of being aware that a native

82  Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border literature existed, and left him in peace during the whole war, reassured but disillusioned” (Svevo 1930: 14). When Svevo wrote this story in 1925, he must have been savouring all the ironies of his own sudden literary fame. And perhaps fearing events which might make this fame as fantastic, as improbable, and as fleeting, as Mario’s. Translation, as the link between Trieste and the outer world, is in Svevo’s typical neurotic fashion a subject of both joy and worry. That Svevo should couple translation with a threat of mystification and falsification is surely linked to his failed attempts to become an established writer. How does a writer come to literary fame? Svevo was largely ignored throughout his career, but in 1925 he was suddenly being translated into both French and German. How did this happen? It was in the years following the First World War that Svevo’s work fanned out over Europe through the widening networks of translation – from Italian into French, then German and English. Svevo’s reception beyond the borders of Italy made possible new Italian readings of his work and the gradual recognition of Svevo as a major writer within the Italian tradition. The story of Svevo’s fame illustrates the mysteries of translatability. What seemed like an alien language to the Italian critics of Svevo’s time became less so. The surprising turns of history, the decisive role played by the coincidental friendship of two very different men (Joyce and Svevo) united by their love of literature, the portrait of the 65-year-old writer flushed with the joy of finally finding readers, these make for an endearing tale. Validation from powerful internationally recognized critics changed expectations and created a wide readership. That fame came to Svevo from the French-speaking world first, before German, was certainly one of the major surprises of the story. It was to a German critic that Svevo wrote for approbation after the publication of his second novel. Paul Heyse (1830–1914) was the first German Nobel Prize winner, an important mediator between German and Italian cultures, a translator of Machiavelli, Foscolo, Leopardi, Manzoni, Alfieri, Ariosto, D’Annunzio, Ada Negri, and others, and an immensely influential writer. His response to Svevo was tepid and unencouraging – he found the subject of the novel and its main character repelling, and was filled with “disgust for his moral failings” (Stasi 2008: xxi). Recognition came, rather, through James Joyce and France – culminating in the first translations of Svevo being undertaken by the Frenchman Paul Michel. When Michel, in the course of translating Zeno, was given The Hoax to read, he immediately recognized Svevo’s fears over translation and rushed to reassure him. Michel wrote to Svevo in 1927: “M. Crémieux had me read your story Una burla riuscita … I hope you don’t identify with your unfortunate hero? Because your novel has indeed been translated and – please be assured – will be published” (4 March 1927, Stasi 2008: lxx). Svevo replied a week later, but not to reassure Michel. Indeed, he answered, he was worried and did identify with the hero of this story, because Crémieux had demanded that almost one hundred pages be

Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border  83 cut from the French version of Zeno (Stasi 2008: lxx).25 Svevo’s worries turned out to have had some basis – since the translation of his novel into French would mislead his French readers, giving only a truncated version of Zeno’s tergiversations.

Trieste-Triest-Trst The reverse side of this success story, and the cruel paradox signalled by The Hoax, is that the widening links opening for Svevo were being made as Trieste itself was becoming less international, less multilingual. Svevo’s choice of the very day of the Italian victory to tell his story of deception and translation is powerfully significant. This was the day that the German language was banished from Triestine territory, and connections to the outside world diminished with the disorderly flight of Austrian nationals out of the city. It is this link that caused Bondy to remark that “One notes in this tale to what degree the Italian patriot felt himself belonging to the German culture of Central Europe …” (Bondy 1967: 579). The acid humour of The Hoax suggests an ironic reading of Trieste’s day of “victory”. Samigli’s story of writing and self-deception seems to mirror the self-perception of the city as the decade progressed and the city’s dream of cultural self-realization was embittered by economic decline and the rise of Fascism. No longer a crossroads of culture, Trieste was becoming a city in which opposition to outsiders hardened into aggressive anti-Slav – and later anti-Semitic – policies. There is an interesting parallel here to the arc of the career of Austrian author and critic Hermann Bahr, whose association with Trieste is most famously replayed through his characterization of Trieste as “the city of nowhere” (used by Jan Morris as the title of her popular book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere). Bahr would have been well known to Svevo and indeed to all cultivated Europeans. He was one of the best-known playwrights and a very prominent critic. His 1916 study on expressionist painting in its relation to the will was particularly influential (Cowan 2008: 5). Bahr was also a cultural activist, mediator and a proponent of “Austria of the nations” as a solution to the problem of nationalities (Daviau 2003, 2004). Beginning as early as 1889, he adopted the role of mediator between Germanic and Slavic cultures, and “unleashed into the German-speaking world a steady stream of articles in newspapers, journals and books, heralding all of the newest literary and artistic trends and tendencies occurring other countries” (Daviau 2004, online). Bahr was resolutely modern, vigorously opposed to anti-Semitism, and dreamt of a new European identity and a more tolerant Empire. This dream was shared at least in its political aspects by such Triestine thinkers as the socialist Angelo Vivante, Scipio Slataper and the Stuparich brothers. Giani Stuparich spent a year at university in Prague, and also developed the ideal of an “Austria of nations” in La nazione ceca (The Czech Nation, 1915) and in the pages of La Voce (Senardi 2007: 57). But the triumph of Irredentism in Trieste and the dispositions of the Treaty

Source: Author

Figure 3.5 Claudio Magris’ favourite café, the Caffè San Marco, has become a symbol of Mitteleuropean Trieste.

Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border  85 of Versailles meant that this idea of a plurinational empire was roundly rejected in favour of separate nations. The previously lionized Bahr became an object of hostility. Bahr’s star fell as Europe after 1918 took on a very different political and cultural configuration (Daviau 2004). Indeed, the realization of a redeemed Trieste had sinister implications, as the exacerbated patriotism of the Triestines turned into an uncritical embrace of Fascism. Presumably because of Trieste’s cosmopolitanism, but also because of Mussolini’s popularity there, Mussolini chose Trieste as the site for his 1938 speech on the new racial laws. Svevo’s wife Livia was forced to take flight, having been denied Aryanization (despite her family’s conversion to Catholicism and Svevo’s mother-in-law Olga Veneziani being an early member of the Fascist party in Trieste). Svevo’s early death in 1928 saved him from the tragedies of Nazism, but his bust in Trieste was desecrated by anti-Semites in 1939 (7 September 1939). The novelist Haydée (Ida Finzi) was a particularly pathetic example of the betrayals of the Fascist regime, she who had been a popular novelist and once a particular favourite of Mussolini’s. She was able to escape the Nazis, but her daughter was taken to Auschwitz, as were more than 1000 Triestine Jews (Cusin 1998: 143). Today’s memorial at the concentration camp of Risiera di San Sabba,26 situated not far from the former site of Svevo’s home in the industrial region of the city, recalls the spectacular breakdown of Trieste’s culture of mediation. The Fascist regime left a physical imprint on Trieste. The promised university took the form of a massive concrete structure looming over the city. Urban clearances resulted in the demolition of hundreds of houses in the very oldest part of the city, the Cittavecchia, between 1934 and 1938. The quarter had been run down, and associated both with the Jewish community and with dissolute bars and brothels. Its labyrinth of streets was a strong contrast to the ordered grid of the Borgo Teresiano – the area reclaimed from the salt marshes by the Empress Maria Teresa. Joyce had been attached to the bars and seamier establishments of the Cittavecchia. He celebrated both the old quarter and the languages it generated in this passage from Finnegans Wake: Not to wandly be woking around jerumsalemdo at small hours about the murketplots, smelling okey boney, this little figgy and arraky belloky this little pink into porker but, porkodirto, to let the gentlemen pedestarolies out of the Monabella culculpuration live his own left leave, cullebuone, by perperusual of the petpubblicities without inwoking his also’s between (sic) the arraky bone and (suc) the okey bellock … Joyce 1972: 368.9–15 This vision of the old city as a site of poverty, dilapidation and unleashed libido was perhaps a motive for the “corrective” action taken by the authorities. “The area had become poorer and poorer, a place where only the least fortunate Jews lived. Destroying it was a way of erasing the ghosts of the past” (Cusin 1998: 158). Thus, there was little opposition to the clearance,

86  Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border either from Jews or non-Jews. Umberto Saba was one of the rare intellectuals to regret the razing of the neighbourhood, a “renovation” which still disfigures the city today. Saba was profoundly attached to the Jewish history of Trieste, and to its ghetto. His tales of ghetto life reimagine the life of the Jewish community in the 1860s. In his novel Ernesto the Cittavecchia is charged with erotic connotations. Saba was forced to leave Trieste during the war years and he wrote with vehemence in his prose (his epigrammatic Scorciatoie or “short-cuts”) of the crimes that had been committed by both the Italian and the German Fascists (Saba 1964, 1976). Fascism changed the meaning of translation between German and Italian. The political implications of translation were set out in crude terms in the notes of a consultant such as Lavinia Mazzucchetti at Mondadori who in the 1930s advised against translating Joseph Roth because his pacifist ideas and nostalgia for the old Austria were not “useful” to Italy (Corriere della Sera, 17 March 1995: 29). The possibilities of translation into Slovene changed as well. The triumph of Italy in 1918 and the advent of Fascism resulted in tightened restrictions against Slovene and made translation between Italian and Slovene impossible.To read the record of interactions between these two literary communities is to become aware of their strictly “parallel” trajectories (Košuta 1997) and their separate imaginative universes. What little translation did take place was an expression of distancing.27 No author better represented the raw impossibilities of translation than Boris Pahor (1913– ). The important oeuvre of Pahor was widely translated into French,28 and Pahor himself received the French Legion of Honour before his major works were translated into Italian. Pahor was suddenly welcomed into his home city in 2008 (at the age of 95) when his most famous novel Nekropola (published in Slovene in Trieste in 1967) was finally translated into Italian by a major publisher. The scandalous neglect of a literature which was produced in such close proximity to the voluminous and self-conscious Italian-language literature of Trieste was finally visible, and indeed publicized extensively (La Repubblica, January 2008, Il caso Pahor (“The Pahor Case”). Necropolis (2007) is a major work of concentration camp literature, based on Pahor’s year in the Struthof concentration camp in 1944, and has been compared to the novels of Primo Levi. This publication was quickly followed by others including Qui è proibito parlare (2009), a programmatic novel which Pahor wrote during the 1960s and which describes the political radicalization of a young Slovene in Trieste during the 1930s and 1940s. The novel conveys the atmosphere of intense repression which affected all Slovene cultural expression during the Fascist years. Pahor is a remarkable exponent of the Slovenian experience in Trieste, a witness to the subjection of Slovenians in Trieste from the 1920s onwards and the struggles of the pre-war and the wartime periods.29 His career illustrates the “paradoxical space” given to Slovene-language writing in Trieste. Slovene had a significant street presence in Trieste in the years leading up to the First World War, and enjoyed a period of cultural flourishing as

Habsburg Trieste: anxiety at the border  87 represented by the imposing building of the Narodni Dom, the Slovenian national centre located in the Hotel Balkan. But the building was an early object of violence by the Italian Fascists who set fire to it in 1920. Slovene language and culture were prohibited during the 1920s and 1930s. Forced Italianization of Slovenes (Colombi 2006), the events of the Second World War and the conflict between the new Yugoslavia and Italy only exacerbated the antagonisms between the communities. Pahor’s work takes place in the “imagined representation of the concrete space of a Slovene in Trieste” (Campanile 2006: 160). But if once the space allowed to a writer like Pahor in Trieste was only imaginary, the recognition given to Pahor through translation into Italian seems to confirm Claudio Magris’ sense that the “grand, painful, obsessive, guilty” history of Trieste is turning a page. For Magris, the fact that Boris Pahor is now recognized and celebrated as “our writer”, that he was chosen by the local newspaper, Il Piccolo, to write the yearly commentary on the memorialization of “le foibe” (the sites of Second World War atrocities where Italian-Slav memories conflict most conspicuously) – this recognition would have been unthinkable only a few years previously (Magris, Il Piccolo, 24 August 2008). Pahor’s sudden literary fame through translation parallels the earlier story of Svevo’s sudden recognition. As the furthering enacted by translations of Svevo stands for the remarkable modern sensibility that emerged out of the ruins of the Habsburg Empire and the chaos of the First World War, the translation of Pahor represents a later moment of historical reckoning. It recognizes the rifts of a city whose eastern edge had become the Iron Curtain, giving its inhabitants “the impression that the dividing line passed through our very being” (Magris 1999: 53). The double story of translation reinforces Trieste’s identity as a site particularly suited to express the instabilities of modern consciousness, its sense of interior division, marginality and ambivalence. The most recent turns in Trieste’s fortunes result from the creation at the turn of the twenty-first century of a cross-border Euroregion which, instead of separating Trieste from the realities across its eastern border, turns Trieste into the most positive version of a border city.30 No longer at the edge of the empire, Trieste now finds itself at the centre of a new cultural and economic zone, with plans to revitalize its port as a gateway to the east. The meaning of Trieste’s borders are shifting again, and will in turn modify the interchanges among Trieste’s languages. Translation remains a trope central to Trieste’s history, but the trope only works if it can account for the changing effects of these language relations and the weight of the memories they express. This conclusion applies to all the cities in this book. In each case, the friction between languages constructs a culture of mediation which takes shape against the changing landscapes of history.

4 Barcelona The cracked mirror of selftranslation

When the Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda returned to Barcelona in the early 1970s after thirty years of exile in France and Switzerland, she found her city transformed. “Nothing is the same as before”, she complained. Her own neighbourhood, Sant Gervasi de Cassoles, with its picturesque towers, gardens, and grand old houses, had been a proud village, “breathing Catalan”. But Rodoreda had left this idealized world behind her when she, like her character Aloma, moved downtown to become part of the politically active Catalan intelligentsia in the 1930s. Like many others, she was then driven into exile by the defeat of the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War and the long dictatorship of Franco. The city she returned to in 1971 had been altered both physically and culturally. The few stately houses remaining in her neighbourhood were now dwarfed by apartment buildings. And the city had become home to a large population of Spanish-speaking workers from the south of Spain who were lured to Barcelona between 1950 and 1975 as part of Franco’s deliberate effort to suppress Catalan culture. In an interview with Montserrat Roig in 1973 Rodoreda was dismayed to find that Barcelona had become “a bilingual city. People speak Castilian1 everywhere, in the shops, in bars, in taxis” (Roig 1975: 53). The prewar Barcelona, tranquil and proud of being European and Catalan, had given way to “a noisy, depersonalized and hybrid city”. It is not surprising then that Rodoreda chose to leave the city and settle in the Catalan countryside – where she lived until her death in 1983. The Barcelona she evoked in her modernist novels, and in particular the emblematic Plaça del Diamant, had become part of a new cultural constellation – one from which Rodoreda felt alien. The statue of her character, Colometa, which now stands in the Plaça, and the gardens reconstituted in her honour on the roof of the Casa de la Convalèscencia on the Ramblas, are markers of a long-ago city. Rodoreda’s discomfort with Barcelona stands in sharp contrast to the views of other Barcelona writers at the time. In the early 1970s, the young writer Montserrat Roig carried out a series of interviews with Barcelona writers about their relationship to writing, language and the city, taking the pulse of the final years of Franco’s regime. Writers like Juan Marsé and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán had attitudes toward the city that were quite

Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation  89

Source: Author

Figure 4.1 Colometa, the heroine of Rodoreda’s classic novel, in today’s Plaça del Diamant in the neighbourhood of Gracià.

different from those of the older Rodoreda. They had grown up in Barcelona during the dark postwar years when Rodoreda was in exile, in neighbourhoods which were far from genteel – Marsé in the district known as Carmel, in the north of the city beyond Parc Güell, and Vázquez Montalbán in the Raval, the traditional working-class neighbourhood in the Old City. Both were proudly attached to their city – and both wrote about Barcelona not in Catalan, but in Spanish. The rifts between neighbourhoods, classes and languages produced two species of Barcelona writers – those who write in Catalan and those who write in Spanish. The conflict has hardly diminished since Roig’s investigations in the early 1970s. Her playful tone in the exchange with Marsé is revealing. They are still friends, she jokes, even though they don’t agree on language issues. Roig is no longer alive and so we don’t know if that friendship would have lasted. Marsé has taken some controversial positions in recent years, especially as a signatory of the infamous 1997 Foro Babel Manifesto which was signed by ninety Barcelona writers and intellectuals in protest against renewed measures to protect and promote the Catalan language. These writers claimed that the Catalan language had already achieved “normality” in a bilingual environment. A more recent controversy

90  Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation arose when Catalonia was invited as a special guest of the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2007, and Spanish-language Barcelona writers were excluded. When Marsé was awarded the prestigious Cervantes prize in 2008 (the first Catalan to receive this Spanish-language Nobel) he declared in his reception speech: “I am Catalan and I write in Spanish and I see nothing abnormal in that … We are enriched by our cultural duality”.2 This “cultural duality” has been a reality of Barcelona life throughout its history, taking on different forms and different degrees of intensity. During the long era of Francoism, public use of the Catalan language was prohibited and so an entire generation of writers – of whom Marsé and Vázquez Montalbán are important representatives – had no choice but to attend school in Spanish. Were a new series of interviews to be undertaken now, the affiliations of today’s writers would be different. Regional government was restored to Catalonia in 1977 and in 1983 the first Llei de normalització lingüística (Language normalization law) was introduced. Children today are educated in Catalan, and live in a city where Catalan is given maximal prominence by an array of governmental bodies. The recent publication of a very successful novel in Catalan by a Moroccan-born author, The Last Patriarch by Najat El Hachmi, winner of the Ramon Llull prize (2008), points to new cultural affiliations being created through the Catalan language. Nevertheless, the presence of Spanish in Barcelona is powerful, and writers negotiate among the various possibilities of expression – sometimes using Castilian in one area, Catalan in another (as is the case for Quim Monzó, who is a journalist for the Castilian-language Vanguardia and writes his novels in Catalan, or Eduardo Mendoza who writes plays in Catalan and novels in Castilian, or Terenci Moix whose most popular novel had “original” versions in both Spanish and Catalan, or Carme Riera who writes Castilian versions of novels she first writes in Catalan). And despite the necessary measures to protect and promote Catalan, and the vigorous creative life of Catalan theatre, cinema, and literature, the idea of a “Catalan culture in Spanish” has become a recognized (though still controversial) category of expression. Most novels of Barcelona take for granted a basic fiction: they assume that the city is either Castilian or Catalan speaking, depending on the language in which the novel is being written.3 Only occasionally is a word or expression of the other language dropped into the text, as a reminder of the unavoidable language contacts of daily life. Literary institutions remain rigorously separate – with Spanish-language writers at a disadvantage on the local scene where Catalan associations are dominant, and vice versa in the rest of Spain. As in the other dual cities in this book, the friction and complicity between Barcelona’s two main languages shape the imaginative landscape of the city. But several aspects of the geography of contact are unique to Barcelona. Spanish and Catalan are Romance languages both born in the Iberian peninsula in the twelfth century (castellà and català), and sometimes a single letter can distinguish words in one language from the other, making

Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation  91 for a closeness which can be confusing.4 But while the surface resemblances between the two languages might suggest easy communicability, in fact the separate oral traditions and the weight of centuries of parallel literary histories add layers of impenetrability. This mix of familiarity and strangeness, closeness and distance, is replicated in the demographic mix of the city, with its double population of “native” Catalans and “immigrant” population of Spanish speakers originally from southern Spain who flooded the city between 1950 and 1970. Like the languages they speak, these populations are similar and different – sharing their national affiliation but participating in very different histories. The status of Castilian in Barcelona as a state language means that all Catalans are bilingual, educated to be able to function in both languages (Pujolar 2001: 16–17, Boix-Fuster 2003). The history of long years of suppression and the precariousness of a language forced to converse daily with its stronger twin make for the special character of the Barcelona language scene. Self-translation and the figure of the double take on special significance under these circumstances, and they will be our point of entry into the tumult of Barcelona letters. After Calcutta and Trieste, Barcelona suggests yet a new spatial configuration of the dual city – one which is best represented neither by territorial divides (as in the colonial city) nor by a horizontal overlay (as in the Habsburg city). Like Rodoreda’s neighbourhood of Sant Gervasi, Catalan-identified neighbourhoods are scattered throughout the city, in many cases correlated with the upper middle class. Translation navigates through subterranean routes whose patterns are similar to the network of passatges that honeycomb the city, moving between languages of uneven power, between the confidence of Castilian and the energy of Catalan, forced to ensure the conditions of its own survival and flourishing. Some symbolic sites take on special importance as nodes or switching-points – or, by contrast, as unruly zones of hybrid identity like the historic core area, the Raval, which disturbs Barcelona’s longstanding narratives of difference. The fictions of Juan Marsé and Carme Riera offer rich reflections on translation as it plays through the collective consciousness as well as on the individual psyche. Both show how language dynamics shape the class and identity conflicts that are a legacy of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism.

Misaligned languages “Barcelona’s modern history is bound up with the struggle to retain its linguistic identity”, writes Joan Ramon Resina (Resina 2008: 143). For Resina, this modern history can be given a quick summary: it began with the cultural reawakening of the Renaixença (Renaissance) towards the end of the nineteenth century, with excitement over a rediscovered Catalan literary heritage and the publication of Pompeu Fabra’s great dictionary in 1913, and it entered a period of decline in 1992 with the Olympic Games, “as the hopes for linguistic reclamation after the death of Franco were dashed by the refusal, on the part of a sizeable segment of the immigrated population,

92  Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation to go along” (144).5 Resina’s suggestion that the decline of Barcelona is due to the “refusal” of part of the immigrated population to “go along” with the renewed national project of Catalonia points to the bitter divisions that haunt the imagination of Barcelona. The workers who flooded into Barcelona from other parts of Spain, some 1.8 million between 1950 and 1975 (King 2005: 36), are seen by some as refractory to the Catalan national project, refusing to take on the collective memory of Catalan history and language. Resina’s peremptory verdict fixes responsibility for what he considers the inevitable disappearance of Catalan on outsiders who refuse to become insiders. His frustration resonates with many similar situations around the world, where there are perceived difficulties in conscripting newcomers into an unfamiliar cultural memory, especially one which carries the weight of defeat or the handicaps of a minority position. Immigrants gravitate towards vehicular languages, those which circulate without the burden of affective links and which promise the most direct route to social and economic integration. While Resina is referring to the Spanish-language immigrants of Barcelona, the chasm of difference he fears can only deepen as new waves of workers from North and Central Africa, the Middle East, and Asia become a part of Barcelona’s population. Yet Barcelona’s history has always been one of interaction between insider and outsider codes, between vernaculars and international languages (Davidson 2006: 169). The struggle between Castilian and Catalan did not begin with Franco. In 1716 Philip V banned Catalan from all public areas and activities (Anguera 2003) and the struggle for language rights continued throughout the nineteenth century, culminating in the revival of Catalan literature during the Renaixença. Catalonia’s entry into modernity in the late nineteenth century involved not only a rediscovery of its language and literature (including the rich literature of the Middle Ages and its history as a prosperous medieval trading culture) but an engagement with the boldest trends in international art, placing Barcelona’s literature, music, architecture, and visual arts in the mainstream of the European avant-garde. The city grew into a metropolis during a spectacular period of economic growth, due in large part to the opening of trade with the American colonies, allowing the Catalan bourgeoisie to acquire fabulous wealth. This wealth continues to mark Catalonia as an anomaly among minority regions in centralized states. Despite the reversals of history, including the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923–30), and the ravages of the Franco era, the Catalan bourgeoisie endured and prospered. Though Catalonia is politically subordinate to Madrid, it has not experienced the economic underdevelopment that typically characterizes such a position. “Catalonia’s early economic lead over the rest of Spain gave rise to a second phenomenon unusual in a minority region: a primarily non-native working class” (Woolard 1989: 2–3). This arrangement explains the peculiar situation of the Catalan bourgeoisie in its own capital city. While Catalan continues to be the language of a self-confident community, it struggles to maintain symbolic control over a diverse and divided metropolis.

Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation  93 While language issues remain omnipresent in the press, strongly linked to pressures for the increased autonomy of Catalonia within Spain, and while the civic use of Catalan is relentlessly promoted by governmental bodies (with increasing success, despite Resina’s perception, among the younger generations of immigrant populations), while purists struggle against the hybridizations that are a feature of Barcelona’s Castilianized Catalan and its Catalanized Castilian, language tension is sometimes entirely absent where one might expect it. Many of Barcelona’s most prominent Castilian-language writers evoke a city without Catalan. Eduardo Mendoza’s City of Marvels is an internationally successful novel which chronicles the history of the city from its first International Exhibition in 1888 to the next in 1928. Except for place names and family names, there are no allusions to the Catalan language itself. The same is true for Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s international bestseller The Shadow of the Wind, also written in Castilian and lovingly evoking the dark mansions and atmospheric byways of the Barri Gòtic. This language-neutralization is the result of a particular kind of self-translation. It indicates that the language of the Barcelona novel will always be in some ways out of kilter, misaligned, with the sociolinguistic reality of the city. Choosing to write in one language or the other dictates which social or linguistic references will be excluded. Eduardo Mendoza has written plays in Catalan and he functions as part of Catalan literary society. And yet it was possible for him to depict what was an emphatically Catalan city (1888 to 1928) in language which is not obviously Catalan-inflected. From Mendoza to Zafón and many others, Castilian-language writers in Barcelona have become adept practitioners of a form of self-translation which is covert, resulting in the effacement of the language of lived experience. The mixture of idioms that make up daily conversation is transferred to Castilian before it sees the page. Barcelona’s self-translation is all the more curious when brought into dialogue with the literary practices of a similarly “dual” city like Montreal, where institutions and convention emphasize the separate patterns of language life. In Montreal, as will be seen in Chapter Five, the city is recounted in one language or the other, and only exceptionally would French experience be recounted in English or vice versa. Rare are the writers who would translate their city out of its home territory, or consider translating their own work into the other language. The longstanding practice of the city is to perpetuate distinctive and separate language institutions – mediated by professional literary translators. The differences between the translational practices of Montreal and Barcelona highlight the theme of this book – that the meeting of languages across the city is mediated by the historical and social imaginary, by its distinctive spatial and cultural dispositions. Montreal is a divided space which has fostered autonomous practices on each side of the rift. Barcelona, by contrast, is a space of overlapping and doubled realities, where languages impinge on one another. Self-translation takes on increased importance in this context, negotiating the gaps and aiming for an equivalent degree of

94  Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation aesthetic mastery. Rarely will the result be identical. In fact, self-translation heightens the potential for self-betrayal, and it is not surprising that the contention between languages and identities in Barcelona has inspired the pervasive themes of “warring twins” or “distorted mirrors” in its fiction. The novelists Juan Marsé and Carme Riera are both self-translators – the first covert, the second overt – and they use the figure of the double to highlight the city’s tensions of language. Their dramas are linked, in different ways, to the culturally saturated spaces of the city. Self-translation is only one kind of writing practice in a city where longstanding cultural rifts have led to many different kinds of communicational strategies, including indifference; where English is an increasingly important player;6 where cinema, theatre, the press and television all contribute to language consciousness; where “both groups consider the contamination of the other language as a step forward, as if languages were territories that had to be conquered one word at a time” (Solana 2006a: 407). The figure of the double as it appears in numerous Barcelona authors may appear to be a somewhat simplified window onto a complex and layered reality, and yet the trope is pervasive. I begin with a novel which has the clarity of a fable, and which proposes a literal representation of Barcelona’s doubled urban space.

Breaking down the walls, constructing passatges The setting of L’últim home que parlava català (The Last Man who Spoke Catalan) (2009) by Carles Casajuana is an apartment building in the Born neighbourhood of Barcelona – a building in an advanced state of disrepair, emptied of its tenants except for two stubborn writers. The owner of the building wants to renovate in order to sell off the building and cash in on the real estate boom. Despite extravagant buyout offers, Ramón Balaguer won’t leave. He claims that he can’t finish his novel without the security and inspiration of his apartment and surrounding neighbourhood. Miquel Rovira, on the other hand, is just squatting. He actually has no home, and sleeps in the parking garage where he works as a night guard and camps out in the abandoned apartment during the day. These are the simple plot elements of a programmatic novel whose subject is language. Most of the novel is taken up with arguments between the two writers about the languages they have chosen to write in – Catalan for Balaguer, Spanish for Rovira. Each is convinced of the superiority of his position, bringing in social, aesthetic, and political arguments to support each point. Their “sharing” of the space of the apartment in fact reflects the reality of the latest sociodemographic statistics for Barcelona: about half of the population of the city considers itself Catalan-speaking, the other half Spanish-speaking (Boix-Fuster 2003: 26). Over their story hovers the figure of the “last speaker of Catalan”, a putative lone survivor, a living fossil, discovered sometime in the next century, whose demise will signal the extinction of the language. The spectral presence of this linguistic freak hovers over the discussions of the writers, with its somber message.

Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation  95 The apartment building is also an important symbolic presence. For Balaguer the apartment represents the stability and continuity he needs, while, for Rovira, the apartment building is more like a nonplace, a ruin, vacant territory with an uncertain destiny. Balaguer is an owner, Rovira an intruder. The small distance between the flats where the writers spend their days at work echoes the proximity of the two languages, Catalan and Castilian. The implications for Catalan literature could not be more clear. “Home” space is a contested territory, threatened on the one hand by the pressures of inflated real estate values and on the other hand by a competing cultural narrative. While both writers are renegades, battling the rules of capitalist speculation, they operate with separate understandings of the ways in which language claims territory. There is no automatic linguistic or territorial security to be had. The idea that the two writers make up two halves of an impossible whole underlies this somewhat transparent tale. Though the destinies of the two writers in some ways precede them, providing them with well-rehearsed scripts to follow, the novel is effective in highlighting the political meanings of public and private space in Barcelona, and showing how language and space are embroiled in the same issues of citizenship. In Barcelona, the controversies over public space have been as virulent and persistent as the ongoing debates on language. Between 1981 and 1987, for example, Barcelona saw the completion of more than one hundred projects for new public spaces throughout the city – plazas and parks where none had been before. This extensive movement of urban renewal came about through a conjunction of circumstances: the collective will of a city filled with the energy of post-Franco exuberance, strong political support, and plentiful artistic resources. This was a period of social activism, with a fruitful consensus about the importance of recovering civic spaces. The spirit of freedom that was expressed during those years can be compared to a previous great moment of civic change in Barcelona’s history – the moment when its ancient city walls were destroyed. According to Robert Hughes, there was no more significant moment in nineteenth-century Barcelona than the day in 1865 when the city finally did away with “the straightjacket of stone” that had prevented urban expansion since 1720. The political and architectural importance of the wall and citadel which enclosed and surveilled the city could not be overestimated, says Hughes. “In the nineteenth century the muralles freighted every town-planning decision with extra political meaning. Were you for democracy or for the military? Republican or Carlist? Church or state? Catalan independence or Madrid centralism? Privilege or benign public services? Your attitude toward the walls would tell” (Hughes 1992: 193). Opposition to the walls was part of a “general campaign for a free society”, beginning in the 1840s and 1850s. Progressive voices used “the image of urban space oppressed by Crown, Church, and army much as they used the issue of freedom to write and publish in Catalan” (193).

96  Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation The demolition of the walls, followed by one of the first modern urban planning projects in the world, made Barcelona a city conscious of the political and symbolic dimensions of space. The Eixample (“extension”) was the first area of the city outside of the city walls to be developed, and it was planned by the first modern city planner, Ildefons Cerdà. The area is renowned for its rationalist grid pattern – and for the conflicted political history out of which it emerged (see Resina 2008). Its chamfered corners, designed to make turning easier for vehicles going at high speed, have become iconic. They give the area a distinctive spaciousness, widening each intersection into the size of a mini-plaza. Aerial photographs show the special geometry of Cerdà’s huge apartment blocks, which, similar to those of Le Corbusier in Brasilia, were designed to allow green spaces in the interior courtyards. However, almost none of the apartment blocks in Barcelona use the reserved interior space for trees or grass, as most are crowded with additional constructions – underlining how the best efforts of architects and city planners are appropriated and diverted by citizens for the immediate needs of their everday life. Similar interventions in the urban fabric are illustrated by the system of passageways that traverse the city. These are not the grand “arcades” celebrated by Walter Benjamin, or the “cites” or “alleyways” of other cities. They are the passatges creating connections between buildings – and inscribing a tracery through the tissue of the city. For Nuria d’Asprer, the passages form patterns of circulation made possible by the materiality of the city itself but actualized by the walker who takes advantage of them. At once public and private, above and underground, this is a circuitry integrated into urban architecture itself. It is a culturally specific network, with its own nomenclature and terminology, including secret places heavy with history, and places of communication and exchange. While many of the passages have official names and are located on maps, others belong to neighbourhood lore. Some passages have histories as places of cultural resistance. This is the case of the Passatge Arcádia, which was once a meeting place for the “gauche divine”, the name given to the young left-wing movements of the 1960s and 1970s, many of whose members were children of the bourgeoisie (d’Asprer 2010: 4). Sometimes the passages are harmoniously integrated into the environment, sometimes strange and disjointed – the residues of a former world. Even the spelling varies, from the Catalan passatges and the Castilian pasajes to the archaic pasages. But according to d’Asprer, these passages are so numerous that one can almost cross the city using them. “At the end of the trajectory, one would have touched something essential about the city, something that remains inalterable … As if this configuration had preserved them from invasions or aggressions. These are enclosures surrounded not by walls but by the human bone structure of buildings.” They are not pieces of a puzzle or a museum, but “synecdoches of a city which once was” (d’Asprer 2010: 8). The passatges of Barcelona are an apt representation of the city as a space of translation. Like Benjamin’s passages, which are also spaces of language,

Source: Photograph: Nuria d’Asprer

Figure 4.2 The characteristic chamfered corners of Cerdà’s Eixample.

98  Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation

Source: Photograph: Nuria d’Asprer

Figure 4.3 The Catalan spelling of passatge.

these pathways mark the interaction between codes, temporalities and affects. They have come into existence according to the logic of history. They enact connections which are partly secret and partly public (d’Asprer 2010). Individual trajectories might be random, but over time collective patterns, well-practiced routes, emerge. Isabel Núñez speaks of the meanders of translation, the pathways of words which are lines of flight to other worlds. For a translator these are not idle metaphors, but figures that explain the ties between language and place (Núñez 2008: 21). And so the city is construed as a space of translation, its neighbourhoods, cafés, apartment buildings, symbolic nodes in a history of repression, secret transmission, and reconstructed pathways. To d’Asprer’s network of hidden passages could be added another element of Barcelona geography, the few remaining traces of the Jewish quarter known as “the call”. The ancient narrow laneways of the Jewish neighbourhood were emptied of its population as a result of persecutions in the fourteenth century and the subsequent expulsion of Jews from all of Spain in 1492. Barcelona, and especially neighbouring Gerona, were renowned centres of Jewish thought in the Middle Ages, and Barcelona has given its name to the famous thirteenth-century “Disputation” which saw

Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation  99

Source: Photograph: Nuria d’Asprer

Figure 4.4 Pasage is an archaic Castilian spelling.

Rabbi Nahmanides of Gerona engage in debate with a Dominican friar at the court of James I of Aragon (Caputo 2007). The laneways of the “call” are reminders of the Golden Age which prevailed among Christians, Jews and Muslims in Spain – which came to a catastrophic end with the double exclusion of both the Moors and Jews from Catholic Spain. For five centuries, there was no official Jewish presence in Spain. The suppressed double past of Spain is only gradually being rewritten into Barcelona’s present, with the work, for example, of Juan Goytisolo who has made it his vocation to imaginatively recall forgotten languages, especially Arabic. But while some passageways point to the absences of history, others open into the future. The possibility for the pedestrian to improvise ever new circuits through the passageways of the city, and for the city to open up previously unknown connections, points to the open-ended nature of the networks that can be created. The city is always under construction. For Didier Coste the unfinished business between the two languages can be compared to the unending changes made to the infrastructure of Barcelona, the essential incompleteness of the city itself. There is no longer any original to compare the current version with, only an ever-receding series of lost, distorted or unrecognizable images (Coste 2002: 10).

100  Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation

The “norm” traduced The tensions of translation across Barcelona city space are laid out in broad parodic terms in Juan Marsé’s novel, El amante bilingüe. Published in 1990, the novel is an ideologically charged spoof on language politics in the city. It draws on many of the themes and figures of Marsé’s personal literary universe, but distills them into a bitter duel between an upper-class Catalan woman and a lower-class immigrant man, between the powerful institutions of Catalan and the disenfranchised world of the Spanish-speaker. The backdrop of these evolving relationships includes the symbolic spaces of the city – its immigrant neighbourhoods, upper-class villas, and literary cafés. Written in the simple but emotionally charged narrative style for which Marsé (1933– ) has become known, the novel offers a reading of Barcelona as a terrain of warring languages. But the novel has an unusual Nabokovian component – as the narrator implodes under the stress of his identity dilemmas. The novel’s richly satirical material, its references to actual spaces and individuals (in particular the sociolinguist Vallverdú), has given much notoriety to the book, providing a template through which the language politics of the city can be debated. The novel begins with the protagonist, Juan Marés (his name clearly marking him as a double of the author), discovering his wife in bed with a shoeshine man who has a heavy immigrant accent. His wife’s name is Norma – and she stands for everything that is normative and repressive in Catalan language policy. Norma was in fact a character created for a campaign of linguistic redress in 1978, and shown, in a variety of cartoons, encouraging people either to use Catalan or to correct their Catalan. The figure became the butt of satirical jokes, and Juan’s wife Norma is similarly caricatural: she is the essence of Catalanism, a student of Catalan philology who comes from a middle-class, anti-Franco Catalan family and progresses to the higher ranks of government bureaucracy. She holds all the right progressive ideas, and the young Juan gained her favour when, in their student days, he joined a hunger strike only in order to win her over. While she is all about ideals and convictions, he simply follows his ambitions. Marés befriends the shoeshine man, and over the course of the novel comes to resemble him. Mock comic scenes are combined with moments of cruelty and self-loathing. These often take place in sites that are identified with “high” Catalan culture in Barcelona. The first is the apartment complex where Marés lives with his wife. It is the famous Walden 7, built in 1974 by the Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill. Ricardo Bofill’s building was constructed to fulfill the utopian dream of a sixties-generation collective lifestyle, yet in the novel the physical deterioration of Bofill’s building, the progressive detaching of its exterior enamel bricks (“las losetas”), underscores the character’s crumbling psychic state. Walden 7 was a social experiment, put together with the help of artistic advisors such as poet José Agustín Goytisolo who worked with the firm of architects. Built at a time of wild unregulated urbanization when there was an urgent need for social housing,

Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation  101 the building is a powerful symbol of Spain’s entry into urban modernity. Yet its condition over the years gave that symbol ambiguous meanings. Once a site for expressing solidarity across classes and a daring non-conformism, it has become a much more conventional and problematic building today – its dark colours and dense expressive textures forming a powerful contrast to the transparent structures of the contemporary city. But the building also represents a tradition of aggressive interventions on the part of architects and city planners in Barcelona’s history – Bofill joining a line that goes back to Ildefons Cerdà and Antonio Gaudí and includes today’s Manuel de SolàMorales, all of whom have marked the city with their bold innovations, often for the benefit of the Catalan bourgeoisie. A later, very different intervention by Bofill was the Catalonian National Theatre – again an imposing structure, but this time spectacularly framed by transparent glass, situated at the crossroads of a new area of construction around the Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes. A grand showcase for Catalan culture, which opened in 1996, the building has also become the embattled centre of debate over the models for Catalan theatre, over the significance of this no-man’s land at the intersection of many major roads, and of the glorification of Catalan at the expense of other constituencies in the city (Buffery 2006). Another site reflecting this same class position is Norma’s family villa, on the upper part of Carrer Verdi on the western edge of Parc Güell, near the neighbourhood where Juan Marsé spent his own childhood. Here the young Marés is introduced to bourgeois Catalan culture, in the form of a clandestine Catalan pageant, where the young Marés first learns to put on masks and learn counterfeit roles (in 1943). Then there is the Opera café on the Ramblas, across from the Liceu theatre, where – surrounded by mirrors – Norma humiliates the immigrant shoeshine boy as she recalls her past love affairs. At all three of these sites the anti-hero is humiliated by the desirous but dominating Norma. The resolution of the novel comes with Marés turning into another character, Faneca, and returning to the street where he was born. This neighbourhood is Castilian-speaking and here Faneca can hope to be comfortable at last. Over the course of the novel he has willfully manipulated his appearance and his identity, translating himself also from one language to another. But in the final pages, the language dissolves so that the last words are in a mixture of Catalan and Castilian – and he declares “me guta el mestizaje, zeñó, la barreja y el combinao …” (220), these mangled words reflecting Marés’ loss of identity and the impossibility of refinding a home language – and suggesting that a resolution might be found somewhere between the two languages, in a space which escapes coding by one side or the other. Language and its relation to class, power, sexuality and the city are the theme of the novel. One comic scene has Marés telephoning the “Assessorament Lingüístic” (the office that provides citizens with correct terms in Catalan) in order to hear his estranged wife’s voice. He pretends to be a merchant who needs to know the Catalan words for various kinds of underwear. A more depraved scene shows a disguised Marés following his wife on the

102  Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation sidewalk, mumbling obscenities in Spanish, then suddenly throwing in lewd words in Catalan “Cigrony, capdecony, recony i codony”, to finally attract her attention (32). Valls Verdú, the thinly disguised Catalan sociolinguist,7 is Norma’s “unilingual lover” – while the schizophrenic Marés has two codes with which he can play. But it is never clear exactly how Marés defines his real identity, because from the start he is made to take on roles. As a young boy he is asked to recite Catalan verse with a Spanish accent. Later he uses stereotyped aspects of Catalan identity as he plays the accordion in front of tourist sites, playing “sardanas” and Catalan songs for Japanese tourists, pigeons and children. That he resorts to playing the accordion at tourist sites is the symptom of his ultimate degradation and loss of self: he exploits the Catalan identity for profit, although this is the identity from which he is most alienated. Marsé’s characterization of Catalan as the expression of a cultural superego is heightened by his own reference to Mercè Rodoreda, the most admired modernist Catalan writer. One of the early scenes of Marsé’s novel includes the child being given a goldfish, which is then cruelly taken from him by a middle-class child. There are resemblances to a similar scene in Mercè Rodoreda’s Mirall trencat (1974) where a child’s fascination with a pond of goldfish in a bourgeois household also resonates with a sense of loss (Resina 2001: 99). This gesture of respect and affiliation to the Catalan tradition is similar to that of the Moroccan immigrant writer Najat El-Hachmi who, as we will see later, also includes references to high Catalan culture in her novel, The Last Patriarch. Marsé’s reference to Rodoreda, like his mention of Barcelona’s emblematic sightseeing attractions, anchors his own novel in a familiar history. In contrast to Norma, who speaks from the security of a single code and class position, Marés is an absence who must assume a mask in order to take on physical presence. Language for him is not identity, but performance. For Marés, there is no ontological benefit to language, and in this sense his novel is a critique of the kind of parochialism which assumes the superiority of one language over another. In El amante bilingüe, language exchange is powered by feelings of resentment and inadequacy. There can be no reciprocity between the two languages because they are aligned vertically, with Catalan holding the monopoly of prestige. This is Marsé’s subjective reading of languages in Barcelona, one that reflects his own experience as a workingclass Spanish-speaker, with little recognition of the hegemonic powers of Spanish as a national language. Critics of the novel, such as Joan Ramon Resina, take offense at the suggestion that Catalan overpowers Spanish in Barcelona.8 But Marsé’s novel clearly speaks to a personal experience of inferiorization, acquired through the formative encounters of childhood. For many writers of Marsé’s generation, the childhood past includes the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. No aspect of modern Barcelona can be understood without reference to the impact of the Spanish Civil War, the atmosphere of sadness and repression, and the anti-Catalan measures implemented by the Franco regime. And by the same token, no aspect of today’s Barcelona can be understood without reference to the counter-measures

Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation  103 which were adopted when the regime finally came to an end with the death of Franco in 1975. Marsé shows the territory of the city as literally marked by language – and in this sense his representation of language movement through the city is an accurate account of the “reconquest” of Barcelona through translation.

Occupying the territory The revival of Catalan after the Franco years, which prohibited both the public use of Catalan and the publication of books in Catalan, has involved the marking of both civic and literary space by language – through planned governmental interventions, and through the imaginative creations of artists and writers. Translation has played a major role in this reconquest – as it has during much of Catalan literary history, going back to the second half of the thirteenth century (Bacardí 1998: 13) and again through the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Renaixença (Parcerisas in Godayol and Bacardí 2010: 23, Buffery 2007). But this movement came to a halt with the victory of Franco in 1936. “Prohibition of translations into Catalan was extremely strict in the 1940s and 1950s, to the extent that it became one of the main elements of the regime’s publishing policy” (Bacardí 2002: 83). Indeed translating into Catalan was considered a deliberate provocation, more culpable than original writing because it was not spontaneous or issued directly from the people. Censorship was implacable and when exceptions were made, as in 1948 for such publications as Riba’s Odyssey and Sagarra’s Divine Comedy, the grounds were simply that these translations by prestigious writers were published in expensive bibliophile editions with small print runs and therefore not likely to attract any substantial readership. Devotion to translation as a means of keeping the Catalan tradition alive was nourished in exile (Bacardí 2009, Arenas and Skrabec 2006: 69). Joaquin Mallafrè’s assertion that “it could be that Catalan was more receptive than creative during certain eras” gives a long view of a tradition of translation as a way of “saving our words” (Mallafrè 1991: 40). Mallafrè’s own translation of Joyce’s Ulysses was influential in this respect, digging deep into the fund of oral literature silenced for many years, a “literature of the tribe” that had been forced underground. Mallafrè’s translation of Joyce’s novel coincided with the resumption of Catalonia’s linguistic normalization and the effort to regain a complex, multifaceted language of expression. The recent surge in attention to the history of translation in Catalonia illustrates the formative role that translation has played for Catalan literature and identity. Although the object of prohibition for most of the Franco régime, some translations were permitted as early as the 1950s, “partly to counterbalance the accusations of intransigence which were appearing everywhere. Everything, however, was done in a highly arbitrary way: it depended on the situation, on personal connections, on the censor, on the type of work involved, on the translator ... ” (Bacardí 2002: 85). By 1962, the authorities

104  Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation were pressured to lift this censorship and from then on translations were subject to the controls which affected all other books.9 The appearance of new publishing houses, Edicions 62 and then Edicions Proa in 1964, marked the beginning of an aggressive attempt to reverse history. A great number of translations were produced and published during the period from 1962 to 1973, as if to make up for lost time (Bacardí 2002: 85). Translations into Catalan were deliberately political interventions. As Pilar Godayol has shown, Maria Aurèlia Capmany represents the spirit of this period (Godayol 2007). A vigorous opponent of the regime and an early outspoken feminist, she was one of the first to contribute to this wave of translations – translating in all some thirty writers into Catalan, not only from French but also from Italian and English – novels of neo-Italian realism but also thrillers for the newly created Cua de Palla, which was a replica of the French “Série noire”. A theatre director, actress and essayist, she later went on to become an important political figure in the Catalan government. She also wrote works that were inspired by writers she admired, such as Virginia Woolf (Quim-Quima is a transposition of Orlando) and Simone de Beauvoir, turning translation into a form of rewriting. Her Catalan “version” of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, La dona a Catalunya: Consciència i situació published in 1966 was the first serious modern work devoted to the situation of women in Catalonia and was the basis for several more works by Capmany devoted to women and feminism. These translations contributed to the prestige of literary Catalan, through the richness of the vocabulary and the spontaneity of expression. Capmany is one of the most important representatives of the self-consciously political translator – attempting to give a vigorous refueling to Catalan through translation (Godayol 2007). The fact that Capmany assumed many literary roles, and that she used translation to augment and enable Catalan literature, identify her as a translator fully engaged in processes of furthering. Capmany is the most prominent of a culture of women writers10 who have doubled as translators, and whose careers have been investigated and reclaimed by feminist researchers, especially Godayol. Helena Valentí (1940–90), for example, lived in Britain during the Franco years but returned to Catalonia in 1974, publishing Catalan translations of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. And Pilar Godayol has translated into Catalan the writings of Chicano women, using the tensions between Spanish and Catalan to reproduce the linguistic hybridity of the originals (Godayol 2001). The integration of writing and narrative styles from other sources have been crucial for modern Catalan literature and indeed the exile of many writers of the Franco years was a factor in the hybridation of its literary styles, making the literature a rich crossroads of influences. As in the cases of Calcutta and Trieste, the direction of translation which is most important to Barcelona is towards the newly resurgent vernacular. This is the language most affected by the flow of translations, the most vulnerable and therefore the most influenced by input from other languages. There is no need for the translation of Spanish into Catalan, because of widespread

Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation  105 bilingualism in Catalonia, and so most published translation into Catalan has traditionally been from languages other than Castilian. And so when Spanish is translated into Catalan, there is a plus-value attached to the process. Translation into Catalan works to bolster the literary tradition, to increase the expressive potential of the language, to appeal to the nosaltres, identitarian function of language. Here is the way the poet Francesc Parcerisas expresses his relationship to the identitary elements of Catalan: Catalan is the language of my father, my grandparents, my sons. It is the language that for me identifies land, sea, trees, houses, colors, food, landscapes, and, of course, emotions. But Catalan was never the language of my schooling or my university or my prayers ... We were the Republicans, the Catalanists. We had a language centuries old that was forbidden and repressed by Franco’s regime but which we used at home and was our way of expressing our emotions and preserving our memories. Without Catalan, they would disappear. Venuti 2009: 53 Parcerisas’ personal history echoes that of many Catalan writers of his generation – reviving many of the important tropes associated with an identitary tongue and reenacting the tragic history of the Civil War and exile to France. His father was Catalan, and despite the relative economic comfort and social position that his family occupied, they were identified as “the losers”. His mother had arrived in Catalonia first as a Republican refugee from northern Spain fleeing Franco’s troops and then, after a second exile into France at the end of the civil war, as a refugee fleeing the advance of German troops. He considers his choice of writing in Catalan as “my pleasure and my duty, a way to express my gratitude to the people and the language who have helped me build an imaginative world of emotions and memories, made out of respect for the same words they used” (Venuti 2009: 53). That Parcerisas is both a poet and a translator is another element common to defenders of a beleaguered language. The value of translation as a display of language is well demonstrated in the recent phenomenon of translations of Spanish-language and international authors into Catalan. Translations of international literature into Catalan have more than doubled from 1996 to 2006 (Parcerisas in Godayol and Bacardí 2010: 30). And translations of writing from or about Barcelona from Spanish into Catalan have also increased significantly. Why translate Camilo José Cela or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Eduardo Mendoza, Javier Cercas, Carlos Ruiz Zafón and Ildefonso Falcones into Catalan when Catalan readers can also read the Spanish version? Translation clearly plays a symbolic, rather than a purely communicative role. And in particular the translation of Spanish-language Catalan writers like Mendoza into Catalan has the feeling of a “return” to a home language. These translations bring the fiction back to the real language in which they would have been written – had Spanish not been imposed by history.

106  Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation The ironies of language reversals are reflected in the very institutional arrangements of translation in Barcelona. The mutual dependencies of the two language literatures turn up in the publishing apparatus itself. Barcelona happens to be a publishing hub in both Spanish and Catalan. And so the vast majority of prose translations into Spanish (90 per cent of translations from Catalan go to Spanish, followed by French, German and English) are in fact produced in Catalonia (Arenas and Skrabec 2006: 76). What is more, publishing in Catalan is often possible only because of the power of the Castilian publishing machine of which it is a subsidiary (Godayol and Bacardí 2010: 12). Well-known authors often publish Catalan and Spanish versions of their new works simultaneously, sometimes by the same publishing houses (Arenas and Skrabec 2006: 76). And so it is not surprising that the city becomes the domain not only of “natural” translators (those mythic inhabitants of plurilingual spaces) but of professionals, who turn up regularly in Barcelona fiction. Cassandra Reilly in Barbara Wilson’s Gaudí Afternoon or the narrator in Mercè Ibarz’s La ciutat en obres (The City under Construction) are only two of a large population of fictional characters whose language skills and whose capacity for betrayal make them useful ciphers on the Barcelona landscape. If Barbara Wilson’s novel has the feel of a travelogue written for outsiders, Ibarz’ narrative, by contrast, takes the reader into the realm of memory, marking the distance between the solidarity of the anti-Franco years and the individualistic and careerist present, between her pleasurable activities as a translator of books and her monotonous employment as a translator of the ingredients of cosmetics. Ibarz makes Barcelona into a dreamy, disorienting setting, where places are infused with sometimes conflicting memories.

Originals twice over Confusion of languages, identity loss, irretrievable memories, conflictual translation: these are themes that are heavy with meaning in a city still oppressed by a legacy of secrecy. For a nation which has lived through a civil war, the double will have an inevitably sinister quality. The remarkable tradition of crime fiction in Barcelona is no doubt related to the atmosphere of suspicion created by the silences which followed the war. The city is often portrayed as a double realm, a living tableau shadowed by a darker domain. One of the most intriguing new participants in the genre of crime fiction is Teresa Solana, herself a translator. Her first novel, Un crim imperfecte (Barcelona 2006b) introduces twin brothers as improvised detectives – only the twins have different names, one claiming an upper-class, conservative Catalan heritage, the other left-wing, middle-class and Castilian – exaggerating the stereotypical aspects of both identities. The novel satirizes the milieu of the Catalan bourgeoisie, and, like so many of its predecessors in Barcelona crime fiction (most famously Vázquez Montalbán), gives the city itself a large role as an atmospheric backdrop to high drama.11 In a more sober vein, the prolific novelist Enrique Vila-Matas, in Impostura (1982),

Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation  107 introduces the theme of memory loss as the origin of double identities. A “desmemoriado”, a man who has lost his memory as a result of the war, washes up in an insane asylum in the 1950s, and is claimed by two families – one for which he is a respected upper-class professor, the other for which he is a thief and extortionist. But the novel takes unexpected turns, as the investigator himself joins the suspect in flight, and all start a new life in a new language – Portuguese. Few novelists have conjugated themes of language and betrayal as effectively as Carme Riera (1948– ). Riera was born and brought up in Catalan-speaking Majorca, and now teaches Spanish-language literature at the University of Barcelona. Although she belongs to the Catalan literary world and writes her books in Catalan, Riera was also educated in Spanish and writes Spanish versions of her stories and novels. One of her most popular books is a powerful historical novel about the persecution of Jews in seventeenth-century Majorca, Dins el darrer blau (1994) (In the Last Blue (2007)). Her postmodern narrative structures explore themes of memory and literary tradition, selfhood and betrayal. The short story, “Mon semblable, mon frère”, (from Contra l’amor en companyia i altres relats, Catalan in 1989, Spanish 1991, English 2001) is a compelling tale of language and eros, creativity and imitation. It is an extended fable on the theme of friendship and literary influence across languages. Two childhood friends (one from a family of “winners”, the other of civil war “losers”) both become writers, and continue to influence one another through their careers. When Rafel writes a series of poems in French in 1957 (he was brought up as an exile in France) José finds them perfect, and spontaneously decides to translate them into Catalan. Rafel takes the poems and publishes them as if they were his own. Then begins a crisscross of influences and translations between Spanish and Catalan, English and French. Rafel persuades José to write his own poetry in Spanish, but when José publishes Extrarradios (in Spanish), it is a flop. Then Rafel translates the poems from Extrarradios back to Catalan as Aigua passada and receives an enthusiastic response. Critics understand Rafel to be the original writer, and condemn José as the imitator; Rafel becomes a hugely successful poet, José is ignored. The love-hate relationship between the two men (with a hint of homosexuality) continues throughout their lives, until Rafel dies and is given the honours of a national funeral and José goes on to pursue a career as a painter. Adopting familiar devices from the postmodern repertory, the story explores the enigma of originality. It uses translation as a key to understanding the inter-indebtedness of literary traditions in general (à la Borges), but of the Catalan writer in particular. Though Rafel receives the more enthusiastic critical reception, he is in fact derivative, an imitator. We are led to understand that originality resides in the unknown and less-celebrated friend. Yet José’s literary talents, original as they are, are best expressed through translation. And so José writes: “At this point I knew that my literary gift served Rafel exclusively … who otherwise would have been an

108  Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation ignored Sunday versifier …” (Riera 2001: 77). The fact that translations produce novelty – once again an idea that is Borgesian – is an important element of the story. José’s poetry is ignored when he publishes it in Spanish, but is celebrated when it reaches Catalan under Rafel’s name. Rafel’s poetry is considered banal, “déjà-vu” in France, but well received when it is translated into Catalan. And so the work acquires new value as it crosses literary borders, becoming “news” to a tradition where its particular lessons were not yet learned. Riera’s story becomes all the more intriguing when we learn that her tale is based on two actual Barcelona poets – Jaime Gil de Biedma (1929–90) and Gabriel Ferrater (1922–72) (Glenn 1999: 43). Riera became familiar with the work of both these poets as she was working on her doctoral thesis, La Escuela de Barcelona (1988) which recounts in meticulous detail the rise to fame of a group of poets who became spokesmen for their generation. Riera lists the university halls, bars and literary meeting places which became the haunts of the poets; she describes the friendships and rivalries, acts of political courage and compromise, debates and influences, which moved them along the path to literary fame. In introducing the Spanishlanguage poet Jaime Gil de Biedma, she invokes – among his other friendships – the figure of Gabriel Ferrater. Ferrater is known as a brilliant writer whose short career achieved a remarkable synthesis of Catalan and international influences. He committed suicide, as he had announced he would, at the age of fifty. Between 1955 and 1958, the relations between Ferrater and Gil de Biedma were particularly intense. The two writers were united by intelligence and brilliance, by their common predilection for alcohol, and by their interest in English culture, T.S. Eliot especially. Ferrater was the perfect “sparring partner” for Gil de Biedma, says Riera, and closest to him poetically although they wrote in different languages. Gil de Biedma perhaps influenced Ferrater’s turn to poetry in 1958. They both admired Baudelaire, Catullus, medieval poetry and held similar ideas about poetry as an expression of the individual and against surrealism (Riera 1988: 60). While Gil de Biedma never strayed from Castilian, Ferrater wrote in Catalan, but earned his living for many years as a translator, mainly into Spanish (Udina 2010: 107). These translations during the 1950s and 1960s were essentially bread-winning activities (crime novels, Dashiel Hammett, for instance), but occasionally gave him the opportunity to express his own literary interests, especially when he was able to translate Kafka’s Trial into Catalan. (He also translated language theory into Catalan, books by Leonard Bloomfield and Noam Chomsky.) El procés was published in 1966, by Proa, with a prologue by Ferrater which he concludes by claiming that “literalness” has been his article of faith. In contrast to translations into French, Ferrater has resisted attempts to “correct” Kafka, rather seeing humour in Kafka’s parody of repetitive or dry administrative styles and even retaining the German typographical markings in order to respect Kafka’s “deliberately playing with massive blocks of paragraphs as if they were police reports” (cited in Udina 2010: 105–14).

Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation  109 And so Riera’s elaborations on translation have a basis in the oeuvre of Ferrater. Her fictionalizing of these doublings, between Ferrater and Gil de Biedma, represents both the specific case of two writers in intense crosslanguage conversation, and the more general case of the cross-influences that stimulate Barcelona literature. Riera argues that the influence of one over the other led to “parallel results in two neighbouring and distinct languages” (Riera 1988: 62). In an interview, Riera calls her story “a literary wink at this group of poets who closely resemble one another. If the two had written in the same language, they would have been the same poet, because what they say and how they say it, the tone of their work, the verse forms they use are so similar” (Glenn 1999: 43). The lives of these two poets, each half of an entire universe of expression, seem impossible to imagine anywhere else than in Barcelona. But the story is more than a simple allegory of the Barcelona literary scene; it also serves as the core of a creative impulse that extends to other novels by Riera. The theme of the double is most evident in two novels, Joc de miralls (Mirror Images, 1993 in English, first published in 1989) and La meitat de l’ànima (2003) (Half of the Soul) – both novels developing out of the conjoined themes of translation, self-transformation and literary rivalry. Mirror Images has intriguing resemblances to Juan Marsé’s El amante bilingüe (which was published the following year, 1990), in particular when the fictional novelist takes on the identity of his dead rival. Doubles, masks, and the betrayals of translation figure prominently in Riera’s plot which circles around Goethe, whose own delight in costumes is recalled (96–100). The novel follows a quest for a mysterious writer and former political prisoner, with the seeker ultimately assuming his identity. The detective genre opens onto questions of political responsibility, and the nature of authorship in its contradictory guises of creativity and self-promotion. The protagonist, Gallego, is a translator of Goethe. Among the twists in the plot is a dispute over the authorship of one of his translations, undertaken under a pseudonym. When Gallego decides to claim the translation as his own, he is tricked out of the paternity of even this work. The extensive intertextuality of Riera’s novels points to the many different meanings and expressions of authorship. Translation too is a form of authorship, spinning its own webs of authority and deception. La meitat de l’ànima is also a quest novel, this time written in a classic cinematic style. It is the story of a Catalan author who is led to question her past – after she has mysteriously been given a cache of letters that her mother wrote during the Second World War. In the course of the novel she learns that her mother had an affair, that she may have been a double agent, and that she was killed for political reasons. The opening chapter appeals to the reader for help in resolving the mystery, revealing from the start the fact that the quest has not led to any definitive conclusion. The story centres on questions of memory, faithfulness and treachery during the Civil War and its aftermath. There are many references to the literary scene, including the circumstances during which the author was given the fateful letters – a

110  Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation book signing at the important literary festival of Sant Jordi, even naming the year (2001), the precise bookstore and the names of writer friends who were also signing during this time. Real and fictitious references are cleverly blended throughout the story, with characters like Albert Camus and Maria Casares woven into the narrative. During the course of the novel, the author accumulates fragments about her mother’s past, but realizes that she will never be able to learn the truth. What remains are the passionate though fraught emotions of a daughter, the silences of history, the moral ambiguities of conduct in difficult times. The figure of the double persists throughout, in the mother’s double name of Cecilia Balaguer/Celia Ballester, in the opposing affiliations of her grandfather, who was a member of the Catalan parliament in exile and of her father, who was an enthusiastic supporter of Franco’s new Spain. And so the divided self, representing the divided reality of Barcelona, is at the source of the impossible quest for certainty about the past (anticipating a novel with a similar quest and a similar structure, Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas, 2003).

Self-translation The doubling of Riera’s novels spirals into additional turns when her Catalan novels are translated into Spanish. Riera has translated several of her own novels and stories, and as might be expected of this highly selfconscious writer – for whom the activities of the literary world take on metaphysical qualities – Riera has reflected on her own practice as a selftranslator (Riera 2002). Central to her thinking is the distinction between translation and rewriting. The translation of great works, she claims, is impossible. Cervantes, Shakespeare or Joyce are irrevocably diminished by translation, the mark of the “universal” writer being indeed a resistance to translation which strips the work of its enchantment and aura. For her own work, she prefers the term “version”, insisting that the Spanish version of her work will necessarily be different from the original Catalan. This difference results not only from the purely technical difficulties of translation but is a consequence of the uneven historical development of the two literary systems. The richness of the Baroque era for Castilian has given that language a range of expression, particularly in regard to the vocabulary of the senses, which does not exist in Catalan, but Catalan on the other hand has resources of sonority which are quite different from Castilian (39). And so, in producing the second versions of her novels and stories, she introduces changes – for instance in the linguistic registers of Catalan in the Spanish version of En el último azul (1997). The implications of differing connotations are illustrated in the title of her story, Te deix, amor, la mar com a penyora, whose Spanish equivalent Te dejo, amor, en prenda el mar, replaces a poetic Catalan word penyora (warrant, gage) with a more prosaic word prenda, which do not have the same associations to classical Catalan literature (Riera in Hibbs and Martinez 2005: 35–41).

Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation  111 It has been suggested that Riera has not always served her best interests in her translations, producing what have been perceived as inferior versions. The most frequently discussed example is Riera’s first autotranslation, her 1980 book Palabra de mujer: Bajo el signo de una memoria impenitente which is a reorganized version of the original, containing only twenty-four of the original twenty-nine stories. Subsequently the stories were retranslated according to the original table of contents (Cotoner in Hibbs and Martinez 2005: 42–51). The changes that Riera introduces into her translations include predictable clarifications, like those that explain specific cultural references (Barcelona’s special book day devoted to Sant Jordi), or omissions that indicate a desire to improve on the original, to achieve better “aesthetic equivalence”. A major change that Riera introduces into Estiu d’inglès reveals the shocking endpoint of the narrative two chapters earlier than in the original. One critic has found that “in some instances the new ‘version’ actually loses elements that are vital to the success of the fiction in the original, or at the very least, includes substantial changes that are difficult to justify. Such variations compel us to reconsider up to what point her Castilian readership is in fact reading the ‘same’ text’” (Stewart 2010: 105–14). Most relevant to the personal experience of language doubling is the description Riera gives of the “ideal creative process”. This is the process she adopted while working on her 1987 epistolary novel Qüestió d’amor propi.12 For this book she actually wrote and translated at the same time, doubling the process of imaginative creativity, and allowing herself a constant second “point of view” on her own text. She became a critical reader of her own text, more distanced and able to correct the aspects of her text that seemed less pertinent. This double performance which brings into being parallel literary selves is richly evocative. It vividly materializes the image of the postmodern writer as a double of herself, hearing the echo of her imagination as she moves back and forth across the space of language. The doubleness also provides a critical position, a way of being both inside and outside the work. This position puts Riera in the company of such contemporary writers as Nancy Huston, for whom self-translation represents an aesthetic and even a moral stance, a desire to be inscribed in more than one literary tradition and to participate in a cosmopolitan sensibility (Huston 1999). Riera could claim then, as Isaac Bashevis Singer did regarding English versions of his Yiddish, that her writings in Castilian take the form of a “second original” (Norich 1995).13 This process also puts her in the company of a fellow-Catalan writer, Terenci Moix, whose novel, El día que va morir Marilyn (The Day Marilyn Monroe Died) became the manifesto of a generation, those who were twenty years old when Marilyn died in 1962. The novel is a chronicle of life in Barcelona, and the expression of a new kind of intimate and honest narrative voice. The novel was published in several versions, both Catalan and Castilian, as a result not only of Moix’s divided loyalties but of a process of revision that he never abandoned. (The dates of composition given at the

112  Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation end of the 1998 “definitive” version of the novel are 1964, 1969, 1983–4 and 1998.) The first version of the novel was in Spanish, but this version was not considered publishable, and following the suggestion of a Catalan publisher and following his own rediscovery – which is part of the novel itself – of the Catalan identity and language, the first published version, in 1969, was actually in Catalan. The Castilian version appeared immediately after, in 1970, translated by José Miguel Velloso in the very Catalanized Spanish that Moix had requested. For the second Castilian version, Moix decided at this point to remove the Catalanisms. And then he revised the Catalan version as well, simplifying the language, eliminating much of the Baroque excess of the first version (Preface to Moix 1998: 8–9). And so, in a manner similar to Riera, Moix used the alternation between languages as a means of refining his vision, and shaping the novel for new audiences. Such a process of self-criticism speaks both to the evolution of Spanish society (Moix could restore some of the material eliminated by censorship) and to Moix’s understanding of his novel as the testimony of a generation. Self-translations are absolved from the strict contractual relations of ordinary translation. The writer is author of both texts, and therefore not obliged to conform to conventional notions of equivalence. And yet, of all forms of translation, self-translation is most open to accusations of betrayal. That the writer sometimes engages in double dealings for reasons of writerly gain makes the operation all the more suspicious. It has been mentioned that Rabindranath Tagore earned himself the Nobel Prize by translating his Gitanjali into English, as did Singer for his translations from Yiddish. Although celebrated for their contributions to English-language literature, these writers were also resented by their original-language readers for the ways in which they simplified or distorted the richness of their own cultural worlds. More so perhaps than for high modernist writers like Beckett, these more socially based writers were expected to remain faithful to the cultural worlds of which they wrote. So too in Barcelona, self-translation carries the risks of betrayal that lurk in the passage between two very different conceptions of a “home” readership. Still, by blurring the boundaries between writerly roles, by obscuring the relations between original and derivative products, self-translation is a particularly effective kind of furthering. As both Moix and Riera envisage it, it is an activity which is literally without end, as each version can serve as the motor for subsequent rewriting. Rather than using the work of another as inspiration and platform, the writer turns inwards, finding in the doublings of language and consciousness the material for newly unfolding dramas. With their imbrication of postmodern writing and translation, Riera’s stories and novels are compelling representations of Barcelona’s language passages. The chain of language transactions which extend from the conception of a literary work (in a double linguistic environment) to overlapping practices of translation and diffusion is a distinctive form of furthering fostered by the double city. Riera evokes a scene of shifting and pulsing languages, and of friendships and rivalries still dark with mystery. There

Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation  113 is anxiety on the borders where memories meet. Far from the bustle of Barcelona’s crowded streets and landmarks, her novels take more tranquil, interior paths of exploration. The double becomes the disquieting representation of a reality which resists single and definitive truths. Like Juan Marsé, Riera calls upon translation to represent doubling effects which have a powerful psychic impact, and which come to haunt the symbolic sites of the city itself.

Ravalejar The Barcelona writer probably best known worldwide is Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1939–2003). Author of internationally popular detective stories, but also of a parallel oeuvre of social philosophy and left-wing critique, Vázquez Montalbán was brought up in the district known as the Raval – or the Barrio Chino – in the tragic atmosphere following the Civil War, his father having been imprisoned for the first five years of his childhood. To describe the sense of alienation he experienced, Vázquez Montalbán wrote a poem called “Prague”, in which he compares himself to a poet writing in German in Prague, drawing a comparison between Prague and Barcelona: “I write in German so that words/are not yours nor mine/ all language is a tam tam/that cries for help/in an unacceptable language”14 (Vázquez Montalbán 1982). There is surely no area of Barcelona that has a richer aura of alienation or transgression than the Barrio Chino – the area considered an “outsider space” by the Barcelona middle class and made notorious as a red light district by such writers as Jean Genet (1910–86) in The Diary of a Thief (1949) and later Pieyre de Mandiargues in La Marge (1967), both of whom launched the international literary legend of the Raval. That the Raval should acquire this reputation via French literature is appropriate, as it long had an international population (of sailors especially) and a reputation as a world apart. The friendship between Jean Genet and Juan Goytisolo, (chronicled in Goytisolo’s Genet en el Raval 2009) emphasizes the darkly mythical character of the neighbourhood. Goytisolo, a member of a prominent Spanish-speaking Barcelona family, who made the Raval the scene of his own youthful night-time forays, has become the most language-conscious of all European writers, integrating Arabic and other languages into his self-reflexive novels.15 And so it is appropriate that he be a conduit linking the French Genet back to what has now become an intensely multilingual quarter. Goytisolo left Spain as a radical young writer, and has chosen to live abroad, in Paris and Marrakesh, ever since. His embrace of multilingualism and métissage is one of the strategies he uses to challenge Spain’s suppression of its pre-1492 multilingual heritage as well as its difficult relation to immigration today. The Raval has been a source of “civic concern” for centuries and as early as the seventeenth century was considered a dangerous area ridden with disease and in need of reform (Resina 2008: 269). A twentieth-century plan

114  Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation to renovate the area was delayed by the civil war. In the late 1990s, City Hall opened a new Rambla at the centre of the Raval but plans for gentrification have been only moderately successful. The Raval remains engaged in a yet unfinished process of redefinition. The area represents in this sense a point of resistance in the fabric of the city, a district which has not seen the successful application of a planned intervention. In a neighbourhood which houses such institutions as the CCCB (Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture), dedicated to developing consciousness of public space and serving as an arena for debate extending across Europe on the political dimensions of urban life, the Raval remains recalcitrant. Many immigrants to the city gather in the Raval, and so the Raval could be called Barcelona’s “third” space. “Between 1996 and 2003, foreign immigration to the city grew by 500 percent, with most of the growth in 2001 … In 2003, 47 percent of the residents of the Raval were foreign immigrants from 34 different countries” (Resina 2008: 274). The district today is very different from the one with which both Vázquez Montalbán and Genet were familiar. During the 1930s, Spanish was the language of the underclass in Barcelona. In 2010, Arabic, Urdu and Tagalog rival Spanish as the most prominent languages of the neighbourhood. Given the diversity and the growing predominance of people with different cultural memories, the old division between immigrant Spaniards and native Catalans is becoming obsolete. The Raval is now an emphatically multilingual space. In a laudable initiative, Barcelona has chosen to take advantage of its multilingualism by promoting language as an object of civic display. A highly innovative House of Languages has been set up across town, in the Poblenou district, as a museum and cultural centre. The site is a former factory that was among the first in Catalonia to print cotton fabrics mechanically and is now a symbol of Barcelona’s industrial past – as it is converted into a post-industrial future. It is significant that Barcelona should attempt to put language on the map and specifically into its urban core. Whatever the program that the centre finally adopts, the fact that it has received major support from governmental associations means that the values of linguistic diversity have been perceived as a source of potential wealth for society. There would have been a strong logic to situating this new House of Languages in the Raval – which is the real contact zone of the city – but where tensions continue to emphasize the challenges of contact. Perhaps the most striking sign of the meeting of old and new realities in the Raval is the novel The Last Patriarch by Najat El Hachmi. This novel ushers in a new era for Catalan literature. The Last Patriarch was written in Catalan by a young Moroccan immigrant, and tells the story of a Moroccan girl’s difficult relations with her family but especially with her larger-thanlife father. Somewhere around the middle of the book, the teenaged girl begins to read the Catalan dictionary. The dictionary becomes a symbol for all the mysteries in the girl’s world – and the very partial way that language can help her understand it. “I was probably at C in the dictionary when father took us to meet Isabel [his mistress]. Ca is a dog. Or ca, the letter K.

Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation  115 Or ca short for house, a ca l’Albert¸ for example, to Albert’s house, or a ca la ciutat, to the city” (164). From this point on, the narrator concludes each chapter with a few words from her Catalan dictionary, demonstrating her progress through the language but her inability to progress in other regards, her difficulty in being “hàbil, able, suitable, skilled at something” (186). Some of the words are simple, some abstruse: “làbar, a standard adopted by some emperor or other. Labdàcida, the definition’s far too complicated for me to read” (204). The words chosen from the dictionary convey the confusion of someone who sees it as a list of words, with no families or hierarchies. Ordinary and complex words, proper and common nouns, are thrown together. And suddenly the dictionary is gone, as the narrator changes her life. The upward movement of progress has come to an end. The dictionary figures in the book as a symbol and a narrative device, the words and their definitions tracking the development of the narrator. But it also reminds the reader that the narrator is engaged in the process of translating the raw experience of violence and complicity into an alien code, stretching the Catalan language to account for the material and emotional world that is woven into the narrative. Occasional translator’s footnotes explain both Muslim customs and Catalan literary references. For instance, the narrator compares her mother to Milà, protagonist of the Catalan classic of rural Catalonia, as well as to Colometa, Rodoreda’s heroine, who also kept doves in her apartment building. These literary devices underscore the jarring distance between registers – imaginative, linguistic, narrative – and alert the reader to the new distances involved in translation today towards Catalan as well as the desire for affiliation. The fact that Arabic immigrants to Catalonia, especially those settling in the cities of the interior (El Hachmi’s family settled in the provincial city of Vic but El Hachmi has since moved to Barcelona), are becoming increasingly fluent in Catalan represents a new development for the language, and a sign of optimism for the future. The bridges and gulfs of translation are shifting in Barcelona, new cultural distances gradually displacing the more familiar divides of the past. A plaque fixed to the wall beside the glistening white MACBA (Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona) designed by Richard Meier is entitled “Ravalejar” – turning the name of the area, “Raval”, into a verb and conjugating it in Catalan. The panel takes what was the name of a Spanishspeaking neighbourhood and conjugates it according to the rules of a semialien language system, creating a new Catalan concept, and suggesting that this space may one day be integrated into the Catalan language sphere. Who will perform the activity that is “ravalejar” and who will oversee the rules of conjugation? “Ravalejar” was in fact a slogan invented during a public relations campaign begun in 2005 to reanimate and restore confidence in the area of the Raval. Versions of the plaque were also seen in Spanish, Tagalog and Urdu. The active form of the verb represents the edgy attitude and nervous energy of the Raval and the plaque is located on a wall which divides the modernist museum from the exposed walls of half-demolished apartments. The immense white hulk of the museum stands in a clearing,

116  Barcelona: the cracked mirror of self-translation

Source: Author

Figure 4.5 Ravalejar: to conjugate this once Spanish-speaking, today polyglot, neighbourhood into Catalan.

surrounded by the labyrinth of surrounding streets and their densely populated buildings. The “Ravalejar” plaque stands precisely at the boundary between a space created by the demands of gentrification and the vestiges of previous disorder. This fragile border reflects a tension similar to that which separates Spanish from Catalan – it is an uneasy point of contact between communities driven by conflicting interests and memories. This evocation of the fragile spatial and linguistic boundaries of the Raval will provide an easy transition to Montreal. Although the patterns of expression are not the same, although the struggle for memory is rooted in different histories, a similar atmosphere of competition energizes the daily life and the literary cultures of both cities. Just as the character of the Raval complicates the tensions of Barcelona, Montreal’s third space exposes the fault lines which lie between its two main language groups. In neither case is the third space a place of refuge from confrontation. Rather, the role of third identities in the contest for urban space becomes a key to understanding changing logics of engagement.

5 Montreal’s third space

Snatched from the centre, we learned circumference. A.M. Klein, In Praise of Diaspora

“Bienvenue” (“Welcome”) is what newcomers to Montreal hear from one storekeeper after another. How hospitable, they think! Only with time do they realize that the greeting has little to do with their recent arrival. “Bienvenue” is a copycat version of the English “you are welcome”, long integrated into colloquial Québécois French. The confusion is the perfect point of entry into the Montreal experience, a sign of what the new arrivals have got themselves into: a place where the crisscross between languages can send out misleading signals. Here is another Montreal vignette. Some years ago during a provincial election campaign, I walked by a campaign poster for a political party whose slogan that year was OSER (O-zay), meaning: TO DARE. Instead of drawing a moustache on the candidate’s face or adding glasses, some joker had done something simpler, but more damaging. The clown scratched a big L in front of OSER, turning an infinitive into a noun, an O into an OO, a rousing French challenge into an English taunt, and prematurely declaring the candidate a LOSER. This is the kind of bilingual joke that makes Montreal the home of “language games” of the sort Doris Sommer praises in Bilingual Aesthetics (Sommer 2003: vii). Sommer has special regard for the way jokes pinpoint the anxieties of contact. The playful yet aggressive L is a lovely illustration of the fine line between humour and belligerence. The L introduces a phonetic shock, jarring the circuitry of the slogan from French into English. The move from “daring” to “losing” plainly exposes the political stakes of such language games. The fact that one English letter has the power to cancel out both the sound and the meaning of the French word has resonance in a city where languages jostle for symbolic dominance. Signage has always had much more than informational value in this city – and those who study branding and lettering in public space have a field day in Montreal. They discover that language is never innocent and that every sign also sends a message pointing to itself, to

118  Montreal’s third space its own language. And so road signs, high‑rise corporate logos, engravings on buildings and monuments, the lettering on public art, these are at once material elements of design and architecture and, in Montreal, political messages charting the progressive shift in linguistic ownership of the city. Despite the official, legislated francization of Montreal some thirty years ago, when English signs were largely replaced by French ones, English continues to surface in devious, illicit, borderline-tolerated, and sometimes unintentional ways. And so it can happen that signage will turn into art. This can happen, for instance, when the overpainting of French lettering on English signs peels away with time. A sign once belonging to a grocery store called Simcha’s has become an iconic image representing the uncanny elements of this process. The lettering was originally in English, then painted over in French to respect the language laws. But the reappearance of English behind the fading French, creates an unexpected palimpsest. The spectral presence of a second language hints at the subjective experience of many Montrealers today, for whom the constant presence of another tongue complicates all communication. A pesky second language insinuates itself into the picture, drawing attention to the materiality of the message. The Simcha sign is a visual representation of this disturbance, showing how ghosts from the past can make furtive reappearances in the present.

Source: Grant Collins, 2004, for www.LogoCities.org

Figure 5.1 The Simcha sign. A palimpsest that evokes the instability of language relations in Montreal.

Montreal’s third space  119 The language games of the city are not always intentional or funny. And indeed, to live in Montreal is to experience daily the unruly aspects of translation, its gains and losses, its differing cultural objectives, its unsettling effects. The mood of these manoeuvres reflects the historical resonances that inform language politics in Montreal. The translating-over of public space was a necessary move, fortifying French in its struggle to survive in a small corner of a vast English-language North America. As in Barcelona, the protection of the regional language is essential to its survival and legal measures indispensable. Yet the regulation of language is a difficult business.1 The influence of one language on the other is inevitable, and can be cause for outrage (“Why can’t translators get it right?”) but also for ludic hybridity (as in the slogan “Lait’s go!” used by a milk company to promote itself with the skateboarding crowd). These examples point to the way in which languages interact in Montreal, not necessarily in the form of conventional translation but often in fraught or deviant forms of contact. Generally the story of Montreal is told from one language side or the other. But my aim is to highlight the interactions among these communities, showing that the circuits themselves are part of the story. In Montreal, as we saw in Calcutta, to travel across town is to enact the double sense of translation: to move across space and across language. As in other cosmopolitan cities, the sidewalks of Montreal are today alive with the languages of migration and globalization. But many of these languages have only limited engagement with the city. It is the patterns of translation which will tell which languages count. Relentless language contact can cause confusion and insecurity, but, when language is more than a currency of exchange, contact can be a source of stimulation. Proximity breeds tensions, intensifies the meaning of language collisions, enrolls them in the struggle or turns them into play. Far from being a site of harmonious difference, Montreal remains a city of unequal and fraught transactions, yet which make today’s city a laboratory of new forms of expression. The transgressions and unruliness of today’s city, its linguistic porousness, are a product of the divisions of the past. It is because Montreal was a city of divisions that it can today be a city of mixture, that its differences can be appropriated, dislocated, perverted, translated. The literary and cultural history of the city is full of cross-town voyages, voyages of forced or voluntary translation across time zones, voyages whose lessons vary according to their origin and finality. The Montreal imagination has long been dominated by the narrative of east–west confrontation, which is also a story of tension between languages. As the city becomes increasingly polycentred, as its language topography becomes more diverse, its translational trajectories become more diverse. These changes are reflected by the increasing prominence of the “third space”, the urban zones and forms of expression which cut across and destabilize the old divisions. Taking a meandering path through some sixty years of the cultural history of the city, calling up evocative images and portraits, I will track the transformations of this third space, from the site of a singular culture of Yiddish-language modernity in the 1940s to an ever-enlarging zone of translational writing.

120  Montreal’s third space

Laneways The Montreal writer André Carpentier began an experiment in 2002. Every day he would visit the laneways of the city, the back alleys which are integral to Montreal’s urban fabric, and compile his observations. His Ruelles, jours ouvrables (2005) (“Laneways, Working Days”) was written during a period of five years and is a remarkable volume. The writing is vigorous and original, and it has a liveliness that belies the monotony of a task undertaken with perseverance and discipline. The writer overhears conversations, imagines stories, evokes the textures of an always changing landscape. But the book also has significance in the context of Montreal history. Instead of constructing a narrative from the official perspective of boulevards, monuments and city squares, Carpentier tracks the activities of city dwellers in the semi-private, semi-public arena of the laneway. Using the passage of the seasons as his structuring principle, he tells his own story as a flâneur observing a world normally hidden from view. The lanes were part of the nineteenth-century plan for Montreal, partly corresponding to a French idea of houses giving onto an exterior courtyard space, partly serving to provide a utilitarian space for service vehicles. But for Montrealers brought up in crowded neighbourhoods, the laneways were the domain of children and their games. Laneways became essential places to learn how to ride a bicycle, to organize hockey games, and to spy on neighbours. And so to stroll the laneways is to return to the odours and sounds of time past. The author observes fragments of life, and responds to them in the same spirit of spontaneity and improvisation, creating a form of writing as unplanned as the jumble of sheds, fences and gateways which make up the unruly architecture of the back alley. Like Barcelona’s passatges, the lanes are part of an unofficial network of connecting pathways. The histories that speak through these avenues reflect the distinctive past of each city, the burden of secrets in Barcelona, the ancient conquests of Montreal. As in Barcelona, roaming the lanes and passageways carries a hint of transgression. Occasionally Carpentier’s “strolling” is interpreted as “lurking”, and he is called upon, on one occasion by the police, to explain his motives. But Carpentier was indeed following rules, injunctions that might have been devised by de Certeau or Alain Médam or Benjamin, to direct one’s attention to the details of everyday life, to the sensuous surfaces of the city, to areas seemingly untouched by history – or rather where history presents itself in an unusual guise. Carpentier discovers that beneath the surfaces of back lanes there are layers of history that have accumulated away from the spotlight of official chroniclers. Il y a un vaste passé sous le béton des villes, dont on a perdu conscience; tout ça, dont on a collectivement perdu la mémoire, parce que le présent, comme le moulin de la chanson, bat trop vite et trop fort… Qu’en est-il de ces ruines et fragments de mémoires réunis sous le béton de cette terra incognita sous l’asphalte et sous les maisons, les hangars,

Montreal’s third space  121 les garages, sous le bois traité et le carrelage des terrasses? Toutes ces ruelles, ces coins dallés ont été des territoires de chasse, des lieux de fermes, des sentiers … (Carpentier 2005: 126–8). There is a vast history under the asphalt of cities that we have forgotten, so much we have collectively forgotten because the present is too present, because time moves too fast … What kinds of ruins and fragments of memory lie hidden under the concrete of this terra incognita under the asphalt and under the houses, sheds, garages, under the treated wood and the paving stones of the patios? All these laneways, those areas covered with paving tiles, were once hunting lands, farmland, pathways … What Carpentier brings to light are fragments of unofficial memory, which he shapes into a kind of counter-narrative, a history from below, which proposes a scale of space and time different from conventional historical or travel literature. Rather than crossing vast expanses of space, he explores small spaces, in the manner of what Michael Cronin calls “endotic” travel (Cronin 2009: 3–7), following itineraries that are not signposted by official markers. Such forms of counter-narrative are particularly resonant in Montreal, where occupation of city space and the trajectory across the city have traditionally carried with them heavy ideological agendas. By contrast, these are ramblings on more casual terrain. They avoid the divides which carry with them longstanding dramas of confrontation. And they speak of a moment in Montreal history when narrative topographies are being scrambled. This widening of the terrain is evident in both English-language and French-language novels.2 By broadening the scope of geography, by defusing the power of traditional sites, fiction introduces stories and histories that were occluded by the overriding preoccupation with the east–west axis of Montreal. Montreal is revising its self-perception, rewriting its myths. What I will explore in this chapter are the configurations of Montreal’s third spaces – the spaces which disturb and alter the traditional duality of the city. Rather than functioning as the always dependable separator of identities, the traditional dividing line of the city, the boulevard Saint-Laurent, is now a more uncertain cipher. The street long functioned as home to many of Montreal’s immigrant communities. They established their neighbourhoods around the street – first in the lower areas around the port, then further north as new neighbourhoods were constructed, around the turn of the twentieth century (Anctil 2002). And so the street became a buffer zone, and like the Raval in Barcelona a territory marked by an identity which was neither one of the city’s polar doubles. While this third identity once comforted and sustained the opposing poles of east and west, it now interferes with established codes and extends into a widening zone of interconnections. It is the progress of this third space – in its spatial, linguistic and symbolic dimensions – that I would like to track, returning to a period which was crucial for today’s Montreal. In many ways modern Montreal was born in

122  Montreal’s third space the 1940s, in the dark days of the war and in the promise of the postwar years, and in the very particular configuration of linguistic and cultural relations that prevailed. To enquire about the modern in Montreal in the 1940s is to elicit responses in three languages – English, French and Yiddish. In the 1940s, Montreal was home to three important modernist movements, whose stories are rarely recounted together. They are told as separate narratives bounded by their language and by the national history to which they belong. The view from the city allows a perspective which can embrace all three. To see these movements spatially, on the urban map, brings into focus the paradoxes of their isolation, as well as the changing conditions of translatability that allows pathways and conversations to emerge among them. Mapping the interweavings among them becomes a useful way to understand the conditions of translatability then and now. All events in Quebec’s recent history are linked to the central reference point of the 1960s, and so, paradoxically, it is impossible to discuss the 1940s without dealing with the myths and realities of the later decade. Like the rest of Quebec, Montreal began a new life in the 1960s. This was the moment when the repressive régime of Maurice Duplessis finally came to an end, when in a magical moment of spontaneous generation the new Quebec was born. 1960 saw the election of a new government which acted vigorously on economic, political and cultural issues to allow Quebec to “catch up” with the rest of the world. A secular, modern, progressive society seemed to emerge, fully formed, almost instantly. And Montreal was greatly affected by these changes, with extensive changes to its infrastructure, especially in preparation for the 1967 World Exhibition, Expo 67. In the 1960s Montreal’s first skyscrapers were built, new bridges were constructed, urban renewal bulldozed entire neighbourhoods, and the city was the site of the political and social turbulence which would lead to the francophone “reconquest” of Montreal (Levine 1990, Lortie 2004). The vibrant cultural forces at work in the city were best represented by the journal called Parti pris, which promoted the aggressive use of joual (colloquial, urban, English-inflected French) as a literary language and defended the ideal of a secular, socialist, decolonized and independent Quebec. And the figure who best encapsulates the dynamics of this era for me is Malcolm Reid, the author of the classic The Shouting Signpainters – an anglophone who travelled across the city to participate in the francophone struggle and to report on the shift of cultural power from the anglophone west to the progressive francophone movements of the east end (Simon 2006: 28–57). Reid’s journey was a homage to the new Montreal and the new Quebec, and captures the excitement of the dramatic changes that were defining the terms of Montreal’s modern physical and cultural self. But, as might be expected, the suddenness of this transformation (known as “La Révolution tranquille”, “The Quiet Revolution”) has been contested in recent years. Scholarship in all areas of the social sciences has shown that “le Québec moderne” had been in gestation for many decades – and this realization provoked an intense interest in the idea of modernity itself. What

Montreal’s third space  123 does the idea of the modern mean, and why did radical change become a myth so integral to Quebec’s understanding of itself? Modernity became a focus of critical research, producing a rich body of reflection on the recent histories of Montreal and Quebec, with a view to relativizing the “revolution” of the 1960s (Lamonde 1986, 2010; Schwartzwald 2004). This relativization extended to the powerful polarizations of the 1960s, which, while testifying to the winds of change blowing over the city and the ebullience of its francophone culture, left out many cultural aspects on the ground. The growing nationalism of the 1960s and its brittle categories left little room for the diversities of the city that were not contained by its defining terms. All of reality had to be squeezed into the English–French dichotomy, and yet, like any city, Montreal was home to many communities, whose members did not necessarily fall into the subject positions defined by patrician Anglo or working-class Franco. In particular, little attention could be given to the kinds of class and racial inequities that fell along the north– south divide and that figured prominently in the industrial history of the city, beginning with Herbert Brown Ames’ The City Below the Hill (1897). The title of this classic primer for social reform emphasizes the contrast between the “heights” of affluent neighbourhoods and the unsanitary congestion of industrial districts along the waterfront (see Simon 2009). Despite its importance in the economic history of Montreal, this high–low, north–south division has not played a strong role in the literary imagination – which has been dominated instead by the strong personality of east–west streets like Ste Catherine and Sherbrooke. Few literary works, with the notable exceptions of Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute (1947) and Morley Callaghan’s The Loved and the Lost (1951), used the vertical drop between mountain and river as dramatic material to be exploited.3 To see the city along a north– south axis brings into view groups like the Irish who broke the symmetries of religion and language (they were largely Catholic, English-speaking and often poor) and the Black community in Little Burgundy, whose role in the cultural life of the city during the 1920s and 1930s was vital (Gilmore 1988). It also brings into view many immigrant communities whose realities as a third cultural force were largely ignored. It is in this broad context that the 1940s emerge as a kind of retroactive corrective to the bifocal vision of the 1960s. The postwar years saw a huge influx of immigrants and refugees, contributing to the sudden diversification of the city – and prefiguring the more recent waves of immigration into the city. Both the francophone writer Gabrielle Roy and the anglophone Mavis Gallant have written compellingly of the ways in which Montreal streets were transformed by this presence, and the way mentalities were changed. Gallant was drawn to the stories of refugees, and her very first published short stories had to do with the experience of exiles. Roy was similarly swept up by the strangeness and disorientation of the city as it experienced the war and postwar years – and used these perceptions as the backdrop to her novel Alexandre Chenevert (1954). During the 1940s Montreal was becoming modern. It was already a very “American” city, where the

124  Montreal’s third space automobile, movies, newspapers and other features of North American mass culture defined its daily life. Currents of liberal, sometimes anti-clerical thought were emerging through trade unions and reform movements, often from within the Church (see Schwartzwald 2004). What has been less noted, however, is the simultaneous presence in Montreal in the late 1940s of three modernist movements – each represented by an artistic community (visual arts and literature) anchored in the separate cultural spaces of the city. These three movements all experienced a period of remarkable energy in the 1940s and left a rich heritage which would be transmitted to the present through modes of translation, the conversations of the past shaping the narratives of the present. Montreal’s spatial and cultural divisions have made it a particularly rich terrain for displaying the affects and meanings of translation, the changing dynamics of distancing and furthering. The unfinished nature of these transactions can be profitably explored through the asymmetries of the cultural connections that were initiated at this time. The triangular configuration is crucial. By the 1960s, the narrative of Montreal was reduced to a confrontational duality. But as the “middle ground” of Montreal culture becomes in the twenty-first century an increasingly rich zone of identification, the third modernity of the 1940s takes on enhanced importance for having created spaces of expression which continue to act upon the city.

The third modernity To situate Montreal’s three modernities on the map, the following addresses can serve as indicators. The most easterly address is that of the studio of the painter Paul-Émile Borduas, on rue Mentana near Napoléon, who began, in the early 1940s, to bring together a group of students and colleagues at his studio on Tuesday evenings. Borduas went on to become the leader of the group called the “Automatistes”, an avant-garde movement of the arts which would define modernity in francophone Quebec. Towards the centre of town is the apartment of Ida Maza, at 4479 Boulevard de l’Esplanade, in the immigrant neighbourhood of Mile End. Ida Maza was one of the most important “salonnières” of the Yiddish literary community and her apartment was the meeting point for Yiddish-language writers and artists during the 1930s and 1940s. The most westerly address is the residence of the poet, lawyer and activist Frank Scott at 451 Clarke Street in Westmount. Scott was a leading figure in the English-language modernist movement and also a professor of law – and so his stable home in the more affluent part of town would have contrasted with the rented downtown apartments of most of his poet friends. Although the bulk of the English-language literary scene would have been played out closer to McGill University, Scott’s house was nevertheless a significant pole of activity. Scott used his home as a gathering place for francophones and anglophones from both the political and literary worlds. The distances that separate these buildings are not huge – they could be best navigated on a bicycle. The mental distance however is very large, given

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Souce: ©2011 Google, Map Data ©2011 Tele Atlas, prepared by Marie Leconte

Figure 5.2 The three modernities of Montreal: an easy bicycle ride from one to the other.

that each of these movements takes place in a different language and within its own separate intellectual and aesthetic world. Each movement belongs to a different imaginative geography, the Automatistes looking towards France and the Surrealists for their inspiration, the Canadian Modernists looking to Anglo-American sources and the Yiddish writers looking towards their Eastern European pasts, as well as to the flourishing movements of modern Yiddish letters in New York. The map highlights the separateness of the imaginative and institutional worlds, with each literary movement located in the heart of its own separate territory – east, west, centre. All the addresses are epicentres for the production of literature and visual art – a process involving publication, a reading public, networks of influences. Yet the neatness of the map is somewhat deceptive, because the professional activities of these writers and painters took place in the same downtown areas of the city. But even when these writers and painters did share the same sidewalks, as they often did on the central downtown streets, the feel of the place is different, giving rise to a sense of the uncanny. And so Gilles Marcotte says that when he visits Sherbrooke Street in the fiction of Hugh MacLennan, he

126  Montreal’s third space has the impression that he is a tourist in a place that resembles “étrangement, bizarrement”, the place he knows (Marcotte 1997: 30). How unusual would it be for a city to see the simultaneous flourishing of three such sites? Every metropolis is the site of multiple “scenes”, as Alan Blum explains, the theatre of ideas and styles in a continual dance of emergence and decline (Blum 2003: 164–88). What makes the coexistence of these three modernities in Montreal exceptional is that fact that all three represented during the 1940s a powerful moment of separate literary and artistic expression. All were strong and vibrant movements on home terrain, and all would ensure a significant literary heritage. All had their own cafés, salons, public meetings, art exhibitions, and their own definitions of the modern – in splendid isolation one from the other. From this initial state of separateness, however, links would be created through time, and it is the relations of translation which became possible over the years that will be of most interest. How did “moderne” and “modern” enter into conversation? In the following capsule portraits, I will evoke in very broad strokes the three modernist movements, their places in the city, the atmosphere of the times.

Moderne/modernist “Le moderne” in the 1940s was powerfully associated with the avant-garde group known as the Automatistes, today recognized as the defining expression of modernity in the arts in Quebec. The artistic program of the group, although best known in the realm of painting, included dance, theatre and poetry. Le moderne carried a strong political charge, and a call for transgression of bourgeois norms. Paul-Émile Borduas was the acknowledged leader of the movement whose radical practices were widely celebrated in the 1960s. But Borduas and his group actually began their collective activities early in the 1940s, with a first art exhibition in 1941, and their celebrated manifesto, Refus global (“Total Rejection”) written and distributed in 1948. Borduas gathered a lively group of creators around him, and brought them together at his studio on Mentana Street for regular discussions. From the 1960s onwards, the group was enthusiastically adopted as the poster-child of modern Quebec, with its influence only increasing over the years. Its anti-bourgeois ideology, its resolute anti-clericalism and secularism, and its presence on the Montreal landscape (in the form of public art works particularly in the Montreal metro4) continue to shape the urban environment. For the Automatistes, being modern included following Surrealist influences and subscribing to the ideal of a radical break with representation, whether in painting or poetry. Claude Gauvreau, poet and playwright, was another of the key thinkers behind the Automatistes’ revolutionary aims. For Gauvreau, language, like visual art, held a powerfully transformative potential. And so abstraction in both painting and poetry was pursued with the same goal of expressing spontaneous feeling and interior impulses. The idea of the radical break (“la rupture”) set the tone for artistic experimentation in the arts in Quebec for many decades – influencing trends

Montreal’s third space  127 in literature like the radical aesthetics of new formalism and feminist writing in the 1970s and 1980s. The publication of the manifesto in 1948 was a coup d’éclat in what was still a very conservative society and Borduas was fired from his job as a teacher at the École du meuble. What most characterized the work and influence of the group was its emphasis on the variety of the arts and the interaction between art and social change, expressed most spectacularly in their manifesto which remains a key document in the modern history of Quebec (Ellenwood 1992: ix).

Source: Photograph by Maurice Perron. Reproduced with the kind permission of Line-Sylvie Perron

Figure 5.3 Paul-Émile Borduas, 1951, Quebec’s most illustrious modernist painter, and intellectual leader of the Automatistes.

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Source: Photograph by Maurice Perron. Reproduced with the kind permission of Line-Sylvie Perron

Figure 5.4 A group portrait, 1947. Left to right: Claude Gauvreau, Mme Gauvreau, Pierre Gauvreau, Marcel Barbeau, Madeleine Arbour, Paul-Emile Borduas, Madeleine Lalonde, Bruno Cormier, Jean-Paul Mousseau.

Anglo-American-style modernism also had a political edge, but in AngloMontreal it did not carry the aesthetics of transgression that were so integral to the thinking of the authors of Refus global. Less radical than their francophone counterparts in terms of style, less aggressively confrontational to their own society, the English-language modernists adopted the marginal stance of bohemians, setting up their journals on the fringes of established institutions, living in the pockets of space left vacant as the Anglo-aristocracy began its slow decline. Some of Montreal’s English-language modernists were active in left-wing political organizations (notably A.M. Klein and F.R. Scott). During the 1930s before he left for the Spanish Civil War and later China’s War of Liberation, the dashing Norman Bethune was the very model of the activist artist – implementing art education programs for children of the working class. His combination of creativity and left-wing idealism was immensely appealing and Marian Scott – later to become an important modernist painter – worked with him. It was in 1936 that Marian Scott joined forces with Bethune and the painter Fritz Brandtner to teach at their newly established Children’s Art Centre for the underprivileged (Trépanier 2000: 104–5).

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Source: © Estate of Jean Paul Riopelle/ SODRAC (2010)

Figure 5.5 The title page of the manifesto, Refus Global, 1948. The homonymic play on words “Refus global/ Raie fugue lobeale” is Surrealist-inspired.

Montreal was the gathering point for English-language poets from all over Canada. “During the latter half of the Second World War, a group of young and unknown Canadian poets converged on Montreal and in a few short years of little magazine and small press publication, rewrote the history of English-Canadian poetry” (Trehearne 1999: 3). Almost every major modernist Canadian poet either grew up or spent a considerable amount of time in Montreal during this period – from Frank Scott and A.J.M. Smith, to A.M. Klein, P.K. Page, Irving Layton, Louis Dudek, Raymond Souster, Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood and Alden Nowlan. Novels too were important, and Montreal saw significant works by Gwethalyn Graham, Hugh MacLennan and later Mordecai Richler, Brian Moore, Leonard Cohen and Morley Callaghan. Joan Roberts, who moved to Montreal in the 1940s where she would meet her husband the painter Goodridge Roberts, describes her discovery of two communities in English Montreal. We had found the English-speaking community to be divided into the Protestant old-timers, some of whom were the wealthy power brokers in the city and quite conservative in outlook, and another large group of artists and intellectuals, often Jewish, who were left-wing, sometimes communist, but with different social views and values and very

130  Montreal’s third space conscious of what was happening in Europe and in the war. This group provided a sort of alternative community … Roberts 2009: 52 Mavis Gallant has also described the excitement of the 1940s in Montreal. It was a wonderful, thrilling time to be young. All the old conservative dead weight was still there, and of course French Canada was still locked, but there were elements breaking out, and that was what was so exciting. And there was something thrilling about Montreal: the two languages, the centre still hadn’t been destroyed as it is now, and it was full of shade trees and attractive stone houses and the stone houses had been made into little flats for a lot of artists and writers and young people. Gallant in Leith 2010: 19 Joan Roberts lived in one of these subdivided old houses on Lorne Crescent, which became a co-op, and where Paul Robeson, in town for a concert, once came to sing for them. Literary modernism in English emerged and gained strong identity in the 1940s around two small magazines, Preview and First Statement, whose principal sites of encounter were McGill University and the cafés and rented rooms on a couple of miles of streets in downtown Montreal between Guy and Bleury (Leith 2010). With a few exceptions, this strong movement of English-language writing, marked by its linguistic selfconsciousness and predilection for wit, remained entirely within the orbit of Anglo-American modernism, and went into spectacular decline with the rise of francophone nationalism in the 1960s. Relations between English- and French-language writers during the 1940s were distant and there was little contact. Only since the late 1990s has English-language writing come to life again in Montreal, but with consciousness of its new place within the cultural disposition of the francophone city.

Modernism in Yiddish Against the backdrop of the two modernisms of Montreal, it is time now to examine the less-known Yiddish-language modernism. The period during which Yiddish flourished in Montreal as the language of a vibrant culture can be given precise dates: Yiddish arrived in Montreal with the great waves of immigration from Eastern Europe during the 1880s and disappeared with the last published issue of the popular newspaper, the Keneder Odler, in the mid-1960s. The Holocaust in Europe put an end to Yiddish culture in North America, as Jewish writers increasingly turned to English as a language of expression. Brian Trehearne’s authoritative study of modernism in the Montreal of the 1940s (Trehearne 1999) discusses four poets of whom two are Jewish: Irving Layton and A.M. Klein. While Klein and Layton were both children of Yiddish-speaking parents, they were part of the first generation

Montreal’s third space  131 of Jewish writers educated in English and who chose to express themselves in this language. Until then, Montreal Jewish writing had been written in an immigrant tongue, Yiddish. For a half-century, Montreal fostered a vibrant scene of creation in the Yiddish language – one which had links with groups such as Di Yunge in New York and fostered important poets like J.I. Segal, Melekh Ravitch and Rokhl Korn and novelist Chava Rosenfarb. This is how Chava Rosenfarb describes her arrival in Montreal after the war: In Montreal I found a bustling Yiddish social life. Without having to wait until I learned English properly, I could read the Keneder Odler every day, and so keep up-to-date with world and Canadian news events. Harry Hershman, my Montreal publisher who made it possible for me to emigrate to Canada, supplied me with Yiddish literary periodicals, which kept me informed about Yiddish cultural life both here and abroad. He took me to the Folk University at the Jewish Public Library, which was the centre for Yiddish cultural life in the city. I visited the Peretz schools and the Folk Shule and became a student at the Yiddish teacher’s seminary. I could count more than forty Yiddish writers living in Canada in the years just after my arrival in this country, writers of international reputation, recognized all over the Yiddish-speaking world, as well as more marginal writers, so-called Sunday scribblers … There was an active writers’ union in Montreal, which I was invited to join. There were constant public lectures on literary topics. There were visits by the great Yiddish writers from abroad. Rosenfarb in Anctil et al. 2007: 11 One of the hubs of activity during the interwar period in Montreal was the home of Ida Maza.5 Maza was one of the most prominent figures in the city’s dynamic Yiddish cultural community. Born Ida Zhukovsky, and also using the more anglicized name Massey (1893–1962), she was an active poet, whose work was included in many anthologies and journals and she wrote widely for children. Most concretely, Maza provided a second home to the many poets who had immigrated to Canada alone, worked in factories and lived lonely lives in rooming houses. Miriam Waddington gives a particularly vivid description of Ida Maza’s salon, describing Ida Maza as a “jolie laide”, who had a “beautiful low voice, full of dark rich tones and a chanting, trance-like way of talking” (Waddington 1989: 2). She also describes the special role that Ida Maza took on as the “foodgiver and nourisher, the listener and solacer” to these immigrants, many of them lonely and impecunious. She would listen to their poetry with absolute intensity, rocking gently to the rhythm of their words. And she fed not only the spiritual but also the real hunger of these “oddly assorted Yiddish writers”. She also fed them real food, and not just once a week, but every day. She served endless cups of tea with lemon, jam and sugar lumps, plates

132  Montreal’s third space of fresh fruit, Jewish egg-cookies, home-made walnut strudel, and delicately veined marble cake. And for the really hungry there were bowls of barley soup, slices of rye bread thickly buttered and eggs – countless eggs – boiled, omeletted and scrambled. I never knew her to serve anyone, including her family, a conventional meal from beginning to end; but she was always making someone an egg or opening a can of salmon or slicing a tomato to go with a plate of pickled herring. Waddington 1989: 4 Miriam Waddington’s engaging portrait of Ida Maza and her crowded apartment conjures up an era of special intensity in Montreal Jewish life. A rich crop of memoirs and essays emphasize the density of the literary life that sustained the Yiddish community – two examples being David Roskies’ Yiddishlands (2008) and Eva Raby’s “Memories of Yiddish Montreal” in Anctil et al. (2007). Raby vividly describes her own mother’s salon, and the many stars of Yiddish culture who passed through. This cosmopolitan scene which saw constant visitors was relatively isolated from both English- and French-language writing in Montreal. For Chava Rosenfarb, Even the bicultural pull of a city like Montreal was never strong enough, or attractive enough to intrigue or stimulate a Yiddish writer, who, arriving here from Europe, already possessed a rich cultural baggage ... Estranged and isolated in their otherness, yet nurtured and encouraged by the camaraderie and warm fellow-feeling of their equally isolated fellow writers, Canadian Yiddish writers found in their East European valises all the necessary nourishment for their muse. Rosenfarb in Anctil et al. 2007: 12

English–French/distancing The view from the city shows Montreal in the 1940s to be a crisscross of layered modernisms – existing in relative isolation one from the other. And so the relation of concepts and social movements across the city remains largely one of skewed correspondences, of differing temporalities, of misalignment. “Modern” is not the same as “moderne” and finds little place in the modernismus of Yiddish. These relations of non-equivalence mirror the separateness of the city’s space and the ways that it harbours contested zones. Buildings too, by their physical placement on Montreal’s cultural map, by their names, and by their use of inside and outside, public and private space, participate in a history of parallel and often competing modernisms – the yellow brick and Art Deco francophone Université de Montréal replying to the gray stone Gothic McGill University, the textured Complexe Desjardins with its immense indoor plaza responding to the cruciform and Le Corbusierinspired Place Ville Marie. And so physical structures, like concepts, were given meaning within separate histories.

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Source: Collection of the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University. Gift of Canadian Car and Bus Advertising Ltd, 1966. Oil on pressed wood panel (masonite).

Figure 5.6 Portrait of Ida Maza, the “jolie laide”, by the painter Sam Borenstein (1945).

What kinds of translation, then, are possible in this situation of autonomous, parallel communities? I will explore the geometries of communication along two lines: first the line that links English and French, then the wide array of connections that resulted from the rise and decline of Yiddish modernity in Montreal.

134  Montreal’s third space The dominant mood of translation between the anglophone and francophone communities was distancing. By this I mean that passages across the city, attempts to foster friendships and connections, mainly served to reveal the gap that prevailed between the communities at large. Distancing is best illustrated by the practices of the poet, activist and lawyer Frank Scott. He was a prominent literary and political figure in Canada, one of the most significant intellectuals of his time. Scott initiated the serious practice of modern literary translation in Montreal – particularly in his English versions of the poetry of Anne Hébert. His literalist translations of Anne Hébert were a deliberate attempt to highlight the autonomy of her writing, in contrast to Scott’s own style. Her work was part of a dark, lyrical and mystical tradition – one which stood on the cusp of literary modernity in Quebec, while Scott was a writer of clear, unadorned modernist poetry, often with a parodic twist. His Anglo-American version of modernism was light years away from the interiorized, haunted poetry of a Saint-Denys Garneau or an Anne Hébert. Scott was clearly attracted to an imaginative world that was far from his own, and yet he was also stirred by the implicit political critique of the poetry. His choice of literalism points to a stronger measure of distance than of affinity. Literalism was the mark of the distance which separated the anglophone and francophone poetic traditions. A record of the literary transactions between them was published as Dialogue sur la traduction (1970) which became a foundational document for Canadian translation. The exchange of letters around Scott’s translation of Anne Hébert’s “The Tomb of Kings” – which is the core of the publication – indicates the seriousness he brought to the task. Scott’s attention to detail, the sober and yet exalted tone that each uses to thank the other, are among the most impressive aspects of the exchange. He declares the primacy of the original, the translation being an echo rather than a recreation. “My principal aim in translating is to alter the poem as little as possible and to let it speak for itself in the other tongue. This means a preference for literalness rather than for alternate renderings: for one poem in two languages, instead of two similar poems” (Scott 1962: 9). Scott’s literal renditions were not attempts to create English-language poems which could stand in the place of the original. The distance between Scott’s cultural and political positions and the spirit of nationalism that prevailed among many Quebec writers at the start of the 1970s resulted, however, in the widening of this divide. His support for the equality of two nations within the Confederation (a position which the later Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau would turn into official policy) was mirrored by his practice of translation, which confirmed the separations, and indeed the widening gap, between communities. Translation here stands for a relationship sustained by respectful distance, for “entente cordiale” (Godbout 2004). Scott was generous in his attention, determined to reveal the subtleties of Hébert’s great poem “The Tomb of the Kings” for his anglophone readers. But everything about the transaction drew attention to the gulf which separated their sensibilities and indeed the two communities they represented (Simon 2006: 48–56).

Montreal’s third space  135 Attention to English-language poetry from the French side manifested the same qualities of formal courtesy. A special issue of the French-Canadian literary journal Gants du ciel (printemps 1946, Fides) introduces its issue on English-Canadian poetry (“Poésie canadienne-anglaise”) by announcing that “the hour has come to work towards the rapprochement of the Canadian cultures in view of ensuring harmonious unity, rich in distinctive traits” (“l’heure est venue de travailler au rapprochement des cultures canadiennes en vue d’assurer à la patrie une unité harmonieuse, riche de particularismes féconds”) (Brown 1946: 5). Poets like A.M. Klein are introduced to their compatriots as if they came from a distant planet. A.J.M. Smith enters the same rhetorical territory when he introduces Klein to the Frenchspeaking world as a poet whose Jewish sensibility allows him to understand the patriarchal, traditional and ecclesiastical world of French Canada better than any English writer (Brown 1946: 4). In a pamphlet of A.M. Klein’s poems which were distributed in French, the Québécois critic Jean-Marie Poirier recommends Klein as a “Jewish poet among us” (“Poète juif parmi nous”), stressing the understanding of Quebec which Klein demonstrates, in terms similar to Smith. Klein is exceptional in his sensitivity to the common realities of Quebec because he can bring to bear his identity as a Jewish poet, Quebec born, English in culture “juif d’origine, québécois de naissance, anglais de culture” (Poirier 1948: 5). It is the idiom of origin that best defines distancing, as writers and translators are presented as the representatives of their nation or religion and made to conform to the “metaphysics of communication” defined by Naoki Sakai (2006). Poets approach one another with the respectful manner of a host introducing a guest rumoured to be distinguished – but whose world is entirely foreign to one’s own. There are no clues other than a ceremonious presentation. The introductions of English-Canadian and Jewish writers to French Canada, as described by Patricia Godbout, were often undertaken by writers who had strong connections to federalism and to Ottawa, like the editor of Gants du ciel, Guy Sylvestre. Theirs were among the very few attempts to initiate cross-cultural literary transactions across the city, from the French side (Godbout 2004). Indeed there were few published translations at all during this period. The translation of poetry took place in anthologies or journals, and translated novels were still rare. The few exceptions were sometimes published outside of Canada, as was Hannah Josephson’s translation of Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion (1945): The Tin Flute (1947), published first in the United States.6 A few novels like Le Survenant (1945, translated 1950) and Charles Harvey’s Les Demi-Civilisés (1934, translated 1938) appeared in English, and several non-fiction works were translated into French during the 1940s. But the almost automatic inter-translation of English-language and French-language fiction which has become a feature of today’s Montreal was a very distant reality. Distancing could also be seen in the work of writers whose own literary aesthetic was influenced by the encounter of languages. The most significant

136  Montreal’s third space example of such a writer is Mavis Gallant, who was exceptional for her time in her knowledge of English and French literary modernisms. Like the francophone writer Gabrielle Roy, with whom she had a great deal in common, Gallant had a childhood marked by the painful tension of two languages (Simon 2010). But her knowledge of French was invaluable during the wartime years in Montreal, when as a reporter for the Montreal Standard she was one of the few English-language journalists who reported on the artistic avantgarde. In the July 1946 issue of the American magazine Harper’s Bazaar, she contributed a feature article on the Montreal avant-garde, mentioning writers, actors and painters like Gabrielle Roy, Roger Lemelin, Gratien Gélinas, Alain and Madeleine Grandbois, René Garneau, Pierre Dagenais, Alfred Pellan and Paul-Émile Borduas. Few journalists would have had such remarkable insight into the internationalist and urban spirit of Quebec culture at the time (Coleman 1994: 129). Gallant interviewed visiting luminaries from France – including Jean-Paul Sartre, and prided herself on having knowledge of and access to French Quebec culture which few anglophone journalists at the time would have had. She identified with the Montreal modernists sufficiently to publish her first short stories in December 1944 in the journal Preview. “Good Morning and Goodbye” and “Three Brick Walls” are about refugees and the effects of war. In the early 1950s, Gallant left for Paris where she has lived ever since, an internationally renowned short-story writer (whose short stories appeared regularly in The New Yorker) who writes in English against the backdrop of French. Her many volumes of short stories explore the uncertainties of identity – the lives of migrants and expatriots. Her Linnet Muir stories are autobiographical, and display Gallant’s precocious sensitivity to language even as a child – certain French words setting off powerful associations, nourishing her memory like Proust’s taste sensations. Other stories enter the lives of French-Canadian families, in parts of Montreal she might have explored as a journalist. Gallant’s fiercely intelligent portrayals of Montreal life are light years away from the images proposed by a novelist like Hugh MacLennan, whose emblematic Two Solitudes shares more with the tradition of the roman du terroir than the resolutely urban writing of Gallant and later Gwethalyn Graham or Morley Callaghan (Leith 2010). Gallant used her knowledge of the Montreal divides to literary advantage, and one might argue that her self-consciously modelled literary prose is a melding of French and English modernist influences. Some visual artists were able to bring together the double traditions of Montreal. One such exceptional figure is Marian Scott, the wife of F.R. Scott, who herself noted the very different nature of her experience as a Montrealer from that of her husband. Marian Scott contrasts her open and relaxed experience of the city, and her kinship with francophone artists, with that of her husband’s polite and distant relationships across town. As a student at Beaux-arts, she “found such nourishment among the French-Canadians in the way I hadn’t with a lot of English people I knew of my age … I was used to rather raggedy friends” (Grove-White 1987: 56), suggesting that Scott’s relationships were a great deal more formal. Marian Scott learned

Montreal’s third space  137

Source: Photograph of Marian Dale Scott, Studio Adolphe, during the 1940s. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Estate of Marian Scott.

Figure 5.7 Painter Marian Scott was more comfortable with the francophone artistic community than her husband, the poet, political activist and lawyer Frank Scott.

French at a young age and was profoundly implicated in the Montreal art scene throughout her long and productive life.7 Although she was not part of the Automatiste movement, she was sympathetic to its tenets and understood their grounding (see also Godbout 2004: 85). And she engaged extensively with abstract art, in one of the several transformations which marked her work. Friendships and creative relationships among painters of

Source: Reproduced with the kind permission of the Estate of Marion Scott

Figure 5.8 Marian Scott’s 1939 evocation of a Montreal outdoor staircase.

Montreal’s third space  139 different communities were much more frequent in the painting world than in literature.8 These connections, documented in the occasional footnotes by art historians (see in particular Trépanier 2000, 2008), depict a city where separations were not nearly as rigid as they were in the literary world. The reasons for this difference are surely the question of language – and perhaps the stronger spirit of internationalism in the universe of visual art.

Into Yiddish: ennobling While the relations between English and French were largely constrained by the formalities of social and cultural distance, the translational fate of Yiddish was shaped by quite different historical factors. Discussions of translation in relation to Yiddish are almost inevitably monopolized by the movement out of Yiddish in the postwar period. But before we take this tack – and show how translations from Yiddish were infused into Montreal’s two other modernisms – it would be useful to recall the extent to which Yiddish literature was long sustained by translations into Yiddish. Translations into Yiddish were a major element of Yiddish-language culture from the 1880s onward and they increasingly fed a “mass transnational Jewish readership hungry for access to a variety of knowledge that included world literature” (Margolis 2009: 184). The standard joke about translation into Yiddish has to do with the Yiddish version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet whose title page declares that the Shakespeare play has been translated and “improved”. In fact, what was improved was the Yiddish language itself, as translations into Yiddish enlarged the repertoire of the language and ennobled the vernacular. The Montreal Yiddish-language community, like its international counterparts, was actively engaged in translating into Yiddish, particularly between the two world wars. As the scene of a vibrant Yiddish-language culture from the 1880s onwards, Montreal saw the publication of some remarkable translations into Yiddish – and these continued right up to the 1960s. One important source of information on such translations was the Canadian Jewish Chronicle and in particular the reviews of A.M. Klein. To read the list of these reviews as they have been collected (Klein 1987) is to enter a truly cosmopolitan translation zone where there is intermingling not only among languages – Hebrew, Yiddish and English – but among genres – the sacred and the secular, poetry and prose. A remarkable range of works are covered, many of these translations into Yiddish. The very first review that appears in this collection, published in The Judaean, a magazine that Klein edited from 1928 to 1932, is a translation of the Biblical book of Koheleth (Ecclesiastes) into Yiddish by Judah L. Zlotnik. Klein underlines the difficulty of the task, particularly because of the immense gap between the Hebraic spirit of the Solomonic age and the Jewish spirit of the Middle Ages – the former characterized by high seriousness and a puritanic tone, the latter by passive resignation. Yet Klein is enthusiastic about the translation, its use of proverbial Yiddish idioms, its wit and vividness, its use of archaisms (a reflection of Klein’s own poetic preferences) – and the way it underlines the areas where

140  Montreal’s third space the affinities between the philosophy of Koheleth and that of the diaspora Jew do exist. (Klein 1987: 3–6) The meaning of translation into Yiddish changes drastically by the time Klein reviews the translation of The Mishna into Yiddish by Symcha Petrushka in 1945. Everything changed when the Yiddish community began to come to terms with the unimaginable losses of the Holocaust after 1945, accompanied by the wholesale liquidation of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union by the early 1950s, and the active exclusion of Yiddish in the creation of the new State of Israel in 1948. Margolis 2006: 165 Petrushka was a Polish-born Montreal scholar, once a prolific journalist in Warsaw, who produced his most significant works after his arrival in Canada as a refugee on the eve of the Second World War (Margolis 2009: 183). A fervent pedagogue, Petrushka published a Yiddish two-volume version of his own Jewish encyclopedia in Montreal in 1943 (188) and then a Yiddish version of a foundational text of Judaism, the Mishna, which is a commentary on the Bible. The Mishna is a multilayered text combining Hebrew and Aramaic texts. Petrushka punctuated and translated the text, adding his own commentary in Yiddish (190). The translation of religious works was accompanied by a lively and extremely diverse flow of secular translations. These were most often published in literary journals, as Canada’s publishing industry was still embryonic and most books – English, Yiddish or French – arrived via New York, London or Paris. But the many Yiddish literary journals (a large number of them short-lived) that mushroomed in Montreal from the 1920s onwards featured extensive translations, particularly from American sources. In her detailed account of translation in these journals, Rebecca Margolis emphasizes the cosmopolitan spirit that pervaded such publications as Nyuansn (Nuances, 1921), and Royerd (Raw Earth, 1922), both edited by the poet J.I. Segal. These journals published not only translated poems but also essays on poetics, and in the case of left-wing journals like Heftn (Notebooks, 1929) and Montreol (Montreal, 1932–5) promoted proletarian culture and American left-wing poetry, Russian poets such as Sergei Aleksandrovich Esenin and Chicago poet Carl Sandburg. These translations “promoted cultural literacy in the widest possible sense … They reflect a Yiddish culture that was vital and open, confident and strong, and intrinsically optimistic about its future as part of the modern world” (Margolis 2006: 160). One last translation must be mentioned here, and this is the extraordinary and often overlooked translation of Kafka’s Trial by Melekh Ravitch (1893–1976) published as Die Prozess in 1966 (New York, Der Kval) (Bruce 1994). Ravitch settled in Montreal in 1941 after leaving Poland and wandering the world for some years. In Montreal he became a mainstay of the Yiddish cultural community, serving on the boards of its institutions and publishing four collections of verse, a two-volume autobiography Dos

Montreal’s third space  141 Maysebukh fun mayn Lebn (“The storybook of my life”, 1962–4), and six volumes of an encyclopedic work on Yiddish writers, Mayn Leksikon (“My lexicon”, 1945–82). His efforts helped to turn Montreal into one of the major centres of Yiddish literary activity in the 1940s. The Kafka translation was published with illustrations by Ravitch’s son, Yossl Bergner, an Israeli artist (Bruce 1994: 43). Why would Ravitch have chosen to translate into Yiddish at this late date? The work was most certainly an ideological statement, and an act of faith in the continued relevance of the Yiddish language. The startling cover of the book, dominated by Kafka’s name in Yiddish (Hebrew) characters, would surely have pleased Kafka himself – who nourished a fascination for Yiddish. Ravitch had had a chance encounter with Kafka’s lover, Dora Diamant, in 1925, shortly after Kafka’s death, and this meeting may have impelled Ravitch to fulfill an act of homage. Although Ravitch writes an afterword to the translation, he makes no reference to his technique of translation but rather stresses Kafka’s involvement with Judaism – and in his translation uses several terms in Yiddish which stress the Jewishness of Kafka’s world, even using “bagel” as a synonym for the “twist of a circle” (Bruce 1994: 47). Ravitch’s Yiddish translation makes abundant use of oral expressions which are more informal than the German equivalents, and, according to Iris Bruce, conveys a lighter and more comic feeling. Whatever his critical leanings, Ravitch’s translation is an astonishing statement of defiance, and a monument to the spirit of the language. It stands today essentially as a gift to Yiddish.

Out of Yiddish: memorializing and transmigrating If translation into Yiddish was sustained by optimism and the desire to expand the range of the Yiddish language and its connections of solidarity with other cultures, translation out of Yiddish was driven by necessity. With the emptying of its creative forces as a result of the Holocaust, Yiddish gradually ceased to be a language which received translations. Even if translators attempted to forestall the death of Yiddish, their works inevitably participated in the spirit of memorialization.9 In the Montreal of the 1940s, the flow occurred most naturally towards English. Much of this output – memoir, fiction, poetry, non-fiction – has appeared in anthologies. Poetry is the preferred genre, and the most prominent poets are J.I. Segal, Melekh Ravitch and Rokhl Korn. But there is another kind of translation which was widely practiced in Montreal, and which we might call transmigration. Irving Layton and A.M. Klein were raised in Yiddish-language families and attended school in English. They began their writing lives as English-language poets. This transfer of languages was accompanied by the postwar physical displacement of Montreal’s Jewish community from its historic position in the central areas of the city (around the boulevard Saint-Laurent) to the western suburbs. In this movement of social ascension, Yiddish was left behind as the Jewish community moved on. This kind of conversion can be compared

142  Montreal’s third space

Source: National Yiddish Book Centre

Figure 5.9 The cover of Melekh Ravitch’s translation into Yiddish of Kafka’s The Trial. To translate into Yiddish in 1966 was a gesture of defiance.

to a kind of self-translation, especially in the case of A.M. Klein for whom Yiddish continued to act as an active ferment in his work (Margolis in Anctil et al. 2007). An unsuspected twist to the story of Yiddish translation comes with a new routing through the city, into French. Beginning in the 1980s, Yiddish began to be turned into French and the Yiddish heritage of Montreal appropriated into the new intellectual configuration of the city. This movement was largely due to one translator, Pierre Anctil, who has brought into French some twenty volumes of Yiddish. This is a rerouting of cultural lines of transmission, an exciting development in the life of the city. This latest shift is a symptom of the more general reconfigurations of identities occurring in Montreal. It is rare that a translation project is as laden with historical significance as this one. Although French was the language of the majority in Montreal, its weaker cultural status in relation to English made it, until the 1960s, a minor tongue. The lateral transfer from Yiddish to Quebec French was literally un-thought, unthinkable. Some indication of this “unthinkability” can

Montreal’s third space  143 be grasped from the following commentary by the translator René Chicoine in the preface to his French Rue Saint-Urbain by Mordecai Richler (1969). Le lecteur s’étonnera peut-être “d’entendre” des personnages qui sont tous Juifs s’exprimer comme des Canadiens français. Leur façon de parler pouvait-elle trouver une équivalence véritable dans la traduction? Quelque part, l’auteur fait un rapprochement entre les Juifs de la rue Saint-Urbain, qui sont les seuls personnages du livre, et les Canadiens français des environs: “Comme nous, écrit-il, ils étaient pauvres et communs, ils avaient des familles nombreuses et parlaient mal l’anglais.” On pourrait ajouter: et le français. Chicoine 1969: preface The reader will perhaps be surprised to “hear” characters who are all Jewish speaking like French Canadians. Could a truer equivalence have been found to reflect their way of speaking? Somewhere the author makes a comparison between the Jews of St Urbain Street, who are the only characters in the book, and the French Canadians living nearby. “Like us,” he writes, “they were poor, had large families and spoke English badly.” French too, we might have added. Chicoine anticipates a reaction of disbelief on the part of his readers: how could Jews speak “like French Canadians”, that is, speak in the characteristic Montreal urban variant of French, with its connotations of incorrectness and class markers? He is asking his readers to correct their instinctive reactions, and to take account of the fact that Richler himself sees the broad similarities between groups that made them both subordinate to English Montrealers during this period. Chicoine’s early translation of Richler, which would be followed by many other translations, in Montreal and in Paris, confronted the classic dilemma of translating identitary languages, especially where there has been friction between the groups in question. Time has altered these distances. And what seems untranslatable, opaque or excessively culture-laden at one moment may be welcomed at another. Translations are time-bound interventions, undertaken in view of current interests and sensitivities. The move from Yiddish to French reinforced contact between two languages whose relations had been minimal. But the translations also confirmed another change. They signalled a shift of intellectual territory. The history of Jewish Montreal, like the history of other immigrant groups, was, until the 1980s, considered to fall under the exclusive purview of anglophone historians. Pierre Anctil’s translations join a number of other translations which expand the range of francophone Quebec culture.10 To write about Jewish Montreal in French has made possible the convergence between Jewish and French-Canadian social realities and opened a new space of discussion and debate within the Quebec social sciences. These translations are a spectacular illustration of furthering, their impact defined less by their stylistic innovations than by their unusually powerful social and historical implications.

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Cohen chez lui Leonard Cohen’s family was one of the earliest Jewish families to become “uptowners”. In the early twentieth century, they moved away from the poor immigrant neighbourhood and its network of Yiddish-language institutions. Cohen’s contact with Yiddish came through his maternal grandfather, a renowned rabbi, and from his mother who was of Russian origin and sang Yiddish songs to him (Nadel 1996: 10–14). In his formal religious learning, in his activities at the synagogue, and in the Jewish religious themes that later infused his poetry, Cohen would have engaged with Hebrew and not Yiddish. But once he became a poet, Cohen was heavily influenced by Jewish Montreal poets Irving Layton and A.M. Klein, both of whom spent their early lives in the Yiddish-language milieu. Cohen’s writing was born at the intersection of Montreal’s communities, of their points of convergence and of conflict. His novels and poetry show links with all three of Montreal’s literary traditions, with Yiddish Montreal, as well as English-language and French-language Montreal. Cohen was part of the McGill scene during the 1950s when English-Canadian modernism remained a strong and vibrant presence. And although his contacts with French-language writers were distant, Cohen sensed the growing energy of the francophone scene – and Beautiful Losers (1966) taps into the French-language past and present of Montreal to shape its arguments. Although the dissonant clamour of the city became a burden to Cohen – who, like his character Breavman was relieved to leave Montreal’s “ugly magnificence” (Cohen 1963: 128) and to turn his back on its “absurd … vicious … cross-fertilization” (113), Cohen was very much a product of Montreal’s multiple modernities. In Cohen’s 1963 novel The Favourite Game, Lawrence Breavman is a teenager who, like Cohen himself, grew up in the wealthy English-speaking neighbourhood of Westmount. One Saturday night he and his buddy Krantz travel downtown for an escapade in a dance hall where they find themselves in a crowd of francophones. Their brash flirting sets off a brawl, and the boys suddenly hear “a noise like a wail of national mourning” and “see the mass of dancers change to a mass of fighters” (Cohen 1963: 49). The scene is repeated in slightly different form in Beautiful Losers. The protagonist once again finds himself in the middle of a crowd that confuses dancing, fighting, politics and sex. This time the event is a nationalist rally, and in the excitement of mingled bodies he bursts into the chanting of anti-English slogans, even though he knows that the anti-colonialist rhetoric of “Our turn!” is aimed at people like himself. Cohen’s take on the nationalism of francophone Montreal during the 1960s reflects the frictions of the divided city in which he grew up. Anglophones lived in the more privileged west, Francophones in the east – and, although there was little physical distance between the communities, the weight of historical inequalities made communion impossible. For an English-language Jewish Montrealer, the voyage across town led to foreign, even hostile territory. This was a city whose differences were aggressive and intrusive reminders of past

Montreal’s third space  145 wars which would not go away. “In Montreal there is no present tense, there is only the past claiming victories” (Cohen 1963: 125). Cohen succeeded in translating himself out of Montreal, out of its sectarianism and into the idioms that have gained him world renown. But Cohen never entirely gave up his Montreal connections. When he returned to the city after many years abroad, he didn’t return to the Westmount of his childhood but chose to keep a pied-à-terre in the central zone of Montreal, near the legendary dividing line between east and west, the boulevard SaintLaurent. One of his neighbours was good friend Quebec poet and playwright Michel Garneau. The fact that it was Garneau who has become the translator of Cohen’s poetry into French says much of the changes that have occurred over the last decades in Montreal’s cultural geography. Garneau is known for his brilliant translations of Shakespeare into his own personal version of Quebec French, a partly archaic, partly invented language that has become a classic of Quebec dramaturgy. These translations were part of a wave of writings, in all genres, that were vehicles of francophone Quebec’s new linguistic confidence. When Cohen realized that the French (France) translation of Stranger Music was not satisfactory, he asked Garneau if he would consider taking it on. Garneau accepted, as a gesture of friendship, and then translated Book of Longing as well.11 These translations are a striking development in Cohen’s relationship with Montreal. Garneau’s French versions enable Cohen to be at home in the francophone city, which is now increasingly a mixed and cosmopolitan space. As Garneau’s Shakespeare versions represented a moment in the history of cultural renewal in Montreal, so his translations of Cohen speak of a new kind of exchange – transactions that radiate outwards from the city’s contact zones, linkages that reflect the sensibility of an increasingly hybrid city. These linkages are also reflected in an additional spiral issuing from the encounter between Cohen and Garneau, and this is Garneau’s Poèmes du traducteur (2008), (Poems of the translator), a volume of poetry conceived and crafted by Garneau as he was translating Cohen. Garneau gave himself the gift of a new poem for each poem that he brought over from the English. This type of volume represents perhaps the purest form of furthering that one might imagine, as each poem is a result of a previous text and a further development. But in the case of Garneau’s poems, the formal connections between Cohen’s poetry and his own are tenuous and the links are largely of pure contiguity. And so it is rather the idea of translation that dominates the new poems rather than the kind of imbrication that the poets Jacques Brault and E.D. Blodgett developed in their poetic dialogue and renga called Transfiguration (Simon 2006: 137–41).

The line gives way In the course of Cohen’s lifetime, the meaning of the symbolic dividing line, le boulevard Saint-Laurent, has changed from site of confrontation and transgression (as in The Favourite Game and in Beautiful Losers) to a site

146  Montreal’s third space of more complex interactions, where translation mobilizes a wide variety of affects.12 And so the re-placement of Cohen in the imaginative world of Montreal could serve as an illustration of the ways in which Montreal is revising its self-image. The mythical dividing line which stands between east and west is taking on new meanings in an increasingly fluid city. And so, for example, a novel like Lullabies for Little Criminals (2006) (Ballade de Baby, 2008) by Heather O’Neill, highlights the extent to which the linguistic dividing line has become porous. O’Neill situates her novel around the old red-light district near the intersection of Saint-Laurent and Ste-Catherine to tell the story of a twelve-year-old girl whose too-young father is a heroin addict. The young girl is called Baby, her father is called Jules. But is that Jules in English or in French? He is from a village called Val des Loups, and at one point Baby cites the Québécois classic L’avalée des avalés by Réjean Ducharme (1966) as her favourite novel. This linguistic undecidability is echoed by the use of Saint-Laurent as an inbetween geographical space, but it is made even more evident in a strange linguistic slip at the start of the novel. The novel begins with Baby and her father moving into yet another dilapidated downtown hotel, which she calls the hotel Austriche. This is neither Autriche nor Ostrich, but a strange amalgam. The name underlines the inbetweenness of language at the border (O’Neill 2006: 2) just as other expressions do that occur in the novel, for example Jules saying “We’re localized here” (5). Some of the characters have French names, like the pimp Alphonse, or her friend Xavier. By using the corner of Saint-Laurent and Ste-Catherine as her starting point, O’Neill taps into the mythology of the city, exploiting the symbolic resonance of the streets and their rich history. The pre-adolescent Baby thinks this neighbourhood is the most beautiful in town, with its bright lights and prostitutes in “gorgeous high-heeled boots”, and the permissiveness that allows her to build a precarious existence on the margins of class and language. In the Lebanese-Canadian writer Rawi Hage’s novel Cockroach (2009, Le Cafard 2009), Saint-Laurent figures prominently as the centre of immigrant culture, but in this version of the street its desperate newcomers are suspicious and angry, often turning against one another. Hage’s protagonist returns over and over to the café on Saint-Laurent (the café Artista) where he either devises schemes to exact a return of money he has loaned or steals from fellow immigrants. The novel is strong in its evocation of a generation of newcomers scarred from war zones, troubled by past histories, longing to break through the layers of cold that isolate them from the life of the city. The narrator’s impotent rage leads him to imagine himself as a giant cockroach, which breaks into people’s houses and moves among their possessions, crawling along their walls and their drains. He is driven by a thirst for revenge, and a desire to wreak havoc on the favoured classes. The immigrant is an outsider, doomed to reliving his old stories of hatred, and without any cushion of solidarity. Cockroach shares with O’Neill’s Little Criminals a sense of linguistic undecidability. The English is alternately poetic and violent. The polyglot community of Iranians, Algerians and Lebanese speak

Montreal’s third space  147 a mixture of French and English, Arabic and Farsi. The cruelty and rage of Hage’s novel are reminders that the immigrant contact zones of Montreal have not always been treated as pure conviviality.13 The novels of O’Neill and Hage are indications of the ways in which the linguistic geography of Montreal is being reconfigured, and its heritage of division imaginatively rechanneled. Another kind of reinterpretation of the spaces of Montreal can be read into the French-language plays of Wajdi Mouawad and especially the very successful film version of Mouawad’s play Incendies by Denis Villeneuve. Born in 1968, Mouawad moved from Lebanon via France to Quebec in the 1980s, and has become one of the most important and innovative Quebec playwrights. The film Incendies (2010), made by the Québécois filmmaker Denis Villeneuve on the basis of the play (translated into English as Scorched by Linda Gaboriau), is a rich illustration of furthering, extending and enriching the material of the play. In Incendies the main characters are young Québécois twins who return to Lebanon after their mother’s death in search of a father and a brother they did not know they had. Language features prominently as the twins are faced with extreme difficulties of translation: secrets are kept from them and translations are deliberately withheld. While the play is a powerful and very stylized reflection on war, the film fills in the blanks, furnishing visual concreteness and narrative continuity. Yet, despite the naturalistic flow of the plot, the film actually enhances the mythical dimensions of the story. By the end, the spectator understands that the film has been translating not only between geographical realities (Montreal and Beirut, Quebec and Lebanon), but also between the realms of history and myth. The characters reveal themselves to be much more than individuals, as their actions take on horrific symbolic significance in the context of a country engaged in civil war. And the plot of a play which is hardly credible on a naturalistic level, which is excessive – too emotional, too violent, too coincidental – takes on an absolute clarity within the régime of myth. Remarkably, the physical details of the film do not limit the scope of the story or work against this mythical interpretation, but rather open the landscape itself (the ravaged city, the deserted highways) to its symbolic dimensions. The film continues the dialogue, intrinsic to the play and to Mouawad’s creative life, between the separate realms of “here” and “there”. How can the violence of Beirut become part of a story told here? It is not insignificant to recall that the film written and directed by Denis Villeneuve before Incendies was Polytechnique (2008) the story of the massacre of fourteen women students at Montreal’s Université de Montréal in 1989. It is as if this descent into the anti-feminist violence of his own city was preparation for an incursion into the prolonged violence of a civil war. Villeneuve’s film takes liberties with Mouawad’s script, introduces clarifications and transitions, and gives a stronger presence to the Arabic language. These interventions by Villeneuve define Incendies as a translational artifact. The fact that the film is known exclusively by its French title, even as it has gained wide circulation within the North American market, makes a statement about

148  Montreal’s third space the specificity of the cultural matrix within which the film was produced. Incendies is a striking illustration of the ways in which French-language writing in Montreal, produced at the crossroads of translational tensions, has expanded its language borders. In its dialogue between theatre and cinema, between history and myth, and between the linguistically divided cities of Montreal and Beirut, Incendies is a powerful symbol of Montreal’s changing cultural scene. Montreal is particularly striking proof that the languages of a multilingual city do not coexist in a free-floating mélange. The flow and mingling of languages is driven by the forces of history, in the case of Montreal by the growing power of French as the matrix of the city’s cultural life. But equally important has been the increasing points of contact among languages, and the creation of intermediary spaces. For more than two decades now, diasporic sensibilities have been crucial elements of Montreal francophone literature, with the contributions of such writers as Marco Micone, Émile Ollivier, Ying Chen, Ook Chung, Mona Latif-Ghattas, Marie-Célie Agnant, Monique Bosco, Abla Farhoud, Régine Robin, Sergio Kokis, Pan Bouyoucas, Dany Laferrière, Wajdi Mouawad, Aki Shimazaki, Kim Thuy and Naïm Kattan. As in the English-language examples discussed earlier, the linguistic border is also porous in these French-language novels. These diasporic practices of self-translation are further examples of the “transmigration” undertaken by the immigrant writers of the 1940s. The impulse is similar: what has changed is the direction of translational flows, with French the new destination language. And so Montreal reveals itself to be a particularly rich zone of translational activity. These nurture the sensibility of a ‘middle ground’ which – in the case of Montreal’s distinctive topography – is both a physical and a conceptual reality. While this middle ground was powerfully represented in the 1940s by Yiddish modernism, it is now exploding into a terrain of many languages in an increasingly diasporic city. The middle ground points to a polymorphous “third space”, which not only allows for representations of new communities but at the same time modifies the long-standing polarities which have defined the city.14 The history of language tensions in Montreal joins those of Calcutta, Trieste and Barcelona in illustrating the overlapping dynamics of distancing and furthering, memorialization and transmigration. It is not the simple fact of translation which defines the history of these cities but the ways in which language interaction reflects and extends social forces. Often these forces are antagonistic, competitive. Sometimes, however, translation – or, more properly, incomplete forms of translation – evoke forms of shared culture which have more to do with collusion and humour. These are forms of communication that build on the shared knowledge of the double city, partial transfers that take the reader or listener only halfway across. They can take the form of bilingual jokes, as in the example which began this chapter, or playful uses of language in the cinema, such as in the film Bon Cop, Bad Cop (2006). This successful buddy-cop comedy features the stereotypical figures of two

Montreal’s third space  149

Source: Photo Crédit: FranÇoise Ségard

Figure 5.10 Regard sur le fleuve by Lisette Lemieux (1992) shows the French “fleuve” (river) dissolving into the liquid forms of the water itself.

policemen, a stolid, repressed Anglo and a wild, undependable Franco. With a predictable plot and very overstated gags, it is language which is the real source of fun. Each of the two characters is unilingual and speaks his own language on screen. The film is shown in two versions, depending on which character is subtitled. For a francophone audience, the Anglo character will be subtitled and vice versa. Audiences who understand both languages can appreciate the interplay between the two unilingual characters, an interaction which is often comical in itself. There are linguistic jokes in the film, including a lesson on swearing in joual. The film enjoyed great success with Montreal audiences – proving that language games and the complicities they create can be an effective form of entertainment. There is a majestic piece of public art that looks onto the Saint Lawrence river (le fleuve Saint-Laurent) from the banks of the suburb, Lachine. It is a sheet of rusted metal, the size of two billboards one on top of the other, and it has two levels of script: first the word FLEUVE carved confidently in capital letters across the space of the metal, then an upside down wavy version of the letters, as if a watery reflection, the letters dissolved into liquid movement. The piece, by Lisette Lemieux, installed in 1992, is at once a screen

150  Montreal’s third space blocking access to the water and a point of entry – “fleuve” announcing that this is the name of what can be seen on the other side of the screen. But the second level of letters turns that affirmation into a doubt. The word “fleuve” becomes as mobile as the river itself. The word is translated not into another language but into the material signifier itself: water. Like the Simcha sign, like the film Bon Cop, Bad Cop, the sculpture projects a message of doubt. One code is rivaled by another, single truths are put into question. These are faithful images of Montreal, where every name has a potential double, where régimes of language are always precarious, where translation is a constant, shaping presence.

6 Language landscapes and memory

One of the many legends about the god Hermes is a story that involves a Babel-like episode. In order to spoil Zeus’ pleasure in ruling over mankind, Hermes introduces the confusion of languages into the world – and succeeds in causing Zeus to give up his throne (Kerényi 1951: 222). This echo of the Biblical episode fits the portrait of Hermes as a trickster, and also sets him up in his career as a translator. There must be splintering if there is to be repairing, difference if there is to be mediation. The combination of doing and undoing, construction and ruins, also figures in what has become the most familiar image of the Babel story, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1563 painting of the Tower, known as the Vienna version. The imposing Tower, with its Roman coliseum arches superimposed on the swirling Babylonian ziggurat, is represented in a state of semi-completion, with several edges not yet constructed or else already falling into ruin. For an image that has been for centuries one of the most powerful representations of humanity’s Second Fall, the painting shows a surprising lack of pathos. Much of the pleasure of the viewing comes, as in many Bruegel paintings, from deciphering the details of the individual acts that make up the ant-hill-like configuration. There are countless arches and windows, and myriad tasks being undertaken. It is not height that dominates in the Vienna version, but the crosscut perspective moving the eye inwards towards ever smaller units. In fact the representation seems to have a lot more to do with a fascination for human ingenuity and diversity than with a presentiment of tragedy. Art historians (Mansbach 1982; Morra 2007) confirm that Bruegel’s painting does carry more of a utopian message than one of doom – reversing the traditional message of the Biblical narrative and rewriting Babel as a polyglot humanist city. City? It is often forgotten that the site where the tower was built is not an open plain but a city – the Biblical phrase being “the city and its tower”.1 Bruegel’s 1563 Vienna version is faithful to the Biblical text in showing the tower to be part of an already considerable city stretching outwards into the plain. This is no desert. There is a bustling port at the foot of the tower, and this is the surest clue as to the identity of the city. In a still authoritative interpretation of the Babel painting, S.A. Mansbach (1982) explains that the “Babylonia occidentalis” that is being portrayed

152  Language landscapes and memory

Source: Reproduced with permission from the Kunsthistoriche Museum, Vienna

Figure 6.1 Bruegel’s celebration of his own multilingual city.

in the image is Antwerp itself, Bruegel’s city, and the kingly figure in the foreground neither Nimrod nor Alexander the Great but the Spanish king, Philip II. Bruegel’s Antwerp was the largest, richest, and most international city of its day, the centre of European trade and finance, the host to large communities of merchants from Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal and England. Antwerp sustained a vigorous humanist polyglot culture and, like Venice and Amsterdam, a flourishing publishing industry in an astonishingly wide range of languages (Burke 2004: 118). One of the most distinguished realizations of the period was the Polyglot Bible of May 1572 published by Bruegel’s friend Christophe Plantin, a member of the circle of poets, writers and artists of liberal learning and humanist sympathies that Bruegel frequented between 1554 and 1563 in Antwerp. This Bible was a monumental enterprise, involving the printing of sacred text in Hebrew, Greek, Syriac and Aramaic, with translations into Latin and into Hebrew, explicated by the greatest theological minds and printed on the finest paper with supreme artistry (Mansbach 1982: 53). The Vienna version of Bruegel’s painting celebrates a very deep fascination for his own multilingual city and its polyglot activities, including its humanist practices of translation. But the presence of the ambitious and

Language landscapes and memory  153 imperious King Philip in the picture is a reminder that the conflicts of political power loom over the multilingual city, as they did over Antwerp. During the late 1550s and 1560s Flanders was under increasingly harsh Spanish domination, and communities of liberal Catholic and Protestant thinkers were under siege. For Mansbach, this is precisely what Bruegel is representing: the flourishing polyglot and humanist urban culture of Antwerp under threat of silencing by the Spanish king. Indeed, with the fall of Antwerp in 1585, Catholic and Spanish-dominated Flanders was separated from Protestant Holland, leading to the emigration of many Protestants to Amsterdam. The triumphalist paintings of Rubens would take over from Bruegel, and the printer Plantin would ensure the remarkable longevity of his company by catering to the requirements of the Catholic church. The Polyglot Bible turned out to be Plantin’s pledge of fidelity to the Spanish Crown and to the Inquisition, because its Biblical humanist scholarship was based on ancient languages only and stayed away from the vernaculars of the Protestant Reformation. Bruegel’s representation reverses the received meaning of the Babel episode in two ways. The threat that looms over the city is not divine, but quite human. And second, the consequence of this disaster will not be the splintering of one human language into many but, on the contrary, a narrowing down of the city’s cosmopolitanism. The contradictory effects introduced by Bruegel are anticipated by the Biblical text itself, whose formulation is highly ambiguous. The Babel story is constructed around one of the Bible’s characteristic examples of wordplay, the words BABEL and BALAL. “Therefore was the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth (Balal)” (Genesis 11: 9). Babel (the place name), it is said, was named for Balal, the confusion that reigned in this place. Yet the name (Bab-El, gate of god) and the idea (confusion) have neither an etymological nor a causal relationship. Babel rather received its name because of its “false” resemblance to the word for “confuse” or “confound” which is a word with Akkadian roots (Kaufmann 1997: 107). A confusion of meanings and a confusion of tongues is inscribed then into the very letter of the text, and because of this unruliness, Derrida explains, “Babel” cannot be translated. The originary mixture puts into question the possibility of separation and equal restitution demanded by translation (Derrida, in Graham 1985), just as it questions the meanings put into circulation through faulty wordplay. Is there irony to be read into this foundational mis-translation, and might this irony not open onto conflicting interpretations of what the confusion at Babel was really about? Bruegel’s painting can be read as a celebration of the multilingual city, but also as a warning of its fragility. This cycle of making and unmaking, of diversification and reduction, has been amply demonstrated in the life of cities. Certain cities have become legendary as the site of multilingual cultures which did not endure. Toledo in twelfth-century Spain was not only a city of religious coexistence, but the site of an exemplary enterprise of translation – put to a very radical end by the expulsion of both Jews and

154  Language landscapes and memory Moors from Spain in the fifteenth century (Foz 1998). The cosmopolitan cities of the Levant have similarly assumed a mythical status for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as idealized images of cosmopolitan diversity. In fact they came to illustrate the violent passage from prenational forms of coexistence to national forms of identity – illustrating the multiple and sometimes contradictory roles of translation. Istanbul, Beirut, Smyrna, Alexandria were multilingual port cities which contained, in addition to significant populations of conquered Ottoman peoples, enclaves of Europeans (Mansel 2010). This structural duality was an extraordinary feature of Levantine cities, meaning that Westerners could be “at home” in the east, through a system of renewable permissions granted by the Sultan. Galata (or Pera) was a semi-independent colony of Istanbul where Orientalized Europeans – known as Levantines – lived both within and outside the city, making the city an “interzone” of mediation (Eldem 1999: 137–8).2 Multiplicity became the essence of Istanbul, experienced by travellers as a joyful confusion of colours and tongues (Mansel 1995: 7).3 The vertigo of numbers is a prominent feature in descriptions of Levantine cities, the recitation of the sheer variety of language and costume turns into a litany which seemed to have a pleasure of its own. Translation, as the basis of mediation among these languages and as an instrument of diplomacy, was a highly valued function in the empire. This importance is recalled by a small mosque in the Fethiye district of the city, originally designed by the famed architect Sinan and dedicated to Yunus Bey, the chief translator of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent (1494–1566). Like other powerful dragomans of the empire, Yunus held functions similar to those of an ambassador and served the Sultan from about 1533 until his death in 1551 (Warner 2001: 350). He is especially famed for a pamphlet in Venetian dialect which provided influential firsthand information about the Ottoman domains (353). The mosque which bears his name has been in continuous use since its construction at the time of Suleyman, although frequent renovations have meant that today’s structure bears little resemblance to the original design of Sinan. The combination of continuity and change is appropriate for a monument to translation – the core identity of the monument remaining the same despite the outer layers of the structure having been modified. But the modern history of Istanbul has given a radically different cast to the cultural meaning of translation. The character of Istanbul and its language was drastically altered with the fall of the Ottoman empire in 1919 and the declaration of the Turkish republic in 1923.4 “The cosmopolitan Istanbul I knew as a child had disappeared by the time I reached adulthood”, says Orhan Pamuk (Pamuk 2005: 239).5 As the neighbourhoods of the Golden Horn, Balat and Hasköy were being drained of Jews and Greeks, the city was losing its vernacular diversity. The association of multilingual Istanbul with a time now past, with a childhood tinged with mystery, corresponds to a pattern of “then” and “now” in the life of cosmopolitan cities. “Then” was the time of the

Source: Author photograph

Figures 6.2, 6.3 The Translator Mosque: a monument to the multilingual city Istanbul once was.

156  Language landscapes and memory pre-national city. Nationalism came with a call for translation: the modernity of the Turkish language was announced by the purging of Eastern words, just as the Turkish nation itself was purged of ethnic minorities. The powerful meanings of this dual translation are hard to escape. In an accelerated version of the process through which European nations had acquired territorial and linguistic identities, Turkey embarked on a crash course of modernization. A Translation Bureau oversaw the translation of some 1250 works into Turkish, contributing to the work of modernizing Turkish society (Gürçağlar 2008).6 Istanbul was translated out of its messy imperial multiplicity, away from its past, and given a simpler shape. The other Levantine ports were similarly transformed into national cities. If Babel is traditionally understood as the moment of the creation of the world’s numerous language communities, the moment when the single Adamic language of humanity splintered into many, the Translator Mosque can be seen as marking the opposite movement, the turn from a multiplicity of languages to one single national language, from the Many to the One. The translational tensions of Istanbul and the enduring power of Bruegel’s vision of Antwerp are products of distinctive histories. But the stories of both cities bring to life, in heightened form, the issues discussed in this book. The diversity of cities is fragile and provisional, strained by the pull between pluralism and the constraints of what Doris Sommer calls “monoculture”. The dual cities I describe articulate a specific form of these pressures, as two languages vie for the role of tutelary tongue. The languages which face one another across urban territory often represent two kinds of forces: the passionate, identitary values of the vernacular and the looser, more utilitarian, ties of the vehicular tongue. This opposition applies, mutatis mutandis, to all four of the cities considered in these pages, from Montreal (English and French) to Barcelona (Spanish and Catalan), Calcutta (English and Bengali), to Trieste (German and Italian). Do these pressures inevitably call for a resolution? The dualities of Istanbul, Calcutta and Trieste were indeed “settled” by the historical forces that put an end to the Ottoman, British and Austro-Hungarian empires. Each city was reconfigured within a national frame and the losing languages demoted or expunged. The role of Hermes has frequently been an embattled one, and has brought into play his identity not only as a professional trickster but as the Psychopompos, bearer of souls to Hades. Translation has been a writing-over, the effacement of the past, the sponging out of competing memories. The city has been the scene of warring factions struggling to impose a single language and a single regime of meaning. The language intersections of the city were quickly projected onto a reconstructed past, poignant reminders of communities who had disappeared. Today’s Barcelona and Montreal participate in a different set of historical tensions: will their futures inevitably see a similar shift towards one single dominant language? In what ways will duality be reshaped by the dynamics of globality, by the movements of diasporic and virtual communities, and the ever widening economic, political and social networks which are increasingly significant in cities worldwide?

Language landscapes and memory  157 Indeed, the central tension of today’s dual city has to do with its expanding translational dynamics and the transformations which these introduce into effective citizenship. Translation is a useful and often neglected entry point into questions of diversity and accommodation, identity and community, and the kinds of durable links that can be established across histories and memories. Diasporic communities are particularly evident in the “third spaces” of dual cities – spaces like the Raval in Barcelona, or in the traditional immigrant zones of Montreal. Street corners of dual cities are especially alive to these changing powers of language, as the dialogue of double entitlement comes into contact with diasporic communities. While these third spaces were once considered exceptional to the life of the city, forming alien pockets of identity, they are now increasing in dimension and in symbolic power. The third space no longer corresponds to the position of the stranger, the individual or the group which stands apart from the mass, but represents a space of collective, hybridized identities. It is true that this third space cannot include all the alterities of a city, some of whom will be resistant to conversation, but the idioms of this space are becoming more expressive of the city as a whole. And so Montreal and Barcelona are both engaged in a polycentric reshaping with third languages introducing new angles of interaction between the two dominant languages, making transmigration a privileged form of self-translation and the means through which new conversations are initiated. Effective interconnections among the languages of the city are to be ensured by forms of translation which integrate memories and landscapes in new ways. This means that the city requires forms of furthering which will multiply points of contact among languages, enrich languages with previously alien dreams and myths, put memories into circulation. Translation is then more than the recognition of difference; it is a process that contributes to the redefinition of civic space. Language borderlines are also sites of tension and insecurity. It is appropriate that the author who turns up most often in these pages and across these various cities is Kafka. His novels, written in the Prague German that was a symptom of the language contacts of his own city, came to reveal similar symptoms in other linguistically conflicted cities. Kafka was read early on in German by Triestines including Svevo. The Trial travelled to the rest of Italy thanks to the mediating culture of that city, though it was later blocked by the censorship of the Fascist years. Kafka translations turn up in Montreal in the 1960s, with the historically significant linguistic Yiddish version of The Trial in 1966 by Melekh Ravitch and in Barcelona with Gabriel Ferrater’s translation of that same year into Catalan. These translations stand at the extreme opposite points of the scale of language vitality. While Ravitch’s translation represents the last moments of Yiddish modernity in Montreal, Ferrater anticipates the rebirth of Catalan in the Barcelona of the post-Franco period, just as translations of Kafka into Bengali will accompany the emerging modernist literature of that city. And so Kafka’s work is a vector of translational effects, an engine that reproduces the intensities, instabilities and insecurities of the city of its composition.

158  Language landscapes and memory Both Kafka and Svevo, emblematic writers of their respective cities, shaped their prose in ways that were questionable, alien, to early readers. The history of the prohibition of Catalan created a generation of Barcelona writers who were insecure in their own written language, and who needed to reconnect with a lost oral history and a forgotten literary heritage. Constant contact with Castilian, the stronger national and international language, meant that Catalan had to prove itself, to display its difference and resist contamination. In Montreal too, French is on its guard, always showing that its formulations are not products of interference from English. Writers of Bengali in Renaissance Calcutta crafted their language as they went along, navigating among social registers and pitting their new urban idioms against a more Sanskritized idiom. In all such contexts of border consciousness, there prevails an atmosphere of suspicion, a hyper-awareness of norms and deviations. At the same time, the powers of translation are enhanced, either carrying the social force of distancing (confirming alterities, emphasizing social and cultural difference, relying on categories of origin – national and religious – to define otherness) or of furthering (creating new linkages through excessive or deviant forms of cross-over, including forms of interference, self-translation, rewriting, transmigration, memorialization). Practices of furthering are at the origin of the novel form in India, through the self-translations of Bankimchandra, as they are at the core of Svevo’s renewal of the novel form in Italian. Contacts across traditions contribute to the expansion and renovation of literary forms. Furthering, however, is not always a positive force, as illustrated by the excessive empathy of James Long. His practices of furthering, forms of imaginative projection permitted and encouraged by the colonial situation, were in fact a type of cultural imposition, an assumption of sameness which stifled the need for difference. Similarly distancing can play an important aesthetic role in situations where separateness is required, where forms of literalism open a salutary space between voices and languages. Indeed, in today’s diasporic cities, it is the dialogue between forms of furthering – which will ensure the integration of memories within common conversations – and forms of distancing – which situate memories within their literary and historical contexts – that shapes consciousness of multiplicity. The dynamics of globalism are just one of the pressures that contribute towards the instability of duality – or indeed of any situation of multilingualism, as the emblematic histories of Istanbul and Antwerp demonstrate. All of the situations I described in the four cities paint a picture of movement, of a progression towards a stronger cultural pole. One language in the city rides a wave of optimism, indicating the direction of the modern. Translation into French in Montreal has become essential to the reinvention of French as a civic language, receiving not only contributions from English but from the many diasporic languages that now inhabit the territory. Bengali, Catalan, Italian: these became the languages of their time. But this is not to say that the values represented by the vernacular are permanent or firmly attached to any one state of the language. Languages are forms of

Language landscapes and memory  159 historical memory. They reanimate the ghosts of the past, they replay the stories of battles lost and won. They affirm entitlement, or they speak of displacement. But these messages also transmute over time. For instance, Bengali (or “Bangla”) was during the period of the Renaissance under construction, a series of “states” and conditions of language which were only gradually codified. Today’s Bengali literature once again coexists with English-language literature, but under terms which are different from those of the nineteenth century. English has been restored and redefined as an Indian language in today’s Kolkata, and the literature of the city is produced both in English and in Bangla. The double language of home reintroduces a new variation on the rivalries of the colonial period. Italian has been naturalized in Trieste, and no longer represents a distant, idealized homeland. It no longer represents a foreign and difficult tongue, which required an effort of translation. Catalan in Barcelona and French in Montreal are undergoing transformations which are revealing of the new affiliations between identity and language in the twenty-first century. They are reinventing themselves today as languages which transcend the aspirations of a single ethnic group. Both through official ideology and through the integration of multiple literary imaginaries, they are becoming post-identitarian, civic tongues. From the cities of the Levant to those of erstwhile Mitteleuropa, from the cities of European colonization to regional capitals of multilingual nations, a geometry emerges of divided and contested space, where language relations are regulated by the opposing forces of coercion and resistance, of willful indifference and engaged interconnection. As models of plurality, all such cities provide insights into the evolution of today’s global cosmopolis, contributing to an understanding of meaningful interaction among its increasingly diverse communities and heightening awareness of the precariousness of coexistence. In many of these cities, the dynamics of Babel have played themselves out with particular intensity, repeating the cycle of construction and ruin, of cooperative interaction and violent takeover. Many have been caught in the midst of historical forces which were literally beyond them, and yet they did for a time become the theatres of a richly complex culture of circulation. To understand the full range of elements which create both the appeal of such cities and their terrible fragility is the task of an observer with a boundless historical and geographical canvas. This observer would need to be able to track such multi-century narratives as the incursion of German into Central and Eastern Europe in the thirteenth century, and its final violent extirpation from its urban centres in the twentieth – as well as the distinctive patterns of colonialism which prevailed in Latin America, or which influenced the richly multilingual cities of Africa. It is not simply the presence of languages that will count for our observer, but the memories which direct the flow of language traffic and the mood which animates life at the intersection. As a site of opportunity and danger, of hopeful encounters and disappointed miscommunication, the intersection is the symbolic centre of the city’s imaginative life. The kinds of translation that arise there are various, unpredictable and richly formative.

160  Language landscapes and memory The changing values attached to language, the tensions expressed in the social effects of translation, these contribute to the dynamics I have been trying to capture in the life of cities. They are at play in the creation of a literature of contact, when the language borderlines of cities become privileged sites of modernity. It is at such sites, at such moments, that the work of Hermes is most evident. Standing at the intersection, he marks the boundary as he shows the way across. It is because these cities were divided that their languages can be appropriated, dislocated, remobilized. A literature of contact derives its power from the special character of urban life, where the coexistence and competition among meaning systems heightens awareness and appreciation of difference. The continual interference among languages – already present in the primordial narrative of Babel – cannot guarantee immunity from global sameness or violent forms of political hegemony. But the co-presence of languages and institutions, uneven in the values they represent and the histories they replay, turns the city’s translation zones into productive territories of the imagination.

Notes

Chapter 1 1 … Je vais m’exercer seul à ma fantasque escrime, Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime, Trébuchant sur les mots comme sur les pavés Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés. … 2

I will alone practice my fanciful probing Seeking out in every corner the chance luck of rhyme Stumbling on words like paving-stones Sometimes colliding with verses I have long dreamed of … Baudelaire, “Le Soleil”, Les fleurs du mal (1857).

See Robert Schwartzwald (2001) for a powerful contemporary enactment of the déclic. 3 By placing travel, geography and mediation at the centre of analysis, literary and cultural studies have sought to redefine monolingual nations and literatures as vigorously plurilingual (Pratt 2009; Spivak 2001; Dimock 2003; Sommer 2004; Gentzler 2008; Rosenwald 2008). The vehicles of transmission are themselves influenced by the voyage. “A form can be said to move intelligibly from one cultural space to another only in a state of translation’’ (Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003: 392). 4 Other cities that might have been included in this study: Brussels (today an increasingly francophone city but the object of Flemish desires), Dakar (a city where French dominates as the written language but where Wolof is the strong oral presence), cities of the former Soviet empire (where Russian continues to cohabit with the languages of the new republics), Dublin (where Irish is playing an increasingly important symbolic role), Manila (with its combinations of English, Spanish and Tagalog), Indian cities like Bangalore, for instance, where Kannada as the official regional language interacts with the pervasive presence of Hindi (but also important minority languages like Tamil and Telugu, as well as English), Miami (although Spanish will never have the authority of English in the United States) and the many other cities that have been suggested to me in the course of my research – which to my interlocutors have the “feel” of dual cities. The key element of definition for me is that the two languages have equal or similar institutional authority in the city. Duality is a distinctive form of multilingualism. 5 “ … it is impossible to conceive of the contemporary novel in English without taking Garcia Marquez into account … The influence of his writing ... is evident in a gamut of prominent writers like Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, and Michael Chabon, to name only a few … It is wonderful to contemplate,

162  Notes isn’t it: the freedom Garcia Marquez discovered in Joyce, and the structural and technical lessons he learned from him and from Faulkner, have been passed on to a younger generation of English-language fiction writers through the translated impact of the Colombian’s writing” (Grossman 2010: 21).

Chapter 2 1 Originally published in Hindi in 1998, English translation by the author in 2002. 2 “Around the edges of saheb para, and meeting its indispensable service requirements, had developed what urban historians of Calcutta today describe as a heterogeneous intermediate zone” (Sarkar 1998: 166). Sarkar notes that though the Marwaris have played a significant role in the history of the city, they tend still to be perceived as marginal to the Bengali city. See also Hardgrove (2002) on the Marwari community. 3 Deliberate spatial planning by the British began very early in 1757, after the Battle of Plassey, with the moving of Fort William to Gobindopur, and the provision of the Maidan around it, along with the peripheral roads (Lal 2006: 7). As the new century progressed, new justifications were found for accentuating the spatial divides. The medical profession (and its handmaiden, public health) became the new experts in questions of space, favouring wide streets (Home 1997: 42). “The distinctive social characteristic of the colonial city … is the fact of race” (King 1990: 34). 4 For Raj, Calcutta is an “emblematic instantiation” of the dynamics of knowledge mediation. Conceived in 1690 as a contact zone between the English East India Company and its suppliers from north and east India, it became the largest clearing-house of trade in Asia, the second-most-important city of the British empire in the 1820s, the nerve centre of British expansion into the Far East and the Pacific and a world-renowned centre of scientific knowledge (Raj: 2009: 112). Like the work of Raj, Schaffer et al, which seeks to “remap the emergence of modernity as a global phenomenon, not one simply conceived of in western Europe and subsequently diffused to the rest of the world” (Schaffer 2009: xi), Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) suggests that advances in Western science and medicine were products of the cross-cultural exchanges, translations and mutations of Calcutta. 5 The Renaissance was not an exclusively urban phenomenon, as will be seen with the figure of Bankim, who spent most of his life as an administrator in rural settings. But the effects of the Renaissance were crystallized in the urban milieu. Sarkar complained of this neglect, and initiated work on the urban texture of the period (Sarkar 1998: l61). Other exceptions are Sumanta Banerjee’s work on popular street culture, Tapati Guha-Takurta’s research on visual culture and public space, or mentions such as we find in Rosinka Chaudhuri’s study of early English language poets suggesting that the house poet Henry Derozio lived in all his life was “indicative of the unique confluence of cultures upon which Derozio’s character was constituted”, situated as it was “only a short distance from the Hindu College and the northern ‘native’ quarter of the city on the one hand” – from which friends and students frequently visited his house – “and from the southern, European areas of Chowringhee and Park Street on the other, literally at the crossroads of two cultures” (Chaudhuri, R. 2008: xlvii). 6 It is worth noting that Thomas Moore first gained recognition as a translator and was deeply critical of the effects of British colonial rule on the dispossessed majority in Ireland (Cronin 1996: 115, 120–1, 141). 7 “ … an upper-middle-class invention, too closely restricted to Hinduism, dismissive of popular forms of culture, encompassing questions of social improvement for women but neglecting women as legitimate actors, and identifying too closely with British ideas of progress” (Chaudhuri, A. 2004).

Notes  163   8 He translated a version of Molière’s Love is the Best Doctor (L’Amour médecin) as well, but this play does not seem to have been performed (Lebedeff 1988: 13).   9 The two main sources for our information on Lebedeff’s performances are the introductory notes to his own Grammar published in 1801 in London (on his way home to Russia from Calcutta) and then reissued in 1963 and 1988 with additional materials, and a book by M. Kemp, Bharat-Rus, using Russian sources (published in 1958 in Calcutta by the Indo-Soviet Publications Society). That Lebedeff’s story should re-enter India under the auspices of Soviet Marxism is an interesting twist of history. Bengal has historically had a powerful Communist party and was a Marxist state for some thirty years. M. Kemp, Phyllis Mary Kemp-Ashraf, wife of the Indian communist leader K.M. Ashraf, was a communist historian who died in the GDR (the former East Germany) in 1983. Chatterji’s preface to the Grammar underlines the importance of the Soviet connection: We in Bengal are exceedingly interested in Lebedeff because he was the first individual who had dramas in the European style rendered into Bengali and had one of them actually performed on the stage. It was only in 1955 that for the first time in India the memory of Lebedeff was sought to be revived, at a meeting by the Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association in Calcutta on the occasion of the 160th year of Lebedeff’s first performance which took place in 1795. Four years later, a celebration on a bigger scale took place under the auspices of Little theatre on the stage of the Minerva Theatre in Calcutta on 27 Nov 1959 when prominent Bengali literary men and actors as well as the representatives of the Soviet Union in Calcutta took part (Chatterji in Lebedeff 1988: 2). After his return to Russia, Lebedeff gained fame as an Indologist. He established a press, financed by the Tsar, for printing Bengali books, equipped with Devangar and Bengali scripts, the first of its kind in Europe. It is particularly noted that he praised modern India, without deferring as was common at the time to the glories of the mythical past (Vanina 1999: 362). 10 N. Kamala’s recent translation of Le journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers from French indicates renewed interests in Dutt’s French connections (2005). 11 The British Library has some 40 of Long’s published documents, from a HandBook of Bengal Missions (1848), to Analysis of the Bengali Poem Ráj Málá, or Chronicles of Tripurá (1850), and Analysis of the Raghu Vanśa, a Sanskrit poem of Kálidása (1852), Notes of a tour from Calcutta to Delhi in January 1853, Notes and Queries suggested by a visit to Orissa in January 1859 and Calcutta and Bombay in their social aspects (1870). Several of these documents have been reissued either in Calcutta or London. 12 The effectiveness of Long’s efforts is evident in the fact that a new catalogue was drawn up by J. Wenger, presumably his successor and officiating Bengali Translator to the Government of Bengal, 30 January 1865. “Of late years the Hindoos have shewn great literary activity, partly by editing numerous texts of their Ancient Sanscrit literature, partly by translating English and Sanskrit works into their vernacular dialects and partly by producing original compositions on subjects of a political, scientific and religious character”. See Introduction, Selections from the Records of the Bengal Government. No. XLI Catalogue of Sanksrit and Bengalee Publications, printed in Bengal, Calcutta, 1865. 13 The entire title continues: or Emblems Explanatory of Biblical Doctrines and Morals with Parallel or Illustrative References to Proverbs and proverbial Sayings in the Arabic, Bengali, Canarese, Persian, Russian, Sanskrit, Tamul, Telegu and Urdu Languages.

164  Notes 14 Long claims the paternity of a law on censorship: My peculiar position in Calcutta has brought me more in contact with the native press than other Missionaries ... In my examination of native books I was struck with the open way in which obscene books were sold, and the number that were thus put in circulation in Calcutta. I therefore brought the subject before the Legislative Council, and a law was passed on the subject which has worked well in this city. Statement by the Rev. J. Long, in An Anthology of “Apologies”, published in Calcutta, printed by Sanders, Cones and Co., 1861: 4 By erotic is meant books abounding in obscene passages. The above list represents not the entire number, but with the introduction of a better class of works, moral tales and innocent works of fiction, the number of these is diminishing, and the terror of the law against obscene publications is effecting what a regard to morality could not. (This law imposes a fine of Rupees 100 and three months’ imprisonment for the sale of any obscene books or pictures.) Such books are now sold on the sly and are not obtruded on the public gaze as before. Long 1859: xv 15 Tagore is similarly considered a giant, but his career extended far beyond the period of the Renaissance. Bankimchandra Chatterjee is also known as Bankimcandra Chatterji and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay. 16 The switch to Bengali in the novel did not extend to all aspects of Bankim’s life. He continued to write essays and letters in English. Nothing in his lifestyle seems to have been definitive. His home in Calcutta was very much the home of a westernized Bengali or an Indian civilian … In one phase of his life, he had adopted the western way of dining … ate tabooed food until 1885, remained a moderate drinker all his life … [B]y his own admission, his command over Sanskrit never equaled his knowledge of English. What is more, he confessed that both in writing and speaking he was more at ease in English than in Bengali (Raychaudhuri 1988: 124–7). Insecure about his mastery of Bengali grammar, Bankim read out his novel Durgeshnandini in 1864 to some of his friends, “asking them to comment on grammatical errors …” (Das 1984: 22) and famous pundit, Chandranath Vidyasagar remarked, “in some places I have noticed improper grammar, but it is exactly in those place the language has become sweeter”. cited in Chattopadhyay 2005: 193 17 Ironically, “Bankim was the only major intellectual of the last century who did not make Calcutta his home except during the last few years of his life”. As a British administrator, he spent much of his life in country towns. Yet although he remained an outsider in Calcutta, his impact was strongly felt in that city (Das 1984: 12). He spent his last years in Calcutta at a house at Pratap Chatterji Street, near the Calcutta Medical College (Das 1984: 201). 18 The first translation was published 2008, by Swarup Roy, as The Observant Owl. Kaliprasanna Sinha was the wealthy Bengali who rushed to pay the fine imposed on James Long when he was condemned by the court. 19 Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824–73) converted to Christianity despite strong opposition from his father. He studied Greek, Latin and Hebrew; he experimented with hybrid forms, mixing European and Indian sources, Sanskrit literature and Shakespearean drama. “I am aware”, he writes to a friend, “that there will, in all likelihood, be something of a foreign air about my drama…” (Chatterjee, S. 2007: 102–5).

Notes  165 Chapter 3 1 “A Socialist would never step into an Irredentist café or hotel, while no Irredentist (National Liberal) would show himself in a Socialist, Slav or Austrian milieu. People lived in almost watertight social compartments, signaling their allegiance by their matchbox labels” (Gatt-Rutter 1988: 184). 2 Mark Thompson’s The White War. Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915– 1919 (New York, Basic Books, 2008) is an important study of the cruelty that reigned on the Italian front and of the misjudgments of the Italian generals who led their soldiers into needless slaughter. 3 Trieste was “città immediata”, placed directly under the rule of the Austrian administration, with powers which were closer to those of a province or city-state. The fact that Trieste was cut off culturally from its hinterland became an important issue in the negotiations following the Second World War. The Yugoslav government argued that the “nation” is defined not by the capital city but by the hinterland, that the interior trumps the coast (Ara and Magris, 1982: 51). Because of Trieste’s special status in Italy, its literature has been treated as a regional literature – comparable to Sicilian literature, for instance. 4 The city has figured as backdrop in countless cold war films, thrillers and espionage novels, from Michael Pearce’s 2004 Dead Man in Trieste to Alan Furst’s The Foreign Correspondent (2007) to German novelist Veit Heinichen’s bestselling police thrillers, and a successful TV series in Germany and Austria (Pizzi 2001, Bosetti 2006: 13). 5 Multilingualism was one of the distinguishing features of Habsburg cities, including Vienna. “While the proportion of foreigners in Paris in 1900 was only 6.3%, that in Vienna was over 60%” (Csáky 1999: 45). 6 Thanks to Matteo Colombi for these clarifications. 7 The founder and leader of the Futurist movement, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) admired Trieste, which he considered as the most modern and Futurist city in Italy, unencumbered with the dead weight of the past. The very first Futurist soirées took place at Trieste’s Teatro Rossetti between 1909 and 1910, as well as the legendary “Futurist Supper” at the Restaurant Alla Città de Parenzo where the order of meal courses was famously inverted (Pizzi in Klopp 2008: 54). 8 Although the Austrian element of Trieste’s personality is mentioned in all writing on Trieste, the nature of the German-language presence in the city is rarely spelled out. The portrait of German-language culture in Trieste drawn here was composed through readings of Magris (1976), Schachter (2000: 6–13), Camerino (2002, 2008) and Campanile (2006, 145–62). The majority of the sizeable Austrian and German-language community living in Trieste until 1918 belonged to the imperial administration, the armed forces and the police. Magris emphasizes the complexity of restoring the texture of cultural life in Trieste during Svevo’s time, because there are few records of the lived experience of the class of bureaucrats and teachers from Austria who promoted the culture of their country and lived as its representatives in Trieste. Roberto Bazlen remembers seeing many of their libraries for sale when he was a young boy, libraries which were dispersed with no sense of the careful collections of which they were a part (Bazlen 1970: 147–8). Most of these officials and teachers would have come for limited stays, and considered themselves something like benevolent colonizers (Magris 1976: 40). For these Austrians, Trieste would have been – as it was for Hermann Bahr – a city of “nowhere”. 9 The Barcelona writer Enrique Vila-Matas calls Bazlen one of the “Bartlebys” of the modern age, a “writer without books” (Vila-Matas, 2002: 36–40).

166  Notes 10 Renate Lunzer’s Irredenti Redenti (2009) is a precious recent source of documentation on Trieste’s culture of mediation. Her chapters on Spaini and Pocar, in particular, fill important gaps in the literature – furnishing details on their careers from unpublished archival materials and from the testimonies of family members (Lunzer 126) (“Il poliedrico Alberto Spaini”, Lunzer 2009: 201–17, “Ervino Pocar, gran maestro della traduzione letteraria”, 113–31). 11 For instance, Anthony Alofsin’s When Buildings Speak: Architecture as Language in the Habsburg Empire and its Aftermath, 1867–1933 (2006), or Friedrich Achleitner, “The Pluralism of Modernity: The Architectonic ‘Language Problem’ in Central Europe” (in Blau and Platzer 1999). The Hungarian architect Ödön Lechner, 1906, phrases the idea in this way: “We must take the search for a Hungarian language of form seriously. Rapid developments in technology, new feats in engineering … have created a great stir in architecture. This new shift in evolution gives us an excellent opportunity to incorporate our national character in a new language of form and in architecture” (quoted in Blau 1999: 11). 12 In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Viennese architects were commissioned to design many new buildings in Trieste – architects like Heinrich von Ferstel (1828–83) who designed the headquarters for the Lloyd Austriaco in Piazza Grande in the Renaissance style and whose influence was felt throughout the Empire, Palazzo Revoltella by Friedrich Hitzig in 1859, the railway station by Wilhelm Flattich in 1878, the main Post Office by Franz Setz in 1894, the Governor’s palace by Emil Artmann in 1904 (Schachter 2008: 7). Triestine architects generally studied in Vienna (Schachter 2008: 7). Statues of emperors are still prominent in city: the Column of Leopold I in Piazza della Borsa, Charles VI in Piazza dell’Unità, the Monument to Elizabeth of Austria (the consort of Franz Joseph) in Piazza della Libertà. 13 And indeed the attention paid to Trieste in the remarkable volume, the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (Cornis-Pope, Neubauer, John Benjamins, 2006, part of a five-volume series), attests to this family resemblance. Trieste has been compared in particular to Lemberg (Galicia), as cities of similar size both having had German as a language of theatre and entertainment, despite the absence of a significant German population, both displaying the same mixture of Slavic and German in the streets, the same café culture, and overall a similar architectural style (Prokopovych 2009: 9–11). 14 As late as 1851 German was the main language of a slight majority in Pest and five out of six people in Buda. This was also true of the majority of Jews at the time. But after 1860 this changed (Lukacs 1988: 101–2). The Hungarian literary theorist Georg Lukács “wrote Hungarian badly”. He was essentially a German thinker and writer, preferring to live in Germany long before circumstances made him leave Hungary (Lukacs 1988: 158). 15 Bock credits Rainer Maria Rilke as being the first mediator in the German literary community. Rilke’s early works Leben und Lieder (1894) and Larenopfer (1896), “give ample testimony to Rilke’s knowledge of Czech history, his enchantment with Czech country life, his admiration for Czech poetry …” (Bock 1978: 241). This work, according to Bock, signalled both the beginning of the German literary boom and the tradition of mediation. See also Kieval (2005) for a discussion of Jewish cultures of mediation in Bohemia. 16 The recent controversies over Kafka’s papers, left in Brod’s care in Israel (Elif Batuman, “Kafka’s Last Trial”, New York Times Magazine, 22 September 2010), are revealing of some of the problematic aspects of Brod’s role as mediator and impresario of literary destinies. 17 Matteo Colombi has also compared Prague and Trieste. Concentrating on the interwar years, he focuses on the parallels between the “minority” literatures in the post-1918 cities, the German writers in Prague, the Slovenian writers in Trieste. Among the many differences in the status of these writers is their freedom

Notes  167 to write: German writers in Prague were tolerated; Slovenian writers in Trieste were forced underground or into exile in Slovenia (Colombi 2006, 2009). 18 Saba’s commentary was in fact just a gentle mocking. “Svevo poteva scrivere bene in Tedesco; preferiva scrivere male in italiano. Fu l’ultimo omaggio assimilatore della ‘vecchia’ cultura italiana. E la storia dell’amore – prima della ‘redenzione’ – di Trieste per l’Italia” (Saba 1964: 104). (“Svevo could write well in German, but preferred to write badly in Italian. This was his homage to the ‘old’ Italian culture, part of the love story (before Redemption) of Trieste for Italy.”) 19 “… se egli di solito pensava in triestino, quando si trattava degli argomenti che più importavano per la sua creazione artistica (le situazioni e le relazioni umane, la psicologia del profondo ed il comparamento che essa ispira, ecc.) allora si mescolavano col suo triestino termini, locuzioni, frasi, modi di dire presi dalla lingua tedesca. E non gli era facile tradurre in italiano (lingua che egli non dominava perfettamente) questo miscuglio” (Voghera 1995: 46). 20 Israele Zoller was Chief Rabbi in Trieste from 1911 to 1939. He became one of the most controversial figures in Jewish history, after converting to Christianity in February, 1945. He published intensively in Italian and also German – and among these publications was The Nazarene in 1938. In 1939 he was named Chief Rabbi of Rome, but dismissed in April 1944. Because Zolli was not a citizen of Italy, he considered himself more vulnerable to deportation than the Italian Jews and spent much of the war in hiding rather than fighting for the community. His conversion in February 1945 – at a time when Jews around the world were mourning the unimaginable losses of the Holocaust – may have been motivated partly by anger at his treatment by the Jewish community (Weisbord 1992). 21 Svevo took the tram from his house in Servola all the way downtown. He has a humorous series of five pieces called “Noi del Tramway di Servola” (“We, Servola tram-riders”) which was published in La Nazione in 1919 and 1921, where he tells stories of tram rides and complains about the service (Svevo 2004b: 1096–105). 22 An avenue has been named after Weiss in Trieste and a plaque placed on a house where Weiss lived and practiced (Roazen 2005: xiv). Weiss had not only grown up in Svevo’s Trieste but was his nephew by marriage and a school-friend of his wife and brother-in-law (xiv). Weiss analyzed both Bruno Veneziani, a brotherin-law of Svevo’s, and the writer Umberto Saba. 23 Nevertheless the Trieste asylum was closed down in 1977. Claudio Magris evokes the ghosts of the asylum in his play La Mostra (“The Exhibition”, 2001), focusing on the story of Vito Timmel, a Triestine painter who spent many decades there. That Magris considers this play the most autobiographical of his works was highlighted in the major exhibition “The Trieste of Claudio Magris” held at the Centre for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona from March to July 2011. The exhibition was an extraordinary testimony to Magris’ influence as the major exponent of the Triestine sensibility. To see the stops on Magris’ journey along the Danube described in Catalan was particularly evocative in the context of this book. 24 This reference to a historical event (echoing Zeno’s mention of the first day of the war) may be the only other reference to historical events in all of Svevo. The novella Una burla riuscita (1928) was the first of Svevo’s works to be published in English, in 1929 by the Hogarth Press. 25 Svevo’s German translator, Piero Rismondo, was glad to discuss fine grammatical points with Svevo, but seems to have overruled most of Svevo’s suggestions. He brings up the broad dilemma of “trying to create a new language, the German of Svevo”. This is not so much because Svevo’s Italian is bad, but because there is no “readymade” model of literary German (Svevo 2008: lxxxii). 26 The Risiera was the only Nazi death camp on Italian territory (Cusin 1998: 138).

168  Notes 27 Fulvio Tomizza (1935–99) became the voice of a population of Italian speakers who were forced into exile in Trieste after Istria was accorded to Yugoslavia after the Second World War. Despite being sympathetic to the Slavs and writing in an Italian strongly coloured by Slavisms, Tomizza spoke for an Italian population. 28 Some eight volumes by Boris Pahor have been published in France, beginning in 1990. Publication in Italian only really began in 2007 (with the exception of works published by very small publishing houses) although the number of publications has now grown quickly. 29 Pahor began writing in the late 1940s, published numerous novels in Slovenian, and he wrote a biography of Srečko Kosovel in Italian (published in Trieste in 1992) See L’altra anima di Trieste: saggi, racconti, testimonianze, poesie, a cura di Marija Pirjevec, Trieste: Mladika, 2008. This anthology is exceptional in that it specifically identifies Slovenian writers from Trieste. 30 Trieste now finds itself at the centre of a region, reclaiming its “natural vocation” in the domain of urban and economic affairs (Waley 2009: 245).

Chapter 4   1 I will alternate between the terms “Castilian” and “Spanish”. Castilian corresponds to Castellano, the language of Castile which became the national language of Spain and then of many nations of Latin America. Spanish refers to the name of the country and the federation (España) of which Catalonia is a part. Both Castilian and Catalan are in fact Spanish – both belong to the national federation which is Spain.   2 “La dualidad cultural y lingüística de Catalunya, que tanto preocupa, y que en mi opinión, nos enriquece a todos, yo la he vivido desde que tengo uso de razón, en la calle, en mi propia casa.” (“Catalunya’s cultural and linguistic duality, a subject of much concern and which in my opinion enriches us all, is a reality that I have lived with all my life, on my street, in my own house.”) (Award of 2008 Cervantes Prize, 23 April 2009).   3 Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) is a good example of the way outsiders can ignore the Catalan language in Barcelona. The language is absent from the film, except that one of the tourists, Vicky, is writing her Master’s thesis on “Catalan Identity”. But the Catalan language itself is neither mentioned nor heard.   4 This is the same closeness as obtains between Italian and Spanish, or Galician and Portuguese, as Romance languages.   5 Resina’s perception that Barcelona’s decline begins in 1992 is shared by those who feel that the city lost its essential character as it grew to be an internationally celebrated centre of architecture and design. The Olympics of 1992 drew attention to Barcelona as a world-class cultural capital.   6 Although interference in Catalan from English is not perceived as a threat.   7 The sociolinguist Vallverdù is well-known for his 1968 (rev. 1975) essay, L’escriptor català i el problema de la llengua. Vallverdù argued that bilingualism was simply a ploy to neutralize a conflictual situation, because bilingualism always tends towards the annihilation of the weaker language. He argued very strongly for the revival of Catalan as a literary language and in 1968 his essay was an influential intervention. Spoken Catalan had survived the period of repression, but written Catalan was in a more problematic state.   8 “In Barcelona’s metropolitan area, Catalan is now a minority language that has shed a great deal of its vocabulary and mimics Spanish morphologically, syntactically, and even semantically. This is the stark reality concealed by cavalier critics who have no problem asserting that the policy of the Catalan government has been to ‘impose’ the Catalan language and culture on immigrants” (Resina 2008: 157).

Notes  169   9 See “Traducció i censura en la represa cultural dels anys 1960”, Jordi CornellàDetrell, L’Avenç, July–August 2010, 44–51. 10 Maria-Mercè Marçal, Marta Pessarrodona, Maria Antònia Oliver, Maria Antònia Salvà, Carme Montoriol, Maria Teresa Vernet, Carme Serrallonga, Montserrat Abelló, Maria Àngels Anglada, are others named by Godayol (2005, 2006). 11 There are subtleties of overlapping identifications between the twins, as well as the specific connotations of Catalan street language which are impossible to convey even in the astute and entertaining English translation of the novel, A Not so Perfect Crime (trans. Peter Bush, London 2008). 12 Per mi, l’ideal seria poder treballar com vaig fer-ho amb la novel·la Qüestió d’amor propi. Quan l’es­tava escrivint l’anava traduint a la vegada; això em donava un punt de vista diferent per anar observant com funcionava en l’al­ tra llengua i esmenar els aspectes que no em semblaven perti­nents, perquè em convertia en una lectora crítica del meu propi text, molt més distanciada que quan llegia en la meva pròpia llengua després d’escriure, per anar corregint” (Riera 2002: 45–52).   “For me, the ideal is to work as I did with the novel Qüestió d’amor propi. I was writing and translating at the same time, and this gave me a different perspective from which to observe how the other language functioned and revise those aspects that did not seem relevant, because I became a critical reader of my own text, much more distanced than had I been reading the version in my own language and adding corrections”. See “Ironía y autotraducción: de Epitelis tendríssimsa El hotel de los cuentos y otros relatos neuróticos de Carme Riera”, Luisa Cotoner Cerdó, Quaderns, 17, 2010: 115–29. 13 The imbrications of languages in Riera’s work are such that the English translators of A Matter of Self-Esteem explain that “[w]e have treated her as a bilingual writer and based our translation on the Spanish version; thus, the characters’ names in A Matter of Self-Esteem appear in Castilian instead of Catalan” (Riera 2001: xii). 14 “Escribo en alemán para que las palabras/no sean vuestras ni mías/todo lenguaje es un tamtam/que pide socorro en una lengua/inaceptable.” From “Como el judío que añora”, Praga 1982. 15 In Campos de Nijar (1960) Goytisolo described his travels to the south of Spain to explore the areas from which Barcelona’s new labour force was emigrating.

Chapter 5   1 Even counting the number of francophones and anglophones can be a difficult task. Except for a short period in the nineteenth century, Montreal has had a francophone majority. But the exact figures are always out of reach, because of the difficulty of actually defining these terms. English is increasingly present in Montreal not as the historic language of colonial domination but as the lingua franca of a globalized world. It should be recalled that the history of Montreal is not that of the classical colonial city: the initial French colonization of First Nations territory was followed by a second colonization by the British when it conquered New France in 1759. Montreal grew into a place where language and class were, for some two centuries, strongly correlated and where the generally more affluent English speakers remained separate from the working-class francophones.   2 For instance Cote-des-Nègres by Mauricio Segura (1998), La Brûlerie by Emile Ollivier (2004) and Pierre Nepveu’s Des mondes peu habités (1992) for Côte des Neiges, little Italy in Nicolas Dickner’s Nikolski (2005), Montréal-Nord in d’Alfonso’s Avril ou l’anti-Passion (1990), Mile End in Lise Tremblay’s Danse juive (1999) and also in Myriam Beaudoin’s Hadassa (2006) or the suburbs in Dée by Michael Delisle (2002).

170  Notes   3 Morley Callaghan’s The Loved and the Lost (1951) was an early and unusual depiction of the Black jazz clubs on St Antoine Street, bringing into visibility the question of race in Montreal. Despite Roy, Callaghan and David Fennario, the Southwest was for decades as isolated from the literary imagination as it was in geographical terms.   4 The Automatistes’ mandate to find venues for the exhibition of their own work outside the institutional context extended to the Montreal metro which used the work of Jean-Paul Mousseau and Marcelle Ferron. (“Métro Borduas”, Tammer El-Sheikh, http://www.metroborduas.concordia.ca/html/essay.html)   5 Another salonnière was Mascha Wisse, mother of noted Yiddish scholars David Roskies and Ruth Wisse. The family home was on Pagnuelo in Outremont, and was open to local and visiting writers (see both Raby 2007 and Roskies 2008).   6 See Barbara Godard’s entry on “Translation in French Canada” in O. Classe, and see Agnes Whitfield’s forthcoming work on the translations of the two emblematic novels of the 1940s: G. Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion and Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes.   7 Similarly, the English-Canadian modernist painter Edwin Holgate was involved in the francophone painting community – he taught at the École des beauxarts in Montreal from 1926 to 1935 and then at the school of Montreal’s Art Association. His prize pupils included Borduas, Jean-Paul Lemieux and Stanley Cosgrove. There is interesting evidence of these interconnections in the chalet on Mont Royal, whose historical frescoes were painted by a mix of painters commissioned by the architect Aristide Beaugrand-Champagne – FrenchCanadian, English-Canadian and also European. Holgate’s painting is side by side with tableaux by Borduas (Lacroix 2003).   8 The studios and galleries of the artists were often in the same small parts of Montreal (Lorne Crescent, Sherbrooke, Greene Avenue). The Contemporary Art Society was founded in January 1939 at the house of John Lyman and Borduas was elected vice-president (Ellenwood 1992: 7). (This friendship ended with the publication of Refus global.) Other friendships included that of Alfred Pinsky with Goodridge Roberts, and Alexandre Bercovitch with Marc Aurèle Fortin. Alexandre Bercovitch’s first exhibition was organized at the Musée d’art de Joliette by the père Etienne Maron (November–December 1945). Sam Borenstein lived in a loft on Greene Avenue where Herman Heimlich, Goodridge Roberts, Ernst Neumann and Norman McLaren also had studios (Trépanier 2008: 235).   9 I am recalling the expression used by Gershom Scholem, quoted by George Steiner, and referring to Buber’s Hebraicized German version of the Bible. Scholem writes that it was to be a gift to the German people and it became a tombstone instead. 10 In L’Amour du yiddish, Régine Robin notes that even in France Yiddish literature has not been abundantly translated, in contrast to the American tradition. “Why do we have so few studies and translations of this immense cultural heritage? Where are our anthologies, our collections of poems, our encyclopedias?” (Robin, 1984: 27). 11 Cohen hadn’t liked the version of Stranger Music made in France. Stranger Music had become Musique d’ailleurs in France. Garneau turned it into Etrange musique étrangère, accentuating the double strangeness of the original title, rather than referring to the vague “elsewhere” which the Parisian title gives. Garneau is hardly a newcomer to translation. During the 1980s, he was one of the first Québécois playwrights to take on Shakespeare, translating Macbeth, Coriolanus and The Tempest into his own influential versions of joual, Montreal’s urban slang. But Garneau was criticized for the heavy nationalist cast he gave to his translation (Brisset 1996). 12 Major changes have been made to the street in the last few years, with the construction of a new entertainment zone at the foot of the street (le Quartier des spectacles) and a gradual exodus of immigrant merchants in favour of high-end

Notes  171 restaurants, design and furniture stores. The economic transformation of the street takes on a striking visual form in the case of the Peck building at the corner of Saint-Viateur and Saint-Laurent. Built for the clothing industry in the early twentieth century, the building was bought by the French videogames giant Ubisoft for its Montreal staff of some 1,800 workers. Today the techno-workers sit at their computer monitors at the exact same worksites where once there were sewing machines, and work the same long hours that their predecessors did. The company cashes in on the immigrant history of Mile End by promoting its convivial neighbourhood as a perk to its workers, even – at one point – organizing a yearly street festival. The interplay between between immigration, media, globalization and neighbourhood here has ironic aspects. 13 Michel Tremblay, known largely for the way he brings out the carnivalesque, transgressive and liminal spaces of sexuality on the street in his novels and plays, also suggested some of the less savoury aspects of this liminality. In the 1978 La grosse femme d’à côté est enceinte, he shows housewives from the francophone Plateau Mont-Royal making anti-Semitic comments about the Jewish shopkeepers to whom they owe money (Tremblay 1978: 22–3). These remarks are Tremblay’s way of recalling the anti-Semitism of the 1940s and the historical reality of the street as a barrier. And so for Hage as for Tremblay, the liminal space of Saint Laurent can prove to be a space of confrontation. By contrast, the translation of Michel Tremblay’s emblematic play Les Belles-Soeurs into Yiddish played to enthusiastic audiences at a Jewish cultural centre during the early 1990s – and has become a powerful sign of the new connections and networks of the city. 14 It is not surprising that Gail Scott’s latest novel, The Obituary (Toronto, Coach House, 2010), is situated in Montreal’s traditional immigrant zone, Mile End. Gail Scott is the English-language writer who has most boldly explored the double language of Montreal in her fiction, using experimental, mixed forms. Montreal is truly the condition of possibility for her writing, as each of her novels has proposed new ways of writing about language and urban space (see Simon 2006: 125–34).

Chapter 6   1 The phrase “the Tower of Babel” does not appear as such in the passage, rather the phrase is “the city and its tower”: “‘Come let us build us a city and a tower’ and the Lord came down to see the city and the tower” (city: “ha-ir”, tower: “ha-migdal”, Genesis 11: 1–9).   2 Among Ottoman cities, only Cairo rivaled Istanbul in size (Eldem 1999: 14).   3 In 1852, Théophile Gautier, like many observers of the day, remarked that in the streets of Istanbul you could hear Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Italian, French, English and Ladino (Pamuk 2005: 171) and the lingua franca of Levantine ports was itself a language containing many others. The Levantine “interzone” was also defined by language: first by lingua franca, lisan al-franji in Arabic, and then after 1850 by French which was used as a parallel language to Ottoman. The mixtures of Istanbul life were also reflected in Ottoman, a language mixed with Arabic and Persian as well as Western influences.   4 While the forced displacements decreed by the Lausanne Agreement of 1924 did not directly apply to Istanbul, its effects were felt there. A series of discriminatory measures and vexations forced non-Turkish minorities to gradually abandon the city over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. The population exchange did not respect language affiliation, but was directed only at religious identity. So, although efforts were made to exempt them from the exchange, the Turkish-speaking Christians of Cappadocia were forced to emigrate in 1923. And the legendary Dönme from Salonica, Jews who had converted to Islam at

172  Notes the time of Shabbtai Zvi in the seventeenth century, were forcibly displaced to Turkey. 5 As a child he recalled wandering in and out of Greek shops in Beyoğlu, enjoying the “background sound of mothers, fathers, and daughters chattering to one another in rapid-fire Greek” but made to understand by his parents that “the Greeks, like the city’s poor and the denizens of its shantytowns, were not quite ‘respectable’” (Pamuk 2005: 171). 6 For a complete account of the activities of the Translation Bureau, see Gürçağlar 2008.

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Index

accents 1; in El amante bilingüe 100, 102 adaptation, and translation 31–2, 35, 50; Long’s belief in 40, 44–5, 52 Adelphi (publisher) 61 Adria (literary journal) 75 Agnant, Marie-Célie 148 Alexandria 154 Allen, Woody: Vicky Cristina Barcelona 168n3 Ames, Herbert Brown: The City Below the Hill 123 Anctil, Pierre 142, 143 anglophone modernism, in 1940s Montreal 11, 13, 19; as AngloAmerican 128–30; and English– French distancing 132–6; and later decline of anglophone writing 130; left-wing politics of 128; neighbourhoods associated with 130; Scott as central to 124, 125; see also Montreal, and entries following; Scott, F.R. (Frank) Antwerp: in Bruegel’s Tower of Babel 151–3, 152, 156; fragility/fall of 152–3, 158; as multilingual 152–3 Arabic 14, 23, 171n3; in Barcelona 99, 113, 114, 115; in Montreal 11, 147 architecture and urban planning: in Barcelona 94–9, 97, 98, 99; in Calcutta 22–3, 24–5, 27, 47, 48, 162n23; in Habsburg empire 63, 64, 166n11, 166n12; in Montreal 132, 170n12; in Trieste 63, 64, 79, 80, 167n23 Artifoni, Almidano 60 Atwood, Margaret 129 Auster, Paul 5 Automatistes 124, 125, 126–8, 128; Borduas and 124, 125, 126–7, 128; modernism of 126–7; Montreal

metro art of 126, 170n4; and Refus global 126, 127, 128, 129, 170n8; Scott and 137; Surrealists’ influence on 125, 126, 129 Babel: Biblical story of 151, 153, 156, 159, 160; Bruegel’s painting of 151– 3, 152, 156; etymological confusion over 153; Hermes’ connection to 151 Bahr, Hermann 83, 85 Baier, Lothar 5 Bandopadhyay, Bhavanicharan: Kalikata Kamalalaya 51–2 Banerjea, K.M. 42, 46; Arian Witness 46 Banerjee, Rangalal: Padmini Upakhyan 29 Bangalore (India) 161n4 Bankim see Chatterjee, Bankimchandra “Bankim” Barcelona 19, 88–116, 148; architecture/ urban planning in 94–9, 100–1; as bilingual 88, 89, 91, 104–5, 168n7; and border zone 9; Catalan–Spanish dynamics in 9–10, 11, 12, 19, 88–94, 158; Catalan–Spanish rift in 89–90, 93–4; Catalan neighbourhoods of 88, 91; Catalan Renaissance in 18, 92, 103; compared to Prague 113; crime fiction of 106, 113; deviant translation in 11, 94, 110–13; Disputation of 98–9; English in 11, 94, 168n6; immigrants to 91–2, 93, 100–2, 114–15, 168n8, 169n15; Jewish quarter/laneways of 98–9; language competition in 9–10, 12, 116; linguistic hybridization in 88, 91, 93, 111–12; linguistic overlapping in 93–4, 112–13; linguistic switching in 90; as multilingual 2, 11, 113–16; ongoing linguistic tensions in 156–7; passatges of 12, 91, 96, 98–9, 98,

190  Index 99, 120; post-Olympics decline of 91–2, 168n5; pronunciations of 9–10; publishing houses in 104, 106; Rodoreda’s return to 88–9; selftranslation in 11, 19, 91, 93–4, 110– 13; third space of 12, 91, 113–16, 157; see also Castilian (Spanish), and entry following; Catalan, and entries following; Raval, The (Barcelona) Barcelona, architecture/geography of 94–9, 100–1; and Catalan bourgeoisie 101; Catalan neighbourhoods 88, 91; Cerdà’s planning of 96, 101; city walls 95–6; Eixample 96, 97; Jewish quarter/laneways 98–9; passatges 12, 91, 96, 98–9, 98, 99, 120; Raval 89, 113–16; street corners 2–3, 96, 97; as unfinished 99; and urban planning projects of 1980s 95; Walden 7 100– 1; see also Raval, The (Barcelona) Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture (CCCB) 114, 167n23 Barthes, Roland 30 Basaglia, Franco 79 Battala (Calcutta), publishing industry in 43, 50; Long’s research on 43–4, 46 Baudelaire, Charles 5, 38, 108, 161n1 “Bazaar Hindustani” (“Moors”) 31, 33; as lingua franca/contact language 31, 35 Bazlen, Roberto “Bobi” 61, 77, 165n8, 165n9 Beirut: in Incendies (film) 147–8; multilingual history of 154; political/ linguistic division of xix, 3, 147–8 Benco, Delia 62; Ieri 62 Benco, Silvio 61 Bengal: echoes of Irish anti-colonialism in 29, 40, 162n6; indigo planters vs. peasantry in 39, 40, 46; Marxism/ Communism in 163n9; nationalism in 10–11, 19, 26, 28–30, 39, 47–8, 51 Bengal Social Science Association 40 Bengali 12; Lebedeff’s theatrical use of 30, 31; Long’s translations into 10, 19, 26, 39–40, 44–7; novel in 10–11, 18, 26, 47–53, 158; other literary forms reshaped in 53; and Sanskrit 23, 26, 31, 158, 163n12; translations into 29, 45, 53; translations into English from 29, 54–5; as vernacular language 39–40, 42, 43–4, 46–7, 158, 159; see also Calcutta Bengali art 28, 28 Bengali novel: Bankim and 10–11, 26, 47–53, 158; in colonial context 50–2;

precursors/influences of 48, 49–50, 51–2; Tagore and 54; as translation/ act of furthering 18, 50–1, 52–3, 158 Bengali poetry 53; Tagore’s false translations of 54–5 Bengali Renaissance 23, 26, 27–55; and acts of furthering 18, 23, 26, 29, 53, 55, 158; and Calcutta’s translational culture 18, 19, 22, 23, 26, 27–30, 53; in colonial context 28–30, 50–3, 54– 5; linguistic/cultural mediation of 23, 26, 28, 29, 30, 35, 42; modern view of 53–4; modernity of 26, 27, 29–30, 47–53; and nationalism 26, 28–30, 39, 47–8, 51; Town Hall tribute to 47, 49; as urban phenomenon 27–30, 162n5; see also Calcutta; specific translators and writers Bengali theatre 30, 32, 35; Datta’s reshaping of 53; jatra 30, 43; Lebedeff’s adaptation for 30, 31–2, 33, 35; Long’s criticism of 43 Benjamin, Walter 5, 96, 120 Bergner, Yossl 141 Bethune, Norman 128 Bey, Yunus, 154; and Translator Mosque 154, 155, 156 Bible: Babel story in 151, 153, 156, 159, 160; Buber’s Hebraicized German version of 170n9; Plantin’s Polyglot edition of 152; as translated into Bengali 45–6, 50; and translations into Yiddish 139–40 bilingualism 3; in Barcelona 88, 89, 91, 104–5, 168n7; in Habsburg Trieste 75; in Montreal 117, 148–9; as oppositional 2; Sommer on 1–2, 117; and weaker language 3, 9–10, 91, 142, 158, 168n7 Black community, in Montreal 123, 170n3 Blodgett, E.D. 145 Blum, Alan 7, 126 Bofill, Ricardo 100–1 Bolts, William 35 Bon Cop, Bad Cop (film) 148–9, 150 border zones, cities located on: Barcelona 9; Istanbul 154; Trieste 5, 9, 56–7, 67, 87, 165n3 border zones, within cities xv–xviii, 1–2, 17; see also dividing lines Borduas, Paul-Émile 127, 136, 170n7; and Automatistes 124, 125, 126–7, 128; studio of 124, 125, 126 Borges, Jorge Luis xiv, 16, 61, 107, 108 Bosco, Monique 148

Index  191 Bouyoucas, Pan 148 Braidotti, Ludovico: Trieste Asylum of 79, 80, 167n23 Brandtner, Fritz 128 Brault, Jacques 145 Brecht, Berthold 61 Brod, Max 66–7, 166n16 Brooklyn (New York) 1–2 Browning, Robert (trans.): Agamemnon 38 Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder: The Tower of Babel 151–3, 152, 156 Brussels xix, 2, 15, 161n4 Buber, Martin 170n9 Budapest 63, 65, 166n14 Caffè San Marco (Trieste) 84 Calcutta 19, 21–55, 148; and architecture of power 24–5, 27, 47, 48; Bengali Renaissance in 23, 26, 27–55; Bengali–Sanskrit dynamics in 23, 26, 31, 158, 163n12; Black Town and White Town of 22–6, 27; as centre of scientific knowledge 23, 27, 162n4; as colonial city 9, 17, 19, 22–30, 32, 50–5, 58; contact languages of 31, 35, 36; cultural tolerance in 32; dividing line of 22–3, 24–5; Eastern–Western dynamics in 27–8, 28, 29–30, 32; English–Bengali dynamics in 10–11, 26, 29; French in 36–9; grey zone of 12, 22, 23, 162n2; indigenous publishing industry of 43– 4, 46, 50; and introduction of novel 10–11, 18, 26, 47–53; as Kolkata 15, 21, 22, 53–5, 159; linguistic/ cultural mediation in 23, 26, 28, 29, 30, 35, 42; Marwaris in 21–2, 162n2; as multilingual 11, 35–6, 42; Muslims of 23, 26, 29, 32; as port city 17; professional readers in 43; public space in 51; and “spillover” of modernity 27; Town Hall of 47, 48, 49, 51; translation industry in 23; translational culture of 18, 19, 22, 23, 26, 27–30, 53; as uncanny city 27–30; urban planning in 22–3, 24–5, 27, 162n3; see also entry below; see also Bengali Renaissance; Chatterjee, Bankimchandra “Bankim”; Dutt, Toru; Lebedeff, Herasim; Long, James Calcutta, as colonial city 9, 17, 19, 22– 30, 32, 50–5, 58; and architecture of power 24–5, 27, 47, 48; and Bengali novel 50–2; and Bengali Renaissance 28–30, 50–3, 54–5; Black Town and

White Town of 22–6, 27; and echoes of Irish anti-colonialism 29, 40, 162n6; and Indian independence 9, 29; Long’s experiences in 10, 39–40, 46–7, 158; and Partition 22, 47 Callaghan, Morley 129, 136; The Loved and the Lost 123, 170n3 Canadian Jewish Chronicle 139 Capmany, Maria Aurèlia 104; and The Feminine Mystique 104; QuimQuima 104 Carpenter, Mary 40 Carpentier, André: Ruelles, jours ouvrables 120 Casajuana, Carles: L’últim home que parlava català 94–5 Castilian (Spanish) 11, 168n1; and bilingual state policy 88, 89, 91, 104–5, 168n7; Catalanization of 93, 112; as close to/distant from Catalan 90–1; and displacement of Catalan 88; as language of some Catalan writers 89–90, 93, 105, 108, 111–12; publishing houses and 106; range of expression in 110; as spoken by half the city 94; as stronger language 158; as translated into Catalan 105 Castilian-language writers, in Barcelona: and absence/effacement of Catalan 93; and figure of double 91, 94, 101–2, 109, 113; and Foro Babel Manifesto 89; linguistic switching by 90; self-translation by 11, 91, 93–4, 101–2, 109, 113 Català, Víctor (pseud. of Caterina Albert): Solitude: A Novel of Catalonia 115 Catalan 9, 11, 12, 168n1; assimilation of 168n9; and bilingual state policy 88, 89, 91, 104–5, 168n7; Capmany’s translations into 104; Castilianization of 93, 112, 158, 168n8; as close to/distant from Spanish 90–1; dictionaries of 91, 114–15; as displaced by Spanish 88; and exile/exodus of Catalan speakers 88, 104, 105; as identitary language 105; and immigrants 91–2, 93, 100–3, 114–15, 168n8; as language of bourgeoisie/upper middle class 91, 92, 96, 100–3; marginalization of 168n3; neighbourhoods of 88, 91; in post-Franco world 89–92, 103–6; as previously suppressed/prohibited 88, 90, 92, 100, 102, 103–4, 105, 158; protection/promotion of 90, 93,

192  Index 100, 119, 158; publishing houses and 104, 106; Renaissance of 18, 92, 103; sonority of 110; spoken vs. written 168n7; as spoken by half the city 94; threats to territory/existence of 94–5; translation as crucial to 103–6; translations from Spanish into 105; Vallverdù’s championing of 168n7; as vernacular language 158, 159; as weaker language 158 Catalan writers: acts of furthering by 103–6, 112–13; exile/exodus of 88, 104; and figure of double 91, 94, 106–10, 113; linguistic switching/ hybridization by 90, 112; selftranslation by 11, 91, 93–4, 110–13; as writing in Spanish 89–90, 93, 105, 111–12 Catalonia 90, 168n1; autonomy of 90, 92–3; bilingual policy of 88, 89, 91, 104–5, 168n7; history/culture of 92; industrial past of 114; and protection/promotion of Catalan 90, 93; Renaissance of 18, 92, 103; see also Barcelona, and entry following Catalonian National Theatre (Barcelona) 101 Cela, Camilo José 105 Celan, Paul: and Czernowitz 6, 15–16; German poetry of 15–16 Cercas, Javier 105; Soldiers of Salamis 110 Cerdà, Ildefons 96, 101 Certeau, Michel de 6, 120 Cervantes, Miguel de 110 Cervantes Prize 90 Chakrabarty, Dipesh: Provincializing Europe 53–4 Charles University (Prague) 65 Chatterjee, Bankimchandra “Bankim” 47–53, 49, 55, 164n16; and Bengali/ Indian novel 10–11, 26, 47–53, 158; as comfortable/knowledgeable in English 50, 164n16; compared to Tagore 55; English novel by 50–1; on imitation as precursor to original writing 52; linguistic unease of 50–1, 67; and nationalism 10–11, 19, 26, 47–8; and problem of place/public space 50–1, 52; as rural resident 162n5, 164n17; Town Hall tribute to 47, 49; see also Bengali Renaissance; Calcutta Chatterjee, Partha 27 Chatterji, Suniti Kumar 31, 163n9 Chattopadhyay, Swati 27, 28, 51

Chaudhuri, Amit 23, 30 Chaudhuri, Rosinka 29 Chaudhuri, Sukanta 22 Chen, Ying 148 Chicago: superimposed “translation” of xviii Chicano literature 17, 104 Chicoine, René 143 Children’s Art Centre (Montreal) 128 Chung, Ook 148 Chwin, Stefan: Death in Danzig 15 cities: and artists’ moments of illumination/inspiration 5; imaginaire/self-image of 7–8; language as taken for granted in 7–8; literary revivals/Renaissances in 17–18; and modernity 4–5, 16–18; as multilingual 2, 11–13; names of 9–10, 15; translators’ role/importance in 2, 5–7, 8; see also dual cities; multilingual cities Cittavecchia (Trieste) 12, 85–6 Clementi, Sir Cecil 13 Coda del Diavolo, La (Trieste weekly) 60 code-switching 1 Cohen, Leonard 11, 129, 144–6; Garneau as translator of 145, 170n11; at McGill University 144; Yiddish influences on 144; see also Montreal, three modernities of Cohen, Leonard, works by: Beautiful Losers 144, 145; Book of Longing 145; The Favourite Game 144, 145; Stranger Music 145, 170n11 Colombi, Matteo 166n17 Colometa (fictional character) 88, 89, 115 colonial/imperial cities: and acts of distancing 13, 29; and acts of furthering 17–18, 29, 40, 162n16; as dual cities 3, 9, 17–18, 156; as “translated” out of empire 4, 9, 60, 83–7, 154, 156, 171n4 colonial/imperial cities (specific): Calcutta 9, 17, 19, 22–30, 32, 50–5, 58; Czernowitz 6, 14–16, 63, 67; Istanbul 154, 156, 171n4; Montreal 9, 169n1; Trieste 57, 58, 59–60, 63, 73, 83, 85, 87, 165n3; see also Calcutta, as colonial city; Trieste, as imperial city Coscienza di Zeno, La (Svevo): Freud’s influence on 75–6, 77–9; language in 12, 71, 78–9; Schopenhauer’s influence on 73, 76, 79; translation

Index  193 of 82–3; wartime reference in 56, 167n24 Cosgrove, Stanley 170n7 Cosini, Zeno (fictional character), 56, 76; and language 12, 71, 78–9 Crémieux, Benjamin 82–3 Cronin, Michael 121 Curwen, Henry (trans.): Echoes from the French Poets 38 Cyprus xv–xviii; cultural/linguistic history of xvii; hybrid language of xvii; political/linguistic division of xv, xvii–xviii, xviii, xix, 3; see also Nicosia Czech, in Prague 4, 17, 65–7; and German 4, 12, 65–7, 166n15; Janáček and 66; Kafka and 65, 67; Renaissance of 17, 65; as vernacular language 4, 65; see also Kafka, Franz; Prague Czernowitz (Ukraine) 6, 63; Celan and 6, 15–16; German language/culture of 14–15, 67; as multilingual xix, 14–15; name changes of 15 Dagenais, Pierre 136 Dakar (Senegal) xix, 2, 161n4 Danzig/Gdansk 15 Darnton, Robert 43, 47 d’Asprer, Nuria 96, 98 Datta, Michael Madhusudan 30, 39, 53, 164n19 Defoe, Daniel, 49; Robinson Crusoe 50 Derozio, Henry 30, 46, 162n5 Dhaka (Bangladesh) 22 Diamant, Dora 141 Dias, Willy (pseud. of Fortuna Morpurgo) 62–3 diasporic communities 11–12, 17, 156–8; in Barcelona 91–2, 93, 114–15, 168n8, 169n15; in Montreal 12, 19–20, 119, 121, 123, 145–8, 157, 171n14 Dickens, Charles: Sketches by Boz 52 dictionaries: of Anglo-Indian terms 36; Catalan 91, 114–15; Tuscan 78 Dionysios xv Disguise, The (play adapted by Lebedeff) 30, 31–2, 33 distancing, acts of 12–16, 17, 19, 148; colonialism and 13, 29; and ideology 14; memorialization as 15–16; among Montreal’s three modernities 13, 19, 121–6, 132–6, 142–3, 144–5; Orientalist translations as 29; and suppressed/prohibited languages 14–16, 156

dividing lines: in Calcutta 22–3, 24–5; in Montreal xvii, 12, 13, 145–6 Döblin, Alfred 61 dual cities 1–20, 156–60; acts of distancing in 12–16, 17, 19, 148; acts of furthering in 12–13, 16–18, 19, 148, 157–8; bilingualism in 3, 75, 88, 89, 91, 104–5, 117, 148–9, 168n7; in border zones 9; as colonial/ imperial 3, 9, 17–18, 156; cultural/ linguistic shifts in 9; cultural renewal/ reconquest in 17–19; definition of 3–6, 161n4; and effacement of past 6, 14–15, 118, 118, 156; language competition in 9–10, 12, 116; lessons to be learned from 3–5; linguistic dynamics of 3–6, 11–18; linguistic ideology of 12, 14, 30; and modernity 4–5, 16–18; as multilingual 11–13, 161n4; and name changes 9–10, 14– 15; as port cities 17, 59, 87, 121, 151, 154, 156; street corners of 2–3, 5, 157; third languages in 11, 157; third spaces in 11–13, 157; as translational 3, 5–6, 6–20; translators’ role/ importance in 2, 5–7, 10–11, 16–18; vehicular vs. vernacular language in 4, 18–19, 57–8, 92, 156; weaker language in 3, 9–10, 91, 142, 158, 168n7; see also cities; specific cities Dublin 17, 161n4 Ducharme, Réjean: L’avalée des avalés 146 Dudek, Louis 129 Dutt, Aru 37 Dutt, Toru 19, 26, 36–9, 37, 55; fame of 36, 38; isolation of 36; translation style of 38; see also Bengali Renaissance; Calcutta Dutt, Toru, works/translations by: Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan 38; Le journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers 36; A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields (trans.) 36, 38 East India Company 23, 35, 162n4 Ecclesiastes (Koheleth), Book of 139–40 Edicions Proa (Catalan publisher) 104, 108 Edicions 62 (Catalan publisher) 104 Edinost (literary journal) 62 Eixample (Barcelona) 96, 97 El Hachmi, Najat: The Last Patriarch 90, 102, 114–15 Eliot, George 36

194  Index Eliot, T.S. 108 English: in Barcelona 11, 94, 168n6; in Calcutta 10–11, 26, 29, 50, 164n16; dominance/authority of in U.S., 2, 12, 161n4; in Montreal 9–10, 11, 169n1; as vehicular language 4, 169n1 English-language writers, in Montreal: anglophone 125, 128–30; Jewish 129–30, 130–1, 141–3, 144; left-wing politics of 128, 129–30; modernism of 128–30; neighbourhoods of 130; Scott as central to 124, 125 Esenin, Sergei Aleksandrovich 140 Esperanto 60 Expo 67 (Montreal) 122 Fabra, Pompeu: Catalan dictionary of 91 Falcones, Ildefonso 105 Farhoud, Abla 148 Faulkner, William 16, 161n5 Favilla, La (literary journal) 75 Felstiner, John 16 Fennario, David 170n3 Ferrater, Gabriel 108–9; as translator of Kafka 108, 157 Finzi, Aurelio 75, 77 First Statement (literary journal) 130 First World War: Trieste and 56–7, 59, 62, 74, 86–7 FitzGerald, Edward (trans.): The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám 38 Flanders 153; see also Antwerp Foro Babel Manifesto (Barcelona) 89 Foucault, Michel: on authorship and discourse 48–9 France 44, 147, 170n11; Catalan exiles in 88, 105, 107, 108; Gallant’s departure for 136; poetry of, as translated by Dutt 36–9; and publication of Pahor 168n28; and recognition of Svevo 82–3; Surrealism in 5, 125, 126, 129; and translation of Cohen 145, 170n11 Franco, Francisco 95, 110, 157; death of 91, 103; and exile/exodus of Catalans 88, 104, 105; and Spanish Civil War 88, 91; and suppression/prohibition of Catalan 88, 90, 92, 100, 102–6 francophone artistic modernism, in 1940s Montreal 11, 13, 19, 170n7; Borduas as central to 124, 125; and “le moderne” 126–7, 132; Scott’s relationship with 136–7, 139; see also Automatistes; Borduas, Paul-Émile; Montreal, three modernities of

francophone literary modernism, in 1940s Montreal: and English–French distancing 134–6 French, in Montreal 9–10, 11; and joual 122, 145, 149, 170n11; protection/ promotion of 118–19, 158; as vernacular language 4, 158, 159 Freud, Sigmund 5, 15, 49, 60; Svevo as influenced by 75–6, 77–9; Svevo as translator of 75, 77; and visits to Trieste 76–7; Weiss as translator of 77 Friedan, Betty: The Feminine Mystique 104 furthering, acts of 12–13, 16–18, 19, 148, 157–8; as augmenting language 17; and Bengali Renaissance 18, 23, 26, 29, 53, 55, 158; in border zones 17, 157; by Catalan writers 103–6, 112–13; and colonialism 17–18, 29, 40, 162n16; and diasporic communities 147–8, 157; and literary expansion/ innovation 16–17, 18; and literary revivals/Renaissances 17–18; and modernization/cultural renewal 16–18; among Montreal’s three modernities 136–7, 139, 142, 143, 145, 170n7; Svevo and 87, 158; and translational writing/culture 17 Futurist movement, 165n7 Galata (Pera), Istanbul 154 Gallant, Mavis 13; “Good Morning and Goodbye” 136; as expatriate writer 136; and Montreal immigrant experience 123; and Montreal’s wartime modernity 130, 136; “Three Brick Walls” 136 Gants du ciel (literary journal) 135 Garcia Marquez, Gabriel 16, 105, 161n5 Garneau, Michel: poems of 145; as translator of Cohen 145, 170n11; as translator of Shakespeare 145, 170n11 Garneau, René 136 Gaudí, Antonio 101 Gautier, Théophile 38, 171n3 Gauvreau, Claude 126, 128 Gdansk/Danzig 15 Gélinas, Gratien 136 Genet, Jean 113, 114; The Diary of a Thief 113 German: in Czernowitz 14; in Danzig/ Gdansk 15; evolution/spread of 159;

Index  195 in Habsburg Trieste 9, 10, 11; in Kafka’s Prague 4, 12, 65–7, 157–8; as language of Nazism/Holocaust 15–16; “paper” 65, 67; as vehicular language 4 Gerona (Spain) 98 Ghosh, Amitav: on Bankim 50–1; The Calcutta Chromosome 162n4; Sea of Poppies 35–6, 42; The Shadow Lines 22 ghosts, linguistic 14, 15, 118, 118, 159 Gil de Biedma, Jaime 108–9 Godayol, Pilar 104; and translations from Chicano into Catalan 104 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 74; in Jocs de Miralls (Riera) 109 Gosse, Edmund 38 Goytisolo, José Agustín 100 Goytisolo, Juan 99, 113; Campos de Nijar 169n15; Genet en el Raval 113 Graham, Gwethalyn 129, 136 Grandbois, Alain and Madeleine 136 grey zone (Calcutta) 12, 22, 23, 162n2 Greece: and political/linguistic division of Cyprus xv, xvii–xviii, xviii Grillparzer, Franz 75 Grossman, Edith 16–17 Guèvremont, Germaine: Le Survenant 135 Guidice, Daniele del: Lo Stadio di Wimbledon 61 Habsburg empire, cities of, 63, 64–5, 67–8, 87; architecture of 63, 64, 166n11, 166n12; German language/ culture in 14–15, 19, 63, 64–5; horizontal linguistic overlay of 91; linguistic mediation in 63, 66–8; modernity of 5; as multilingual 165n5; see also Czernowitz (Ukraine); Prague; Trieste Hades 156 Hage, Rawi: Cockroach 146–7, 171n13 Harvey, Charles: Les Demi-Civilisés 135 Harvey, David 7 Hašek, Jaroslav: The Good Soldier Schweik 66 Haydée (pseud. of Ida Finzi) 63, 85 Heaney, Seamus 6 Hebbel, Friedrich: Giuditta 73 Hébert, Anne 13; Dialogue sur la traduction 134; Scott as translator of 134; “The Tomb of the Kings” 134 Hebrew: and Arabic 14; in Mishna 140; in Polyglot Bible 152; and Sanskrit

46; and Yiddish 71, 139, 141, 144 Heftn (Yiddish literary journal) 140 Heine, Heinrich 62, 73 Hermes xv, xvii–xviii; as bearer of souls to Hades 156; and colonial/ post-colonial city 9; as god of both boundaries and crossroads xv, xvii, 160; and hermeneutics/translation xvii–xviii, 151, 156; as ironic presence in Nicosia xv, xvii–xviii; and literature of contact 160; and origins of language 151; as trickster xvii, xviii, 151, 156 Hermes street (Nicosia) xv, xvii “Herms” (stone boundary markers) xv Heyse, Paul 82 Hindustani 23, 30, 36; “Bazaar” 31, 33, 35 Hobson-Jobson (Anglo-Indian dictionary) 36 Holgate, Edwin 170n7 Holocaust: and Celan’s German 15; and decline of Yiddish 130, 140, 141; and Zoller’s conversion to Christianity 167n20 Hong Kong 13 Horst, Moritz (pseud. of Anna Jahn) 62 House of Languages (Barcelona) 114 Huston, Nancy 111 Huyssen, Andreas 7–8 Ibarz, Mercè: La Ciutat en obres 106 Ibis Editions (Jerusalem) 14 Ibsen, Henrik 60, 73, 75 immigrants 11–12, 17, 156–8; in Barcelona 91–2, 93, 100–2, 114–15, 168n8, 169n15; in Montreal 12, 19–20, 119, 121, 123, 145–8, 157, 171n14 Incendies (Mouawad play) 147; Villeneuve’s film of 147–8 India: independence of 9, 29; novel in 10–11, 18, 26, 47–53, 158; Partition in 22, 47; Sepoy Rebellion in 35, 39, 46; see also Bengali Renaissance; Calcutta Indipendente (literary journal) 74 Ireland: anti-colonialism in 29, 40, 162n6; linguistic revival in 161n4; literary Renaissance in 17 Irish community, in Montreal 123 Istanbul xix; as Constantinople 15; history of multilingualism/translation in 154, 156, 158, 171n3, 172n5; as linguistic/cultural “interzone” 154, 171n3; and purging of ethnic

196  Index minorities/languages 154, 156, 171n4; Translator Mosque in 154, 155, 156 Italian, in Habsburg Trieste 58, 59, 60, 71–2, 159; and German 10, 11, 19, 57–8, 59–63, 68–79, 86; literary (Tuscan) 12, 57–8, 68, 74, 78–9 Italy, Fascist 12, 57, 63, 71, 72, 83, 85–7, 157; and Mussolini’s Racial Laws 77, 85; and Slovenes 86–7; and translation 86 Jacobs, Jane 5 James I of Aragon 99 Janáček, Leoš 66; Jenůfa 66 Japanese 18 jatra (traditional Bengali theatre) 30, 43 Jerusalem 3, 14 Jesenská, Milena 67 Jewish communities: of Barcelona 98–9; of Czernowitz 14; of Istanbul 171n4; of Prague 65, 66; of Toledo (Spain) 153–4; of Trieste 12, 69, 71–2, 85–6, 167n20 Jewish writers, in Montreal: francophone distancing from 13, 135, 142–3; as influence on Cohen 144; left-wing politics of 128, 129–30, 140; Maza as central to 124, 125, 131–2, 133; Roberts’s observations of 129–30; and translations into Yiddish 139–41, 142; and translations out of Yiddish 141–3; as writing in English 130–1, 135, 141–3, 144; as writing in Yiddish 11, 19, 124, 125, 130–2, 139–43, 144, 148; see also Cohen, Leonard; Klein, A.M. Jodrell, Richard: The Disguise 30, 31–2, 33 Jones, Sir William 29, 35 Josephson, Hannah 135 joual 122, 149, 170n11; and Garneau’s translations of Shakespeare 145, 170n11 journals, literary: in Montreal 122, 135, 139–40; and Trieste writers 61, 62, 74, 75, 83 Joyce, James 57, 73, 82, 110; and Cittavecchia of Trieste 85; The Dubliners 62; Finnegans Wake 60, 61–2, 85; language of 60, 61–2, 85; Mallafrè as translator of 103; and Svevo 82; Ulysses 60, 103 Judaean, The (Yiddish literary journal) 139, 140

Kafka, Franz: Ferrater as translator of 108, 157; as German-language writer 4, 12, 65, 67, 157–8; and interest in Czech 65; Jesenská as translator of 67; linguistic unease of 4, 65, 67, 68; papers of 166n16; Pocar as translator of 61; and Prague 4, 12, 65, 67, 157, 158; Ravitch as translator of 140–1, 142, 157; Spaini as translator of 61, 68; Svevo and 61, 67, 68, 73–4, 157, 158; The Trial 61, 140–1, 142, 157; as unallied to any specific language 68, 73; and writings in other dual cities 157; and Yiddish 141 Kalighat paintings 28, 28 Kattan, Naïm 148 Keneder Odler (Yiddish newspaper) 130 Klein, A.M. 129; and Canadian Jewish Chronicle 139; francophone distancing from 13, 135; as Jewish poet writing in English 130–1, 141–2, 144; and The Judaean 139–40; leftwing politics of 128; as reviewer of translations into Yiddish 139–40 Kleist, Heinrich von 15, 73 Koheleth (Ecclesiastes), Book of 139 Kokis, Sergio 148 Kolkata (Calcutta) 15, 21, 22, 53–5, 159; museum of 47, 48, 49; see also Bengali Renaissance; Calcutta Korn, Rokhl 131, 141 Kornesios, Hadjigeorgakis xvii Krückel Germani, Elsa 62 Laferrière, Dany 148 language: and acts of distancing 12–16, 17, 19, 148; and acts of furthering 12–13, 16–18, 19, 148, 157–8; competition of 9–10, 12, 116; as construct 12; ghosts of 14, 15, 118, 118, 159; and identity 12; and ideology 12, 14, 30; as lingua franca 31, 35, 57–8, 169n1, 171n3; memorialization of 15–16; mythological origins of 151; palimpsests of 15, 79, 118, 118; stronger vs. weaker 9–10; as suppressed/prohibited 14–16, 156; vehicular vs. vernacular 4, 17, 18–19, 57–8, 92, 156; see also specific topics lascars (Indian sailors), language of 36 Latif-Ghattas, Mona 148 Layton, Irving 129, 144; as Jewish poet writing in English 130–1, 141 Lebedeff, Herasim 19, 26, 30–6, 39, 55; and “Bazaar Hindustani” 31,

Index  197 35; Bengali theatrical adaptations by 30, 31–2, 33, 35; Bengallie Theatre of 30, 32, 33; as cultural hero 35; and expulsion from Calcutta 30, 32, 35; and genuine interest in local language/culture 31–2, 35; Grammar of 31–2, 34, 163n9; as “knowledge intermediary” 35; multilingual translation by 31; as musician 32; Soviet Union interest in 163n9; see also Bengali Renaissance; Calcutta Le Corbusier 96 Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine) 63, 166n13 Lemelin, Roger 136 Lemieux, Jean-Paul 170n7 Lemieux, Lisette: Regard sur le fleuve (sculpture) 149, 149–50 Levant, The: multilingual port cities of 154, 156, 171n3 Levi, Primo 86 lingua francas: “Bazaar Hindustani” 31, 35; English 169n1; in Habsburg Trieste 57–8; of Levantine ports 171n3; see also vehicular languages Long, James 39–47, 41, 55; on adaptation as precursor to original writing 40, 44–5, 52; and censorship law 164n14; and colonial authorities 10, 39–40, 46–7, 158; door-to-door canvassing by 40, 42; and genuine interest in local language/culture 10, 39–40, 42–3; as hero in Bengal 10, 39; and indigenous publishing industry 43–4, 46, 163n12, 164n14; as missionary 10, 39, 40, 42–7; and Nil Darpan controversy 39–40, 164n18; and public affairs/social reform 39–40, 46; as resident of “Native” neighbourhood 42; as tireless walker 36, 40, 42; and translations into Bengali 10, 19, 26, 39–40, 44–7; and translations of Bible 45–6; and vernacular literacy/education 10, 39–40, 42–5; and Vernacular Literature Society 42, 43, 44–5, 47; see also Bengali Renaissance; Calcutta Long, James, works by: Five hundred questions (pamphlet) 42–3; Returns (report on Bengali publishing) 43, 44, 46, 163n12; Scripture Truth in Oriental Dress 45–6 Luzzatto, Carolina 62 Luzzatto, Emma Conti 62

MacLennan, Hugh 125–6, 129; Two Solitudes 13, 136 Magris, Claudio 5, 13, 61, 87, 165n8; and Caffè San Marco 84; La Mostra 167n23 Maier, Bruno 61 Maier, Charles 57 Mallafrè, Joaquin: as translator of Ulysses 103 Manila xix, 161n4 Mansfield, Katherine 104 Marcotte, Gilles 125–6 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 165n7 Marsé, Juan 11, 19, 91; as Catalan writing in Spanish 89–90; Cervantes Prize won by 90; and Foro Babel Manifesto 89; and Parc Güell neighbourhood 89, 101; as selftranslator 94; see also entry below; see also Barcelona; Castilian (Spanish), and entry following; selftranslation, by Barcelona writers Marsé, Juan, El amante bilingüe 100–3; accents in 100, 102; and allusion to Rodoreda 102; and architecture as cultural/linguistic symbol 100–1; and dominance/repressiveness of Catalan 100–3; double identity in 94, 101–2, 109, 113; language and sexuality in 100, 101–2; and legacy of Spanish Civil War/Franco regime 102–3; and protagonist’s unsuccessful self-translation 101–2; Riera and 109, 113; and satirizing of Vallverdù 100, 102 Marty, Edda 62 Marwaris (Calcutta merchant class) 21–2, 162n2 Mauthner, Fritz 69, 71 Maximilian, Archduke 63; and Miramare Castle 63, 64 Maza, Ida 124, 133; apartment salon of 124, 125, 131–2 Mazzucchetti, Lavinia 86 McCourt, John 62 McGill University 124, 130; Cohen at 144; Gothic architecture of 132 Médam, Alain 120 memorialization: as act of distancing 15–16, 148, 158; and translations out of Yiddish 141–3 Mendoza, Eduardo 90, 105; City of Marvels 93 Mexico City xviii Miami 161n4 Michel, Paul 82

198  Index Micone, Marco 148 Mignolo, Walter 5 Milà (fictional character) see Català, Víctor Mile End (Montreal) 124, 169n2, 170n12, 171n14 Miramare Castle (Trieste), 63, 64 Mishna, The 140 Mitra, Dinabandhu: Nil Darpan 39–40 modernity/modernism: of Barcelona 91–2, 95–6, 100–1, 102–3, 104, 115– 16; and Bengali Renaissance 26, 27, 29–30, 47–53; furthering and 16–18; in Prague 65–7; of Svevo’s fiction/ translations 58, 72–9, 87; translation and 4–5, 6, 16–18; in Trieste 60–3, 71, 83, 85; see also Montreal, three modernities of Moix, Terenci 90; El día que va morir Marilyn 111–12 Mondadori (publisher) 61, 86 Montreal 6, 9, 18–19, 117–50; and absence of self-translation 11, 93; architecture of 132, 170n12; bilingual jokes/word plays in 117, 148–9; colonial/imperial history of 9, 169n1; compared to Kafka’s Prague 4; contact zones of 17; deviant translation in 11, 17, 20; English–French dynamics in 9–10, 11, 117–18, 121, 122–3, 142, 169n1; immigrant areas in 12, 19–20, 119, 121, 145–8, 157, 171n14; laneway memories/narratives of 120–22; language competition in 9–10, 116; linguistic dividing line of xvii, 12, 13, 145–6; linguistic geography of xvii, 19–20, 119, 121, 122, 124–5, 125, 130, 141, 144, 145–7, 169n2; linguistic mediation in 4, 13, 93; as multilingual xix, 2, 11, 148; north–south dichotomy of 123; ongoing linguistic tensions in 156–7; political/linguistic upheaval in xvii, 4, 9; pronunciations of 9–10, 15; and Quiet Revolution 122–23; signage laws/controversies in 117–18, 118; “solitudes” of 13; as template for superimposed “translations” xix; third space of 11, 12, 19–20, 116, 119, 157; three modernities of 11, 13, 19, 121–6; and transformation of 1960s 122; translational culture of 17, 18; Yiddish in 11, 19, 119, 124, 125, 130–2, 139–43, 144, 148, 170n5 Montreal, third space of 11, 12, 116, 119, 157; and diasporic/immigrant

communities 12, 19–20, 119, 121, 123, 141, 145–8, 157; laneways and 120–22; as place of tension/ confrontation 116, 144, 145–7, 171n13; widening of 19–20, 119, 121; and Yiddish literary modernism 11, 19, 124, 125, 130–2, 139–41, 148; see also Saint-Laurent, boulevard (Montreal); Yiddish literary modernism, in Montreal Montreal, three modernities of, 11, 13, 19, 121–6; and acts of distancing 13, 19, 121–6, 132–6, 142–3, 144–5; architecture of 132; and English– French distancing 13, 132–6; and English–French furthering 136–7, 139, 145, 170n7; and French–Jewish distancing 13, 135, 142–3, 144–5; and French–Yiddish furthering 142, 143; as seen on map 122, 124–5, 125; translations between 135 Montreal, three modernities of (specific): anglophone 11, 13, 19, 128–30, 132–6; francophone 11, 13, 19, 124, 125, 126–8, 134–7, 139, 170n7; Jewish (writing in English) 130–1, 135, 141–3, 144; Jewish (writing in Yiddish) 11, 19, 124, 125, 130–2, 139–43, 144, 148, 170n5 Montreol (Yiddish literary journal) 140 Monzó, Quim 90 Moore, Brian 129 Moore, Thomas 29, 162n6 “Moors” (“Bazaar Hindustani”) 31, 33 Morris, Jan: Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere 83 Moscheni, Carlo (publisher) 62 Mostar (Bosnia and Herzegovina) xix Mouawad, Wajdi 148: Incendies, 147–8 multilingual cities: as dominated by one language 2, 161n4; dual cities as 11–13, 161n4; fragility of 153–60; of Habsburg empire 165n5; of Levant 154, 156, 171n3; third languages/ third spaces of 11–13; and translation 2, 7, 16–17; see also dual cities; specific cities Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona (MACBA) 115 Musil, Robert 73; The Man without Qualities 59 Mussolini, Benito 77, 85 Nachmanides, Rabbi 98–9 names, geographic 9–10, 14–15, 93, 132; and Babel story 153; of

Index  199 Barcelona’s passatges 96, 99; of cities 9–10, 15; of linguistic border/contact zones 115–16, 116, 146; of streets/ venues 14–15, 39, 167n22 names, personal 93, 131, 169n13; and figure of double 100, 106, 108, 110, 150; of Jews in Trieste 71–2, 167n20; Kafka’s, on cover of Yiddish translation 141, 142; of linguistic border/contact zones 146; and Svevo’s pen names 71, 79–80; and Translator Mosque 154, 155 Narodni Dom (Trieste) 87 National Theatre (Prague) 65 nationalism: in Bengal 10–11, 26, 28–30, 39, 47–8, 51; Czech 65; in Istanbul 154, 156; and linguistic upheaval 4, 9, 60, 83–7, 154, 156, 171n4; in Quebec 123, 130, 134, 144, 170n11; in Trieste 57, 62, 63 Neruda, Pablo 16 Nestroy, Johann 75 New Orleans xix New York: multilingualism of 1, 2; Yiddish literary scene in 125, 131, 140 newspapers: Catalonian 90; in Trieste 60, 87; Yiddish–Canadian 130 Nicosia xv–xviii; cathedral-turnedmosque in xv, xvi; Dead Zone of xv; historical multiculturalism of xv; opening of checkpoints in xvii; political/linguistic division of xv, xvii– xviii, xviii, xix, 3; see also Cyprus Nietzsche, Friedrich 73 Nitti, Alfonso (fictional character) 68–9, 72–3, 75 Nobel Prize for literature, winners of: Heyse 82; Singer 112; Tagore 54, 112 Nouss, Alexis 6, 15–16 Novalis 73 novel: and translation, 8, 158; see also Bengali novel Nowlan, Alden 129 Núñez, Isabel, 98 Nyuansn (Yiddish literary journal) 140 Ollivier, Émile 148 Olympic Games (Barcelona) 91–2, 168n5 O’Neill, Heather: Lullabies for Little Criminals 146–7 Orientalism 29, 35 Ottoman (language) 171n3 Ottoman empire xv, xvii, 154, 156; and importance of translation/mediation 154

overlapping, linguistic xix, 148; in Barcelona 93–4, 112–13; in Prague 65–6 Page, P.K. 129 Pahor, Boris 86–7, 168n29; neglect of 86; as translated into French 86, 168n28 Pahor, Boris, works by: Nekropola (Pilgrim Among the Shadows) 86; Qui è proibito parlare 86 palimpsests, linguistic: cities as 15, 79; grocery store sign as 118, 118 Parcerisas, Francesc 105 Parti pris (literary journal) 122 passatges (passages) of Barcelona 12, 91, 96, 98–9, 98, 99, 120; and laneways of Jewish quarter 98–9; as spaces of language/translation 96, 98; as spaces of resistance 96 Passatje Arcadia (Barcelona) 96 Pellan, Alfred 136 Perec, Georges 5 Petrushka, Symcha: as translator of Mishna into Yiddish 140 Philip II of Spain 152, 152–3 Philip V of Spain 92 Piccolo, Il (Trieste newspaper) 87 Pieyre de Mandiargues, André: La Marge 113 Pittoni, Anita 62 Plaça del Diamant (Barcelona) 88, 89 Plantin, Christophe 153; Polyglot Bible of 152 plurilingualism: contact/border zones of 1–2, 17; vs. monolingualism 1, 161n3; “natural” translators and 106; third spaces and 11–13 Pocar, Ervino 61 poetry, Bengali 53; Tagore’s false translations of 54–5 Poirier, Jean-Marie 135 Poliglotta, Il (Trieste newspaper) 60 Polish: in Czernowitz 14; in Danzig/ Gdansk 15 Popper, Amalia 62; Araby 62 port cities 17, 154, 156; Antwerp 151–2, 152; Montreal 121; Trieste 59, 71, 87 Prague: compared to Barcelona 113; compared to Montreal 4; compared to Trieste 63, 64–8; Czech in 4, 17, 65–7; German–Czech dynamics in 4, 12, 65–7; isolation of 65; Kafka as German-language writer in 4, 12, 65, 67, 157–8; linguistic mediators in

200  Index 66–8; linguistic overlapping in 65–6; linguistic unease in 4, 65, 67–8 Premchand, Munshi 38 Preview (literary journal) 130, 136 Primo de Rivera, Miguel 92 Proust, Marcel 5, 73, 136 publishing houses 2, 3; in Antwerp 152; and Catalan 103–4, 106; indigenous, in Calcutta 43–4, 46, 50; and Svevo’s “Hoax” 80–1, 82–3; and translations in conflict zones 14; and Trieste writers 61, 82–3, 86–7, 167n24, 168n28; Vernacular Literature Society (Bengal) 44–5, 47, 50; and Yiddish writers in Montreal 139–41; see also specific publishers Quebec: nationalism in 123, 130, 134, 144, 170n11; Quiet Revolution in 122–23; see also Montreal, and entries following Raby, Eva: “Memories of Yiddish Montreal” 132 Raj, Kapil 35, 162n4 Rajmohan’s Wife (Bankim) 50–1 Ramon Llull Prize, 90 Raval, The (Barcelona) 89, 113–16; as contact zone 113–14, 116; cultural institutions in/near 114, 115–16; as dangerous 113–14; El Hachmi’s novel as set in 114–15; Genet and 113, 114; as immigrant/multilingual neighbourhood 114–15; and “Ravalejar” 115–16, 116; as resistant to reform/gentrification attempts 113–14, 116; as third space 12, 91, 114–16, 157; Vázquez Montalban and 89, 113, 114 “Ravalejar” (verb) 115–16, 116 Ravitch, Melekh 131, 140–1; Mayn Leksikon (Yiddish literary encyclopedia) 141; Dos Maysebukh fun mayn Leben (autobiography) 140–1; as translator of Kafka’s The Trial 140–1, 142, 157 Ray, Bharatchandra 32 Refus global (Automatiste manifesto) 126, 127, 128, 129, 170n8 Regard sur le fleuve (sculpture) 149, 149–50 Reid, Malcolm: The Shouting Signpainters 122 Resina, Joan Ramon 15, 91–2, 93, 102, 168n5

Riba, Carles: as translator of The Odyssey 103 Richler, Mordecai 129; and translator’s preface to Rue Saint-Urbain 142–3 Riera, Carme 11, 19, 90, 91; and changes introduced in translation 110–11; and figure of double 107–10; and legacy of Spanish Civil War/ Franco regime 109–10; Marsé and 109, 113; quest novel by 109–10; as self-translator 94, 110–11, 112–13; and simultaneous writing/translating 111; and story of Gil de Biedma and Ferrater 107–9; thesis of 108; see also Barcelona; Catalan, and entries following; self-translation, by Barcelona writers Riera, Carme, works by: Dins el darrer blau/En el último azul 107, 110; Estiu d’inglès 111; Jocs de Miralls 109; La Meitat de l’ànima 109–10; “Mon semblable, mon frère” 107–8; Palabra de mujer: Bajo el signo de una memoria impenitente 111; Qüestió d’amor propi 111; Te deix, amor, la mar com a penyora 110 Rilke, Rainer Maria 13, 166n15 Risiera di San Sabba (concentration camp) 85, 167n26 Rismondo, Piero 167n25 Rivista, La (literary journal) 75 Roberts, Goodridge 129 Roberts, Joan 129–30 Robeson, Paul 130 Robin, Régine 5, 148, 170n10 Rodoreda, Mercè 91, 102, 115; exile of 88; and return to Barcelona 88–9; as referenced by Marsé 102; Sant Gervasi neighbourhood of 88, 91 Rodoreda, Mercè, works by: Aloma 88; Mirell Troncat 102; La plaça del diamant 88, 89, 115 Roer, Edward (trans.): Tales of Shakespeare 45 Roig, Montserrat 88, 89 Roman Catholic Church: and conversion of Svevo and family 71, 85; and conversion of Zoller 167n20; and Disputation of Barcelona 98–9; and expulsion of Jews and Moors from Spain 98–9, 153–4; and fall of Flanders 153; and Irish community in Montreal 123 Romanian: in Czernowitz 14, 15 Rosenfarb, Chava 131, 132

Index  201 Roskies, David 170n5; Yiddishlands 132 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (trans.): Dante and his Circle 38 Rossetti, Domenico 59, 68 Roth, Joseph 86 Roy, Gabrielle 123, 136, 170n3; Alexandre Chenevert 123; and Montreal immigrant experience 123; The Tin Flute (Bonheur d’Occasion) 123, 135 Roy, Raja Ram Mohan 23 Royerd (Yiddish literary journal) 140 Rubens, Peter Paul 153 Ruiz Zafón, Carlos 105; The Shadow of the Wind 93 Saba, Umberto 57, 73; and Cittavecchia of Trieste 86; Ernesto 86; as forced to leave Trieste 86; Scorciatoie of 86; on Svevo’s Italian prose 69, 167n18; and Weiss 77, 167n22 Sagarra, Josep Maria de: as translator of The Divine Comedy 103 Saint-Denys Garneau, Hector de 134 Saint-Laurent, boulevard (Montreal): economic transformation of 145–6, 170n12; as linguistic dividing line xvii, 12, 13, 145–6; as multilingual contact zone xvii, 12, 121, 145–7; Jewish community near 141, 145, 171n13; as site of confrontation/ transgression 116, 144, 145–7, 171n13 Saint Lawrence River: public art on 149, 149–50 Saint Sofia, former Cathedral of (Nicosia) xv, xvi Sakai, Naoki 13, 135 Samigli, Mario (fictional character) 79–82, 83 San Giusto, Luigi di (pseud. of Luisa Macina Gervasio) 62 Sand, George 36 Sandburg, Carl 140 Sanskrit 30, 36, 38, 46, 164n16; and Bengali 23, 26, 31, 158, 163n12; and European philology 23 Sant Jordi book festival (Barcelona), 110, 111 Sarajevo 3 Saraogi, Alka: KaliKatha, via Bypass 21–2 Sassen, Saskia 7 Schiller, Friedrich 73, 74, 75 Schmitzhausen, Maria 62 Scholem, Gershon 170n9

Schopenhauer, Arthur: as influence on Svevo 73, 74, 76, 79 Scott, F.R. (Frank) 13, 129, 136; Dialogue sur la traduction 134; house of 124, 125; left-wing politics of 128; as translator of Hébert 134; see also Scott, Marian Scott, Gail: The Obituary 171n14 Scott, Marian 128, 137; and Children’s Art Centre 128; painting of Montreal outdoor staircase by 138; and relationship with francophone community 136–7, 139 Scott, Sir Walter 49, 52; The Bride of Lammermoor 50 Second World War: Czernowitz after 14–15; Gdansk/Danzig after 15; Trieste and 57, 59, 72, 87, 165n3, 168n27; see also Montreal, three modernities of Segal, J.I. 131, 141; journals edited by 140 self-translation 17; and transmigration 141–2, 148, 157, 158 self-translation, by Barcelona writers 11, 19, 91, 93–4, 110–13; and authorship/obligations of equivalence 112; and betrayal 94, 106, 107, 109, 112; as effacement of vernacular language 93; and figure of double 91, 94, 101–2, 106–10, 113; languageneutralization as 93; and linguistic hybridization 104, 111–12; and Moix’s many versions of his work 111–12; and Riera’s versions of her own works 110–11, 112–13; while writing 111 Selimiye Mosque (Nicosia) xv, xvi Sen, Amartya 55 Sennett, Richard 4, 7 Sepoy Rebellion 35, 39, 46 Shakespeare, William 110, 139; Garneau’s translations of 145, 170n11; Svevo’s reading of 74 Shimazaki, Aki 148 Simcha’s grocery store (Montreal), sign of 118, 118, 150 Simmel, Georg 5 Sinan (architect): Translator Mosque (Istanbul) 154, 155, 156 Singer, Isaac Bashevis 111, 112 Sinha, Kaliprasanna: Hutom Pyanchar Naksha (Tales of the Owl) 52, 164n18 Situationists 5 Slataper, Scipio 61, 83; Il mio Carso 73

202  Index Slovene: in Trieste 11, 57, 58, 86–7, 168n27 Slovenka (literary journal) 62 Smith, A.J.M. 129; and Klein 135 Smyrna 154 Soja, Edward 7 Solà-Morales, Manuel de 2–3, 101 Solana, Teresa 12; Un crim imperfecte 106, 169n11 Sommer, Doris 1–2, 117, 156 Souster, Raymond 129 Spain: expulsion of Jews and Moors from 98–9, 153–4; after Franco 95, 157; under Franco 88, 90, 91, 92, 100, 102–6, 110; Olympics in 91–2, 168n5; and Spanish Civil War 88, 91, 102–3, 105, 109–10, 113, 128; and suppression/prohibition of Catalan 88, 90, 92, 100, 102–6; see also Barcelona, and entry following; Castilian (Spanish), and entry following; Catalan, and entries following; Raval, The (Barcelona) Spaini, Alberto 61; as translator of Kafka 61, 68 Spanish 9, 11; in U.S. 2, 12, 17, 161n4; see also Castilian (Spanish), and entry following; Catalan, and entries following Spanish Civil War 88, 128; Marsé and 91, 102–3; Parcerisas and 105; Riera and 91, 109–10; Vázquez Montalban and 113 Spector, Scott 4, 6 Spier, Samuel 74 Steiner, George 53 Strindberg, August, 60 Stuparich, Carlo 73, 83 Stuparich, Giani 61, 83; Un anno di scuola 62; La nazione ceca 83 Suleyman the Magnificent 154 suppressed/prohibited languages: and act of distancing 14–16, 156; Catalan 88, 90, 92, 100, 102, 103–4, 105, 158; German 14–16; Slovene 57, 86–7 Surrealists 5; as influence on Automatistes 125, 126, 129 Svevo, Italo 68–83, 70; and acts of furthering 87, 158; as admirer of Wagner 74–5; and conversion to Catholicism 71; death of 85; family of 85; and fictional translation/ writing project 72–3, 75; French translations of 82–3; and German language/culture 10, 11, 58, 68, 69,

71–5, 76, 167n25; as influenced by Freud 75, 76, 77–9; as influenced by Schopenhauer 73, 74, 76, 79; and Italian 71; Judaism of 69, 71, 85; and Kafka 61, 67, 68, 73–4, 157, 158; on language and social advancement/seduction 68, 74; as linguistic mediator 11, 58–9, 71, 72–3; as obsessed with illness 76; on psychoanalysis 76, 77–8; and “Redemption” of Trieste 60, 79–83, 167n24; Roditi on 73–4; sudden recognition of 82–3, 87; syntax/ prose style of 69, 71; on translation as deception 79–83; translations of works by 82–3, 87, 167n24, 167n25; as translator of Freud 75, 77; as translator/self-translator 10, 11, 19, 58, 75, 77, 78–9; and Triestino 68, 69, 71, 78–9; and Tuscan 12, 67, 68, 69, 71, 74, 78–9; as unallied to any specific language 68, 73–4; see also Trieste Svevo, Italo, works by: “Una Burla Riuscita” (“The Hoax”) 68, 79–83, 167n24; La Coscienza di Zeno 12, 56, 71, 73, 75–9, 82–3, 167n24; “Noi del Tramway di Servola” 167n21; “The Old Man and the Beautiful Girl” 74; Senilità 74–5, 76; Una Vita 68–9, 71–3, 74, 75, 76 Sylvestre, Guy 135 Tagalog: in Barcelona 114, 115; in Manila 161n4 Tagore, Rabindranath 23; compared to Bankim 55; false translations by 54–5; and Indian nationalism 47; as Nobel Prize winner 54, 112 Tagore, Rabindranath, works by: Gitanjali 54–5, 112; Gora 54; “The Runaway City” 21 theatre, Bengali see Bengali theatre third languages 11, 157 third spaces 11–13; in Barcelona 12, 91, 113–16, 157; in Calcutta 12, 22, 23, 162n2; exclusive vs. inclusive roles of 12; third languages and 11, 157; in Trieste 12; see also Montreal, third space of Thompson, Edward 54 Thuy, Kim 148 Tieck, Ludwig 73 Timmel, Vito 167n23 Toibin, Colm 17–18 Toledo (Spain) 153–4

Index  203 Tomizza, Fulvio 168n27 Tower of Babel, The (Bruegel), Vienna version of 151–3, 152, 156 Trampus, Clelia Gioseffi 62 translation 3, 6–20; and absence/ displacement 6; and adaptation 31–2, 35, 40, 44–5, 50, 52; and citizenship 7–8; and connection/ convergence 2, 5–7; as critique 6–9; and cultural renewal 18; as deviant 11, 17, 20, 94, 110–13, 158; as display of beleaguered language 105; and distancing/separation 12–16, 17, 19, 148; as effacement 6, 14–15, 93, 156; fidelity/equivalence of 8, 54–5; and furthering/modernization 4–5, 12–13, 16–18, 19, 148, 157–8; and humour 148–9; and ideology 14, 30; and literary expansion/innovation 16–17, 18; and literary revivals/ Renaissances 17–18; as mediation 6, 8; as necessarily local 6–7; and novel genre 8, 10–11, 18, 26, 47–53, 158; reasons for 8; and rivalry/tension 8; and translational writing 8, 9, 17; and transmigration 141, 144, 148; see also translators Translation Bureau (Turkey) 156 Translator Mosque (Istanbul), 154, 155, 156 translators 2, 10–11; as faithful 8; as fictional characters 106, 108–9; as mediators 6, 8; and modernity/ modernization 6, 16–18; as negotiators/connectors of urban space/life 5–7; as recorders of absence/displacement 6; as recorders of rivalry/tension 8; see also translation; specific translators and writers transmigration: of immigrant writers in Montreal 148; of Jewish community in Montreal 119, 141–2, 144; and self-translation 141–2, 148, 157, 158 Tremblay, Michel 171n13 Trial, The (Kafka), translations of: by Ferrater (Catalan) 108, 157; by Pocar (Italian) 61; by Ravitch (Yiddish) 140–1, 142, 157; as reproducing linguistic instabilities of translators’ cities 157; by Spaini (Italian) 61; see also Kafka, Franz Trieste 19, 56–87, 148; architecture of 63, 64, 166n11; Asylum of 79, 80, 167n23; and border zone 5, 9, 56–7, 67, 87; Cittavecchia of 12, 85–6; as

“city of nowhere” 83, 165n8; as cold war outpost 57, 165n4; compared to Prague 63, 64–8, 166n17; and cult of Wagner 75; and Esperanto 60; under Fascist rule 12, 57, 63, 71, 72, 77, 83, 85–6, 87, 157; and Finnegans Wake 61–2, 85; and Freud 76–9; and Futurists 165n7; geography of language in 57–9; German culture/ language in 9, 57, 58, 59, 60, 69, 71, 73, 74–5, 79, 83, 165n8; German– Italian dynamics in 10, 11, 19, 57–8, 59–63, 68–79, 86; history of 59; as imperial city 57, 58, 59–60, 63, 73, 83, 85, 87, 165n3; Italian in 58, 59, 60, 71–2, 159; Jewish community in 12, 69, 71–2, 85–6, 167n20; Joyce in 57, 60 , 61–2, 73, 82, 85; as junction of three cultures 56–7; linguistic/ cultural mediation in 58–9, 60, 61–3, 68–87, 166n10; linguistic unease in 67–8, 78–9; Miramare Castle of 63, 64; as multilingual 11, 59–63, 72, 83; multilingual press in 60, 75; Mussolini in 77, 85; nostalgia for past in 57; and psychoanalysis 76–7; “Redemption” of 9, 60, 79–81, 83–7, 167n18, 167n24; as regional centre 168n30; Slovene in 11, 57, 58, 86–7, 168n27; suppressed/prohibited languages in 57, 86–7; synagogue of 71, 72; Triestino as vernacular in 58; Tuscan in 12, 57–8, 68, 74, 78–9; urban clearances in 85–6; vehicular languages of 57–8; women translators/“femmes de lettres” in 62–3; see also Svevo, Italo Trieste, as imperial city 57, 58, 59–60, 63, 73, 83, 85, 87, 165n3; and “Austria of nations” concept 83, 85; and città immediata status 57, 165n3; German culture/language in 9, 57, 58, 59, 60, 69, 71, 73, 74–5, 79, 83, 165n Triestino: Svevo and 68, 69, 71, 78–9; as vernacular language 58 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott 134 Turkey: and modernization/“translation” of Istanbul 154, 156, 171n4; nationalism in 154, 156; and political/linguistic division of Cyprus xv, xvii–xviii, xviii; and purging of ethnic minorities/languages 154, 156, 171n4 Tuscan, in Trieste 12, 57–8; Svevo and 12, 67, 68, 69, 71, 74, 78–9

204  Index Ukrainian: in Czernowitz 14, 15 United States: Chicano literature in 17, 104; English in 2, 12, 161n4 urban planning see architecture and urban planning Urdu 114, 115 Valentí, Helena 104 Vallverdù, Josep 168n7; as satirized by Marsé 100, 102 Vanguardia, La (Catalonian newspaper) 90 Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel 88–9, 90; as Catalan writing in Spanish 89, 90; crime fiction of 106, 113; and The Raval 89, 113, 114 vehicular languages 57–8, 92, 156; as cosmopolitan/hegemonic 4; immigrant preference for 92; and interaction with vernacular 18–19; see also Castilian (Spanish); English; German Velloso, José Miguel 112 vernacular languages 57–8, 92, 156; literary revival of 17–18; and nationalism 4, 9, 60, 154, 156; as post-identitarian/civic languages 159; reassertion/reconquest by 18–19, 64–7, 158–9; translations into 29, 45, 53, 103–6, 145, 158–9; and self-translation 93; see also Bengali; Catalan; Czech, in Prague; French, in Montreal; Italian, in Habsburg Trieste; Triestino Vernacular Literature Society (Bengal) 42, 43, 44–5, 47, 50 Vila-Matas, Enrique: Impostura 106–7 Villeneuve, Denis: Incendies 147–8; Polytechnique 147 Villoro, Juan xviii–xix Vilnius (Lithuania) xix Vivante, Angelo 83 Voce, La (literary journal) 61, 83 Voghera, Giorgio 61; Gli anni della psicanalisi 69, 77 Waddington, Miriam 131–2 Wagner, Otto 79 Wagner, Richard 60; Ring Cycle of 74, 75; Svevo’s admiration for 74–5

Walden 7 (Barcelona) 100–1 weaker language, in dual cities 3, 9–10, 91, 142, 158, 168n7 Weber, Max 5 Weininger, Otto 60, 74 Weiss, Edoardo 75, 77, 167n22; as translator of Freud 77 Weltsch, Felix 66 Wilson, Barbara: Gaudí Afternoon 106 Wisse, Mascha 170n5 women: as Catalan writers/translators 104; and linguistic/cultural furthering in Montreal 123, 124, 128, 130, 131–2, 133, 136–7, 137, 139, 170n5, 171n4; as translators/“femmes de lettres” in Trieste 62–3, 85; see also Gallant, Mavis; Maza, Ida; Scott, Marian Wondrich, Estella Paalen 62 Woolf, Virginia: as translated into Catalan 104 World Wars see First World War; Second World War Yeats, William Butler 55 Yiddish: in Czernowitz 14; and Hebrew 71, 139, 141, 144; in Montreal 11, 19, 119, 124, 125, 130–2, 139–43, 144; in New York 125, 131, 140; and self-translation 142; as translated into English 141–2; as translated into French 142, 143; translations into 139–41; and transmigration of Jewish community 119, 141, 144 Yiddish literary modernism, in Montreal 11, 19, 139–41, 148, 170n5; Eastern European/New York influences on 125, 131, 140; and legacy of Holocaust 130, 140, 141; Maza as central to 124, 125, 131–2, 133; memoirs of 132; and profusion of literary journals 139–40; and scriptural translations 139–40 Yule, Sir Henry 36 Yunge, Di (Yiddish poets’ group) 131 Zeus 151 Zlotnik, Judah L.: Biblical translation by 139 Zoller, Rabbi Israele 72; conversion of 167n20