Isagani R. Cruz

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Pause

isaganicruz — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 19:42:00 +0000

My 64-year-old body will undergo an unexpected and undesired cholecystectomy and my mind will have to take a rest from thinking through Wikcriticism or interlingual criticism or language or literature or anything else. My cardiologist swears that I am a low cardiac risk, so I am not supposed to worry. Fortunately, I have a little bit of Spanish blood running in my veins, so I can say with all interlingual conviction, “Que será será” though I know that that is not Spanish at all (since the grammar is terribly wrong!), but a Hollywood corruption of “che sarà, sarà,” the motto of the Duke of Bedford. The phrase appears in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (1594):

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and
there’s no truth in us. Why, then, belike we must sin, and so
consequently die:
Ay, we must die an everlasting death.
What doctrine call you this, Che sera, sera,
What will be, shall be? Divinity, adieu!

The phrase may be interlingual (Spanish, French, Italian, whatever), but I’m not sure I like Marlowe’s context! In any case, I shall be back online in a week or so, God willing.

Be back soon

isaganicruz — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 19:35:00 +0000

The phrase may be interlingual (Spanish, French, Italian, whatever), but I’m not sure I like Marlowe’s context! In any case, I shall be back online in a week or so, God willing.

Brenda Cardenas

isaganicruz — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:54:00 +0000

Here’s a portion of an article about poet Brenda Cardenas:

“Listening to Brenda Cárdenas is, on its own, an exercise in crossing borders. She has adapted ideas from interdisciplinary arts into a philosophy for interlingual literature. It’s very important to distinguish interlingual versus bilingual texts. The difference between bilingualism and interlingualism is the same as the difference between ‘either’ and ‘both.’ Biligualism is using either of two languages in turn, but sticking to one discrete language or the other for an entire expression. Cárdenas, on the other hand, is an advocate of interlingualism, which is blending or mixing two languages in-line, within sentences, as they’re used organically and naturally by people who speak both languages fluently. …

“Sometimes when languages blend, and stay mixed in certain ways, they create whole new ways for people to express themselves. Grammars change rules. Fresh words appear that carry tell-tale signs of their parent languages. Old words pick up new meanings. Artists often want to rush into these circumstances to take advantage of the fresh creative opportunities that a still-forming language permits. However, critics and historians often resist this situation, and insist that serious literature is written in well-defined languages such as English or Spanish, but not a blend of both. So there’s always a battle among the people who describe language as-is, versus the people who prescribe language as it should be, when interlingualism is in effect. …

“The delicious ironies, warm blends, and pointed contrasts of commingled languages are Brenda Cárdenas’ incentive to keep crossing frontiers. Listen to her poetry, songs, and stories, and cross the frontiers of the Américas.” (I placed in bold letters what I want to emphasize.)

This is as good a description as any of the resistance most literary critics have towards taking the mother tongue into account when reading a work done in a second or foreign language. Perhaps I should change my word Wikcriticism to interlingual criticism, as suggested by a follower, if only to take advantage of the long history of the 17th-century term (though, of course, qualifying it by expanding it to include our concerns). “Interlingual” is used quite often in different contexts in various disciplines (including computer science, would you believe?). There might be a need, though, to have a catchphrase (similar to Russian Formalism’s defamiliarization and Derrida’s deconstruction), if we want to spread the gospel of interlinguality. Let me think about that a bit more.

Not "interlingual criticism"

isaganicruz — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 20:11:00 +0000

One reason I prefer “Wikcriticism” to “interlingual criticism” is that the latter has been used by comparatists (i.e., experts in Comparative Literature) to refer to studies of translation. While translation (particularly self-translation) is clearly a major area of study in Wikcriticism, interlingual criticism does not cover either mixed-language texts or texts in one language but actually being in another. An example of the use of the term “interlingual criticism” is that of James Liu, whose The Interlingual Critic: Interpreting Chinese Poetry (1982) was a real eye-opener for many scholars that could not read Chinese. I use James Liu a lot in my Critical Theory classes, because he opened my eyes to the truth that literary theory started in China and not in Greece, but his interlingual criticism is just a part,not the whole, of Wikcriticism.

Daniel Gagnon

isaganicruz — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:18:00 +0000

Sherry Simon, in “Translating and Interlingual Creation in the Contact Zone: Border Writing in Quebec” (in Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, edited by Susan Bassnett, 1999), writes about Daniel Gagnon:

“Daniel Gagnon’s short, lyrical texts are idiosyncratic and difficult to categorize. Gagnon writes on the frontier between languages, producing double versions of texts which are written in a hybrid idiom, ‘my so bad English.’” (p. 61)

It is in the French text, however, where hybridity or interlinguality appears more obvious. Continues Simon: “La Fille à marier cannot be separated from The Marriageable Daughter, a translation done by Gagnon himself and published in 1989. The first text to be published was the French version; the English text is presented as a translation of that book. But Gagnon himself has said that in fact he wrote the English text first. And there are many clues in the text which confirm this, associations of words and images which manifestly make more sense in English than in French.” (p. 68)

Here is fertile ground for a Wikcritic competent in French and English, as Simon is. But it is not only trying to figure out which came first that should be of interest, but how the English actually enriches the French (and vice-versa).

Interlingual poetry and music

isaganicruz — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 21:13:00 +0000

Sergio Viaggio has an interesting analogy that has to do with interlinguality. Studying translation from a linguistic perspective, he says:

“The great men of letters who have self-translated have chosen (as far as I know, without exception) to speak in the second language not so much from the LPIo as from the LP1 tout court, renouncing the initial amalgam of the noetic plate and a formal plate in language o in order to try and amalgamate the abstract noetic plate with a formal plate in language i – a bit like the transcriptions for other instruments that great musicians have done of their own compositions. (And since I find it hard to let go of music, let me remind you yet again of a particularly telling case: Beethoven’s piano transcription of his violin concerto, which takes advantage, of course, of the vast harmonic possibilities of the new instrument, and neutralises its infinitely less warm sound.)” (A General Theory of Interlingual Mediation, 2006, p. 370)

We could say that, in an interlingual poem, the bulk of the words are notes from one instrument and the foreign words are notes from another instrument. The poet needs the other instrument/s to make the music beautiful. The notes or sounds from the other instrument/s are not there to jar the listener or reader, but to form part of the musical design.

Viaggio also writes, “What presents the often insurmountable problem of the structural differences between languages is the ‘transcription’ of the emotive harmonics that form makes vibrate – because it is simply impossible. In translation, those harmonics (which will always be a function of a language’s idiosyncrasy, the translator’s sensitivity and prowess, and, ultimately, the readers’ hermeneutic sensitivity and ability), can but be recreated.”

He writes about translation (which basically deals with languages used in sequence or one at a time), but what he says can apply mutatis mutandi to interlingual writing (or languages being used at the same time).

Chicano Movement

isaganicruz — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:04:00 +0000

Interlingual literature has existed since macaronic poetry (if we take the weak version of Wikcriticism, which deals primarily with texts in two or more languages) or even earlier (if we take the strong version of Wikcriticism, which says that all writing is interlingual). In the 20th century, one high point of interlingual literature, in the sense that it gave rise to a conscious effort by literary critics to deal with it, had to be the so-called Chicano Movement of the 1960s in the United States of America. Wilson Neate, in Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature (1997), describes the place of interlingual literature in the movement: “Literature derived from this politically-charged time was generally marked by its alignment with and articulation, at some level, of Movement ideology. Poetry in an innovative, interlingual format provided a popular vehicle for representations of a marginalized socio-cultural and historical experience with the aim of raising consciousness and encouraging self-empowerment. … Since the mid-1970s, poetry has moved away from the interlingual and the overtly political to become more introspective, displaying an increasing formal sophistication and a diversification of thematic concerns.” For literary criticism, we could say that we have to shift from the weak to the strong version of Wikcriticism as the literature moves from the clearly multilingual to the apparently monolingual.

Azade Seyhan

isaganicruz — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:18:00 +0000

Azade Seyhan writes in Writing Outside the Nation (2000):

“Chicano/a literary and cultural criticism has cast its critical vision on a diverse spectrum of theoretical and imaginative writings from Latin America and from other ethnic and minority cultures in the United States. By situating their literature in a more international and intercultural context, Chicano/a literary theorists subtly state their dissatisfaction with the relatively minor critical attention paid to their cultural production in mainstream academic criticism. Angie Chabram Dernersesian has been a leading advocate of reassessing Chicano/a writing in the context of new critical frameworks and of forging transnational linkages with underrepresented and/or emergent literary traditions. Castillo conceptualizes the new poetics of Xicanisma in a manner analogous to the reconfiguration of cultural legacies in contemporary ethnic and immigrant literatures. ‘We are looking at what has been handed down to us by previous generations of poets,’ she writes, ‘and, in effect, rejecting, reshaping, restructuring, reconstructing that legacy and making language and structure ours, suitable to our moment in history.”

I join Seyhan’s advocacy of what I have called Wikcriticism, but I disagree on one major point. I hate the use of the words minor and underrepresented (and even the word emergent, which I am forced to use occasionally, being an admirer of Raymond Williams). We need to decolonize our minds (as the African writers put it). I think that multilingual or interlingual literature is the mainstream, but the so-called mainstream writers and critics just don’t know it. In fact, in theory, all literary texts are dialogic or made up of two or more languages (we all learned that from Mikhail Bakhtin!). In the case of monolingual writers, the other language is what linguists would call the idiolect (or the unique kind of language that only one individual speaks or writes); it is the idiolect that interacts with the common or shared language. Again, I use the analogy of physics: the equations of relativity can be applied to everything, but in ordinary events, where we are far from approaching the speed of light, we just ignore the almost infinitesimal quantities involved, but almost infinitesimal does not mean zero. Many critics ignore the idiolect when reading monolingual texts, but the theoretical reality is still there: a writer writes in one language using words from another language. In a multilingual or interlingual text, the reality hits us straight in the face.

The word "interlingual"

isaganicruz — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:30:00 +0000

Interlingual is not a new word. It was used as early as 1854 to mean merely “of, relating to, or existing between two or more languages.” The ordinary meaning of the word, however, assumes that meanings do not change when they move from one language to another, as in the definition of the phrase “interlingual rendition” ["A written communication in a second language having the same meaning as the written communication in a first language"]. Wikcritics know that meanings change when expressed in different languages. There is no such thing as an exact translation of anything. That is why, when a poet uses a word from another language in a work using mainly one language, new nuances are introduced that are not present in the main language. When wikcritics use the word interlingual, they refer to a negotiation between two or more languages, rather than just a relation between them.