Auteur: Dagmar van Rossum

I know a young lady who is a perfect polyglot. She speaks Abaza, Bai, Chhattisgarhi, Diola, Ewondo, Frisian, Gâ, Hiri Motu, Inuit, Kiki-Chin and occasionally, when she’s in the mood for it, Quenya. Her repertoire of consonants includes Plosives, Implosives, Ejectives, Nasal Trills, Lateral flaps, Lateral fricatives, Ejective fricatives, Ejective lateral fricatives, Percussives, Lateral approximants, Click consonants (including the odd Lateral click) and a couple of grunts defying all description. She switches from one to the other effortlessly, in mid-sentence, simply for the heck of it. The most astonishing fact is the lady’s age. She is a bright-eyed, perky 10-month-old.
Once upon a time, in another universe, I myself was a 10-month-old and I could do what this lady does now. So could we all. As babies we all produced every sound in every language on the planet, and we loved it.
A glimpse of that joy returned to me much later, during evenings with friends and friends of friends in our dorms at the American university I attended. Many of my fellow students came from all four corners of the world, and so did my friends and my friends’ friends. On those evenings we would swap mock insults (cheerfully and deliberately un-PC), weird recipes and linguistic acrobatics. I remember one evening in particular, when among those present was a lady from South Africa who beside an impressive number of other languages also spoke Xhosa. Xhosa is famous for having no fewer than 15 click sounds, which no sluggish Dutch tongue can imitate and live to tell the tale. This lady had mastered them all, and to tease us click-less folks she produced a tongue twister. I have forgotten what the phrase meant; it had something to do with bracelets. What I do remember is that it contained no fewer than three different types of clicks, one for each syllable, and that it sounded like an avalanche of little pebbles. We were stunned. None of us came even close in our attempts to reproduce it. I tried to avenge my nation’s honour by issuing my own challenge, ‘Achtentachtig Scheveningse schonen schaatsten schreeuwend een scheve schaats’, which I am proud to say was fairly effective but did not quite match the effect of the clicks. We concluded that we all spoke weird, impossible languages, and proceeded to have a wonderful evening together.

I never liked the biblical story about the Tower of Babel, one reason being that I don’t understand the Babylonian curse. Why is it a curse to have many languages? Perhaps divine dictators prefer perfect uniformity in all things, including language. I don’t like divine dictators.
……Oh, and all those languages and sounds I mentioned in the first paragraph? Don’t ask me what they all are. I had to look most of them up in my favourite ‘Dictionary of Languages’ (by Andrew Dalby; Bloomsbury 2004). A little showing-off goes a long way.

I am about to grumble a bit. Bear with me, please; it won’t be long.
In informative texts, form and content are inseparable. You may have discovered the ultimate answer to life, the universe & everything (which, as we all know, is 42), but if you publish your discovery in gobbledygook nobody will be interested, except for a few zealots who will be far too much interested and start religious wars about it. How you write matters as much as what you write about. This is why I have noticed with increasing alarm a recent linguistic development in written Dutch: the abuse of a poor, innocent stylistic device called ‘historic present’. English only uses it in informal speech and tabloid headlines, Dutch also in formal (but never in very formal) written prose. The ‘historic present’ involves, as my beloved Principles & Pitfalls of English Grammar (by J. Lachlan Mackenzie, Coutinho 2002) tells me, ‘ …..using the present to invoke the past…….it is generally regarded as making the Dutch prose more vivid.’ [p.39]. And so it does – if used sparingly and with understanding. That is precisely what increasing numbers of journalists and others will not or cannot do. Our local newspaper is full of clumsy sentences like ‘Fifty years ago Mr Jansen goes to the village school’. Even a respectable popular-history magazine I subscribe to includes articles about events in the (distant) past written almost entirely in the present tense. ‘Julius Caesar is being murdered in March 44BC’. Poor man; dead for ages and still being murdered.
Like English, Dutch depends mainly on verbal tenses to ‘reflect in language our perception of time’ (again according to Principles & Pitfalls of English Grammar [p.37]). Other languages use other devices, but if we Dunglish wish to make ourselves understood we have to stick to what our own languages allow. One of these verbal tenses is the present tense, as in ‘It is now time for lunch’ (very true, incidentally). This present tense is a wily beast, in Dutch perhaps even more so than in English. Take for instance the Dutch sentence ‘Hij gaat naar huis’. The word ‘gaat’ is present tense third person singular of the verb ‘gaan’ (English speakers probably guessed as much). The sentence usually means ‘He is going home’ (present), but in other contexts it may also mean ‘He will be going home’ (future), and even occasionally ‘He must go home!'(command, very much present). In this, the Dutch present tense resembles the English, with a few tricky exceptions which have fooled me many times and will continue to do so. Now, keeping this in mind, imagine the confusion and the potential misunderstanding when a text which deals exclusively with past events is written entirely in the present tense. Or, even worse, imagine what this Persistent Present State does to a text which deals mainly with past events but also includes a few current issues. The poor reader is left to work out what happened after what, what is now and what was long ago, and who did what before, or after, or perhaps simultaneously with, somebody else. Most readers are smart enough to eventually figure it out, assisted by a sprinkling of ‘before’, ‘afterwards’, ‘finally’ or ’the next year’ the writer has (hopefully!) been kind enough to add. But if the reader understands the intended meaning of such a text it will be despite its style, not because of it. Instead of making the text more intelligible, as good writing should do, its style has made it less so. There is probably a textbook for journalists somewhere which says ‘Use the historic present! It makes your texts more lively’. Well, yes, up to a point. There is nothing wrong with the ‘historic present’ as a stylistic device, but as with so many other things overindulgence is a fault – and that is precisely what these writers have done. As we Dutch might put it, ‘Ze hebben een klok horen luiden maar weten niet waar de klepel hangt’. Very true indeed.
Grumble, grumble, grumble. It really is time for my lunch.

A while ago I read an interesting and moving article in the Guardian Weekly. It was about Native American tribes in the USA who are trying to revive their languages, many of which are nearly extinct. It is too late for Eyak, about which I wrote earlier, but for others there may still be hope now that many tribes are regaining their confidence and the deliberate suppression of native languages by the dominant English-speaking culture is slowly abating.
You may find the the article on The Guardian’s website. It is well worth reading.

There is translation, and then there is translation. Translating an archaeological text from one language into another is relatively straightforward. Translating a poem from one language into another is anything but that. In poetry, at least in good poetry, everything matters desperately. Words, word order, rhythm, sound, allusions and associations and metaphors: they all combine to form an intricate web of constantly shifting colours and shapes. Remove one strand, and the fabric unravels. Replace one thread, and the fabric has lost its identity.
Translating poetry is like attempting to weave cloth which closely resembles the original, but on a different type of loom and with different techniques, materials and colours. Assuming it can be done at all (which is subject to debate) it requires expert weavers. All others should give the tapestry-loom a wide berth. A badly translated archaeological text may still be useful (although I hope none of those will ever leave my desk), but a badly translated poem is merely horrible. That is why I don’t ‘do’ poetry professionally. I fear to damage beautiful textiles beyond repair and thereby to insult the original weavers.
That being said, I must confess that I do dabble a little bit in private, to sharpen my mind and to remind myself from time to time of my limitations. Here is one of my attempts. The victim is a well-known poem by Ernest Dawson (1867-1900), an English poet of the so-called ‘decadent’ school. The subject is the brevity of life and the oblivion that follows. Surely that appeals to archaeologically minded souls. Judge for yourselves, dear readers, and forgive me.

Original text:

‘Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam’*

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

*from Ode I.4 by Quintus Horatius Flaccus/Horace, 65 – 8BC (my translation).

My translation into Dutch:

‘Het korte geheel van het leven verbiedt ons op lange duur te hopen’

Lang duurt het niet, het huilen en het lachen,
Liefde, begeerte en haat:
Me dunkt, met ons hebben ze niets van doen
Als we door de poort gaan.

Lang zijn ze niet, de dagen van wijn en rozen:
Uit mist en droom
Doemt onze weg op, even, lost dan weer op
in een droom.

I often take a short walk before work. As my office is in my own house it is the only way for me to get some exercise and fresh air in the morning. My route usually leads me through the old town centre and the adjacent parks. It is a walk through history, my personal history. This is the street where my grandmother was born, that is the alley where my great-grandfather spent his last years, and there is the market square where my other great-grandparents, country folk, sauntered on market days, buying their groceries and gossiping. I myself was born far from here. I have travelled much, to places my great-grandparents could only dream of, and I have moved house often. But chance finally brought me back here, to this old, old town.
I’m an average Dutch person, from an average family which mostly avoided the eccentric or the adventurous. Money, land or power never felt at ease with us. If any came our way it was never for long. Linguistically, however, ours is a rich story.

My mother grew up speaking Achterhoeks, of the Almen variety; her mother in turn spoke the Gorssel variety. My maternal grandfather and all his ancestors for many centuries spoke Achterhoeks with a Vorden accent, living as they did in a hamlet near Vorden called Mossel – five farms and a chicken coop. My paternal grandmother and most of her ancestors spoke the Zutphen town dialect, while my paternal grandfather spoke southern Drenthian as a child but switched to standard Dutch as a teacher. That is also what my father spoke as a child. Further back on that side, there were more southern Drenthian dialects and the one of Rouveen, as well as some German ones from just across the border.
These are all Saxon dialects. They are the rumbling voices of my maternal grandfather and his friends, talking grown-up business with serious faces, unintelligible but soothing sounds which surrounded me while I, a toddler, quietly sat under the table and smelled the sweet smoke of their cigars.
For very different sounds than the soft Saxon vowels and smothered word endings, I have to dig deep into my paternal grandfather’s past. Before 1800 the male and female lines all spoke one of the dialects of the south of Zuid-Holland and Zeeland, while further back a few Flemish herring fishermen sailed past, and some middle-class Amsterdam talk of the town could be overheard. The most exotic languages on that side are French, spoken by two Huguenot ancestors, and even – dare I mention it – the solemn speech of English Puritans – from London, and possibly Herefordshire and Devonshire. Much, much further back whispers a shred of Carolingian courtly conversation through the mists of time, one tiny royal strand in a vast web of paupers, peasants and small traders. What exotic languages and looks contributed to that one strand is the stuff of legend.

So what is my mother tongue? In a literal sense it is standard Dutch. That is what my mother taught me, or rather sang to me from the day I was born. But looking at my long line of ancestors I do not know what to answer. Saxon? Southern Dutch? French? English? All of them and more have sounded at some time in my family’s past, and from that past came my present. Do not talk to me about pure language or pure blood. They never existed, not in my line. As president Obama said: ‘I’m a mutt’, and I would add: ‘Thank Goodness’. My cat and I have much in common.

This new entry sat in my waiting room for ages. It read all the old magazines there and was frightfully bored. When business is good, the blog suffers. And business has been excellent for months. Whenever there was a brief lull, there was always administration to catch up with, invoices to be sent or tax returns to be prepared. And then the summer heat would kick in, mercilessly and exhaustingly, and my office became a death zone. Such is a freelancer’s life: always free, and always busy – and no airco.
Not that there was nothing going on language-wise. I’ve had to deal, one way or another, with English, Danish, Dutch, Spanish and Maya – the latter a group of languages which I don’t read but merely stare at in awe. I travelled to Italy, Guatemala, Hattemerbroek (where? Hattemerbroek. Find a good Atlas and a magnifying glass) and Frisia Magna. All from behind my desk, of course. Then there was the constant background noise of language, like a steady drizzle so fine that it can’t be felt but is always there, and plants wilt without it, as a lack of language lames all life.

My cat purrs and PURRS – ‘I’m happy’ and ‘Food!’: language.
A little girl says ‘uhh!!’, and I know exactly what she wants: language.
A wild boar in the woods warns me ‘Mine! Get out!’, merely by using his pungent porcine smell: language.
Ehtyarion, my name in Quenya, in the fuzzy weird world of make-belief: language.
Ans so on and on and on. Always language drizzling, keeping life alive.

The attentive reader has undoubtedly noticed at this point that I’m rather fond of alliteration. Most bad writers are. I will try to make amends by quoting a very good writer. While leafing through my copy of Cervantes’ Don Quixote (which I have NOT completely read) I stumbled upon this gem about translators and translation. My copy is a translation by J.M. Cohen, published in 1950 by Penguin Books in their series ‘Penguin Classics’; this fragment appears on page 877 of that edition.

“But yet it seems to me that translating from one tongue into another, unless it is from those queens of tongues Greek and Latin, is like viewing Flemish tapestries from the wrong side; for although you see the pictures, they are covered with threads which obscure them so that the smoothness and gloss of the fabric are lost; and translating from easy languages argues no talent or power of words, any more than does transcribing or copying one paper from another. By that I do not mean to imply that this exercise of translation is not praiseworthy, for a man might be occupied in worse things and less profitable occupations.”

‘Zo is het maar net’, as we Dutch say.