Over the past decade, the publishing difficulties surrounding the translation of literature into English have received considerable attention. Poorly paid translators, the frustration of marketing books in translation, and the marginal attention span of consumers in a culturally insular era may be intractable issues in the United States and Britain. At least publishers and advocates seem more aware that literature created in languages other than English requires a special amount of support, a critical platform, and tender loving care. Still, there is a lurking sense that the demotion of foreign-language learning, at least in the United States, at a time when English has assumed global dominance has helped to eviscerate public interest in books from other literary traditions.
The Fall of Language in the Age of English
By Minae Mizumura (Columbia University Press)
But what of the obverse perspective? What is the fate of literature in countries engulfed by the global spread of English, a phenomenon that, of course, predates the rise of digital media, but which has become seemingly total?
When the writer Minae Mizumura published her controversial The Fall of Language in the Age of English, in 2008, she placed the blame for what she saw as a steep drop in literary quality in Japan squarely on the shoulders of English. In her provocatively sketched history of Japanese literature and overview of the contemporary political economy of national languages, she excoriated the country’s leftists and intellectuals who reflexively equated a defense of Japanese with Japan’s militaristic past.
Instead she called for an overhaul of the way literature figures in school curricula, arguing for more attention to prewar literary pillars and fewer resources devoted to English instruction (which is obligatory in Japanese schools beginning in the fifth grade; a recent proposal would begin instruction in the third grade by 2020). Her book, which has now been translated by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter and published by Columbia University Press, was a sensation in Japan, sparking a ferocious public debate about elitism, bilingualism, and education policy and selling some 65,000 copies in the process.
In the age of Globish, the popularity of a jeremiad against both the omnipresence of English and the decline of literary standards isn’t particularly surprising. What is striking about Mizumura’s critique is that it appears to come from an unlikely source. The author spent her formative years in Long Island and did her graduate work in French literature at Yale, where she studied with Paul de Man, and she has taught at several American universities, including Princeton and Stanford. In Japan she is a celebrated novelist who has experimented with English and Japanese form in her books. Her recently translated work of fiction, A True Novel (Other Press, 2013), reimagines that canonical example of British Gothic, Wuthering Heights, in postwar Japan. Translation and the substance of language itself are often prominent features of her fiction. She hardly fits the provocateur profile of a cloistered culture warrior defending tradition.
Yet Mizumura’s biography has provided her with a perspective on the history of languages and literature that gives her criticism a real bite, if one that is more impressionistic than systematic. Japanese has a long history of perceived threats from English since the menacing appearance of Commodore Matthew Perry’s “Black Ships,” as she happily calls them, in 1853. Repeatedly Mizumura returns to this primal scene of American expedition, positing a counterfactual history in which the United States annexed and imposed English on Japan in the 19th century. Whatever the effects of that imagined history, “the Japanese that would have circulated as the ‘national language’ under those circumstances could not have been the Japanese that we know today,” she writes.
By contrast, the great flourishing of Japanese literature in the late-19th and early 20th centuries was nothing short of “a miracle,” and it came about from a trio of conditions. First was the existence of a mature written language when the country was “still part of the Sinosphere,” a written language that depended on the combination of ideograms and phonograms that novelists could uniquely exploit. Second was a robust version of what Benedict Anderson called “print capitalism,” or a market for newspapers, magazines, and books in the local language. And third was freedom from Western colonization at a time when such relative autonomy, at least in Asia, was a rarity.
The first of these conditions—the exceptional commingling of the Japanese script of ideograms and phonograms—made Japanese novelists adepts of translation and a particular kind of bilingualism. Much of The Fall of Language in the Age of English is a gentle argument with Anderson’s classic account of linguistic nationalism, Imagined Communities (1983). In Mizumura’s reading, the Japanese language is an outlier. The literary Japanese that developed in the late 19th century, following the Meiji Restoration, was highly conscious of itself as a language of literature rather than as an anticolonial vox populi transferred into a unifying national language.
Far from the atmosphere of “vernacular revolution” that Anderson found in the emergence of other national languages, Japanese novelists had to tangle first with the idiosyncrasies of a highly literary language, adapting it to their own purposes and exploiting the richness of its written form. The result was what Mizumura characterizes as a “mesmerizing polyphony” in which “all writers—including those not endowed with a particularly great gift—were forced to address the issue of language. And in so doing, they produced a body of literature that often seems to transcend the individual writer.”
In the postwar period, reformers sought to eliminate outright the Japanese script in favor of the Western alphabet, and they succeeded in severely limiting the kanji ideograms and hiragana script that were crucial to the development of literary Japanese. Returning to her grad-school preoccupations, Mizumura senses an underlying ideology of “phonocentrism,” in which oral language is seen as the true basis of the written form, and she rails against both undeconstructed assumptions about language and a misplaced ideology of educational egalitarianism. But regardless of the casus belli, she argues that there is an undeclared war against Japanese throughout the country’s school system.
Paradoxically, the language of the prewar Japanese novels that Mizumura devoured as a girl in the mass-produced volumes her family brought with them to Long Island is almost impossible for young Japanese to read today. Her biographical cocoon may have resulted in her becoming a novelist, but it also exacerbated her sense of the violence done to a great literary tradition. As one reads The Fall of Language in the Age of English, it becomes clear that what is at stake for Mizumura is not only a cultural or linguistic issue but a deeply personal one.
Writing movingly of the early 20th-century Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki, Mizumura remarks on the “loneliness” he must have felt as a writer “who knows that his readers will never share the same world he lives in.” One imagines that, as a Japanese novelist indebted to a vanishing tradition, she is already familiar with this feeling of solitude. Her highly charged book may be a way of warding off its most vicious effects.