From Language to Language

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION

In 2002 we—my wife, Mariame, our four children, and I—left Senegal to settle in Chicago, where we had decided to make a life for ourselves. Since 1999, I had been shuttling back and forth between Chicago and Senegal every year to give a quarterly course at Northwestern University from March to the end of May, after having taught philosophy for one semester, from October to the end of February, at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar. But now I was not just teaching on a temporary basis each term before going back home. Home was Chicago, where I was a full-time full professor in the Departments of Philosophy, Religion, and African Studies at Northwestern. With Mariame; our eldest son, age thirteen; our twin boys, age eleven; and our daughter, age five, we now had to love our new life, integrate ourselves into the Windy City and its culture, come to terms with its endless winters and snowstorms, and, since we lived on the North Side, share with our fellow Chicagoans both the misery of always seeing the Cubs baseball team lose and the ability to keep faith in the outcome of the following season.
Above all, we had to cherish and maintain our multilingualism now that the English language was going to be dominant in our lives. Luckily, we were able to enroll the children in a program called École Franco-Américaine de Chicago (EFAC), housed at Abraham Lincoln Elementary School with an extension at Lincoln Park High School in the same neighborhood. Thanks to this program, they were able to remain perfectly francophone. And even though our children quickly got used to speaking to one another in English, Mariame was adamant about maintaining Wolof at home. And there were also the family vacations in Senegal to anchor the use of the language, which did not have the support of school education. Then there were the Arabic script and language that our children were introduced to through the learning of the Quran. They had reasons to be proud of living between many languages.
One day, shortly after we had settled in Chicago, our family was faced with the very question of pride in speaking our native tongue. We were quietly enjoying burgers and fries at a Burger King near Northwestern’s campus in the suburb of Evanston, speaking in Wolof with occasional incursions of French. A woman and her three children were sitting next to us. At a certain point, the children, who were about the same age as my boys, started to make fun of us, pretending to speak “like us” with guttural sounds that made them laugh: a way of saying that our language was not really one. I expected their mother to ask them to stop and maybe even make the moment an opportunity to teach her progeny something about the diversity and equality of languages and cultures. I guess I was being naive. The mother, unperturbed, continued to consider her burger the most important thing in the world, simply waiting for her children to move on. Which they soon did.
It was up to Mariame and me to make sure that the lesson the Burger King woman had failed to draw for her children from that moment would be understood by our own. Basically, the kids who had seen it as funny to “imitate” what appeared to them a barbaric sub-language had merely demonstrated, with the innocence of their age, the fact, in the words of linguist John McWhorter, that “when a language works so differently from ours, a natural gut-level impression is that it is a departure from normality.” When we made the decision to move to the United States, one of our concerns was that our children would now be living as a “minority” in their new country. It was essential that they live out their different identities and the languages that expressed them with self-assurance and pride. It was important for them to understand that Wolof was just as valuable as Anglo-American English, which they would soon be speaking along with the kids who had thought they had to make fun of our language—but with the advantage of being able to look at the world from the viewpoint of other languages.
In a way, this book continues the lesson contained in that moment at the Burger King in Evanston. Two main theses underlie the arguments presented in it. The first is that all human languages are of equal value. The second is that nothing manifests this equivalence better than translation. And I could add a conclusion drawn from the theses, which is ultimately the message of this book: that translation is a humanism. There are, of course, many reasons to be surprised that translation can be presented as a manifestation of the equivalence of our idioms. Indeed, a sociopolitical approach to translation is quick to remind us of the inequality of languages, by immediately establishing a hierarchy among those that are the most translated or receive the most works in translation. And at the heart of the so-called postcolonial turn in translation studies is the notion that translation is often linked to colonialism, revealing its symbolic violence.
What this book says is that the truth of translation must be read through a phenomenological approach to the ethical disposition in which translators find themselves when they bring into contact two languages, one of which gives hospitality to what has been thought and created in the other. What they then experience in this side-by-side encounter is that, while translation certainly has to deal with the untranslatable, what Édouard Glissant calls “opacity,” it manifests, ultimately, the truth expressed in the subtitle of McWhorter’s book The Language Hoax, that “the world looks the same in any language,” and his view of the “magnificence of how a language,” any language, “is built.”
Language to Language, celebrating the hospitality of translation, is an exploration of that experience.