The following is Arundhati Roy’s W. G. Sebald Lecture on Literary Translation, delivered at the British Library on June 5, 2018
At a book reading in Kolkata, about a week after my first novel, The God of Small Things,
was published, a member of the audience stood up and asked, in a tone
that was distinctly hostile: “Has any writer ever written a masterpiece
in an alien language? In a language other than his mother tongue?” I
hadn’t claimed to have written a masterpiece (nor to be a “he”), but
nevertheless I understood his anger toward a me, a writer who
lived in India, wrote in English, and who had attracted an absurd amount
of attention. My answer to his question made him even angrier.
“Nabokov,” I said. And he stormed out of the hall.
The correct answer to that question today would of course be
“algorithms.” Artificial Intelligence, we are told, can write
masterpieces in any language and translate them into masterpieces in
other languages. As the era that we know, and think we vaguely
understand, comes to a close, perhaps we, even the most privileged among
us, are just a group of redundant humans gathered here with an arcane
interest in language generated by fellow redundants.
Only a few weeks after the mother tongue/masterpiece incident, I was on a
live radio show in London. The other guest was an English historian
who, in reply to a question from the interviewer, composed a paean to
British imperialism. “Even you,” he said, turning to me imperiously,
“the very fact that you write in English is a tribute to the British
Empire.” Not being used to radio shows at the time, I stayed quiet for a
while, as a well-behaved, recently civilized savage should. But then I
sort of lost it, and said some extremely hurtful things. The historian
was upset, and after the show told me that he had meant what he said as a
compliment, because he loved my book. I asked him if he also felt that
jazz, the blues, and all African-American writing and poetry were
actually a tribute to slavery. And if all of Latin American literature
was a tribute to Spanish and Portuguese colonialism. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/what-is-the-morally-appropriate-language-in-which-to-think-and-write/
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