Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

When I spoke of the wonder of the word in New York in 1989, I referred to my native, nomadic language and not to the language to which I had emigrated. Its wonders were not accessible to this shipwrecked latecomer. Could it have been? Could I have relived in English the enchantment I had first encountered as a nine-year-old and then my subsequent adventure of self-discovery through Romanian words?

During a stay at the Ledig House writers’ colony in Switzerland some years ago, I asked a renowned German translator of Russian what age one had to start learning another language well enough to become a writer in it. Nabokov had learned foreign languages as a child. Conrad had sailed between ports and languages when still young enough to adapt. I knew that the usual examples did not fit. “Twelve,” the expert announced. “Too bad,” I said, “I’m already thirteen.” By then I had more than doubled the double of that age.

Yet the uprooting and dispossession of exile are a trauma with some positive aspects. They only become apparent once one understands the advantage of relinquishing the idea of one’s own importance. Impermanence and insecurity can be liberating. Exile is also a challenging pedagogical experience. There is much to learn when one is forced to begin again at an advanced age, to enter into the world anew and to prove one’s abilities again like an old child whose past has been wiped out but who has been offered a “second chance” to rebuild his life from scratch, even if without one’s former energy and vigor.

At the age of 26, the Romanian writer E. M. Cioran began appropriating the wealth of the French language like a greedy pirate. He called this metamorphosis of linguistic identity “the greatest, most dramatic event that can befall a writer.” “Historical catastrophes are nothing compared to this,” he later claimed. “When I wrote in Romanian, words were not independent of me. As soon as I began to write in French, I consciously chose each word. I had them before me, outside of me, each in its place. And I chose them: now I’ll take you, then you.” The break to which Cioran had aspired in leaving Romania was more than linguistic. “When I changed my language, I annihilated my past. I changed my entire life.” Is this true? As a famous French author and brilliant stylist in his adopted language, Cioran was constantly haunted by ghosts of the past, which he found oppressive and humiliating. “My country! I wanted to hang on to it at any cost — but there was nothing to hang on,” he wrote in the 1950s. Cioran’s glorious linguistic transmutation, however, was not completely triumphant after all. “Today again it seems that I am writing in a language that does not fit me at all, that has no roots: a hot-house language. French does not suit any temperament. I need a savage, drunken language,” he told Fernando Savater in 1977. On his deathbed, he rediscovered Romanian, but not himself. He experienced the ecstasy of Alzheimer amnesia. The greatest joy, the highest penalty. The End.

My reasons for severing my ties were perhaps stronger than Cioran’s, but still I hung on to my native tongue, and, since I could not turn back the clock, I could not aspire to the transfiguration and profound, radical change toward which Cioran struggled during his decades in exile.

Ultimately the question concerning writers is related not only to their linguistic identity but also to their individual drive and destiny. Compared to collective historical disasters, their worries seem childish. Many artists and writers collapse in exile or at home before the problem of a change in their linguistic identity arises. And yet, historical catastrophes may pale beside the dark forces that destroy their language.

I was almost completely at sea in English. To my fright, I found myself to be like Nabokov’s Professor Pnin, who thought Hamlet sounded better in his native Russian than in English. In my first decade here, I became terribly anxious when invited to speak at conferences. Not only because of my accent, but also because I constantly feared I would lose or forget my script. I still remember arriving in Turin in 1991 and finding that my bags were missing. I was to give my lecture in English the next morning and, in despair, I tried to convince the conference’s organizers to move it to the afternoon. In the meantime, my suitcases arrived and my luck increased: several Italian — Romanian interpreters were attending so that I could speak off the cuff. This epilogue was much happier than the story of the poor Pnin, who misses his train to the conference and even brings the wrong lecture.

The legitimization that translation confers when one lives in one’s own country changes when one has left. “At home,” translations are welcome gifts from the unknown. An author who is translated into several languages cannot evaluate all these translations. He lives in his own language, in which he has found his voice and character. The foreign travesties do not disturb his essential creativity; the alien codes in which his writing has been encrypted and which he himself often cannot decipher are nothing but flattering gifts.

For an author who has been uprooted, translation becomes a sort of entry visa into the land where he now resides (as well as into other lands and realms). Along with citizenship, it ensures he has a literary ID, an entry into a new and fully ambivalent sense of belonging to a community he has joined as an “alien.” Translated, he is better expressed than in his daily speech, and it my open up opportunities for more communication with his fellow citizens and with his fellow writers.

Yes it all remains hopelessly indefinite for an exiled writer, who, although translated into another linguistic territory, still writes in his native and now nomadic language. Such a frustrating working hypothesis merely spreads uncertainty. The heteronymous, as Fernando Pessoa called his contradictory and complementary creative valences, are replaced by one and the same orthonym that appears wearing the masks of different languages.

A writer’s integrity and his inner self are inseparable from his language. They become variable and indefinably foggy when he is robbed of his native tongue. The doubts he has always had to rein in can gain the upper hand in the ambiguity and uncertainty of his new situation.

“My infallible method of determining whether a sentence is good or bad is to imagine I am in the middle of the Sahara without any books. In my pocket I find a note with one sentence. If it suddenly illuminates the desert’s meaning and I no longer wish to leave, then I know the sentence is a good one.” The words of a Romanian writer and friend. In the Sahara of exile, in the desert that Levinas believed to be the root of the spirit, able to replace the ground with the letter, I have often had to repeat these words. For a moment they lent this desert meaning and offered the refuge I had sought for so long. And yet … In New York, a “good” Romanian sentence would have to be channeled through contortions and convolutions, metamorphoses and mutilations in order to be translated into the language in which my identity is now clothed.

The years had flowed by like water and I knew quite well how unreceptive I was to the illusion of imperviousness, but I also knew how much I depended on that illusion. My dilemma became much clearer in the summer of 1991 than it had been in Germany in 1987 during my apprenticeship in Göttingen. My New York publisher, Grove Press, planned a collection of short stories and a collection of essays for my American debut. Various translators had taken on the short stories, and, together with my editor, I tried to improve their English versions. The Romanian text lay on the table next to the French and Italian translations. Fortunately for me, the American editor spoke both those languages. Together, we jumped from one language to the next and reworked the English version. How each sentence tried to express something became less important than what it tried to say. It was a logical, “Aristotelian” reduction to erasure, a kind of Darwinian struggle for existence in which originality could prove to be the greatest disadvantage. As Walter Benjamin said, “any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information — hence, something inessential.”