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

In New York I still live in the Romanian language, as in Paris Paul Celan lived in German. Despite the fact that I also publish now in Romania, my literary message is no longer sent in a bottle to someone on a distant shore but in an ephemeral capsule that floats through a dream in which — and only in this dream, under lucky circumstances — it will have to invent its own legitimization, its own recipient.

The structural differences between Romanian and English are more difficult to bridge than those between Romanian and the Latin languages. Romanian is, in fact, a mix of Latin and oriental languages. My volume Compulsory Happiness came into English through a French translation; some other stories and essays were translated into English from German translations. It seems difficult for a relatively inexperienced translator to find English equivalents for vagueness, metaphors, wordplay, lacunae, equivocal allusions, ironies, intertextual blurrings, as they are practiced in Romanian literature. To embrace the American idiom, the text has often to be retailored; incompatibilities must be eliminated and all that is too obscure or specific has to be altered. Naturally, a great translator, with the necessary time and dedication, can find brilliant equivalents for anything. Intermediaries of genius, unfortunately, are not found on every corner. As my first German editor pointed out, some twenty years ago, translations require persistence and talent, effort and money. And he was not even considering today’s ever decreasing literary standards, the increasingly rushed tempo of reading and editing, the growing aversion to oddities or eccentricities within other literary traditions in favor of what can easily be understood and sold. Books have become simple products that should be as readily bought and used as any other market product.

Should one simplify one’s thinking or expression in order to ease the task of the translator before easing the task of the publisher and the reader? I sometimes tried this compulsive distortion in order to avoid being caught in a dead end. The result didn’t resemble Kafka’s “white” style but was a vacant account of absence with no digression, enchantment, or mystery. Avoiding stylistic risks, difficulty, or subtlety, picturesque or idiomatic expression, I myself became simpler, so pale as to disappear completely into the blank page.

The writer’s block underscores the insanity necessary to pursue this venture, an absurdity that exile only heightens. It was difficult to weather this crisis, if I have indeed done so. When I am occasionally asked in New York in which language I write, I answer, only half in jest, in the language of the birds.

Hannah Arendt, herself an exile, once said: “What remains? The mother tongue remains.” No one can take away the language in which one has been formed and deformed. The Romanian I hear in my thoughts or that I speak with my wife, and the English of the newspapers, television, and banking forms, of my American friends, of the college where I teach, or of my doctor, are not easily divided into public and private realms. Their interaction cannot be compared merely to that between an individual entity and social identity. The tension is not simply linguistic but also geographic, historic, and psychological in origin.

My English is a rented tongue, borrowed by this Robinson Crusoe for the social interaction needed to fit with those harboring him. Far from its natural sphere, my “old” language now exists only for me; I alone reign over its nomadic magic.

The language of life after exile accosts me from all sides. Those nearby who speak to each other or even to me have started, gradually, even if timidly, to reach corners of my inner language. The tension between my two languages of today eventually creates fruitful synergies and interferences. Misunderstandings and misrepresentations are only the unavoidable negative aside of an exchange that also brings insights when the languages mirror and enrich each other. At times, I am rewarded with sudden inspiration when I return to a chapter in the original Romanian text after the simplifications of the English version. A therapeutic spirit helps me recover the way back into myself, heals the cramping undergone in the foreign text that is mine but, strictly speaking, also not my own. Marvelous, untranslatable Romanian words and expressions I had never thoroughly examined before suddenly reveal their uniqueness, incisiveness, and originality.

If separated from the land and the people who rejuvenate it every day, one’s mother tongue, one’s language “with roots,” risks petrifying into an artifact. When transmuted into another linguistic medium, however, it may reveal beauties buried by routine. Yet, the relationship between one’s native and now nomadic tongue and its homeland, left ever further behind, does not become any simpler.

The fact that one belongs to a language in no way heals the wounds that the homeland has inflicted on one’s life; and however incurable the wounds, they do not lessen the priceless gift, language, which we inhabit.

When my first translated stories were published in 1970 in Israel in a Hebrew anthology called Jewish Writers in Romanian, I was annoyed by the title. I considered myself, quite simply, a Romanian writer. My “ethnicity” was my burden and my wealth and my history, but it was no one else’s business. I didn’t consider the language a “tormenting usurpation of an alien property,” as Kafka said.

Since then, I have learned that writers are often classified by other categories than the “essential” one of language: black writers, gay writers, Catholic writers, women writers, and, of course, Jewish writers. They are all claimed by subgroups according to particular identities and not according to their intrinsic “entity,” their language.

My own biography is a reminder that history and personal history cannot be ignored. A biography marked by Holocaust, communism, and exile points to a certain identity, independent of the language of its owner.

Do we eventually grow into the identities that are repeatedly assigned to us? Do we finally become what we’re always told we are? Am I an American writer in the Romanian nomadic language or an American Jewish / Jewish American writer in the Romanian language? Or am I, simply, a Romanian writer in America? An exiled writer, as I was even before exile? Or a Jewish writer in the Romanian language, as I was labeled by fellow sympathizers and by many enemies?

These seemingly futile questions became more confusing when the alien in his homeland was forced again to become an exile and his language became, again, a nomadic one. I couldn’t avoid, in the last twenty years, wondering if the annoying title of that Israeli anthology wasn’t — despite my irritation at that time — an accurate premonition: the correct assessment of my destiny.

In one of the dreams Antonio Tabucchi describes in his picaresque novel Requiem: A Hallucination, a dream expedition in search of Fernando Pessoa, the narrator meets his dead father. The father is young and, surprisingly, does not speak Italian, the only language he knew, but Portuguese. Is that because the hallucination takes place in Portugal or because the Italian writer did not write his book in his native tongue but in his second language, Portuguese? “What are you doing in a sailor’s uniform here in the Pension Pensao?” the son asks. “It’s 1932,” the father answers. “I’m doing my military service, and our ship, a frigate, dropped anchor in Lisbon.” He wants to know from his son, who is older than he and knows more, how he will die. The son tells his father of the cancer which has, in reality, already killed him.

Not only in the beginning was the word. Before the final silence, we often end our existence with the Word. Chekhov spoke his last words, “Ich sterbe” (“I’m dying”) not in the language of his life and works but in that of the land where he ended his earthly adventure. In the rare dreams in which I see my parents, they speak Romanian. And yet, I cannot foresee in which language I will take my leave of this world. Death’s language sometimes differs from that of the life to which it is putting an end.