Mikhail Epstein

The globalization of cultures radically changes the role of languages and translation. It presupposes translingualism, or what Bakhtin called "polyglossia." "Only polyglossia fully frees consciousness from the tyranny of its own language…" ¹

With the spread of multilingual competence, translation will come to serve not as a substitution but as a dialogical counterpart to the original text. Together they will comprise a multidimensional, multilingual, "culturally curved" discourse. Bilingual or multilingual persons have no need of a translation, but they can enjoy an interlation, a contrastive juxtaposition of two or more apparently identical texts running simultaneously in two different languages—for example, a poem of Joseph Brodsky in the Russian original and in English autotranslation. Interlation is a multilingual variation on the same theme, where the roles of "source" and "target" languages are not established or are interchangeable. One language allows the reader to perceive what another language misses or conceals.

Robert Frost said that poetry is what gets lost in translation. By contrast, interlation increases, indeed doubles the benefits of poetry. In addition to those metaphors that connect words within one language, a new layer of imagery emerges through a metaphorical relationship between languages and provides a surplus (rather than loss) of poetic value.

For instance, Joseph Brodsky's poem "To Urania" contains the line, “Odinochestvo est' chelovek v kvardrate”--literally: "Loneliness is a man squared." Brodsky's own translation of this line into English reads, "Loneliness cubes a man at random." It would be irrelevant to ask which of these expressions is more adequate to Brodsky's poetic thought. They together represent the scope of its metaphoric meaning. A stereo effect is produced, not by Russian or English lines as such but by their figurative relationship. The English "cube" amplifies and strengthens the meanings of the Russian "square," as a lonely man self-reflects and self-multiplies, growing multidimensional as a compensation for his losses. English “cube” and Russian “square” both serve as metaphors for loneliness, but in addition they are metaphors to each other and thus build up the next level of figurative relationship between languages. Thus bilingualism makes this poem a work of special verbal art that can be called "stereopoetry," which has more metaphorical layers in it than "monopoetry."

Stereo effects may be intended by an author or produced in the reading experience--for example, if we take Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography as a stereo text in two languages and three consecutive versions: Conclusive Evidence (1951), Drugie berega (Other Shores) (1954), and Speak, Memory (1967). Nabokov himself empasized that these versions relate not merely as a translation, but as a metamorphosis . "This re-Englishing of a Russian re-vision of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place, proved to be a diabolical task, but some consolation was given me by the thought that such multiple metamorphosis, familiar to butterflies, had not been tried by any human before."²

Born at the crossroads of languages is a new work of stereo prose, which may be characterized in Bakhtin's words:

[I]n the process of literary creation, languages interanimate each other and objectify precisely that side of one's own (and of the other's) language that pertain to its world view, its inner form, the axiologically accentuated system inherent in it.³

Translation as the search for equivalence among languages has dominated the epoch of national cultures and monolinguistic communities, which needed bridges of understanding more than rainbows of cocreativity. In the past, the mixture of languages was called "macaronic" and used mostly as a comic, a parodic, technique. When languages were enclosed within monoethnic cultures, their combination was perceived as artificial — a device. With the globalization of culture and automatization (on the Web) of literal translation between languages, it is untranslatability and non-equivalencies among languages that reach the foreground. A work written in parts, English, some French, and some Russian, can now find an audience able to savor precisely the discrepancies among languages.

More fundamental questions follow on the recognition of stereotextuality. Can an idea be adequately presented in a single language? Or do we need a minimum of two languages (as with two eyes or two ears) to convey the volume of a thought or image? Will we, at some future time, accustom ourselves to new genres of stereo poetry and stereo philosophy as we have become accustomed to stereo music and stereo cinema? Will the development of translingual discourses (or, in Bakhtin's words, "the mutual illumination and interanimation of languages") become a hallmark of our century?

¹ Mikhail Bakhtin. The Dialogic Imagination , ed. By Michael Holquist, trans. By Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin : University of Texas Press, 1992, p. 61.