{"id":8360,"date":"2022-05-15T09:06:25","date_gmt":"2022-05-15T07:06:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=8360"},"modified":"2022-12-25T11:38:50","modified_gmt":"2022-12-25T09:38:50","slug":"can-the-bilingual-speak-thoughts-on-the-arabic-hebrew-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/can-the-bilingual-speak-thoughts-on-the-arabic-hebrew-mind\/","title":{"rendered":"Can the Bilingual Speak?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
“Jerusalem” by Nabil Anani, 2013 (courtesy of Zawyeh Gallery<\/a>, Ramallah).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

(In loving memory of Emile Habiby, 1921\u20131996)<\/p>\n

\u201c. . . Fragments. Or the anecdote as a form of knowledge.\u201d \u2014<\/em>Paul Auster, The Invention<\/em> of Solitude<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Anton Shammas<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

A couple of years ago, I was kindly invited, in monolingual English, to be a panelist at a conference on bilingualism, on account of my dubious lingual past in Arabic and Hebrew. I immediately declined the \ufb02attering invitation, explaining to the organizers that it had been a while since I\u2019d last thought of myself as an active <\/em>bilingual writer and translator of these two mutually exclusive languages. Hebrew, in the last two decades or so, seems to have bowed out gracefully from my linguistic state of mind, and the bilingualism I had cherished for decades is no longer a distinct part of my lingual identity, whatever that is.<\/p>\n

Then I reconsidered the invitation and changed my mind, and that change of mind, curiously enough, happened in English, as Arabic and Hebrew were mutually absent from my decision-making process for a change. I thought, in English, that after some \ufb01fty years of life within Arabic and Hebrew and life in the precarious intersections between the two, it\u2019s probably time for me to pause and look back at my humble and equally questionable history as a bilingual writer and translator of these two languages and maybe draw some introspective conclusions as a lingual retiree, for what it\u2019s worth.<\/p>\n

\n

When does one become <\/em>a bilingual or, to paraphrase the ninth-century classical Arabic writer al-J\u0101\u1e25i\u1e93, when does one begin to feel comfortable with having two tongues in one\u2019s mouth?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"
“A classic, complex novel of identity, memory and history” as Goodreads<\/a> notes. Arabesques<\/em> is the first novel written in Hebrew by a Palestinian citizen of Israel.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I should immediately append a disclaimer: I really know nothing about bilingualism, and all I seem to know is something about my own life as an alleged bilingual. The following fragments, then, are extremely personal and, as such, could be unreliable and, worse still, unveri\ufb01able.<\/p>\n

So, maybe I should start off by posing the seemingly simple <\/em>questions: When does one become <\/em>a bilingual or, to paraphrase the ninth-century classical Arabic writer al-J\u0101\u1e25i\u1e93, when does one begin to feel comfortable with having two tongues in one\u2019s mouth? And if you don\u2019t happen to be, say, a George Steiner, is there a moment in time when the knowledge of, or the pro\ufb01ciency in, a second language reaches the same level or exceeds that of the \ufb01rst? Is that an objecti\ufb01able and measurable process?<\/p>\n

Is the knowledge of a language gauged by the ability to speak <\/em>that language or by the ability \u00a0to write <\/em>it well, or by both? Is bilingualism de\ufb01ned by the ability to speak <\/em>two languages equally well? And if so, what does it mean, in effect, to speak a language? Is that at all possible \u2014 to speak a language, to dwell and feel at home in a language, let alone in two?<\/p>\n

Wise Heidegger would tell us that it is language, as such, that speaks, not the subject:<\/p>\n

\u201cLanguage speaks. . .To reflect on language thus demands that we enter into the speaking of language in order to take up our stay with language, i.e., within its speaking, not within our own. Only in that way do we arrive at the region within which it may happen \u2014 or also fail to happen \u2014 that language will call to us from there and grant us its nature. We leave the speaking to language. . .Language speaks. Humans speak in that they respond to language.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, can the bilingual <\/em>speak?<\/p>\n

For if the bilingual can speak only when responding to language, which of the two would they be responding to, and how would the two languages of bilingualism speak simultaneously on their behalf? And what happens when the two languages of the bilingual are mutually exclusive, mutually contestable, mutually trying so violently yet so unevenly to silence each other, on so many levels, like Arabic and Hebrew have been doing for almost 150 years now? And is it possible for a bilingual in Arabic and Hebrew to speak about that bilingualism in either language, or is it only possible to do so using a third, seemingly neutral language? For if you chose Arabic in order to speak, Hebrew, for more than \ufb01ve decades the language of lethal military occupation, would be seemingly <\/em>relegated to the status of a second \ufb01ddle, and vice versa. Which means, in effect, that bilingualism can \u00a0be addressed and de\ufb01ned only from the \u201cwithout,\u201d as Beckett, probably the <\/em>greatest bilingual of all times, refers to the outside in his play Endgame<\/em>. Is there an outside of language or, better still, outside of bilingualism, a \u201cwithout\u201d from which one can examine what\u2019s within <\/em>the two languages? Is that \u201cwithout\u201d possible to \ufb01nd only inside a third language?<\/p>\n

That said, as a retired bilingual desperado, it is also hard for me to \ufb01nd the right words in any of the three languages in which I consider myself to be a refugee to talk about bilingualism. It\u2019s interesting, though, that having a third language to discuss the adversarial, mutually exclusive relationship between Arabic and Hebrew adds a spin of sanity to that act, making the linguistic and political entanglements of my Arabic and Hebrew, and the asymmetrical power relation between the two, seem easier to handle, easier to unravel. Still, who knows, maybe that is yet another illusion.<\/p>\n

Now, let me tell you three anecdotes in totally random order which I think might capture, in varying degrees of relevance, some of the things that come to mind when I think about my own bilingual past, a past in which whenever I wrote in Hebrew, Arabic would always be its unconscious, and vice versa.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1. The Black Rooster of the Rabbi\u00a0<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Some \ufb01fteen years ago, around the time that the Hebrew language and I had a falling out of sorts, something very amusingly uncanny happened to me. A friend of mine, a scholar of Hebrew literature, had written a paper which she wanted to run by me. \u201cIn a 1980 anthology of new Hebrew poets,\u201d the \ufb01rst sentence read, \u201cAnton Shammas [that would be me] published a gripping poem titled \u2018Dyokan\u2019 (Portrait). This poem describes the experience of assimilation into the language of the Other in intensely visceral, corporeal terms, as a kind of violent invasion by a foreign presence.\u201d<\/p>\n

By 1980 I must have been already done with poetry, in both Arabic and Hebrew, and thought I was ready for the intimidating experience of switching to writing \ufb01ction, so how could I have written and published that poem? Besides, the Hebrew word dyokan<\/em>, or portrait, sounded so alien and so unusual to my ears \u2014 and come to think of it, so intrusive for someone whom I remembered would have refrained from opening up like that. Then I went on reading:<\/p>\n

\u201cYet the poem also contains a number of elusive subtexts and baffling references. Through a complex network of intertextual allusions and associations, it invokes the famous midrash <\/em>on Rabbi Shim\u2018on bar Yohai in the cave \u2014 without ever mentioning the word \u2018cave.\u2019 The poem ends enigmatically with this line: \u2018A black rooster beating its wings. Jerusalem.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

I was totally dumbfounded: the famous midrash on Rabbi Shim\u2018on bar Yohai in the cave and a black rooster beating its wings? I pricked up my ears, but no bells were ringing. Was the writer making it all up, I wondered? Because I really didn\u2019t have any recollection whatsoever of writing about that Rabbi, or about his black rooster for that matter.<\/p>\n

I looked the poem up in the two volumes of Hebrew poetry I\u2019d so irresponsibly published in the seventies, and at which I hadn\u2019t looked for a long time, but couldn\u2019t \ufb01nd that poem and was so curious to know what that poem was all about.<\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t \ufb01nd the anthology mentioned in the paper, so I Googled the poem, and all \u00a0I could \ufb01nd were essays written about it by teachers of Hebrew literature, as the poem seemed to have been part of the curriculum of Hebrew literature in Israeli high schools. But the poem itself was nowhere to be found, \u00a0and I was now more interested in trying to remember it, trying to conjure \u00a0it up, but failed miserably.<\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t remember the poem, and, worse still, \u00a0I couldn\u2019t remember the person who had written that poem, apparently in the late seventies. True, I used to have blackouts during that decade, as some of you may have had, but the total erasure of the memory of writing a text in Hebrew, and the total erasure of the memory of that person I used to be, was quite shocking, unsettling, and disorienting.<\/p>\n

And I was wondering, Did that happen because I was no longer that bilingual person I used to be when I recklessly moved around that no man\u2019s land, between Arabic and Hebrew? Does language really inhabit us, in the form of either an original or a translation? Do we really inhabit and dwell in our language, or in our languages?<\/p>\n

Gil Hochberg, who was not <\/em>the writer of that paper, writes in In Spite <\/em>of Partition <\/em>about my work in Hebrew: \u201cshowing how amidst what appears to be a promise of cacophony and a hopeful act of multifaceted translations (borrowing of multiple voices and tongues), one \ufb01nds a bitter reminder of the limits of such affirmative translatability: clear limits, set by and carefully guarded by the ethno-national territorialization of linguistic zones.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, are these clear limits, \u201cset by and carefully guarded by the ethno-national territorialization of linguistic zones,\u201d so discursively powerful that any attempt, personal or otherwise, at challenging them is predetermined to fail or to be swallowed whole by these ethno-national linguistic zones and to be turned into a part of the system of power against which these attempts were aimed at in the \ufb01rst place?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

2. Translation at Gunpoint\u00a0<\/strong><\/h4>\n

In the early \u201880s in Jerusalem, around the time that I was done with writing poetry in Arabic and Hebrew, I started entertaining the idea of writing a novel in Hebrew. I had been investing most of my time and energy in translating \ufb01ction and poetry from and into Hebrew and Arabic, when I was asked by a dear friend, the late Daniel Amit, then a physicist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a very anti-Zionist political activist, who had just founded a small publishing house, Mifr\u0101s (sail), to translate into Hebrew a novel by the Palestinian writer Emile Habiby, Al-Mutash<\/em>\u0101\u2019il <\/em>(The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist<\/em>, or simply The Pessoptimist<\/em>).<\/p>\n

The small press had a very clear political mission: to publish in Hebrew books on Palestine, Palestinian politics, and Palestinian literature. Habiby had served for twenty years as a Knesset member, representing the Israeli Communist Party in the Israeli Parliament, before he decided in 1972 to leave that wasteland behind and focus on writing \ufb01ction.<\/p>\n

When Al-Mutash<\/em>\u0101\u2019il <\/em>was published in 1974, it was hailed almost immediately by literary critics in the Arab world as a masterpiece of Arabic style. So, when Daniel asked me to translate the novel into Hebrew, I told him immediately that it was simply impossible to translate Habiby\u2019s daunting Arabic style. But he wouldn\u2019t take no for an answer. In order to support my claim, I showed him a raving review of the novel, published in Hebrew in the daily Haaretz, by Shimon Ballas, an Iraqi-born Hebrew novelist and renowned Israeli scholar of Arabic literature, in which he stated unequivocally that the novel would be impossible to translate into any <\/em>language. Daniel dismissed the claim on the spot and said, many decades before Emily Apter, that there was no such thing as \u201cuntranslatables.\u201d So, I asked him for some time to sleep on it. \u201cThere\u2019s no such thing as sleep either,\u201d he said, but still agreed to give me some time to reconsider.<\/p>\n

I was living in Jerusalem at the time, and even though I had a steady job, it was hard for me, every now and then, to pay the rent, as translation didn\u2019t pay that well. Amit had offered me $500, a very considerable amount in those days, so that <\/em>was very tempting. Some weeks later I changed my mind (in Arabic) and told him (in Hebrew) that I\u2019d translate the novel. We signed the contract (in Hebrew), and I could pay the rent. Then I set out to trans late Emile Habiby into Hebrew, only to realize after struggling bitterly with the \ufb01rst couple of pages that for one, the novel, all in all, was really untranslatable and two, worse still, I had spent the $500.<\/p>\n

I still can\u2019t remember how I did \ufb01nally \ufb01nd the courage to call Daniel and break the bad news to him. But I remember it was a Thursday afternoon, and after a long, elaborate, and awkward apology, I told him that it would take me some time but I\u2019d de\ufb01nitely return the advance money.<\/p>\n

There was a long, long silence, and I could clearly hear Daniel\u2019s measured, passive aggressive breathing. Then he said, very calmly, \u201cListen, Anton. You know that I de\ufb01ne myself as anti-Zionist, but I had to serve in the army, and I own a gun. As you surely know, I know where you live, and on Thursday next week, \u2018at \ufb01ve in the afternoon,\u2019 as that famous line goes in Lorca\u2019s \u2018Lament \u00a0for Ignacio S\u00e1nchez Mej\u00edas,\u2019 next Thursday, at \ufb01ve in the afternoon, I\u2019ll show up in your apartment building on 7 Menorah Street. I won\u2019t take the stairs to where you live on the second \ufb02oor but will open your mailbox at the entrance to the building, and in your mailbox, I\u2019ll \ufb01nd the translated \ufb01rst chapter of the novel. Then I\u2019ll come back the following Thursday, at \ufb01ve in the afternoon, and there will be waiting for me the translated second chapter of the novel, and so on, Thursday in and Thursday out, at \ufb01ve in the afternoon, until we\u2019re done. Now, if I show up next Thursday, at \ufb01ve in the afternoon, and I don\u2019t \ufb01nd the translated \ufb01rst chapter, I\u2019ll take the stairs to the second \ufb02oor, I\u2019ll knock on your door, you\u2019ll open the door, and I\u2019ll shoot you.\u201d<\/p>\n

I chuckled because I thought he was joking, but he was dead serious.<\/p>\n

The novel had forty-\ufb01ve chapters, so you can imagine that after forty-\ufb01ve Thursdays, the Hebrew translation of Al-Mutash<\/em>\u0101\u2019il<\/em> was completed.<\/p>\n

And I have lived to tell all about it . . . in English.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

3. Translation as Revenge\u00a0<\/strong><\/h4>\n

My translation of Th<\/em>e Pessoptimist <\/em>came out in 1984, and Habiby, whose Hebrew was far better than he claimed, was very happy with the translation. A year later, in 1985, he published his second novel, lkhtayyeh<\/em>, which he sent to me with the very sly inscription, \u201cTo my beloved brother Anton \u2014 all <\/em>I\u2019m asking is that you read <\/em>this book.\u201d But I knew he was asking for more, much more than a no-strings-attached reading, and he knew that <\/em>as well.<\/p>\n

Those days, in between translations, I was wrapping up my own novel, in Hebrew, when I was asked by another publishing house, and a very persistent lobby of Habiby\u2019s fans, to translate lkhtayyeh<\/em>. Well, I had no choice, so I did, and when the translation was published in 1988, I had already left Israel for good the previous year. Then he published his third novel, Sar<\/em>\u0101y<\/em>\u0101, \u00a0in 1991, my most favorite novel of his. By that time, we\u2019d become long-distance close friends, as I had earned his full trust not only as a devout in-house translator, but also as an occasional editor and fact-checker. He would send me the early drafts of the chapters and ask for comments and suggestions, but for some weird reason we never discussed the potential translation. When the novel came out, he mailed it to me in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with the inscription \u201cYour friendship alone is an honor for me, so what can I say when you are also my translator? I owe you more than you\u2019ll ever imagine. Yours, Emile Habiby.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was deeply \ufb02attered, of course, and deeply grateful, but equally apprehensive and anxious. And then on page 151 of the Arabic original, I read the following paragraph, which hadn\u2019t been in the early draft he had shown me (and this is from the English translation of Peter Theroux, which I\u2019ve also edited, along with Peter Cole):<\/p>\n

I am no longer going back to tell you about Sar\u0101y\u0101 or how I \u00a0searched for her . . . until that evening! So, as the Arabs say, what has driven you away, after you showed me your love? In other words, what, in fact, has happened? I answered him: what in fact has \u201chap\u201d in it. And that which has won\u2019t happen again. And with this I challenge Anton Shammas, the Palestinian translator who has translated my books from Arabic into Hebrew \u2014 I challenge him to translate this juxtaposition and this pun, into any language or register, near or far, high or low, as compensation for what the speakers of Hebrew have taken from us and from our language.<\/p>\n

\ufed3 \u0630\u0627 \ufecb\ufeaa\u0627 \ufee3 \u00a0\u00a0\ufe91\ufeaa\u0627\u061f \u0623\ufe9f\ufe92\ufe98\ufeea: \ufee3\ufe8e \ufecb\ufeaa\u0627 \u0625\ufefb\u0651 \ufeeb\ufeac\u0627 \u0627\ufedf\ufeac\u064a \ufe91\ufeaa\u0627. \u0648\ufee3\ufe8e \u00a0\u00a0\ufef3\ufe92\ufeaa \ufee3\ufe8e \ufecb\ufeaa\u0627 \u0648\ufedf\ufee6 \ufef3\ufecc\ufeee\u062f. \u0648\u0623\ufe97\ufea4\ufeaa\u0649<\/p>\n

\u0623\ufee7\ufec4\ufeee\u0646 \ufeb7 \u0633 \u0623\u0646 \ufef3\ufc70\ufe9f\ufee2 \ufeeb\ufeac\u0627 \u0627\ufedf\ufec4\ufe92\ufe8e\u0642 \u0648\u0627\ufedf\ufea0\ufee8\ufe8e\u0633 \u0625\ufc43 \u0623 \u0651\u064a \ufedf\ufed0 \u064d\ufe94 \ufed7\ufeae\ufef3\ufe92\ufe94 \u0623\u0648 \ufe91\ufecc\ufef4\ufeaa .\u00a0.\u00a0.<\/p>\n

\u05d5\u05de\u05d4 \u05e0\u05e9\u05ea\u05e0\u05d4, \u05d0\u05dd \u05db\u05df, \u05d4\u05dc\u05d9\u05dc\u05d4 \u05d4\u05d6\u05d4? \u05d0\u05d5, \u05db\u05de\u05d0\u05de\u05e8 \u05d4\u05e2\u05e8\u05d1\u05d9\u05dd, \u05de\u05d0 \u05e2\u05d3\u05d0 \u05de\ufb3e\u05d0 \ufb31\u05d3\u05d0<\/p>\n

)\u05e9\u05e4\u05d9\u05e8\u05d5\u05e9\u05d5, \u05de\u05d9\u05dc\u05d5\u05dc\u05d9\u05ea: \u05de\u05d4 \u05d4\u05e8\u05d7\u05d9\u05e7 \u05d0\u05d5\u05ea\u05da \u05de\u05de\u05e0\u05d9 \u05d0\u05d7\u05e8\u05d9 \u05e9\u05d4\u05e8\u05d0\u05d9\u05ea \u05dc\u05d9 \u05d0\u05d4\u05d1\u05d4.( \u05e2\u05e0\u05d9\u05ea\u05d9:<\/p>\n

\u05dc\u05d0 \ufb20 \u05b8\u05d3\u05d4 \u05e2\u05dc\u05d9\u05e0\u05d5 \u05d6\u05d5\u05dc\u05ea \u05d0\u05e9\u05e8 \u05b8\ufb31 \u05b8\u05d3\u05d4. \u05d5\u05d0\u05e9\u05e8 \u05d1\u05e2\u05d3\u05d9\u05d9\u05e0\u05d5 \u05d4\u05ea\u05e2 \u05b8\ufb33\u05d4, \u05d5\u05d0\u05d7\u05e8 \u05b4\u05e0 \u05b0\u05ea \u05b8\ufb31 \u05b8\ufb33\u05d4 \u05b0\u05d5 \u05bb\u05d4 \u05b2\ufb20 \u05b8\u05d3\u05d4,<\/p>\n

. . . \u05b8\u05d3\u05d4 \ufb20<\/p>\n

\u05dc\u05d0 \u05d9\u05e9\u05d5\u05d1 \u05e2\u05d5\u05d3 \u05b3\u05e7 \u05b8\u05d1\u05dc<\/p>\n

So Habiby addressed me directly in the text, by name, challenging me to translate a certain Arabic idiom into any language, but speci\ufb01cally meaning Hebrew. And let\u2019s face it, I\u2019d asked for it and had only myself to blame. And I thought that beyond the sly literary device, the literary hailing, and beyond the performative challenge, and beyond the delightful Althusserian interpellation, Habiby was telling me, in effect, that I could speak <\/em>only as a translator, as his <\/em>translator. And that <\/em>was a benign variation on the theme of translation at gunpoint.<\/p>\n

Shai Ginsburg has argued that \u201cunlike the great resistance Shammas the author has raised, Shammas the translator was (and is) well received. As a translator from Arabic into Hebrew he \u2014 like other translators \u2014 allows Israeli culture to present itself to itself as liberal, as sharing in modern universal humanist values. As a Hebrew author, on the other hand, Shammas unmasks the bad faith of this \u2018liberal\u2019 image for as such he asks Israeli culture to do what it cannot do: to follow through its espoused values outside the literary realm.\u201d<\/p>\n

A couple of months after the publication of Sar<\/em>\u0101y<\/em>\u0101\u2019s Hebrew translation in 1993, when I was visiting my family in Haifa, I was asked by the editor of Ha\u2019\u012br, a local newspaper published in Tel-Aviv at the time, to conduct a lengthy interview with Habiby. I reminded him when we met of something that we had managed to avoid mentioning all those years, an early encounter of the embarrassing kind in the mid-seventies. Those days I was working for the public TV station in Jerusalem, as a producer of a literary program, and wanted to interview him about his \ufb01rst novel, The Pessoptimist<\/em>, published in 1974. My division director at the time, who had been a communist in his youth, succumbed to the zeal of converts and rejected the idea because of Habiby\u2019s political views. But later he changed his mind, for the sake of the good old days. So, I made it to Tel-Aviv with the TV crew to conduct the interview.<\/p>\n

In 1974, I had published two collections of poetry, in Hebrew and Arabic, respectively, so I foolishly enough decided on a whim to give a copy of the Arabic book to Habiby when we met. Some months later, our mutual \u00a0friend Shimon Ballas, mentioned above and who was at the time the chair of the Arabic department at Haifa University, organized a conference about Th<\/em>e Pessoptimist<\/em>, at which Habiby was supposed to give the keynote speech. Having had already broken the spell, I traveled to Haifa with my TV crew to prepare a report on the conference. I was sitting in the back of the \u00a0amphitheater, next to the cameraperson, and Habiby started his keynote in Arabic, totally oblivious of my presence. \u201cBefore I talk to you about my work,\u201d he said in his singular baritone, \u201clet me \ufb01rst read to you a poem by a young Palestinian so-called poet, just to show you the kind of ridiculous and hollow stuff written these fateful days by our young generation, those who have no values and no cause to \ufb01ght for.\u201d Then, in a hilarious mocking tone which only he <\/em>could master, he started reading a poem from my book that I had given him, saving me the embarrassment of identifying me by name. I pretended that I didn\u2019t care.<\/p>\n

I was telling the story to Habiby now as we sat for the interview, more than twenty years later. Three years before that, in 1990, he was awarded the very prestigious Al-Quds Prize for Literature, by the book-challenged Yasir Arafat himself, and two years later, much to the chagrin and outrage of Habiby\u2019s fans in the Arab world and then Israeli prime minister, book-challenged Yitzhak Shamir, he was awarded the prestigious Israel Prize for Literature.<\/p>\n

He clutched his bowed head with both hands in disbelief and said,\u201cOh my god, all these years that we have known each other, I was hoping you would never remember that shameful episode.\u201d Twisting the knife, I told him that when he \ufb01nished reading my poem that day at Haifa University, I kept thinking to myself, What would be the perfect revenge? And you know what, I added less than half-jokingly, I decided to translate your work into Hebrew, hoping that one day you might be awarded the Israel Prize for Literature.<\/p>\n

That <\/em>was my perfect revenge.<\/p>\n

The very juicy, meandering, elaborate, multi-layered, and colorful Arabic curse he produced was yet another untranslatable masterpiece.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

In conclusion, let me go back to Heidegger and see if one of his discussions on building and dwelling could give me a proper metaphor for what I have in mind. Mind you, while I like anecdotes, I certainly don\u2019t like metaphors, because I think they seem at \ufb01rst to beguilingly offer us a neat way out, a tangible embodiment of an idea we have, then after a while things fall apart, the metaphor collapses, and we are left in more puzzlement and confusion than we had been in before the metaphor showed up. Frustrated readers of Benjamin\u2019s metaphor-riddled essay \u201cThe Task of the Translator\u201d would get my drift.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m quoting at length from the second chapter of Heidegger\u2019s \u201cBuilding Dwelling Thinking\u201d:<\/p>\n

A bridge may serve as an example for our re\ufb02ections. The bridge swings over the stream \u201cwith ease and power.\u201d It does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other. One side is set o\ufb00 against the other by the bridge\u00a0\u00a0 It brings stream and bank and land into each other\u2019s neighborhood. The bridge gathers <\/em>the earth as landscape around the stream. Even where the bridge covers the stream, it holds its \ufb02ow up to the sky by taking it for a moment under the vaulted gateway and then setting it free once more. The bridge lets the stream run its course and at the same time grants their way to mortals so that they may come and go from shore to shore.<\/p>\n

There might be something in this image of a bridge-long quotation that could offer a different perspective of looking at bilingualism as the bridge that connects two languages. However, the bridge of bilingualism does not only connect the two banks that are already there, but rather it makes them emerge as two languages when it crosses the river.<\/p>\n

But then again, bridges are hard to build, and sometimes they fail to reach the other bank, and sometimes they collapse; rivers run dry, and metaphors fall apart, leading us to nowhere.<\/p>\n

And we cannot speak.<\/p>\n

. . . But we keep trying.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nThis essay first appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review<\/a>, Vol 61, No.2, Spring 2022, as “Can the Bilingual Speak?” and appears here by special arrangement.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anton Shammas \u2014 the Palestinian novelist who wrote the Hebrew-language “Arabeques” \u2014 attempts to sort himself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":243,"featured_media":8387,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,70,50],"tags":[194,249,319,338,589,792,1297],"coauthors":[1897],"class_list":["post-8360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essay","category-review","category-tmr-21-palestinian-israeli","category-tmr-issues","tag-anton-shammas","tag-arabic","tag-beckett","tag-bilingualism","tag-emile-habiby","tag-hebrew","tag-palestinian-citizens-of-israel","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nCan the Bilingual Speak? - The Markaz Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Anton Shammas \u2014 the Palestinian novelist who wrote the Hebrew-language "Arabeques" \u2014 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