Two Literary Festivals Will Highlight Endangered Languages

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the NYTimes, April 21, 2006

Two Literary Festivals Will Highlight Endangered Languages

By DINITIA SMITH

SOME 6,500 languages spoken in the world today. And, according to the 2000
census, you can hear at least 92 of them on the streets of New York. You
can probably hear more; the census lumps some of them together simply as
"other." But by the end of the century, linguists predict, half of the
world's languages will be dead, victims of globalization. English is the
major culprit, slowly extinguishing the other tongues that lie in its
path.  Esther Allen, a professor of modern languages at Seton Hall
University, calls English "the most invasive linguistic species in the
world." Spanish and Hindi are also spreading, subsuming the dialects of
South American Indians, and of the Indian subcontinent.

In the next two weeks, however, some of these endangered idioms can be
heard at two international literary festivals that celebrate languages big
and small, as well as the power and resilience of words themselves. The
festivals are taking place all over town, in places as diverse as the
Studio Museum in Harlem, the New York Public Library, the Bowery Poetry
Club and the United Nations. The PEN American Center is holding its second
World Voices Festival of International Literature, beginning Tuesday and
running through April 30.  Ms. Allen is the curator of the gathering, and
the novelist Salman Rushdie is its chairman as well as a participant in a
discussion at Town Hall on Wednesday night called "Faith and Reason"  the
festival theme with 134 writers from 41 countries around the world.

Among the 58 events is a panel, "Writers on Their Languages," with the
novelist and poet Bernardo Atxaga, who writes in the endangered language
of Euskera, or Basque, and Dubravka Ugresic, whose most recent novel is
"The Ministry of Pain," and who writes in Croatian. Other writers
scheduled to participate include Orhan Pamuk, from Turkey, E. L. Doctorow
and Martin Amis. Then there is the People's Poetry Gathering, from May 3
through May 7, sponsored by City Lore and the Bowery Poetry Club. There
will be some 60 poets reading their work in English and in their native
tongues. Among the highlights is a performance of poetry and music by
Kewulay Kamara, whom City Lore commissioned to return to his boyhood home
in Dankawali, Sierra Leone, in 2004 to recreate an epic poem destroyed
during the recent civil war. The story goes back to before the birth of
the Prophet Muhammad and incorporates slavery and colonialism in West
Africa.

There will also be a reading by Robert Bly of some of his translations and
his own poetry, and a program on endangered languages at the United
Nations, co-sponsored by the United Nations SRC Society of Writers, the
U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and the World Intellectual
Property Organization. American publishers have one of the lowest
translation rates in the Western world, according to Andrew Grabois, a
consultant for Bowker, which tracks the publishing business. Only 3
percent of books published in the United States are translations (4,114 in
2005), Mr. Grabois said, compared with, for example, 27 percent in Italy.
As a result, linguists contend, much of the English-speaking world knows
little of other countries and cultures.

English may be eating up other languages, but paradoxically translation
into English is vital for their survival, Mr. Rushdie said. "People are
not going to learn Serbian," he said. "If Serbian writers are going to
survive in the world, they will have to be translated into English."

Ms. Allen said, "The whole point of this festival is inviting these people
from outside English into the conversation, and making a place for them in
English."

Among those invited to the Poetry Gathering is Mr. Kamara, of Sierra
Leone. Mr. Kamara's native language is Kuranko, part of the Manden
language group in West Africa. Mr. Kamara's father, Assan Fina Kamara, was
a farmer and teacher of Koranic studies. The Kamaras are members of the
Fina caste: orators, or M.C.'s, who recite at ceremonies like weddings and
funerals. The younger Mr. Kamara came to the United States when he was 18.
Now 52, he teaches in the African-American Studies department at John Jay
College. His epic poem "Voices of Kings" tells of the origins of the Fina
caste. One part relates the story of how the Prophet Muhammad rewarded an
old couple for feeding him when he was hungry:

		The old man returned to manhood

		The old woman returned to womanhood

		The child they bore

		They called Fisana

		Muhammad names Fisana and his Fina descendants, "the voices of faith."

The epic has many parts, and recitation can continue for hours, even days,
Mr. Kamara said. He has also interwoven it with his own story.

"It's not linear, you can start anywhere," he said. So far he has written
down about 100 pages. Mr. Kamara and Abdoulaye Diabate will sing and
recite "Voices of Kings" at the Poetry Gathering accompanied by African
instruments, the bala (a precursor to the xylophone), tama (talking drum),
flute and horn.

Another endangered language being highlighted in both the Poetry Gathering
and the PEN festival is Euskera, or Basque. Mr. Atxaga, the Basque writer,
wrote in an e-mail message from Spain that he is fighting to preserve
Euskera because it is "a language we know well, it helps us to live."

And, he said, there are the layers of subtleties and precisions that are
lost when a language dies.

In the Basque language, for instance, gender exists only in the second
person. "If you're speaking to a woman to ask her, for example, whether
she has a book, you say 'Ba dun libururik,' " Mr. Atxaga said. "Whereas,
to a man you'd say 'Ba duk libururik.' That nuance of 'n' or 'k' can be
important in telling a story. Details are always important in literature."

Yet Mr. Atxaga said he disagrees with the idea that language gives
insights into a people's consciousness and culture. "Presumably, a
national epic can be translated," he said.

"All you need to do is read the thinking of the Nazis," he said. To them,
"the German language was unique and carried with it a singular concept of
the world and life, revealing the essence of the German people," he said.
"This quickly reached absurd extremes."

Ms. Ugresic noted that the same thing has occurred in the former
Yugoslavia, where language has become intensely politicized.
Serbo-Croatian has broken up into Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and
Montenegrin, all of them very similar but with speakers of each language
claiming  sometimes violently  the supremacy of their own. Beatings and
book burnings have occurred when one group objected to the language of the
author. "Crazy linguists are ready to project many things into languages,"
she said by phone from Amsterdam, where she lives. She added that
languages are always in a continuous state of transformation, and that to
try and get in the way is useless.

"Some languages are dying and some are appearing," she said. "That is a
much deeper and more interesting dynamic."

Maybe, Ms. Ugresic said, the new language of globalization will be
"Smurfentaal," a kind of slang with bits of Dutch and other languages,
among them Moroccan, Turkish, Serbo-Croatian and Spanish, spoken by young
people on the streets of Amsterdam.

"Every honest linguist will tell you the preservation of language is a
lost battle," Ms. Ugresic said, "because you can't deal with language
dogmatically. Language is a living thing.

"So let it go."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/books/21worl.html?_r=1&oref=slogin