Canaille, Canaglia, Schweinhunderei’: Languages Personalities and Communication Failure in the Multilingual Fiction of Anthony Burgess
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Julian Preece: ‘Canaille, canaglia, Schweinhunderei’: Languages Personalities and Communication Failure in the Multilingual Fiction of Anthony Burgess. In: www.polyphonie.at Vol. 6 (1/2019) ISSN: 2304-7607 Julian Preece (Swansea) ‘Canaille, canaglia, Schweinhunderei’: Language Personalities and Communication Failure in the Multilingual Fiction of Anthony Burgess 1. The multilingual Anthony Burgess Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) read and / or spoke Farsi, French, German, Italian, Malay or Jawi, Russian, Spanish and Welsh with varying degrees of fluency, in addition to his native English in which he published. He was also interested in Chinese and Japanese. He learnt Spanish during a three-year wartime posting to Gibraltar from 1943-46. He explained to the Spanish translator of Earthly Powers (1980) in 1982 that he “then spoke it well. I now speak it badly but I can still read it --- with some help from a dictionary”.1 He then learnt Jawi over his four years in Malaya and Brunei in the mid- to the late 1950s, during which he wrote The Malay Trilogy. In 1942 he married Llewela or Lynne Jones (1920-68), from an Anglo-Welsh but non-Welsh speaking background with whom Burgess translated a trio of French novels in the early 1960s. Burgess maintained an active interest in translation throughout his creative life.2 His second wife Liana Macellari (1929-2007) was a translator from English to Italian. The couple lived first in Malta from 1968-70, then spent most of their time in Italy 1970-75 before moving to French-speaking Monaco near the Franco-Italian border up to Burgess’s death in 1993. Among Burgess’s papers held in Manchester is correspondence in French, Italian and Spanish. He often annotated books and manuscripts with phrases in Jawi script and his private library contained hundreds of titles in languages other than English, mainly Italian and French. In the novel 1985 (1978) he explained that on account of his bookshelves being disorganised and not being able to find the original English, he was obliged to re-read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in Italian, which alerts him to an error in the translation of the very first sentence which he rushes to interpret: ‘Era una bella e fredda mattina d’aprile e gli orologi batterono l’una’. “It ought to be ‘battevano tredici colpi’. They 1 To José Manuel Alvarez and Angela Pérez, 8 January 1982, International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Cambridge Street, Manchester. I am grateful for the Director of the Foundation Andrew Biswell and its archivist Anna Edwards for their advice and assistance compiling sources for this article. 2 See Howard, Paul: Introduction. In: Anthony Burgess, ABBA ABBA, edited and with an introduction and notes by Paul Howard. The Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess. Manchester: Manchester University Press 2019, 11. 1 Julian Preece: ‘Canaille, canaglia, Schweinhunderei’: Languages Personalities and Communication Failure in the Multilingual Fiction of Anthony Burgess. In: www.polyphonie.at Vol. 6 (1/2019) ISSN: 2304-7607 were striking thirteen. Latin logic, you see. The translator couldn’t believe that clocks could strike thirteen, even in 1984.”3 Yet in contrast to many émigrés or migrant writers, his mother tongue remained his medium of literary expression. Burgess’s work consequently does not properly belong in any of the categories elaborated in studies of ‘born translated’ or ‘exophonic’ writers.4 Nevertheless his rich language knowledge inflected both how he wrote his native English and what he wrote about. He moved away from England voluntarily and acquired new language knowledge out of human, cultural or intellectual interest rather than out of necessity. But he did not feel entirely ‘at home’ in land of his birth. In 1976 Burgess wrote of himself in an author’s note that in his view “It is a British writer’s duty to get out of Britain if he can and examine the English language against the foil of other tongues”. He regarded himself as something of a misfit in the London-based English literary world, adding that “Like many Mancunians, especially when they have Irish blood and a Catholic background, he finds the Mediterranean more congenial than the Thames, and he left literary London and journalistic life behind eight years ago to get on with some real work”.5 As a literary critic and biographer he wrote about James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway who also wrote in self-imposed exile in non-Anglophone environments. Burgess saw his own situation reflected in theirs. In 1985 he wrote of himself, thinking of Lawrence, that he was: using foreign languages more than English in daily discourse, trying to hear the English and see the English the more clearly for not living with them. Voluntary expatriation never goes down well with my, and Lawrence’s, fellow subjects of the British crown: the novelist who lives abroad is trying to evade taxation or bad weather or both (in fact, he evades neither). What he is really trying to do is to get out of the narrow cage which inhibits the British novel, to acquire a continental point of view, to avoid writing about failed love affairs in Hampstead.6 These voluntary exiles contributed more to the renewal of English Literature than their stay- at-home contemporaries, according to Burgess. He credits a quartet of multilingual authors, the Anglo-German Ford Madox Ford, who makes an appearance in Earthly Powers, along with Joyce, Hemingway and Lawrence with “the jettisoning of the artificial plot which had 3 Burgess, Anthony: 1985. London: Arrow 1980, 20. 4 See, for instance, Yildiz, Yasemin: Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham University Press 2012 and Walkowitz, Rebecca: Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press 2015. 5 Burgess, Anthony: An Author’s Note, appended to Moses: A Narrative. New York: Stonehill 1976. 6 Burgess, Anthony: Preface to Flame into Being. The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence. London: Heinemann 1985, x-xi. 2 Julian Preece: ‘Canaille, canaglia, Schweinhunderei’: Languages Personalities and Communication Failure in the Multilingual Fiction of Anthony Burgess. In: www.polyphonie.at Vol. 6 (1/2019) ISSN: 2304-7607 sustained the English novel” and demonstrating that “human reality can be shown in a heightened form without manipulation, and if a novel cannot present life direct and dangerous it is probably not worth writing”.7 Beyond Jawi and the Romance trio of French, Italian and Spanish, Burgess’s knowledge of the languages in which he took an interest had its limits. He acquired enough Russian, becoming aware of its alphabet and the basic rules of grammar, to devise Nadsat, a kind of Russian-English creole, for A Clockwork Orange (1962). He was sufficiently aware of Welsh to write a five-page introduction to ‘The Tongue of the British’ in a volume which also has chapters on Japanese as well as German.8 According to his German translator Wolfgang Krege, “he didn’t understand much German”, yet reading Krege’s rendering of the poems in his version of Burgess’s Napoleon Symphony (1974), “he noticed at once when a line had an iambic foot too much or too little”. 2. Varieties of ‘Language Personalities’ in Burgess’s Fiction Krege was less impressed by his knowledge of German literature and in particular his high opinion of Günter Grass whom Burgess considered “a great innovator”.9 Yet Burgess cites Grass’s novel Der Butt / The Flounder (1977) in Earthly Powers, which displays probably the most “continental point of view” of any of his novels.10 Burgess cites Grass moreover in the original after the novel’s bilingual Anglo-French narrator Kenneth Toomey recalls coming across a novelist called Jakob Strehler, the author of a “seven-volume novel sequence under the general title Father’s Day (Vatertag)”. This is the title of The Flounder’s controversial eighth chapter, which includes a double depiction of rape, the first committed by a trio of lesbians using a dildo, the second by Hell’s Angels who kill their victim in the most brutal manner. Strehler’s Vatertag is on the subject of “the Austro-Hungarian Emperor presiding over a Central Europe that is undemocratic and infested with police spies but is also charming, comic and creative”. The titles of the seven volumes are borrowed or adapted from chapter headings or poem titles in Der Butt but listed, with one exception, in the reverse order 7 Ibid., 100. 8 In Burgess, Anthony: A Mouthful of Air. Language and Languages, especially English. London: Vintage 1993, 140-44. 9 ‘Memories: Wolfgang Krege’, News and Blog Posts, International Anthony Burgess Foundation web-site, https://www.anthonyburgess.org/burgess-memories/burgess-memories-wolfgang-krege. 10 Burgess, Anthony: Preface to Flame into Being. The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence. London: Heinemann 1985, x-xi . There are copies of Grass’s novel as The Flounder and Le Turbot at the Archive in Manchester but not the German original. 3 Julian Preece: ‘Canaille, canaglia, Schweinhunderei’: Languages Personalities and Communication Failure in the Multilingual Fiction of Anthony Burgess. In: www.polyphonie.at Vol. 6 (1/2019) ISSN: 2304-7607 to that in the novel: [where they differ originals are in square brackets] “Dreimal Schweinekohl; Nur Töchter; Wir sassen zu Dritt [Wir aßen zu dritt]; Hinter den Bergen; Wie Er Sich Sah [Wie ich mich sehe]; Arbeit geteilt; Woran Sie Sich Nicht Erinnern Will [Woran ich mich nicht erinnern will]”.11 An Italian friend of Toomey’s, who turns out to have a German-speaking background, is surprised to see his reading matter and Toomey confesses his admiration: ‘I didn’t know,’ Concetta said, picking up a copy of Woran Sie Sich Nicht Erinnern Will from the floor by her chair, ‘that you read German’.