Donald Trump says he “has the best words”*: according to you, does he have a particular language and what would be the particularities of this language?
* “I'm very highly educated. I know words; I have the best words…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UIE_MRAhEA
Speech at Hilton Head, South Carolina – December 2015
Responses: –Esther Allen, translator, professor, Baruch College, CUNY
This man once took out a full-page ad in four New York City newspapers to call for the execution of five kids. There was no physical evidence connecting any of the kids to the crime they were accused of, and none had ever been accused of a crime before. A trial date had not yet been set in May of 1989 when the ad was published.
Here are some of the words he used in his ad, words so important to him that he spent something like $85,000 to feature them prominently in all the daily papers:
Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes… Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will.
But what words would actually put you beyond the pale in the United States of America?
What words would actually make you socially and politically toxic, untouchable, unelectable?
The five kids grew up in jail, spending between six and thirteen years behind bars. Then they were exonerated by DNA evidence and the confession of a convicted rapist who had committed a series of crimes much like the one they were charged with. Ultimately the state of New York paid them millions of dollars in damages for their wrongful conviction.
You might imagine this would place the man who called for their execution under ever greater anathema. Nothing could be further from the truth. While the kids suffered in jail, and after they were released, influential people and politicians of all stripes played golf with him, accepted his money, attended his parties, celebrated with him at his latest wedding.
If they thought of the ad at all, perhaps those who frequented him told themselves it had been merely “transactional”—that he was simply preaching hate for the benign purpose of increasing his own net worth, not because he actually felt hate. He somehow gave everyone the impression that he didn't really feel or mean anything he said, however vehemently he expressed himself. He was only seeking his own advantage. Strangely, this seemed to reassure those who thought they, in turn, could use him to their advantage.
In October of 2016—fourteen years after the five convictions were vacated—the man who paid $85,000 to fuel the wave of hatred that sent five kids to jail for years came down once again on the side of hatred. He accused them again of crime and refused to acknowledge the evidence that had exonerated them. Then he was elected president.
Everyone who'd spent the previous decades creating and consolidating his fame and wealth and using it to their own advantage—the Republicans, the Democrats, the TV execs, the newspaper moguls, the publishers, the ghost writers, the real estate investors, the country club goers, the socialites, the Russian oligarchs—had normalized him. We live in a country whose powers that be demonstrated long ago that for the most part they have no problem with someone who calls for the death of five kids.
“Empty words disgrace the one who speaks them,” wrote the thirteenth-century Persian poet Saadi. This man's endless stream of empty words has profoundly and irretrievably disgraced not only himself but an entire nation. And that disgrace began long before November 8, 2016.
–Marie Darrieussecq, novelist, psychoanalyst
Truismes’ trumpismes
Suite à nos échanges par mail, j'essaie de répondre à votre demande de réflexion sur les « trumpismes » (le jeu de mot m'enchante). Je dirai seulement ceci : il n'y a plus rien à traduire, chez Trump. Au bout de six mois de présidence, on sait qu'il est dingo. Juste dingo. Il faut attendre encore 3 ans et demi, en espérant qu'on échappera au pire. Je me suis détournée du sujet Trump, en espérant qu'il ne revienne pas me chercher.
Tenir. Il n'y a plus que ça. Supporter la peur et la rage (aujourd'hui encore, le ciel s'est assombri au-dessus de la Corée du Nord…).
Grâce à vous je relis mentalement (et relie) le personnage du dictateur Edgar, dans Truismes, à celui de Trump. Merci de raviver mes propres mots, à mes propres oreilles… 21 ans après, le plaisir que j'en ai est ambivalent… La direction que prend le monde n'est pas la bonne, malgré les avertissements des livres, que Trump devrait lire !
–Philip Golub, professor, American University of Paris (AUP)
Having a good time
On January 13, 2017, Donald Trump gave a short talk at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The talk was rambling, stream of consciousness stuff, with no real content aside from a general injunction to the assembled analysts, spies, and warriors (who he had excoriated a few weeks earlier for leaking information) to go out and kill bad guys. It was, like all his public talks, mainly narcissistic: he used the word “great” 7 times, the word “amazing” 5 times, the word “fantastic” 4 times, and the word “tremendous” 3 times—referring mostly, of course, to himself or events involving him. At the end, the President conveyed a curious message: “I just wanted to really say that I love you, I respect you. There's nobody I respect more. You're going to do a fantastic job. And we're going to start winning again, and you're going to be leading the charge. So thank you all very much. Thank you—you're beautiful. Thank you all very much. Have a good time.”
Have a good time?
Just in case people didn't get the message, Trump told ABC TV on 26 January that “torture works… absolutely.” Have a good time. Waterboarding is not only efficient, it's fun.
On July 19, Trump was interviewed by the New York Times. Same story: no structure, incomplete sentences, very little substance, but a hell of a lot of me, myself, and I, but also some seriously problematic statements on world history.
The words “great” or “greatest” come up 22 times…
Excerpts of clinical interest:
I have had the best reviews on foreign land. So I go to Poland and make a speech. Enemies of mine in the media, enemies of mine are saying it was the greatest speech ever made on foreign soil by a president… You saw the reviews I got on that speech. Poland was beautiful and wonderful, and the reception was incredible. And then, went to France the following week, because it was the 100th year… He [President Emmanuel Macron of France] called me and said, “I'd love to have you there and honor you in France,” having to do with Bastille Day. Plus, it's the 100th year of the First World War. That's big. And I said yes. I mean, I have a great relationship with him. He's a great guy. He's a great guy. Smart. Strong. Loves holding my hand… The Bastille Day parade was—now that was a super-duper—O.K. I mean, that was very much more than normal. They must have had 200 planes over our heads. Normally you have the planes and that's it, like the Super Bowl parade… We had dinner at the Eiffel Tower, and the bottom of the Eiffel Tower looked like they could have never had a bigger celebration ever in the history of the Eiffel Tower. I mean, there were thousands and thousands of people, ’cause they heard we were having dinner.
Followed by this:
Well, Napoleon finished a little bit bad. But I asked that. So I asked the president, so what about Napoleon? He said: “No, no, no. What he did was incredible. He designed Paris” … The street grid, the way they work, you know, the spokes. He did so many things even beyond. And his one problem is he didn't go to Russia that night because he had extracurricular activities, and they froze to death. How many times has Russia been saved by the weather?... Same thing happened to Hitler. Not for that reason, though. Hitler wanted to consolidate. He was all set to walk in. But he wanted to consolidate, and it went and dropped to 35 degrees below zero, and that was the end of that army. But the Russians have great fighters in the cold. They use the cold to their advantage. I mean, they've won five wars where the armies that went against them froze to death… It's pretty amazing.
Then, without transition: “So, we're having a good time. The economy is doing great.”
In early August, as tensions flared with North Korea over its nuclear program and missile tests, Trump said: “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen...” North Korea responded by sending a missile for the first time directly over Japan.
Yeah, Trump clearly has the “best words.”
And we're all having a great time. Amusez-vous bien!
–Edith Grossman, translator
I have the very strong yet untested impression that Trump tends to speak in monosyllables. Line after line of very short words, his “best words,” like projectiles that he propels out of the pucker of his mouth in a percussive, menacing stream of sound, as if he were firing a machine-gun—a machine-gun loaded with monosyllables.
Why would he speak this way? It turns everything he says into pronouncements of hostility: a tough-guy pose that brooks no opposition and disguises the extreme privilege of his life, his position, his wealth, his “education.”
—Edith Grossman
–Liora R. Halperin, professor, University of Washington in Seattle
The Pedant Class
In her 1995 book, Verbal Hygiene, Deborah Cameron writes of the widespread social practice of correcting other people's language practices, pontificating about correct or incorrect usage, belittling others for their grammatical errors, and lamenting the corruption of the language from a supposed better or more perfect state in the past. Liberals who argue for tolerance in matters of racial, sexual, or national difference bemoan linguistic deviancy, often adopting distinctly conservative and elitist positions with respect to language. Why does language become the space in which social and political conflicts are played out? “Linguistic conventions,” Cameron argues, “are quite possibly the last repository of unquestioned authority for educated people in secular society.” Those with mastery of language see themselves as definitively better than those who lack it.
Trump clearly lacks mastery—despite his proclamation of having “the best words,” he often has the most confusing words. The Merriam-Webster's dictionary has risen to internet stardom by expertly trolling Donald Trump and other members of the administration for using words and punctuation incorrectly, uttering absurd phrases, and giving alternative definitions to words to serve agendas of self-glorification, demonization, and obfuscation. Citing odd elocutions, blatantly incorrect usage, or incomprehensible language, critics see Trump's linguistic deviance as one key reflection of the incompetence of the administration and Trump himself. We see the linguistic flaws as both risible and terrifying. We mock, but we also fear his language for the lack of discipline, rigor, or thoughtfulness that it seemed to reveal.
Expertise, linguistic or otherwise, is not faring well under the Trump administration. Many of his cabinet picks lack even an undergraduate, let alone a graduate-level qualification in the policy-area they now oversee. Many of the universities and educational systems that would have provided these credentials have been losing public funding for decades and relying ever more on contingent labor, but are now being attacked for being bastions of narrow minded liberal professors and “safe spaces.” Those with the linguistic knowhow and inclination to separate a noun from an adjective, a gerund from a participle, a sentence from a fragment—who are also probably people with higher education—feel like an embattled breed, and we know it. And yet we cope with Trump's opaque, rule-breaking language by believing that perhaps we are the real America, the America of founders and leaders who penned the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in high rhetorical style. Ours, we imagine, is a meritocratic form of prestige. It is precisely the merit we want our country to impart by investing in schools and universities. To defend language—and to mock its misuse—is (many think, or reflexively feel) to defend education, rigor, and discipline.
But, as is clear from Trump's election, one doesn't need oratory, or coherence as typically defined, to win anymore. Indeed, Trump won in part because his language, lacking the features of education, prestige, or knowledge, seemed authentic to wide swaths of voters. Communication, we are taught to believe, is effective to the extent that it is understood. But Trump's language was understood not for its content, which is so often opaque, but for its undertones, its simplicity, its emotional core. These undertones are sometimes called dog whistles, implying that they emit a frequency of meaning that is inaudible to mainstream listeners but acutely audible to a certain set of mostly white, mostly rural or suburban masses. The metaphor is telling: the well-educated folk see themselves as full human beings in comparison to the animalistic crowd. The frequencies audible to these masses are not really language, they are sub-linguistic, and those who can understand the sublinguistic must be a little subhuman. These prejudices are crude. Many would deny them while others would simply justify them. But attitudes and discourse about language, in this case Trump's broken, contorted, opaque language, tell us something not only about Trump, but about those who critique him, their anxieties, fears, and concerns.
–Jacques Lezra, professor, University of California at Riverside
“Trumplatonism”
I went to an Ivy League school. I'm very highly educated. I know words; I have the best words.
And Glaucon very ludicrously said, “Heaven save us, hyperbole can no further go.” “The fault is yours,” I said, “for compelling me to utter my thoughts about it.”
“Better” words—that's a claim we could understand; perhaps today we could endorse generally the idea that it's better to have better words to hand than less-good ones (though we'd be hard-pressed to correlate an education, even or especially at an Ivy League school, with the “knowledge” or “having” of such better words). Some words are “better” than others for certain things, and “better” in some hands than in others at those or other things—they designate with greater precision; they persuade some people more readily or more people sooner than other words; they move us more; they serve better to recall words we've loved or feared to hear. “Better” reminds us of language's irreducible practicality: a word's meaning is its use; words perform. A president may inaugurate, may with a word and a signature scrap a bill and end a dream, declare war, victory, defeat. A leader may exhort, inspire, resign, condemn, and so on. Someone like Donald Trump may provoke, insult, demean, recruit, and do so comparatively better or worse than another. “Better” words are the stuff of politics and of policy. In the European imaginary, the public struggle over the “better” word makes the city, the polis, what it is. (The famous marketplace of ideas has a peculiar double sense—use and location meet. In the agora the words that express ideas are on display as if they were wares or goods. But the agora is also just where you or I, or Agathon and Alcibiades, might go to see which of our ideas better persuades more of our fellow citizens.)
The superlative's confounding; the claim to “have” words, whether the “better” or the “best” ones, is at least confusing. The “best” words. It means something stronger than “the best word to this or that end, at some specific time, in a situation given to us.” The “best” word makes a comparative as well as an absolute claim: it's “better” than another word, but it's also different from it in lying outside of the system of relative magnitudes in which merely “better” and “worse” words work. The “best” word is also the last one, the one that ends the series, the one that redeems or buries all the words, the good and bad ones, the better and worse words, in the fire and fury of eternal war. Trump's superlatives: the apocalypse. As to “having” words—here we're on different ground. English allows the rather old-fashioned expression “to have” a language: “Do you have Latin?” one may ask. Or Spanish, Quechua, and so on. In Trump's words the verb “to have” is ostensibly synonymous with “to know”: to “have” a word is to “know” it, and vice-versa. A little elegant variation is at work; the translation between “knowing” and “having” is transparent and immediate. Once we have the word “have” we have the word “know,” and once we know the verb “to know” we know the verb “to have.” We'd have to say that we cannot know which is better suited to Trump's intent—not because we aren't educated in the nuance of their difference, but because his words offer themselves as one: they refuse, reduce, consume the differences of their expression, of their long and distinct histories, of their semantic particularities. Trump's only words shovel a single grave in the air.
Of course there's always been a tension, sometimes violent in its expression and consequences, between the politics of the “better” word and the politics of the “best” one. So too between “knowing” and “having” things, even words, even languages. (If English is the “master's house,” my knowing it will not mean that it is mine, or that I have it in the way the master does: that, at any rate, is one way to translate Audre Lorde's famous line.) The Sophist will not break bread with the Platonist; the “better” word offers what Barbara Cassin characterizes as “enough of the truth for”—for this or that, to this end and not another. The “better” word is never servant to the One. Not so the sole bearer of the “best” word: of these there is only one, suited to the end and the end suited to it.
Two dogmas of translation face off before us. As long as a word is only “better” than another word, we're in the workaday world of approximative translation, whether word-for-word or sense-for-sense. We acknowledge the practical limits of our task. Let's take an example. I set about translating into Spanish, my native tongue, Trump's recent threat to the North Korean leadership, that further nuclear provocation will lead to “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” It's political speech: a threat; a rallying cry to a base of voters attuned to the ring of end-of-days language; a thumbing-of-the-nose at internationalists whose “world,” Trump is saying, blandly or cravenly overlooks the real threats ignored or appeased by more moderate U.S. administrations. I retain some of Trump's alliteration, but not all. I take note of the scansion of Trump's analogy, which offers his English listeners first the apocalypse (a world that's like “fire and fury”: North Korea will see what the world is, what we all recognize it to be—“fire and fury”) and then, fully unpacked, offers the apocalypse we have not yet seen but may, if North Korea does not attend to our threat: “[F]ire and fury like the world has never seen.” There are better and worse ways of saying this all in Spanish—or different ways, at any rate: “Fuego y furia como el mundo no ha visto,” my first thought, works to preserve Trump's scansion. An alternative, from a Russian Spanish-language site, reads “[E]l fuego y una furia que el mundo nunca ha visto” (RT): the pronoun and the article more correct, a little more formal, more distant, than my version. Huffpost in Spanish reads “fuego y furia nunca vistos.” The standard news service Univisión has Trump warning that North Korea “Encontrará un fuego y furia que el mundo jamás ha visto,” or “will find a fire and fury that the world has never seen.” A Mexican source underscores the reflexive: North Korea “Se encontrarán con fuego y furia como el mundo nunca ha visto…” (Indigo—MX), which is to say, roughly, that they “Will find themselves facing fire and fury…” A Spanish-language publication from New York tells its reader that Trump warned, impersonally this time, that if North Korea persists “se verán fuego y furia como el mundo nunca ha visto,” that “fire and fury will be seen, such as the world has never seen.”Footnote1 My world is approximative; each of these translations has something to commend it, and I'll reach for one or the other translation of Trump's words when I want to achieve this effect or that, or move and persuade, enrage or inform this or that group of readers. One translation will be better than another—and different criteria and times will furnish me with tools to decide among them. I have no “best” words; know none.
My world and my words end in fire and fury, in what Celan called “ein Grab in den Lüften,” a grave in the air, when the “best” word is announced. Only one voice can utter it (only one hand, nervously typing, can tweet it). This dogma of translation calls for the end of translation: to “know” a word is to “have” it, and vice-versa. Any position that does not acquiesce to that aristocracy is heretical, marked by the cosmopolitan shibboleth of division, of Babel, of circumcision. The scenario is theological, or better yet: Platonic in the flattest sense. These lines from the closing pages of Borges's great parable “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” offer an answer—though in an unacceptably melancholic key, an answer to Trumplatonism, whose “contact and habit,” like “reality's” contact with the world of Tlön, “have disintegrated this world.” “Ten years ago,” writes Borges, in Irby's translation, “any symmetry with a resemblance of order—dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit?” Borges concludes: “I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogué hotel, an uncertain, undecided [una indecisa traducción] Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urne Burial.”Footnote2 Trading, in other words, the “best” words for better or worse ones—uncertain, undecided. Trumplatonism, that avatar of anti-Semitic, dialectical-materialist, Nazi symmetries, is a call to end translation, to entrance “the minds of men” with a “resemblance of order” held closely by an aristocracy. The task of translation in these times is not the re-integration of “this world” (it was never one, whole, integrated: indeed the supreme and supremacist fantasy that it was ever so is just what Trumplatonism “has,” “knows,” at its core), but rather to introduce the indecision of anapocalyptic, better-or-worse language-uses in the fantasy of sovereign knowledge. To keep “knowing” from drifting, or being forced, into synonymy if not identity with “having.”
–Michael Patrick Lynch, philosopher, University of Connecticut, Director of UCONN Humanities Institute
The Many Sides of Outrage
Donald Trump likes to provoke fire and fury with his words. Few of his remarks over the summer of 2017 provoked more than his claim, following the violence and terrorism by white supremacists in Charlottesville, that there was bad behavior on “many sides” during those events.
At first glance, this seemed like a classic example of an expression of racism posing as a blandly descriptive statement of fact. If so, no one was fooled. Not the Nazis who had demonstrated—they immediately trumpeted the remark on social media. Not Trump's critics—they, like the Nazis, knew that Trump was treating white supremacy as morally equivalent to the counter-protesters’ message of unity and anti-racism. As a result, it may be better to just say that Trump's remark was a descriptive statement—it described, if implicitly, Trump's commitment to a kind of moral relativism.
Trump's moral relativism is a product of his relativism about truth in general. For Trump, what is true is whatever the powerful can get away with. Since he considers himself amongst the powerful—and sadly he really is—then he treats his own proclamations as carrying the weight of fact. From this point of view, any criticism from without—any criticism of power—is pointless and, by definition, impossible. It is “#fakenews!” as he would tweet.
So along with the existential dangers Trump poses to democracy, there is also a philosophical danger raised by his words: the danger brought by a rejection of objective truth. For that view brings with it the possibility of treating fascism as just one more reasonable view among many. In ethics and in life, there can, of course, be multiply reasonable views—“ties for first place” as it were. But the ideal of objective truth mandates that there are unreasonable losers as well. And the toxic fascism of white supremacy is clearly one of them.
–Donna Masini, poet, novelist, professor, Hunter College, CUNY
The Blob
I'm a blob, our mother used to say, pregnant again with that
blobby wobble. We had siblings. We knew how a blob became a baby,
the mother bulb oozing out another child, and now there are four
and it's Steve McQueen Week on the 4:30 movie, The Blob
ending with its ominous question. The End? This was before
I understood irony. We'd seen the drunk old man
prod the ooze and disappear, watched it grow and roll, the little dog
barking its warning…barking, barking, then the barking stops
and the blob rolls on, insistent, engulfing the doctor.
We'd seen his face as the thing he didn't believe in—
what has already absorbed his nurse—came over him.
Town after town it rolls, amassing citizens. Now it is itself
a mass. A malignant mindless mob. How do you fight a blob?
Nobody believes Steve, the blob oozing
under the diner door, past the revolving pies.
His name was Steve in the movie and Steve in real life,
cigarette pack rolled in the shoulder of his T-shirt sleeve.
Desire oozed though me. I don't remember how the horror was contained.
Of the ending I remember the question. My sister and I
screaming in the living room as the horror that was our mother
said, only a movie horror…ended? 4:30 afternoons.
We'd seen Dark Shadows. Seen the way the dead
past comes back, eats you alive. The future will find a mass
in my sister's lung. Size of an orange? Why not say size of a grenade?
Sometimes my childhood closes over me—
enormous, hypnagogic, and I am the crowd
trapped in one of those neon diners of the sixties,
the mob rolling, a bloated demagogue, as now, waiting
in the neighborhood cheese shop, a man's red hands lifting
the rennet and curd out of the boiling
salt and steam, I see my mother, the typeface oozing
down the title screen, my mind, thoughts, nothing
but blob blob blob. The billionaire politician blobbing
across front pages, TV screens, rolling through towns.
Mindless, deadly, malignant. Amorphous, devouring monster.
Why didn't we laugh? Why didn't it seem, well, cheesy?
Surely the director snickered. Surely Steve/Steve understood
it was made of tinted silicone. This happens in Sci-Fi:
the ordinary nodule transforms into a race of aliens. You're next,
a woman barks. You're next, the crowd shouts. The man with red hands
scowls. Step up. They're late. They want their cheese.
It's only cheese. Why am I so frightened?
–Benjamin Moe, video journalist, MIC
When Trump says things like “I know words. I have the best words,” he is expressing a fundamental truth about his character and presidency. The very fact that he is complementing his speech while uttering a juvenile combination of words shows that, for Trump, excellence isn't being excellent through demonstrable actions, it is saying you are excellent. Truth is boasting and boasting is the truth. This is probably why in August 2016, after being gifted a Purple Heart from an Army vet and supporter, Trump said “I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.” To Trump, his brand, his mark on history, his value in the world, is receiving the accolade, not putting in the work to get it. To Trump, it didn't matter if he was on the battlefield or not, he had received his Purple Heart. And to millions of Americans, it didn't matter either.
–Olivier Penot-Lacassagne, professor, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3
« D'un comique, on attend les bons mots ; d'un politique, on redoute les inepties », m’écrivait au printemps 2016 un oncle d'Amérique qui vous écoutait en riant mener campagne sur les estrades provinciales des États-Unis. Votre nom, Monsieur Donald, amusait alors le ban et l'arrière-ban des Démocrates et des Conservateurs, sous toutes latitudes et en tous pays. Vos bavardages vindicatifs, vos tweets agressifs et péremptoires les mettaient presque en joie. Votre grossièreté manifeste, votre évidente vulgarité semblaient vous condamner à une défaite certaine. Vos propos leur répugnaient certes, mais sans trop les inquiéter. Une « bouche à quatre pattes », s'esclaffaient certains de vos opposants qui avaient lu Tzara. « Quel clown pitoyable ! » s'exclamaient les autres en ricanant.
Le temps a passé… et ce qui pouvait arriver arriva : Mister Clown est devenu Mister President… Coup de bâton de l’âne aux ânes bâtés de la politique ?
Depuis le 9 novembre 2016, la « résistance » s'organise, dit-on ici et là. Mais avec quels mots ?
Les mots d'hier, qui réglaient les joutes entre Démocrates et Républicains, sont désormais monnaie de singe. Les anciens maîtres parlaient à tort et à travers ; ils promettaient ceci et faisaient cela. Faux et usages de faux. On leur demanda de rendre compte de leurs bavardages inconséquents. Vous connaissez la suite… Il est à craindre qu'on ne les regrette aujourd'hui que parce que le nouveau maître des lieux les caricature à l'excès.
Car Mister Best Words nous rappelle, bien malgré lui, que les mots qu'il piétine à son tour sans vergogne ont un sens. Nous aimerions croire que l'inquiétude, le dégoût ou le désarroi que soulèvent nombre de ses propos contribueront à restaurer l'autorité sans cesse méprisée du langage, qui fait lien, contrat et communauté. Mais on peut craindre que ce coup de semonce ne serve qu’à promouvoir, une fois encore, des bateleurs « highly educated » et de bons pasteurs dont on saluera ou moquera – heureuse servitude – la courtoise et élégante rhétorique promettant à qui les écoute liberté, égalité et fraternité.
Combien de temps encore se paiera-t-on de mots ?
N'est-il pas déjà minuit, docteur Schweitzer ?
–Burton Pike, professor emeritus, Graduate Center, CUNY
I can't imagine translating Trump, or writing about it. The question immediately arises: from what language, and into what language?
–Alyson Waters, translator, Managing Editor, Yale French Studies
It is now almost mid-October 2017. I have been trying to write this at the editors’ request for days, not to say weeks, and I swear thinking about Trump's language makes me sick, literally sick to my stomach. My outrage and sadness can overwhelm me at times. Puerto Rico, Las Vegas, Charlottesville, the list is never ending; Trump's response to every catastrophe is worse than pathetic, it is apathetic, vulgar, glib. Every day I dread turning on the radio or looking at the paper in the fear of hearing or reading one more platitude about hope and prayer. My “hope” is that by the time this volume appears, he and his language will be things we'll look back on with disgust, but also with the thrill of things past that never have to be lived through again. Not le passé qui ne passe pas, but Le passé qui passe, and the sooner the better. And it's not just Trump's language. It's the words of hatred that spew forth from his supporters. I can't even write them down to prove my point. This is how far we've come from kindness, toleration, compassion.
Still, we live in a world in which kindness, toleration, and compassion do exist. We can't sugarcoat reality, and I certainly cannot “pray” for things to change. At the same time, those of us—readers, writers, translators—who work with beautiful language every day find solace in words that shine on the page; we can delve into thoughts that are actually thoughts, relish a sentence that is more than a 140-character Tweet, and continue to believe that humanity has some saving graces and another language. This is our good fortune. We should cherish it. Trump, too, shall pass.
Notes on Contributors
Esther Allen's most recent translation, of Antonio Di Benedetto's 1956 novel Zama (New York Review Books Classics, 2016), was awarded the National Translation Award by the American Literary Translators Association. A film of the novel by Lucrecia Martel will be released in the United States in 2018.
Marie Darrieussecq was born in 1969 in the Basque country, in France. She graduated from the École Normale Supérieure de Paris and wrote her Ph.D. thesis on auto-fiction. She wrote her first novel Truismes in six weeks (1996). It was translated in 24 languages and was met with immediate worldwide success. It appeared in English translation in 1997 under the title Pig Tales. She has since published many works published by the Éditions P.O.L., six of which have been translated into English. Her recent book Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes received the prix Médicis in 2013. Her latest book is Notre Vie dans les forêts, published last summer.
Philip Golub is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the American University of Paris (AUP). Anchored in the historical sociology of international relations, his research focuses on the state, globalization, and empires in late-modern and contemporary international history. He obtained his MPhil (DEA) in International Relations and Contemporary History at University of Paris IV and his DPhil in International Relations at the University of Sussex. Prior to AUP, he taught at the Institute of European Studies, University of Paris 8, and in the graduate program of Sciences-Po Paris, as well as lecturing regularly in other institutions of higher learning (Lausanne, Bologna, Paris-3…). He has published East Asia's Reemergence (Polity Press, 2016) and Power, Profit, and Prestige: a History of American Imperial Expansion (Pluto Press, 2010), which was translated into French and Chinese, and is a prolific author and commentator on international relations in the world press.
Edith Grossman is a translator and critic, the recipient of awards and honors including the Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson, and Guggenheim Fellowships, the PEN Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Queen Sofía Translation Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Grossman has brought over into English poetry, fiction, and non-fiction by major Latin American writers, including Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Álvaro Mutis, Mayra Montero, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Peninsular works that she has translated include Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, novels by Julián Ríos, Carmen Laforet, Carlos Rojas, and Antonio Muñoz Molina, poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, The Solitudes of Luis de Góngora, and the Exemplary Novels of Miguel de Cervantes.
Liora R. Halperin is Associate Professor of International Studies, History, and Jewish Studies, and Jack and Rebecca Benaroya Endowed Chair in Israel Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her first book, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920–1948 (Yale UP, 2015) explores the politics of multilingualism and nationalism in the Jewish community of British Mandate Palestine. When not teaching and researching the history of Israel/Palestine she's an avid punster and commentator on all things language-related.
Jacques Lezra is Professor and Chair, Department of Hispanic Studies, UCRiverside. His recent books include Untranslating Machines: A Genealogy for the Ends of Global Thought (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017); ‘Contra todos los fueros de la muerte’: El suceso cervantino (La Cebra, 2017); and Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (Fordham, 2010).
Michael Patrick Lynch is a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, where he directs the Humanities Institute. His most recent book is The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017).
Donna Masini's book 4:30 Movie is forthcoming (Norton, 2018). Her books include Turning to Fiction (Norton, 2004), That Kind of Danger (Beacon, 1994), About Yvonne (Norton, 1998). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, APR, Paris Review, Parnassus, Pushcart, Best American Poetry 2015. She is a Professor of English at Hunter College.
Benjamin Moe is a video journalist at Mic covering political extremism in America. He is also the co-founder of the literary magazine Table Talk.
Olivier Penot-Lacassagne is Maître de conférences at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 and a member of THALIM (Théorie et histoire des arts et des littératures de la modernité XIXe–XXIe siècles). He is a specialist of Antonin Artaud's work, the avant-gardes, and the counter-cultures. His books include: Back to Baudrillard (editor; CNRS éditions, 2015); Vies et morts d'Antonin Artaud (CNRS éditions, coll. « Biblis », 2015); Contre-cultures!, co-edited with Christophe Bourseiller (CNRS éditions, 2013); Engagements et déchirements. Les intellectuels et la guerre d'Algérie, co-authored with Catherine Brun (IMEC/Gallimard, 2012); Le Surréalisme en heritage: les avant-gardes après 1945, co-edited with E. Rubio (L’Âge d'Homme, 2008); Moi, Antonin Artaud, homme de la terre (éds Aden, 2007); Le Grand Jeu en mouvement, co-edited with E. Rubio (L’Âge d'Homme, 2007); and Antonin Artaud et les avant-gardes théâtrales (editor; Minard, 2005).
Burton Pike has translated Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and edited and co-translated Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, among other works from German and French. He is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and German at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Alyson Waters translates modern and contemporary literature from the French. In 2012, she won the Florence Gould/French-American Foundation Translation Prize for Eric Chevillard's Prehistoric Times. Waters has received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a PEN Translation Fund grant, and several residency grants. She teaches literary translation at Yale and is the managing editor of Yale French Studies.
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Notes
1. Univisión's “Encontrará un fuego y furia que el mundo jamás ha visto,” from http://www.univision.com/noticias/trump-amenaza-a-corea-del-norte-encontrara-un-fuego-y-furia-que-el-mundo-jamas-ha-visto-video; “Se encontrarán con fuego y furia,” from http://www.reporteindigo.com/; “[S]e verán fuego y furia,” from https://eldiariony.com/2017/08/08/trump-a-corea-del-norte-tendra-fuego-y-furia-como-el-mundo-nunca-ha-visto/
2. Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Sur (Buenos Aires) 68:3 (1940): 30–46. Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Labyrinths. Trans. James Irby. New York: New Directions, 1962. 18. I've had a bit to say about these lines in my “The Indecisive Muse: Ethics in Translation and the Idea of History.” Comparative Literature 60:4 (2008): 301–330.