From Speaking in Tongues, by J. M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos, which will be published this month by Liveright.
j. m. coetzee: I was writing something yesterday, concentrating intensely on getting into words a certain quality that belonged to a fictional character. I was sure that the word for that quality existed—I had it, so to speak, on the tip of my tongue. I went to my thesaurus and searched through list after list of synonyms or near synonyms of the missing word. Finally I had to give up. I wrote down the closest approximation I could find and moved on. The experience I am describing is a common one among writers of all kinds, and translators, too: the experience of being sure that the word—what you might call the magic word—exists, but being unable to find it, either in memory or in dictionaries.
If the word cannot be found, does it really exist? Is there truly, at this point, a gap between what we can think and what the language is able to express? Does there exist, so to speak, an arcane supplement to our dictionary in which all the missing words are listed, all the gaps are covered—a supplement that we will never get to see? Or—to be more down-to-earth—does the word that we cannot find in English (or whatever language we are writing in, living in) exist in some other language? Is that the reason why English adopts “naïve” from French and “kaput” from German—because they fill what we feel to be semantic gaps in English? If this is so, then the more languages we know, the more likely it becomes that the phenomenon of the inexact synonym will disappear. Somewhere, in one of the languages of the world, the exact word sits waiting. But how realistic is this hope, for the writer, for the translator?
mariana dimópulos: Let me try to provide some answer via the roundabout of a story. There is a former philosophy student living on the streets of Berlin who is said to be in search of “correct” words. I’m convinced I once saw him sitting by the automatic ticket machine on the platform of the Jannowitzbrücke station, tightly wrapped in filthy clothes against an icy current that blew across the platform. He was bending over a huge dictionary lying open in front of him. We have a portrait of this former student made by a young artist who had met the youth with the dictionary and asked him about his purpose in reading a thick edition of the Duden—the official German dictionary—one page after another. The homeless youth answered that he used to study philosophy at the university and was keen to write a theory of society but could not do so before getting the right words. Keeping on with formal studies at the university was pointless before settling this issue. Since then he had been concentrating all his efforts on the task, and he had found no better method than a close examination of every word available in German.
There is a natural instinct, of course, to see this student as a dubious figure, too scrupulous to achieve any substantial thought or comprehension of the world. Perhaps he suffers from some malady of the soul that would be labeled as a psychosis in our days and maybe as a form of melancholy in past times. I think, however, that we may see his ambition as legitimate. The story brought me back to an old habit of mine involving sticking yellow Post-its with quotations all over a little apartment I inhabited during my early youth. Among these phrases I once noted: please, bring new categories! Over the years, this little demand has remained stuck to the blackboard in the back of my mind, while almost all other Post-its are now missing. Here “categories” meant the truly significant words, the concepts that make us think accurately, providing suitable tools to examine people, experiences, and readings.
But who, exactly, was supposed to bring me these new categories I so badly needed, I didn’t know. In the resolution of the young man sitting on the platform and exposed to Berlin’s icy winter, I see this same urgency—and an answer to my question. Nobody but ourselves is in a position to bring the words desperately needed to think according to our present times. Over the years, I have come to this conclusion, which is neither easy nor painless. The phrase now reads: go and search for words. Maybe not following too rigid a pattern, like the former philosopher, but with that same conviction. Less desperately, in the more sober vein of thinking about language, its vagaries, pitfalls, and bliss.
coetzee: Your young student reminds me of Flaubert’s comic novel Bouvard et Pécuchet, the story of two middle-aged men who decide that, as a hobby during their years of retirement, they will become masters of all knowledge. What is it about your student that strikes us as tragic as well as comic? I suppose the fact that we can see him disappearing down a long road that leads nowhere. I am tempted to call out to him, “You do not become a philosopher by knowing words; you become a philosopher by having ideas!” First you must have the idea, then you can begin to find the words for it.
Yet the young man is not entirely wrong. What is the dictionary of a language, after all, but a map of the universe as the universe appears to the speakers of that language? So perhaps I ought to amend my advice to him: Do not memorize one dictionary alone, a dictionary of the German language; instead, memorize dictionaries of two languages, and then reflect on their differences, which are the differences between two conceptual maps of the same universe. Once you have completed that process of reflection, you will not necessarily have prepared yourself for a career in philosophy, but you will be equipped for a life as a translator.
If our two dictionaries provide two different maps of the universe, which one is true, or are both false? We have arrived, unexpectedly, at the Tower of Babel once again. The lesson that Babel is meant to teach us is that all dictionaries, insofar as they are dictionaries of post-Babel languages, are false. The only true dictionary is the lost one, the dictionary of the language that perished when the impious tower was built: the original language, God’s language. Is that language, in which each element of the universe bore its true name, lost forever? Not according to the mathematicians. According to the mathematicians, or some of them, math is a language—or a kind of language—in which it is possible to tell the truth about everything in the universe. A proposition expressed in German words is a proposition about the universe relative to the conceptual structure of the German language. It is, so to speak, a German proposition aspiring to be a German truth, neither absolutely true nor absolutely false; whereas a proposition expressed in mathematical terms is an absolute proposition, either absolutely true or absolutely false.
