3. PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD WRITING IN EXTERNAL LANGUAGES

How people understand the history of their language varies greatly. Some populations are less naïve than others. Whether through foreign domination or ethnic conflicts, their history has taught them to be less naïve. Others are relatively more naïve—including the Japanese, islanders whose language has never been threatened from either within or without. Ask them how they as a nation came to read and write, and they will most likely give a short and simple answer like this: “Since time immemorial, we Japanese have always spoken Japanese. One day, some people from the nearby Korean Peninsula brought over Chinese characters, which our ancestors adopted for their own use. They added some phonetic signs they themselves invented and so created their own system of writing. This is how Japanese people came to read and write Japanese.”

Such an answer isn’t entirely false. After all, an answer so vague can be interpreted in any number of ways. Yet it is built on one mistaken premise—a mistaken premise by no means unique to the historically naïve Japanese but prevalent today: that written language is a mere representation of spoken language. Such a premise not only misconstrues the essential nature of written language but also ignores human history. For during most of the six thousand–odd years since the human race discovered writing, people usually have not read and written the language they spoke. More often they read and wrote an “external language”—that is, the language of an older and greater neighboring civilization that exerted its influence in the region. Several such languages have thrived in various parts of the globe at various times in human history. These are what I call universal languages.

Beginning with this chapter, I will develop my argument around three main concepts: universal language, local language, and national language.The last concept, national language, needs some clarification. Though the term is not much used in English, it is a helpful one found in many languages, and the concept has been important in Japan since the Meiji Restoration. A national language is basically the same as the official language of a nation, but the expression underscores the emotional connection people have with their language as the language of their homeland. National language may hence be defined as the language that the citizens of a nation-state consider to be their own language.

Naturally, this definition is fraught with problems. First of all, the borders of a national language do not always correspond with the geographical borders of a nation-state. In many cases, the same national language is used in different regions of the world; in other cases, a single nation can have several “national languages,” since there are states with multiple official languages. In yet other instances, some nations have officially mandated a national language that is not used much in real life. I will not delve into these specifics. The history of human language is terribly messy and confusing. These three concepts—universal language, local language, national language—are merely tools for thinking as clearly as possible about the broad history of human language.

Two other expressions that have already come up in this book may need some clarification as well. First, the notion of a “bilingual.” The word, as generally used, has a strong connotation of someone with an ability to speak two languages. Here, since my discussion centers solely on the written language, “bilingual” is used to designate those people who can read and write a language other than their own, with a stronger emphasis on their ability to read. The second is the notion of the “non-West.” While it is a notion that is critical in understanding modernity, much ambiguity plagues the binary between West and non-West. Anglophone countries such as Australia and New Zealand can be categorized as belonging to the West, as well as countries like Hungary and Finland, both European nations using non-European languages. But what about a country like Israel, a Westernized nation using non-European languages and inhabited by many Semites? Or Mexico, which uses Spanish while the majority of its population is of mixed race? Again, I will not dwell on these subtle points and will simply emphasize that the notion of the non-West is here used as a cultural and linguistic concept and not a geographic or an ethnic one.

Let us begin by trying to better understand what a universal language is, for that will necessarily lead to a better understanding of both local and national languages. A brilliant and fascinating book—one that has had great influence worldwide over the past thirty years—gives us a perfect platform to think about the concept. It’s not that the book offers any insight into the nature of universal language itself. On the contrary, the book has surprisingly little to say about it. Yet the very absence of a true appreciation of universal language paradoxically reveals its primary function.

The book is Benedict Anderson’s now-classic Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.1 An analysis of the formation of modern nation-states, it is particularly well known among students of literature for the beginning section, in which Anderson discusses what turns out to be an inevitable relationship among national language, national literature, and nationalism. The book was published in 1983, and revised editions came out in 1991 and again in 2006. My own book would certainly not have been possible without Anderson’s work.

I will confine my discussion basically to the introduction and first three chapters of Imagined Communities, as I want to focus on Anderson’s understanding of the formation of national languages, not nation-states or nationalism, while fully recognizing that by so doing I am deviating from the main thesis of his book. Such a reading necessarily results in repeating the same “error” that many others seem to have committed and that Anderson laments in his preface to the second edition: it ignores one of the book’s critical points, expounded in chapter 4, which argues that nationalism had its origins in the New World. Yet to examine his erudite work in its entirety is beyond the scope of my book—not to mention my ability.

The essential thesis of the beginning section of Imagined Communities may be summarized as follows: a nation-state is not a natural entity. Today, much of humanity—except for those living in countries that have come into being only recently—tends to take the existence of nation-states for granted. Yet, Anderson argues, nation-states are merely “cultural artifacts” of modernity, created through intertwining forces of history. Once invented, however, they invoke deep attachments that often defy logic.

Let me start by applying this thesis to national language: a national language is not a natural entity. Aside from scholars of language, literature, or history, much of humanity is under the illusion that the language they now use is something their people have always used since ancient times. But just as with nation-states, national languages are nothing but “cultural artifacts” of modernity, created through intertwining historical forces. And yet once such languages come into existence, the historical process of their formation is forgotten, and people come to believe that their language is an expression of their deepest national—and ethnic—character. National languages give birth to national literatures; national literatures, in turn, help to build and solidify nation-states—the “imagined communities” for which millions of people in the past, present, and future sacrifice their lives.

What seems to me to be most innovative about Anderson’s understanding of the formation of national language—though apparently not everyone agrees—is his incorporation of the notion of “print capitalism” into his historical analysis. The invention of Gutenberg’s printing press in mid-fifteenth-century Europe made it possible to print mechanically what had previously been copied by hand; the enormous impact the invention had on the history of written language is now well established. Yet according to Anderson, this invention alone would not have led to a profound transformation in society unless printed books could be distributed as market commodities. (In fact, the printing press itself had been invented in China and Korea well before Gutenberg’s time.) The printing press proved transformational precisely because, in Europe, capitalism had by then developed to a point where books could circulate as market commodities. As books became commodities, they necessarily followed the market mechanism of supply and demand, eventually leading to the publication of books in what Anderson calls the “vernaculars,” which, in turn, led eventually to the formation of national languages.

Let us follow Anderson’s analysis in a little more detail by thinking about Europe just before Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. Nearly all books were sacred or exegetic texts that scribes copied by pen, word by word, onto parchment. And they were virtually all written in what was then the only written language for Europeans, Latin. What exactly is Latin? Anderson says, “The determinative fact about Latin—aside from its sacrality—was that it was a language of bilinguals.” Latin was hence the language of all those people who spoke in their mother tongue in the streets while reading and writing in this “external language” as they entered the world of books. The number of such bilinguals was naturally quite limited: “Their readers were, after all, tiny literate reefs on top of vast illiterate oceans.” Yet manually copying Latin one word at a time could not produce a sufficient number of books even for such a small pool of bilinguals. Then came Gutenberg. With his invention, the first printed edition of the Latin Bible, the Gutenberg Bible, was published and circulated in the market as “the first modern-style mass-produced industrial commodity.” Taking on the idea first put forward by Marshall McLuhan, to call the Gutenberg Bible a “mass-produced industrial commodity” is Anderson’s rhetorical device to highlight the role capitalism played in the process. The book was actually an exquisitely designed volume, a work of art. It was initially less expensive to have books copied by scribes than to have them printed by this precious machine. Even then, the Bible’s becoming a market commodity meant that there was already a sufficient number of people capable of buying such a luxury item—a sufficient number of consumers. In terms of laws of the market, there was sufficient demand to meet the supply.

According to Anderson, the “vernacular revolution”—which later enabled the emergence of national language—took place as the next inevitable stage, complying with the same laws of the market. The Gutenberg Bible was followed by the publication of various books in Latin. However, those who could read Latin were limited to “a wide but thin stratum” of society, and the market was soon saturated. To create a new market, the laws of the market dictated that books written in the language of the street must come into circulation: “The logic of capitalism thus meant that once the elite Latin market was saturated, the potentially huge markets represented by the monoglot masses would beckon.” Thus came “the vernacular revolution.” One by one, various spoken languages in Europe were transformed into written languages, printed, and published. In Anderson’s terminology, various “vernaculars” became “print languages.” First to appear in these new print languages were translations of Latin, soon followed by books written directly in the print languages. In its social status, a print language ranked below Latin but above the vernacular, which was basically a spoken language.

Countless vernaculars existed in Europe, unique to each locality and class, akin to countless dialects coexisting in a region. In contrast, there could be only so many print languages, for in order for a book to make a profit as a “mass-produced industrial commodity,” it needed to be published on a certain scale, which necessarily limited the number of print languages. Thus, following the vernacular revolution, countless vernaculars all over Europe were eventually subsumed into several important print languages: English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Danish, Russian, Polish, and so forth. And these print languages came to be shared by millions of people in each region.

The development from the vernacular revolution to the creation of the languages of nation-states did not progress at a uniform pace in Europe: some European languages emerged as the language of a nation-state as early as the sixteenth or seventeenth century; others, as late as the twentieth century. Nonetheless, with the combination of the invention of print technology, the development of capitalism, and what Anderson calls “the fatality of human linguistic diversity,” this progression was perhaps inevitable, and the process, largely unself-conscious. And once these print languages began circulating as the languages of emerging nation-states, they gave birth to a strong conviction among their populations that those who shared the same language belonged to the same community—the “imagined community.” Whence arose nationalism, which these emerging states soon deliberately exploited. Europe’s path since then was one in which states consciously manipulated nationalism as they went through conflicts over colonial territories, wars of independence, and border disputes. Furthermore, the nation-states that emerged in Europe provided a “module” for other regions that spread all over the world, along with nationalism.

Anderson writes:

Finally, [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. (Emphasis in original)

Contributing to the growth of nationalism was the spread of print media such as newspapers and, yes, national literature. National literature made it possible for an individual living in a nation-state to imagine fellow subjects inhabiting the same space at the same moment and to feel a sense of camaraderie with them. National language, the medium of national literature, was embraced as the essential expression of national character shared by all countrymen.

A good illustration of this sentiment is quoted in Imagined Communities from the late-eighteenth-century German philosopher and literary critic Johann Gottfried von Herder. Anderson cites the original German: “Denn jedes Volk ist Volk; es hat seine National Bildung wie seine Sprache” (emphasis in original). In other words, for every people is a People; it has its own national character expressed through its own language.

Now that I look back with these words in mind, all of us IWP writers in Iowa who were writing in our own language, shutting ourselves up every night in our hotel rooms, had a great task weighing on our shoulders: representing the “Volk.”

In the thirty years since the first publication of Imagined Communities in 1983, the world has changed considerably. For one thing, the fall of the Soviet Union rendered obsolete Anderson’s critiques of Marxist internationalism while further demonstrating how right he was in emphasizing the importance of nationalism in modernity. Imagined Communities continues to be essential reading for scholars and students. And yet, as a nonnative speaker of English, I cannot help sensing a strange lacuna in the book—a lacuna that, as more time passes, begins to seem like a selective blindness: there is no discussion anywhere of English turning into a formidable universal language above and beyond all others. English is treated as merely one of many national languages; it may be the most powerful, but only primus inter pares, first among equals. Anderson completely ignores the reality that English is becoming a language that functions on a different level from all other languages. Why does he fail to mention this? Could it be because thirty years ago there was not yet widespread recognition of English dominance? Or is it perhaps because the new technology that further accelerates the circulation of English—the Internet—was not yet widely available? As it turns out, these factors apparently had very little to do with Anderson’s omission.

Not that the growing dominance of the English language continued to escape his attention as the years went by. In 2005, more than a decade after the second, enlarged edition of Imagined Communities was published in 1991, Anderson delivered two lectures in English at Waseda University in Tokyo. The lectures were published in a book in Japanese the same year. With a gentle, self-deprecating tone that comes through in the translation, he reflects on issues that he should have included but did not, even in the second edition of his book. English as today’s universal language is not among them. And yet his lecture concludes with a strongly worded message that English alone will not do—an indication that he is quite aware of the language’s growing dominance. Here are his final comments to the Japanese audience:

Before I conclude, I just want to emphasize the following.

In those days of “early globalization,” and I think it’s still true, there was an enormous amount of energy going into people learning to speak other languages, read other languages, to pass on information, pass on use, pass on thinking, pass on feelings, from one language to another.

What is really impressive, if you look at, for example, the correspondence of Filipino nationalists at the end of the 19th century, is that they were writing in Spanish, writing in English to Japanese, writing in French to French comrades, writing in German to scholars who were supporting the cause. They were making every effort to reach out across the globe, and certainly this was true of Chinese, Japanese, and many other people. That is, they were not interested in simply acquiring some master language for business. They were interested in entering into the mental world—getting emotional affiliation with people of other linguistic groups. And this is still extraordinarily important. That is, people who think that there are only two languages in the world worth learning, Japanese and English, are fooling themselves. There are many important and beautiful languages. Real international understanding can only come from this kind of inter-linguistic communication. English can’t do it. I promise you. Thank you very much.2

One can almost hear the Japanese audience breaking into spontaneous and enthusiastic applause upon Anderson’s reassurance: “I promise you.” Well, the audience may have been reassured by his words and applauded wildly at that moment, but how many among them, on coming home and resuming their everyday life, would follow his advice and start studying Spanish, French, German, or Indonesian, for that matter? How many would decide that their children need not learn English?

Anderson’s awareness of the dominance of the English language becomes even more manifest in the third edition of Imagined Communities, published in 2006, which includes a new concluding chapter. The new chapter traces the unexpected trajectory of the book’s reception in the world through translations, scheduled to number twenty-nine by the end of 2007. Anderson then goes on to call the English language “post-clerical Latin”: “This spread has much less to do with [my book’s] qualities than with its original publication in London, in the English language, which now serves as a kind of global-hegemonic, post-clerical Latin.” How right he is in his claim that the spread of his book is directly related to its being written in English and published in London. I say this not to disparage the quality of a book that I greatly admire, but as a plain fact. (Only books written in Standard English and published in major cities in the West circulate worldwide at this stage.) How right he is, moreover, in finally equating English with Latin. And yet Anderson seemingly has no interest in making use of this equation to begin to understand the true nature of universal language. On the contrary, he uses the very spread of his book around the world in diverse languages through translation to assert the strength of national languages: “On the other hand, this proliferation of translations suggests that the force of vernacularization, which, in alliance with print capitalism, eventually destroyed the hegemony of Church Latin and was midwife to the birth of nationalism, remains strong half a millennium later.”

The reader is left wondering whether the force of vernacularization—the force of national languages—will eventually destroy the hegemony of English as well.

Anderson’s position never wavers from that of multilingualism, a typical position taken by European intellectuals; it is a position that still resonates strongly in Europe, where a rich civilization was created through tensions among many languages. The European Union actively advocates multilingualism as an ideal, and currently the union of twenty-eight member nations has twenty-four official languages; member nations strive to train their children to be polyglots. Yet it is an indisputable fact that English dominates as a de facto common language within the EU—as in most other international institutions. I myself am a supporter of multilingualism, but multilingualism without a true understanding of universal language will only make us blind and ultimately ineffectual in realizing that very ideal.

Why did Anderson fail to see that English, or any other universal language, plays a unique role? I understand the inherent unfairness in posing such a question to the author of Imagined Communities, which, after all, is a book about the formation of nation-states, nationalism, and national languages (“print languages”). One cannot ask a book that treats oranges why it fails to treat apples. Yet I’m unable to resist the temptation to ask the question because Anderson’s blindness—which persists for nearly a quarter century, from the first edition of Imagined Communities to the revised—seems to typify the general blindness of those whose mother tongue is English. That Anderson was born in 1936 in Kunming, China, that he is multilingual, and that he is fluent in a relatively minor language like Indonesian does not change the fact that his mother tongue is English, that he was educated in English, and that he, quite naturally, writes in English. Those whose mother tongue is English often are unaware that when they are writing in their own language, they are in fact writing in a universal language. They are unaware of what they would be deprived of if they were writing in a nonuniversal language—beyond the sheer number of readers. To apply the phrase I used in the talk I gave in Paris, they are not condemned to reflect on language in the way the rest of us are.

Moreover, the naïveté of Anderson—who is anything but naïve as a thinker—on this topic seems almost inevitable when one takes a closer look at who he is. He is not simply someone whose mother tongue is English. Born of an Irish father and an English mother, he has kept his Irish citizenship when he could have become British or even American. We all know that the Irish are a people with strong literary talent and tradition who have produced an amazing—given the small size of the population—number of writers, including Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, all of whom greatly enriched English literature. Yet not many of us are aware that Ireland’s first official language today is not English but Irish Gaelic. Hence the Irish people, while taking full advantage of their mother tongue of English, proudly claim Gaelic as their own language—a language that only about 5 percent of Ireland’s population actually use on a regular basis. In 2007, they even succeeded in registering Irish Gaelic as an official EU language. The Irish people’s proud embrace of Gaelic has its roots in the country’s centuries-long virtual colonization by Great Britain, resulting in not only the tyranny of English rule but also the forced use of the English language. Since 1949, when Ireland finally and completely won independence, the Gaelic revival has been an important part of state policy. Government documents are now routinely written in both languages, and compulsory education devotes a significant amount of time to teaching Gaelic, so the language is gaining ground. Nonetheless, Ireland’s goal is to become a bilingual nation. It has no intention of abandoning English and turning Irish Gaelic into its citizens’ mother tongue. Indeed, Ireland’s policy of protecting its own language is among the most enviable in the world; it is akin to someone who lives in a sumptuous palace putting up a shack with a thatched roof on the grounds in order to enjoy a bit of rustic life.

On a theoretical level, we can trace Anderson’s blindness to his (mis)understanding of what he calls “sacred languages.” In his terminology, sacred languages are what we have been calling “external languages”—the languages of old, great civilizations that exerted influence on their neighbors. They are the universal languages of the past. In Anderson’s words, long before the birth of nation-states, much of humanity belonged to “religiously imagined communities”: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism (though Confucianism is not a religion). And it was sacred languages that made membership in such communities possible: Latin of the Christian Bible, Arabic of the Qur’an, Pali and Sanskrit of Buddhist scriptures, and Chinese of both Buddhist scriptures and texts like the Analects of Confucius. The Hellenistic Greek of the Greek philosophers, as well as other influential languages, may also be included among them.

What was the distinctive character of these sacred languages? For Anderson, a sacred language like Latin was not only “a language of bilinguals” but, more important, a language used by a minority: “Relatively few were born to speak [Latin] and even fewer, one imagines, dreamed in it.” His understanding that a sacred language was used by bilinguals leads him directly and inescapably to the understanding that it was used by only a small number of people, a minority he refers to as the “elite” or “high intelligentsia.”

In fact, “arcane” is Anderson’s word of choice in describing Latin, the sacred language of Europe. He repeatedly uses the word to emphasize his understanding of a sacred language as one that is comprehensible to only a few. The word itself derives from the Latin arcanus, which means “closed” or “hidden”; arcanus in turn derives from arca, meaning “a chest.” Thus if the sacred language is “arcane,” texts written in it are, for the vast majority of people, hidden in “a chest”—or, to use the expression of the Internet age, something people cannot access. Because of this “arcane” nature, the sacred language inevitably came to be abused by the literate minority, who constituted “adepts, strategic strata in a cosmological hierarchy of which the apex was divine.” To hold on to their power, these people kept the acts of reading and writing “arcane.” Indeed, for a thousand years, translating the Latin Bible into other languages was forbidden. Anderson points out that even at the dawn of the Reformation, the Roman papacy, struggling to protect its Latin fortress, compiled the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of prohibited books) to prevent the spread of vernacular publications. In Imagined Communities, sacred languages thus end up as a villainous tool through which past oppressors tried to entrap the masses in ignorance.

Here, I think, is where Anderson stops too short. Even if a sacred language such as Latin came to function as an instrument of oppression by the few, that is not where its essence lay. Anderson, blessed with having a universal language as his mother tongue, could afford not to see any further. In fact, a sacred language is open, quite the opposite of arcane, and this openness indeed is the defining trait of a universal language. For though comprehensible to only a limited number of bilinguals, sacred language made it possible for bilinguals speaking diverse languages and living in diverse places during the millennium of Latin’s ascendancy to communicate with one another in writing. Sacred language was the sole common language, the sole means of understanding one another, in a world of countless vernaculars. Far from being “hidden in a chest,” a sacred language was actually a language open to the world.

WHAT IS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE?

Let me depart from Imagined Communities here and return to my initial question: What is a universal language? I consider it to be the language that most clearly defines the difference between written language and spoken language. A spoken word disappears into thin air the moment it is uttered. In contrast, a written word remains and can be copied. Not only can it be copied, but it also can be spread. The Rosetta Stone, onto which three ancient writings are carved, weighs approximately 760 kilograms (1,675 pounds) and cannot be moved by the mightiest of men. If successive generations always had to travel across oceans and mountains to Egypt to read what was carved on it, the Rosetta Stone would have made hardly any impact on humanity. The advent of parchment and paper made the written word something that could be copied again and again and spread afar, reaching speakers of different languages in distant lands, some of whom would learn to read and then to write that “external language”—the universal language. It is thanks to these characteristics specific to written words that humans have had the means to accumulate a wealth of knowledge over the centuries.

Homo sapiens means “wise man.” And we humans are wise not only because we are more intelligent than other animals, but also because we seek knowledge and can hand down the knowledge we attain to following generations, through words. The invention of written language did not make us any more intelligent, but it allowed us to accumulate knowledge exponentially—which brings us to this conclusion: if all people in the world read and wrote a single written language, regardless of their spoken language, our pool of knowledge would expand most efficiently. I’m not here referring to all sorts of knowledge, but to knowledge with more or less universal applicability. In fact, the more universally applicable knowledge is, the more efficient it would be to expand it in a single written language. Our pursuit of knowledge in mathematics, the purest of the sciences, is conducted in a single common written language, the language of mathematics. This written language is comprehensible everywhere in the world, no matter what language a person speaks. Mathematical language, which isn’t anyone’s mother tongue, is the purest form of universal language.

No one knows for certain the origin of written language. It may have been invented to record trade, or it may have its roots in magical rituals. Yet one thing is clear: the birth of a writing system is extremely rare. Most of the writing systems that exist today are derived from some script that became a template for future variations. For the overwhelming majority of humans, written language was not something that they invented on their own but rather something that came to them from their neighbors.

Every culture begins as an oral culture, and at some point, some of them have a transformative first encounter with a writing system. Yet the transformation from oral culture to written does not take place just because a writing system arrives one day from next door. People do not immediately say, “My, my, here we have this wonderful thing, now let’s try using it to write our own language,” and suddenly create a written culture. Possession of a spade and a hoe does not turn people into farmers overnight; becoming a farmer requires an understanding of the meaning of farming. The principle is even truer when it comes to something as complicated as writing. Besides, what initially arrives from a neighboring community is not writing as an abstract entity but concrete items such as scrolls with writing on them. And the transformation of a culture from oral to written requires that a small number of people learn to read those scrolls, written in the “external language.” It requires the emergence of a cadre of bilinguals.

Those scrolls may come in different ways: from enemies in war, from partners in trade, or from refugees arriving in waves. They may be brought as gifts from an emperor, carried preciously above the messenger’s head; or by monks as part of their missionary enterprise; or yet again as words of heresy hidden deep in the pockets of exiles. Yet scrolls, even if they are placed in a golden box, differ from other treasures in a critical way. They surely need to exist as physical objects, but without the act of reading, they are nothing more than sheets of parchment or paper decorated with dots and squiggles. The essence of the written word lies not in the written word itself but in the act of reading.

Something critical happens when the cadre of bilinguals learns to read imported scrolls: they gain entry into a library. I use the word “library” to refer not to a physical building but, more broadly, to the collectivity of accumulated writings. Despite the historical vicissitudes of wars, fires, floods, and even book burnings, humans possess an ever-increasing store of writings, the totality of which is what I call the library.The transformation of an oral culture into a written one means, first and foremost, the potential entry of bilinguals into a library.

The importance of access to a library cannot be overemphasized. For if, after being introduced to writing, Homo sapiens became “wise men” on a totally different level, this change certainly did not come about because people were able to memorize all they read. The memory of an elderly sage in an oral culture would surely trump that of any bilingual in a written culture. No, what transformed Homo sapiens into those with knowledge on a higher level was people’s newfound ability to enter, through the act of reading, the library of accumulated human knowledge. And doing so usually meant reading a universal language, necessitating that the reader be bilingual.

Some may object to this statement, pointing out, for instance, that the ancient Romans read and wrote the same Latin that they spoke. Such an objection is founded on the familiar, false premise that written language is a mere representation of spoken language. It ignores the fact that before those Romans began to read and write in Latin, they read and wrote in Koine Greek—a language that combined different dialects with Attic Greek, the Athenian dialect—which was then the universal language of the area around the eastern Mediterranean Sea. If Cato the Elder (234–149 B.C.E.) had not begun writing Latin prose, the Romans might well have continued to write in Greek. Educated Romans naturally remained bilingual even in the golden age of Latin literature. Any description of the prose of Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.) or Seneca (ca. 4 B.C.E.–65 C.E.) as “literary” is also founded on the premise that written language is a direct representation of spoken language—a premise that until modern times no one entertained even with their own language.

Needless to say, there was not just one library but various libraries in different regions, according to the reigning universal language. And all these various libraries initially centered on the most important written words of each region, the sacred texts—records of words uttered or written by those believed to have attained the kind of knowledge impossible for ordinary human beings to attain: Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, Christ, and Mohammad among them. For those who sought higher knowledge, the sacred texts were the “texts to read.”

Now a question emerges: What kind of people want to read a universal language, a language that is often quite dissimilar to the one they speak? To put it another way, what kind of people go to the considerable trouble of becoming bilingual to gain entry to the library of an “external language”? In fact, all human beings seek knowledge from the time of birth. In all corners of the world, children start school with eager eyes. Yet those for whom becoming bilingual is essential, the ones I call “seekers of knowledge,” are a breed apart.

Seekers of knowledge do not necessarily have noble minds; they are not necessarily courageous or fair or kind. They are simply driven by a stronger desire than others to know more. Historically, becoming bilingual required a high level of education. Those who could afford such an education were men of the privileged class. Even in that limited strata, those for whom becoming bilingual was essential were extremely few. Nonetheless, those few have existed in every stage of history, in every region of the world. And the “texts to read” accumulate further as some of those bilinguals begin not only to read but also to write.

For bilinguals, in the beginning, sacred texts were not only the texts they ought to read—or, more probably, to chant or recite. They were also something to reverently copy by hand. Yet as the seekers of knowledge read and copied the sacred texts, they were bound to take up writing themselves. Some would inevitably be tempted to write down their interpretations as addenda. Others would then be tempted to add their own interpretations as further addenda. And as such notes grew in volume, they would be compiled as hermeneutic texts. Soon there would be many hermeneutic texts, and later seekers of knowledge would try to discern which among them were superior; they would eventually turn those into new sacred texts and objects of interpretation, and start creating new hermeneutic texts about them. Later seekers of knowledge would do the same ad infinitum, creating a longer and longer chain of texts to be read. The act of writing that led to this accumulation of sacred texts was derivative of the act of reading, but the process was inevitable.

Universal language was the perfect medium for such a process to unfold. Though universal language is often used in trade for the sake of convenience, or in diplomacy to follow the dictates of custom or international law, its essence comes to light when it is used in the pursuit of knowledge. The validity of the knowledge one has acquired becomes apparent only through attaining the assessment of as many fellow seekers of knowledge as possible, a purpose best served by universal language. Before modernity, much of learning was confined to exegesis of sacred texts—in a word, theology. And theology, as the pursuit of knowledge, was carried out in various universal languages in various regions of the world.

THE ROLE OF LATIN AND THE BIRTH OF NATIONAL LANGUAGES IN EUROPE

When we examine western Europe and the role Latin played there as the language used in the pursuit of knowledge, a very different picture emerges from the one portrayed in Imagined Communities.The period that interests us starts just before the Renaissance, when Europeans were being reexposed—often through Holy Wars—via Arabic translation to Greek philosophy, which had lapsed into oblivion in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire and was preserved only in Islamic territories. Arabic translations were then translated into Latin. Through the writings of great scholars like Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), Latin became a highly speculative language, one that could easily step beyond the boundaries of theology. Then with the waning of the power of the Church came the Renaissance. No longer confined to the sphere of Christian theology, Latin began functioning as the language of learning in totally different dimensions, playing a crucial role in Europe’s bid to become the world’s dominant power.

One such dimension was the natural sciences. As is evident from the phrase “Copernican Revolution,” Nicolaus Copernicus made one of the truly great discoveries in the history of the human race: he found the contradictions in Scholastic geocentrism and advocated heliocentrism. He was born in 1473 in what is now Poland. Later, in 1609, sixty-six years after Copernicus’s death, Galileo Galilei proved the veracity of heliocentrism using the telescope. Galileo was born in what is now Italy, more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) from Copernicus’s Polish home.3 Then came Johannes Kepler, Galileo’s contemporary who defended his theory. Kepler was born in what is now Germany. Finally, in 1687, Isaac Newton provided mathematical proofs for the findings of both Galileo and Kepler. Newton was born across the channel, in England. The most important route traveled by modern science—from Copernicus to Newton—was a long journey that crisscrossed Europe, starting in Poland, moving through Italy and Germany, and reaching England nearly two centuries later. And this journey was made possible solely thanks to Latin: all these men published their major works in that universal language.

The same was true of thinkers in what is now called the humanities. Erasmus (1466–1536), the author of In Praise of Folly and one of the greatest Humanists, played a major role in Europe’s shift from a religious world to a secular one. He was born in the Netherlands but lived, studied, and taught all over Europe—Paris, Leuven, Cambridge, Venice, Turin, Freiburg, and Basel. He exchanged an astonishing volume of correspondence in Latin with politicians and philosophers throughout Europe, becoming friends with Thomas More (1478–1535) while disagreeing with Martin Luther (1483–1546). Not only Erasmus—and More and Luther—but many others wrote their major works in Latin: Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who was born in England; Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), a descendant of Sephardic Portuguese Jews who was born in the Netherlands; Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), who was born in what is now Germany.

These men were all great seekers of knowledge whose names are familiar throughout the world. Yet rarely do we note that they all wrote in Latin. Scholarly writings generally have value independent of the language in which they are written. Moreover, because these men wrote in Latin, we often have only a vague idea of what country they were from or what their mother tongue was.

All this leads us to a simple conclusion: pursuing knowledge in disparate languages is uneconomical; a universal language is more efficient by far. Nonetheless, as we are all too aware, human society comprises many disparate languages; to quote Benedict Anderson again, we live with “the fatality of human linguistic diversity.” And uneconomical though it may be to pursue knowledge in disparate languages, we humans started doing just that at a certain point in our history—that is, since the birth of national languages and nation-states. Before we ask how it was possible for people to pursue knowledge in disparate languages, we must first have a better understanding of what a national language is. And before we do so, we must first have a better understanding of what a local language is. The roles of these three kinds of languages can be grasped only in relation to one another.

Both theoretically and historically, a local language is a concept that forms a binary with, and is juxtaposed against, a universal language. People may live in a society where a cadre of bilinguals read, write, and sometimes even speak a universal language, but even those bilinguals use their mother tongue at home and on the streets like everyone else. That is their local language. Whether the local language has a writing system is irrelevant. What is relevant is that when two languages, the universal and the local, circulate simultaneously in a given society, there inevitably emerges a division of labor between them. The universal, which society places above the local, is assigned the heavy responsibility of aspiring to the highest excellence, not only aesthetically but also intellectually and ethically. In contrast, even if it has a writing system, the lower-ranking local language is primarily intended for only uneducated men and women. Plays, which must be understood by the listening audience, are usually written in local language, as are poems, which are often sung, but serious prose written in local language is extremely rare. A local language may at times be given the task of aspiring to aesthetic or even ethical excellence, but seldom if ever to intellectual excellence.

What, then, is a national language? I would say that it is an elevated form of a local language. And what has elevated local languages, thereby providing the key to the birth of a national language? The perhaps surprising answer I would propose is the act of translation.The role of translation has been under valued or, worse, ignored in our understanding of the history of human languages, especially in modernity, when emphasis is placed on the author as the original subject of meaning. Yet it was through the very act of translation that what had once merely been a local language came to function on the same level as a universal language; that is, it came to be burdened with the task of aspiring to the highest excellence not only aesthetically and ethically but also intellectually. Hence the birth of a national language. While the birth of nation-states was a historical prerequisite for the emergence of national languages, this rather formalistic understanding of how national languages are born helps to better explain their nature.

Because we are deeply immersed in what might be called the “ideology of national language”—because we have so deeply internalized the premise that writing is a representation of speech—we have come to assume that writing means writing in one’s own language. And because of that assumption, we have come to forget the critical role that the act of translation originally played in the development of national language. Historically, translation was necessarily an asymmetrical endeavor (as it still is, in its essence). It assumed the existence of a clear hierarchy between two languages. It was not about translating English into French or German, say, but about translating Latin (the universal language) into various vernacular languages of Europe. For the essence of translation lies first and foremost in the transference of accumulated knowledge otherwise inaccessible—and by extension, ways of thinking otherwise impossible—from a universal language into a lower one, the local language. Through repeated transference, a local language gradually and eventually developed a written language capable of functioning on the same level as the universal language. And so, along with the nation-state, national languages were born.

A caveat. As a novelist, I myself find it unsettling to define the act of translation in such terms. Translating literature is an artistic task that cannot possibly be reduced to the mere transference of knowledge or ways of thinking; indeed, translation can even result in a text of a higher level of excellence than the original. Yet if we take a step back and reflect on the history of human writing, it is difficult to deny that such was its principal function.

With this in mind, let us return to western Europe, where nation-states first emerged, and see how, at the same time, national languages emerged from Latin. Our picture looks quite different from the one Anderson depicts in Imagined Communities. Because Anderson tries to understand the process in terms of market mechanisms, he basically sees the relationship between Latin and the “vernacular” in terms of numbers: after the small Latin market came the large vernacular market for the “monoglot masses.” This description, though certainly not untrue, ignores the critical role played by the act of translation. It makes it seem as if some members of the monoglot masses just went on to write books in their own language to fill the ever-expanding market, when it was translations from Latin that first appeared—a fact he glosses over. Soon books written in vernaculars began to appear, and they themselves were then translated into Latin so that they could be read by bilinguals with a different mother tongue. Through this vibrant two-way process, local languages transformed into national languages in the course of a few hundred years.

Just as the role of translators has been undervalued or ignored in the history of written language, so has the role of bilinguals. If the act of translation was key to the transformation of local languages into national languages, the work of these bilinguals was no less so. Bilinguals were not necessarily translators in a literal sense. Often they were writers who wrote in both universal and local languages. And if national language owed its birth to universal language, it is perhaps no wonder that so many of those who are considered the father of a national language were themselves true bilinguals (or trilinguals even, especially if we include classical Greek).

One seminal bilingual was Dante Alighieri (ca. 1265–1321), who wrote the Divine Comedy in the early fourteenth century. As is well known, the Tuscan dialect he used in the work later became the normative written language for Italian, making him the father of the Italian language. He did not write only in Italian, however. He had recourse to Latin when writing prose. In fact, his very defense of the vernacular language, De Vulgari Eloquentia (On eloquence in the vernacular), was written in Latin. Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), born half a century later, also are regarded as fathers of the Italian language, and they too wrote Latin prose. Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1325), their contemporary across the channel, is often considered the father of English literature, yet even he was versed in Latin and translated the Latin philosopher Boethius. Consider also Luther: his early-sixteenth-century German translation of the Bible—the New Testament was from the original Greek—became the model for today’s German language, while at the same time, having been trained as a monk, he naturally read and wrote Latin on a regular basis, leaving his will in Latin as a matter of course. The Frenchman Joachim du Bellay (ca. 1522–1560), born nearly half a century after Luther, fought for the French language; a member of a group of French Renaissance poets, the Pléiade, he wrote a famous manifesto entitled “The Defense and Illustration of the French Language” that advocated the elevation of the French language to the excellence of classical Greek and Latin. Well versed in Latin, du Bellay not only borrowed expressions from classical literature in his French poems but also wrote poems in Latin. Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), who came a little later, grew up in a home where everyone, including well-chosen servants, spoke Latin just so that he would prattle in that august language from his infancy. And it was the Latin-prattling Montaigne who wrote the essays that laid the foundation for French prose. This bilingualism persisted into the next century. René Descartes’s famous phrase, “I think, therefore I am,” is equally well known in Latin (Cogito ergo sum) and in French (Je pense, donc je suis), precisely because Descartes (1596–1650) wrote in both languages. These and many more bilingual men were all translators in a broad sense, and it is from their writings that national languages grew into what they are today.

Let us examine this development using the concept of the library. Before the Renaissance, there was only the Latin, or universal, library. And then, with the Renaissance, came the rediscovered Greek library, another universal library. At the same time, the number of books in local languages grew, starting with books in translation, until there eventually came to be many libraries, each in a different European language. A clear hierarchical relationship initially existed between the two universal libraries and the many local libraries, not only because the former enjoyed a higher social status but also because they had accumulated vaster knowledge and hence more texts demanding to be read. Both in quantity and in quality, their collections were far superior. Local languages transformed into national languages as, through translations from the universal to local languages, the accumulated knowledge in the universal libraries was steadily transferred to local libraries. The latter gradually caught up in quantity and quality and eventually surpassed the former—at least insofar as the accumulation of universally applicable knowledge is concerned. Seekers of knowledge who previously haunted the universal libraries now turned increasingly to the libraries of national languages. Indeed, by the late twentieth century, five centuries on, classical education in Latin and Greek had largely disappeared from the school curriculum. The once glorious, flourishing libraries of those universal languages were reduced to cobwebby book deposits frequented only by specialists.

THE EUROPEAN EXCEPTION

Now we are ready to ask the questions: How was it possible to pursue knowledge in disparate languages? Wouldn’t the attempt be self-defeating? What does it mean to pursue scholarship in various national languages?

These questions necessarily lead us to take a look at the Enlightenment, the first intellectual movement to sweep through Europe in different national languages. The movement began to blossom in the late seventeenth century. John Locke (1632–1704) first wrote in Latin but switched to English in midlife. David Hume (1711–1776) and Adam Smith (1723–1790) wrote in English from the beginning. Across the English Channel, Montesquieu (1689–1755), Voltaire (1694–1778), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) all wrote in French. Across the Rhine, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) wrote entirely in German except for the academic papers he needed to obtain his university position. The Age of Enlightenment was when many of the fundamental concepts that define the society we live in first came into being: “human rights,” “natural law,” “separation of powers.” And the thinkers who gave birth to these concepts all wrote in their own language. This being the case, the answer to the question of whether it is really possible to pursue knowledge in various national languages would appear to be a resounding yes. Evidently, it is indeed possible to write exclusively in one’s own language and still enrich all humanity in a critical way.

But our “yes” has an important qualification: the pursuit of knowledge was conducted in diverse languages during the Enlightenment, but they were all European languages.The countries of Europe do not simply share a history, culture, and religion. They also share a language in the sense that nearly all European languages derive from the same origin and then were heavily influenced by Greek and Latin as they matured, allowing them to share abstract concepts. As a result, European intellectuals were able to read more than one foreign language in addition to Latin and Greek as a matter of course. It was only because of this unique linguistic condition, confined geographically to Europe, that they were able to pursue knowledge efficiently even when national languages replaced Latin as a tool for learning.

If we look at the Age of Enlightenment solely from the perspective of the marketplace, as Anderson might do, we see that while sales of books in Latin diminished, sales of books in national languages steadily increased. This might suggest that as European intellectuals turned away from Latin, they began to read only what was written in their own languages. If, however, we look at the same historical period through the concept of the library rather than the market, we see a very different picture. For even as European intellectuals entered the age of national languages and read less Latin, they did not frequent only the library of their own language. They slipped into and out of other libraries as well. The Enlightenment thinkers I mentioned earlier could read one another’s work in the original and had personal interactions across the channel or the Rhine.

Moreover, three principal languages that became the de facto universal languages of Europe compensated for the lack of a universal language: French, English, and a newcomer, German. (Though widely used under the reign of the Hapsburgs, German became a national language only in the eighteenth century, when hundreds of small nations were consolidated into the Kingdom of Prussia.) Other key languages—Danish, for instance—also came to bear double duty as national and universal languages in their own regions, but eventually, to reduce the time and effort spent on language study, European intellectuals settled on a tripolar system with French, English, and German as the main means of exchange. Once translated into one of these three languages, books originally written in less major languages became available to a wide readership. (Naturally, when Europe expanded its colonies, intellectuals worldwide set out to learn the three languages—with heroic, heartbreaking effort.)

What comes to the fore as Europe enters the age of national languages is, first of all, a fundamental asymmetry between the act of reading and the act of writing. Reading several foreign languages was one thing, but writing in all of them would require either extraordinary virtuosity or staggering effort. Hence, in contrast to the millennium when Latin ruled, the Enlightenment was a time when intellectuals read and wrote in different languages. They became polyglot readers and monoglot writers who wrote in their mother tongue.

This development would have far-reaching consequences. Humans have made great discoveries in the course of history. I would not go so far as to suggest that the emergence of national languages is of equal importance to the discovery of fire or the invention of money or writing. Nevertheless, the spread of the notion that our writing system ought to represent the language we speak was a critical step in the evolution of human civilization.

First, this notion led to far higher rates of literacy among populations—a prerequisite for the emergence of democracy, itself a prerequisite for the formation of modern nation-states. (Even nations that are in fact totalitarian promote literacy in order to uphold the banner of “democracy.”) The acts of reading and writing were now within the reach of every citizen who spoke the language. Literacy rates climbed even higher as spoken language came to resemble written language more closely.

Moreover, together with the emergence of nation-states and nationalism, the democratic nature of national language soon gave rise to the “ideology of national language.” This ideology—best articulated, as we have seen, in Anderson’s quotation of von Herder, “Denn jedes Volk ist Volk; es hat seine National Bildung wie seine Sprache” (For every people is a People; it has its own national character expressed through its own language)—led to the idea that it was an obligation of the educated to write in their own language. By so doing, they would not only enable their compatriots to read what they wrote but simultaneously enrich their national culture. Intellectuals whose mother tongue had not yet fully matured as a written language felt this obligation even more acutely.

What happened in Russia is a case in point. Though the Russian language had a large number of speakers, it was late in establishing itself as a national language, the country being relatively less developed. As is widely known, French was the court language of the Romanov dynasty (1613–1917); it was also the language aristocrats used in everyday conversation. (Tolstoy’s War and Peace opens with a splash of aristocratic French.) Slightly down the scale, high society routinely used French and German and, more rarely, English. Educated Russians hence wrote in one of the three principal languages as a matter of course. First came Alexander Pushkin, the father of modern Russian literature. Born in 1799, he wrote in French when he was young. Yet as the “ideology of national language” spread to Russia, in the 1820s he began writing poetry in Russian, and by the 1830s he was writing prose fiction in Russian as well. Shortly thereafter, with breathtaking speed, came Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852), Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883), Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), and Anton Chekhov (1860–1904). Around the same time, thinkers such as Vissarion Belinski (1811–1848), Alexander Herzen (1812–1870), and Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) also appeared. Thus Russian, which had only a few decades earlier been a mere local language, was transformed into a national language used for the pursuit of learning.

By the mid-nineteenth century, many Europeans came to believe, almost religiously, that they ought to write in their own language even when writing learned books—and even when to do so might pose obvious disadvantages. Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), the Danish philosopher who paved the way for existentialism in the twentieth century, offers such an example. An avid reader of German literature, Kierkegaard could doubtless have written in German, a language closely resembling his mother tongue. Yet he made a point of writing his critique of Hegelian philosophy in Danish, a major language to be sure but not in the same league as German. Because he wrote in his mother tongue, his works such as Fear and Trembling (Frygt og Bæven) bear a highly personal flavor. Yet confining himself to Danish also meant that he had no inkling during his lifetime that his writings would be grouped with the classics, the “texts to read.” Only through posthumous German translations did the rest of Europe come to know that such an eccentric figure had lived and written in a Nordic kingdom, questioning God in a most devout way.

One point still needs to be emphasized: the relative ease of translation among European languages. Through translations into one of the three principal languages, the works of Kierkegaard did ultimately enter the chain of “texts to read,” first in Europe and then in the world. Danish is, after all, a European language. Over the centuries, European languages have become mutually translatable with minimal loss of meaning. Compared with a language like Japanese, Danish is infinitely closer to German or English—or even French.

All this might sound too crude to those who are aware of what seems like insurmountable differences among European languages. I myself cannot imagine reading Pride and Prejudice in French with the same pleasure that I find when reading it in English, or reading Le Rouge et le noir in English with the same pleasure that I find when reading it in French. In his famous essay “The Task of the Translator” (1923), the German literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin discusses how German Brot and French pain, both of which may be glossed as “bread,” do not mean the same thing. Nonetheless, the difference between Brot and pain, however critical, cannot compare with the difference between, say, English “rice” and Japanese ine—the latter having been lyricized and mythicized for well over a millennium in Japanese culture. Numerous poems with the word ine, including love poems, are compiled in Ten Thousand Leaves (Man’yōshū), the first Japanese poetry collection, dating back to the eighth century, and Japanese emperors still go through the ceremony of planting rice and harvesting it, a tradition said to have begun in the sixth century. A language such as Japanese is thus a world apart from those of Europe, where all the societies are culturally and linguistically kindred. To put it in terms of colors, if the Japanese language were red, then all European languages would be some shade of blue.

Thanks to this kinship among European languages and cultures, by the turn of the century and on into the twentieth century, learned books written in various languages entered the chain of “texts to read”: The Revolt of the Masses, written in Spanish in 1930 by José Ortega y Gasset; Prison Notebooks, written in Italian from 1929 to 1935 by Antonio Gramsci; Homo Ludens, written in Dutch in 1938 by Johan Huizinga, to name just a few. That all these Europeans wrote in their own languages does not contradict our basic assumption about how knowledge spreads. Looking at the long history of humanity, we see that what took place in Europe at this time was an anomaly, which helps us better understand the fundamental nature of a universal language.

Balance, once it begins to keel, swiftly collapses. Once England, and then the United States, began to possess superior national power, the world’s balance of power began to visibly shift. Universal languages have a self-sustaining capacity, so the tripolar system of English, French, and German continued for some time; but as English began to gain the upper hand, the essential connection between the pursuit of knowledge and universal language became undeniably clear.

Naturally the rise of English was not unaccompanied by pain for most Europeans, those whose mother tongue was different. The fate that befell the Polish economist Michal Kalecki (1899–1970) offers a poignant example. The field of economics once flourished in various European regions, but the publication of Adam Smith’s seminal work The Wealth of Nations (1776), written in English, combined with the economic power of England and later the United States, changed everything; by the early twentieth century, economics had become a field of social science predominantly conducted in English. Knowing exactly what sort of age one lives in, however, is not always easy. In 1933, already one-third of the way into the twentieth century, Kalecki published an article, and not just any article: this historic treatise first put forth the principle of effective demand later expounded in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by British economist John Maynard Keynes. Yet sadly, but predictably, because Kalecki wrote in Polish, his discovery went unnoticed. Two years later, he translated the article himself, but sadly again, the language he chose was not English but French. A year later, in 1936, General Theory was published, dramatically altering the course of economics. Seeing this, Kalecki claimed his intellectual property in another article. Unbelievably, he wrote that article in Polish, too. Poor Kalecki became known as a scholar who did not write in English.

Why didn’t a brilliant scholar like Kalecki know enough to write in English? His homeland of Poland formed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the sixteenth century and was once one of the world’s great powers. Yet it began to disintegrate in the seventeenth century and finally disappeared from the map in 1795. For over a hundred years thereafter, the country had a tragic history of being divided by Russia, Austria, and Prussia, until it was able to reunite as a nation after World War I in 1918. In 1933, when Kalecki wrote his original article, nationalist fervor must have made the Polish people feel compelled to write in their own language. Kalecki must have espoused that fervor—to his own detriment.

Even if the “world” as the West saw it had been limited to the West, the prowess of England and subsequently of the United States would have ultimately toppled the tripolar system of the principal national languages. Yet another factor was at work to reinforce this development at the start of the twentieth century: the era when the “world” was limited to the West came to an end. Through colonization and improved means of communication, people from the regions of non-Western languages began to enter that world. This marked the end of an era when “a Christian” meant “a person”; the pursuit of knowledge could no longer comfortably remain Eurocentric. Though most of what is taught in universities all over the world is today based on Western disciplines, the universal applicability of these disciplines is under closer scrutiny from the non-West. Entering this new historical phase was bound to throw a light on the inevitable inefficiency of pursuing knowledge in one’s own language. If non-Western intellectuals wanted their writing to enter the larger chain of “texts to read,” the rational choice would be to write in English, the language that circulates most widely, however difficult that might be. The more non-Western intellectuals wrote in English, the more texts would circulate in English, thereby inducing more Western intellectuals to write in English as well. The entry of non-Western intellectuals into the “world” has had the effect of revealing with blinding clarity the essential nature of universal language: it is in the single universal language—the “external language”—that knowledge is best pursued.

THE NOVEL: A CELEBRATION OF NATIONAL LANGUAGE

The days are now long gone when Europeans unwittingly enjoyed the privilege of pursuing knowledge in their own language—the golden age of national language. That golden age coincided historically (and quite logically) with another: the golden age of the novel as a literary genre. At the basis of the latter was a new status bestowed on literature as something distinct from and even transcending the usual pursuit of knowledge.

Prior to the late eighteenth century in Europe, no distinction existed between literature and the pursuit of knowledge—or between literature and scholarship, or literature and science (the term “science” is here used in its archaic meaning of “knowledge in general.”) The word “literature” then referred, as is well known, to any kind of writing. When learned priests wrote Latin treatises on theology, what they wrote was “literature” on theology, which was also the only “science” of the time. Divinity schools were the only places of learning. But as Europe gradually secularized, those divinity schools were transformed into today’s universities. The pursuit of knowledge, now conducted in one’s own language, increasingly became segmented into different academic disciplines, and the language in which to do so also became increasingly specialized. It was around this time that literature and the pursuit of knowledge—academia—became manifestly distinct from each other. The word “literature” was by this time used almost exclusively to refer to poems, plays, and novels, as it is today.

Something wonderful then happened to literature. Now that the language used in academic disciplines was far removed from the language of everyday life, people no longer turned to academic writings for words of wisdom—the sort that could address perennial human questions such as “What does it mean to be a human being?” and “How should one live?” Where previously they had sought these answers in religious texts, now they were turning to literature for enlightenment—particularly the modern novel, written in prose. Literature became something that transcended science.

Moreover, a national language was precisely the right medium for the novel as the new literary genre befitting a new age. For while a national language could function in the same way as a universal language, bearing intellectual and ethical responsibility, it could also, unlike a universal language, thoroughly exploit every merit of the local language, the mother tongue. Metaphorically, it had not only a father but also a mother. The novel developed while taking full advantage of both parents. On the one hand, as a genre with strong ties to universal language, it could discuss grand and high-flown ideas such as the existence of God, war and peace, the fate of humanity. Yet at the same time, as a genre with equally strong ties to the mother tongue, it could also depict in exquisite detail the life of a common individual—the new center of attention in the new era. It could depict the chain of the most mundane events that constitute everyday human life. It could tap deep into everyone’s most vivid childhood memories—or even earlier, to moments when “memories” would be too concrete a word for fragmentary recollections of touch, smell, and soft murmurs. The novel could take us deep into the human psyche, capturing, examining, and lending dignity to our every fleeting thought or dream. It was inevitable that the national language should come to be thought of as a language that expressed one’s innermost soul, a language of self-expression. The novel developed as a genre that celebrates the superiority of individual interiority over society; and the superiority of individual interiority was in fact the product of writing in the national language.

Indeed, the mother tongue is uniquely privileged. All languages are essentially external to us. As we begin acquiring our mother tongue while we are still inside the womb, we are unaware of the process and the arbitrariness of the connection between sign and meaning, unaware that the word “mother” has no inherent link to the woman who gave us birth. Benedict Anderson said of Latin that “few were born to speak it and even fewer . . . dreamed in it.” But actually, nobody is born to speak (or dream in) any language.

As with any art form, the novel as a literary genre took a long time—a good two centuries—to realize its full potential. At the dawn of the genre, in 1722, Daniel Defoe wrote Moll Flanders, the life story of a woman by the same name. Here is Defoe’s summation of her life in his preface: “Twelve Years a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Years a Thief, Eight Years a Transported Felon.” Yet as one reads through the story of her “sinful” life, one finds that she feels precious little for all that she has gone through. She displays an astonishing, or rather alarming, absence of interiority. Almost exactly two hundred years later, during a period that might possibly have seen the culmination of the novel, in his semiautobiographical novel In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927), Marcel Proust has his protagonist, a fully grown man, reminisce page after page about the time when, as a boy, he would lie in bed waiting for his dear maman to come up to his room and give him a goodnight kiss—something that often and tragically wouldn’t happen when there were guests in the house. The author/protagonist is revealing a supremely personal moment, in language at once analytical and poetic, bringing readers to share in his search of a lost time when such a small ritual meant everything. Readers are then reminded of their own memories of childhood moments—moments that may have been insignificant in and of themselves but that, in retrospect, bestow the grace of a heightened sense of being alive.

As the novel continued to evolve, works often became more difficult to translate, even into closely related languages. As the libraries of national languages expanded, writers began to quote from, allude to, and parody the “texts to read” within their own language, and so the canon of “texts to read” written in the same national language began to form a unique chain of its own. Novelists began to take on such texts and play them off against one another; they also exploited the peculiarities of their own language through dialects and wordplay. The untranslatability that had been more or less characteristic of poetry all along began to extend to novels as well, culminating in a revolutionary work like Finnegans Wake (1939) by James Joyce. Since language produces meaning within an enclosed system, there is always a built-in untranslatability, which national languages began to deliberately pursue. The process added to the creation of an untranslatable “reality” that can be expressed only in a particular language. It also added to the discovery of untranslatable “truths.”

Moreover, what became clearer through the separation of literature from the usual pursuit of knowledge is that there are two kinds of truths in this world. This distinction, I am aware, is a crude one that often fails to apply in reality, but it helps us to grasp what is at stake in the relationship between language and knowledge. On the one hand, there is the kind of truth that can be attained by reading textbooks; on the other hand, there is the kind of truth that requires reading the text itself.

Let me explain what I mean by this.

In the pursuit of knowledge, we are dealing with truths that are attainable through the reading of textbooks because they lie in the realm of science (using the word again in its archaic sense), where the accumulation of previously discovered truths enables the discovery of the next. Copernicus’s heliocentrism of the early sixteenth century led to an accumulation of later truths that eventually made it possible for Einstein to formulate his theory of relativity in the early twentieth century. In this process, the later scientist need not return to any original texts, for the discovered truths they contain do not depend on the language in which they were written. (In the case of natural sciences, discovered truths ultimately do not depend even on human existence: Earth revolves around the sun and the speed of light remains constant whether we exist or not.) Because they do not depend on language, the truths accumulated in science are ultimately attainable through textbooks, where language is used clearly and economically to elucidate how one truth led to the next. The best example of this kind of pursuit of knowledge would be a textbook filled with mathematical formulas.

In contrast, the truths found in texts are not replaceable by textbooks. They depend on the very language that expresses them, and to understand them each person can only go back to and read the text itself. Moreover, this kind of truth does not reside only in literature in the modern definition. Aristotle’s geocentrism was later proved not to be “true,” yet Aristotle continues to be read because his writings include passages that are not transferable to a textbook. The truths found in the text are in the final analysis inseparable from the author’s style of writing. Those truths depend on the author’s choice, out of an infinite range of possibilities, of a particular word order; a particular noun, adjective, or verb; a particular turn of phrase.

Written language comes in many shapes, ranging from some that are completely transferable into textbooks to others that compel one to return to the original text. That range continues to signify the aporia between the possibility and impossibility of translation—which brings us to the final but crucial characteristic of the novel. Though a text, the modern novel is in this critical aspect more attuned for translation among different cultures than earlier forms of prose, for even though—or rather, precisely because—it is written in a national language, it belongs to a genre that is highly global.

As the language of a nation-state, a national language is a product of modernity. Unlike the Greeks or Chinese of a bygone era, citizens of modern nation-states do not look on those living outside their country as barbarians who babble incomprehensibly and observe strange customs. Citizens of modern nation-states are aware that they are surrounded by many other nation-states where other people, different from yet similar to them, are living and using languages of their own.

Writing a modern novel in a national language hence means writing with the awareness that you inhabit the same world as others around the globe. You see the same world map and the same world history as your contemporaries elsewhere, though how each of you interprets and relates the same historical events may vary greatly. You follow the same major scientific discoveries; you have read the same kinds of world classics; and you share with your contemporaries similar concepts of what humanity ought to be. If you were to write a novel today, for example, you would need to know not only that Earth goes around the sun but also that Earth is getting warmer. No matter how oppressive the society you live in, you would need to know that most people around the world embrace the universality of concepts such as “basic human rights” and “individual freedom.” You can choose to criticize your own country or your own people from the standpoint of that global consciousness.

The act of reading a modern novel also presumes a similar global consciousness. An American I once met believed that The Tale of Genji was written in the era before Christ, generously giving the classic an extra thousand or so years of history. If he were reading a modern Japanese novel, he would no doubt have roughly guessed the time in which it was set. Readers of modern novels necessarily share a historical awareness.

To repeat, the novel flourished during an age when literature was believed to transcend science as a source of wisdom. During that time, seekers of knowledge not only wrote texts in their own languages but also read them—sometimes with amused laughter, sometimes with raised eyebrows, but always with devotion, passion, and respect. It was a time of the celebration of national languages of every stripe, golden years for those languages as well as for the writers and readers of national literature.