This Polyglot Life

By Benedict Anderson May 01, 2016

When I arrived at Cornell in 1958, I had to learn in a hurry how to write my seminar papers on a manual typewriter. For distribution to other students, we typed on a kind of green gelatin paper, which allowed us to erase small errors with white paint and then run off the corrected final text on a mimeograph machine. Changing anything was a slow and painful matter, so we had to think carefully before typing. Often we worked from longhand drafts. Today, working on a computer, we can change anything in a matter of seconds. The decline in sheer pain is a blessing, but it is worth remembering that the pearl is produced by an oyster in pain, not a happy oyster with a laptop. I am not sure that today's seminar papers show any stylistic improvement over the products of nearly 60 years ago.

In those days, libraries were still sacred places. One went into the stacks, dusted off the old books one needed to read, treasured their covers, sniffed their bindings, and smiled at their sometimes strange, outdated spellings. Then came the best part: randomly pulling books on the same shelf, out of pure curiosity, and finding the most unexpected things. Chance was built into the learning process. Surprise, too.

Today libraries are trying monomaniacally to digitize everything, perhaps in the expectation that eventually books will become obsolete. Everything will be findable online. Randomness is disappearing, along with luck. Google is an extraordinary "research engine," says Google, without irony in its use of the word "engine," which in Old English meant "trickery" (as is reflected in the verb "to engineer") or even "an engine of torture." Neither Google nor the students who trust it realize that late-19th-century books feel this way in one's hands, while early-20th-century books feel that way. Japanese books are bound one way, Burmese books another. Online, everything is to become an "entry." There is no surprise, no affection, no skepticism. The faith that students have in Google is almost religious.

When I was a graduate student, I used to enjoy decorating my seminar papers with quotations from poems that I had been taught to learn by heart or that I had fallen in love with in a random way. Without thinking much about it, I memorized poems I liked, and often recited them to myself in the shower, on the bus, in the airplane, or when I could not fall sleep. Memorized this way, the poems were lodged deep in my consciousness, not the meaning so much as the sound, the cadences, the rhymes. My fellow students were amazed and pitying. "What's the point? You can just look them up!" They were right, but even Google will not give you the feel of, say, Rimbaud's dizzying "Le Bateau ivre."

Around 2007 I went to Leningrad to help with an advanced class on nationalism for young teachers at various Russian provincial universities. Over the decades, my spoken Russian had almost disappeared, except for "Good morning," "Thank you very much," and "I love you." But to show some solidarity, I started to recite the final stanza of a beautiful poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky, a radical who committed suicide early in the Stalinist regime. To my astonishment, all of the students immediately recited along with me: Svetit vsegda Shine always, Vestit vezde Shine everywhere, Do dnei poslednikh dontsa To the depth of the last day! Svetit — Shine — I nikakih gvozdei! And to hell with everything else! Vot lozung moi — That's my motto — I solntsa! And the sun's! I was in tears by the end. Some of the students, too. They were still part of an oral culture, which Google is helping to end.

Google is a symbol, maybe innocent, of something much more ominous: the global domination of a degraded American form of English. In America itself, it is commonplace to read theoretical works for which the bibliographic foundations are all in English and published in the United States. If there are foreign works cited, the references are often to English translations, made sometimes two decades after the original publication in Japanese, Portuguese, Korean, or Arabic. It is as if scholarship has no value until it is available in English. This is not entirely an American invention; it has its roots in Britain's world domination from roughly 1820 to 1920. But Britain was still part of Europe, and references to books published in German, French, and Italian were still normal. Now more and more scholars feel they have to publish in English.

In itself this may be acceptable, even natural. But the effect is that scholars in different countries feel that unless they write in English, they will not be recognized internationally. And American scholars have become lazier about learning any foreign languages except those they have to acquire for the purposes of fieldwork.

"Globalization" of this kind is of course resisted, and one of the most powerful weapons in the struggle is nationalism. Thousands of excellent scholars in many countries, who are politically opposed to American hegemony, write, as a matter of principle, only in their mother tongue, either solely for their compatriots or, if their languages have a wider readership, for a transnational public. Many others write in their mother language for apolitical reasons: They can express themselves best, or they are too lazy to master another. There is nothing terribly wrong with any of that. But it does risk the obvious perils of falling into narrow-minded nationalism, or of not being exposed to the views of good foreign readers.

Thai and Indonesian languages belong to quite different linguistic ancestries, but both have long had a fatalistic image of a frog who lives all its life under half a coconut shell. Before long the frog begins to feel that the coconut shell encloses the entire universe. The moral judgment in the image is that the frog is narrow-minded, provincial, stay-at-home, and self-satisfied for no good reason.

Nationalism and globalization do have the tendency to circumscribe our outlook and simplify matters. This is why what is increasingly needed is a sophisticated and serious blending of the emancipatory possibilities of both nationalism and internationalism. Hence, in the spirit of Karl Marx in a good mood, I suggest the following slogan for young scholars:

Frogs in their fight for emancipation will only lose by crouching in their murky coconut half-shells. Frogs of the world unite!

Benedict Anderson, who died in December, was an emeritus professor of international studies at Cornell University. He was the author of several books, including Imagined Communities (Verso, 1983). This essay is adapted from a memoir, A Life Beyond Boundaries, just out from Verso.

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