just received the corrected flemish version of an article i wrote. (well, dutch i suppose, when it’s about a written text and not the more embodied oral form of this language i have learned to recognize as flemish so long ago, but it is strange to re-baptise one’s mothertongue… oke, op school kregen we “nederlands”, dat is waar, maar toch, daar ging het juist vaak over geschreven taal…) my piece was first translated from english into dutch by someone from the Tijdschrift voor Humanistiek, then corrected by johanna. the language artist she is.
i write my academic work in english, and in some way it has become more easy to write “academese” in english than in dutch. which has much to do with practise, if i’d write more frequent dutch-academese i’d get more fluent at it, no doubt. like how my french-academese came, and subsequently went, with that year of studying in Louvain-la-Neuve… but there is also something particular about the language. it strikes me every time i get translated. the way in which many of the words and concepts i use in english-academese don’t translate into dutch-academese.
take for instance a keyterm in the title of the article: subjectivity. a quick google gives an indication of prevalence: subjectivity – 5.560.000 hits; subjectivité – 1.070.000 hits; subjectiviteit – 125.000 hits. this of course is a very lousy way of comparing, but often when i use google to check how common a term translated in dutch is, i actually find out that there’s no hit at all (i almost wrote, that it doesn’t exist, but i should pay more attention not to take google as a standard of existence…). (human) agency, for instance, is untranslatable in the sense that i seek to use it, and always needs a description or defining footnote. governmentality is difficult to translate. plurals of these kinds of concepts, like subjectivities, agencies but also futures, epistemologies, vary between heavy and impossible. it seems that there’s a wall of resistance against poststructural insights and theories in flemish/dutch. and it’s definately true that there’s not much of a culture that feeds and fosters thinking and writing and intellectual debate in flanders. if anti-intellectualism is a characteristic of public debate in the United States, i think it’s even more the case for Flanders.
yet the challenge of course is precisely to create new visions and words – even new grammars? – out of the language we have. more language artists needed! (i’m definately not one of them…) not sure these days if this work of translating is enough. of course there are so many crucial texts that are not available in dutch/flemish, but it’s equally the case that existing translations are often awkward and don’t really connect, take root.
and my english-academese? it actually celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. i began to learn how to write english during the M.A. in women’s studies at University College Dublin, in 1996. and i have continued to use english for academic purposes ever since – i never really switched back to dutch- or french-academese. which doesn’t mean that english has become the language in which i write most fluently. actually, it’s not a happy birthday, i’m not happy with english these days. and it’s interesting how different languages lend themselves to different registers of speech. in which languages, and with which accents, do you speak in your dreams? to animals? to amoureux and amoureuses? (see, here english fails miserably) to babies and children? to official institutions? to political companer@s? to people with whom one shares one’s mothertongue and to those with whom one doesn’t? to one’s families?
after the article was checked for language by 4 different people, myself included, this is how the title came out: in english “On stony grounds.” Female religious subjectivities in the battle over modernity. in dutch “On stony grounds.” Vrouwelijke religieuze subjectiviteit in the strijd om de moderniteit. (and “on stony grounds” is an expression by Stuart Hall who paraphrases Antonio Gramsci, translated from italian to english)
i’m writing a lot these days. the brussels apartment is generous to me. there is no phone line, no internet connection, which changes the nature of a space radically. it is not an open space these days, although it can take people in, and it is not a connected space, although it does not stand on its own. but it is small and contained, like a miniature which captures full presence and concentration.