Editorial

The PN Review 281 editorial occasioned many responses. Its themes have informed PN Review from early on – how writers exist between as well as within languages and dialects. The activity of translation from one language to another, from a given to an acquired dialect, can appear analogous to the initial process of generating experience itself in and as language. Many of us are differently, sometimes conflictedly, alive in a variety of languages. Alive even in dead languages, one might say, proving those languages anything but mortal.

Readers can tell by the weight of the issue in their hands that PNR 283 is over-length. Yet even despite its portliness, we have had to hold over some items to PNR 284. It is not hard to suppose the themes aired here will animate our conversations going further forward, too. Among items to anticipate in PNR 284 are Zoë Skoulding’s ‘Translation Relation’, Mary O’Malley’s ‘Notes from a Native’, Michael Edwards’s ‘Poems from Wivenhoe’, Richard Gwyn’s ‘How I Became a Translator’ and Hal Coase’s ‘San Luigi’.

Readers may also be anxious, turning to the first item of the main text, ‘Oan Scots and Respair’, to find it actually in Scots. It was a deliberate decision to start here. Given our theme – Between Language – it seemed salutary to expose monoglot and polyglot readers alike to an initially unfamiliar, even alienating version of our lingua franca. Dwelt on (if the reader is a little patient), ‘Oan Scots…’ provides a compellingly grounding experience; it discloses how much more we know and can infer if we persist, make our mouths shape unfamiliar sounds, then listen for the sense which they deliver. Colin Bramwell and I agreed not to add a glossary, inviting readers to ‘translate’ from the inside. This is remote from ‘our accentless inner voice’ which Zinovy Zinik evokes in his essay, the voice that does not distract the listener with a specific sound of origin. For most writers, the best auditor is the reader, experiencing writing from the inside. The reader’s voice animates the text, not the writer’s.

When Gabriel Josipovici read the editorial to PNR 281, he sent me an offprint of his 2019 lecture, ‘Is there such a thing as a native language’, published in Raritan and reproduced here with that magazine’s kind permission. I shared it with contributors to this issue, at the same time making generally available (by removing the paywall) recent essays from PNR that touch on the themes in different ways, specifically Alberto Manguel’s Selbstgefühl (PNR 266) and Stav Poleg Running Between Languages (PNR 267). I invited reflections, leaving the brief as open as I could.

For this issue, I modified the title of Stav Poleg’s essay from plural to singular, ‘Between Language’, figuratively embedding the preposition in the noun, fragmenting ‘Language’ like shattering a drop of mercury into droplets which roll apart, then reconfigure. Or drops of dew on a nasturtium leaf. That reconfiguration may be inadvertent; it may be wholly natural. Howard Cooper in his essay ‘Ur-Language’ reflects on ‘the transformative potential of language, well-used’: ‘We share linguistic worlds with those who preceded us, and I like to think I hear the echoes and reverberations of that archaic mythos in the poetry my father knew by heart but never shared with me.’

Victoria Moul, her imagination and memory charged with English, Latin and much else, is learning Russian. She takes the theme in a direction I would readily follow.

Speaking another language – indeed, speaking at all – is risky and difficult; it never works perfectly; you can be misunderstood; the pain of incomprehension and imprecision is real; and others might take your words and do wrong by them. But each time we try to reach across that divide, however ineffectually, between the word and its meaning, we are become a lapis offensionis et petra scandali, a little incarnation; a moment of grace; and the ruin of the wickedness of the world, in all its awful variety.

This has turned into a rather special ‘special issue’, touching on matters at the heart of so many writers’ cultures, including those of our founding editors, our later contributing and associate editors, and our contributors today.