Language, Difference, and the City
Written by Sherry Simon
When I was thirteen or fourteen, growing up in Montreal, I invented a game for myself. On Saturdays, when there was nothing much to do at home, I would hop on a bus and then keep transferring until I found myself in some strange part of the city. I lived in the west end, in Snowdon, so the logical direction to head was east. I was trying to get lost. The fun was to discover a totally alien place, surrounded by a language I did not understand. I enjoyed the mystery of it, and the sense of possibility.
Any kid in any city can play this game. But in Montreal it had special dramatic potential, because Montreal was a city divided not only by social class but by language. To cross the city was to enter a different soundscape, and to take in the special accents of history and class. I kept these excursions secret. I’m not sure what I told my parents, but I managed to disappear for most of the day, wander distant neighbourhoods, and come home without reporting any of this. But going off without their permission wasn’t the only rule I was breaking. I also sensed that my very presence in those neighbourhoods was a kind of transgression, that I was an intruder into communities that weren’t mine. The Montreal of my childhood was an intensely parochial place. To venture out of one’s home bubble of language and religion was risky. Not physically risky, one felt perfectly safe. No, it was a more existential kind of risk. The writer Mavis Gallant compared these bubbles to ‘mossy little ponds’ noting that most people simply floated in such ponds, labeled ‘French and Catholic’ or ‘English and Protestant,’ never wondering what it might be like to step ashore. ‘Jewish and English’ was also a pond. It was comfortable and secure, for sure, but to me the shore was tempting.
In writing my latest book, I have been reminded of my adolescent adventures. I realize that I have been playing some version of my childhood game for most of my life — seeking out places, neighbourhoods, cities, where I could experience the disorientation of language. Not for the same reasons, not for the pleasure of doing something I wasn’t supposed to do, but in particular to experience the music of competing languages. The shock of difference I experienced as a child has turned into an attitude of inquiry. How is it that certain places are singularly affecting and that language can be the central stimulus in this experience? How do languages shape our ideas about how different humans are one from the other?
I began to investigate places where languages speak to each other across gulfs of time. I had my fetish-cities, the Italian city of Trieste with its blend of Italian and Slovenian against a German past, Barcelona with the conversation between Spanish and Catalan, Indian cities like Calcutta (today Kolkata) with their tremendous language diversity and turbulent histories, and of course Montreal. In my travels, both real and in books and movies, I have come across many other polyglot places or translation sites. For instance, in my guidebook, there are stops at a German opera house in Prague, a Japanese garden in Ireland inspired by the writing of Lafcadio Hearn, a synagogue given the Christian name Santa Maria la Blanca in Toledo Spain, and a polyglot urban market in HongKong.
At the heart of each site is an unresolved exchange. Like translations, which display the double realities of which they are composed, polyglot places offer in Anne Carson’s words “two tracks of reality running at the same time.”
Montreal has many such sites, I’m sure you can think of some — places whose histories are a movement through and across languages, like the Monument national for instance, that once housed both French-speaking theatre troupes and the Yiddish theatre troupe of Montreal, or one of my favourite places, St Michael the Archangel church on Saint-Viateur which has been Irish, Polish, Italian, and English. Or our Mount Royal which tells stories in many tongues, from the days of the First Nations to today’s Arabic or Bengali.
I’m going to give two examples, two sites among the 18 stops in my guidebook. The first will be a bridge, the second, a monument in Lviv Ukraine.
Consider the bridge of Mostar, a magnificent Turkish construction dating from the seventeenth century, destroyed in 1993 during the Bosnian war, and rebuilt in 2005 with the aid of the European Union. Patching up the bridge and restoring it was a tremendously important symbolic event. But the situation in Bosnia was not repaired and it remains fragile to this day. If you walk on the bridge, among the many languages you will hear, you will hear a language called Bosnian. This is a language that did not exist thirty years ago. It came into being during the 1990s as a result of the breakup of Yugoslavia and was officially recognized along with Croatian and Serbian in 1994. Where once the former Yugoslav languages were considered mutually intelligible, and the minor differences between them downplayed, now the typically Bosnian expressions, usually of Turkish origin, were emphasized. And so translation has become necessary. The bridge of translation has become an obstacle course, more difficult than ever to cross.
Another bridge, this time the Øresund Bridge that connects Denmark and Sweden. Chosen as the symbol and backdrop for a long-running and wildly successful television series called The Bridge, it enables the speedy passage of traffic. It also gave birth to a new language, a mixture of Danish and Swedish, delivered to television audiences in the episodes of the Scandinavian crime television series created in 2011. The plot, which has inspired remakes around the world, features crimes investigated by cops from both sides of the border who become reluctant partners.
In the Danish-Swedish series, the characters each speak their own language, behaving as if they can understand each other with no problem, while a more realistic rendering would reveal at least some misunderstandings. They act as if language difference were of no consequence, as if Tower of Babel never existed, as if we can all understand each other, no matter how arcane the message. In the subtitles read by English-speaking audiences, there is no indication of the two different languages, only the music of this double tongue. This is quite the contrary of what we saw on the Mostar bridge, where the small differences between languages were made more pronounced. While the Mostar Bridge stands as a reminder of the difficulties that block passage across minor differences, the Øresund Bridge suggests the possibility of slick, frictionless surfaces, quick and effortless communication.
So the bridge is a place where languages meet, but the kinds of conversations they can have are different. You might think that the closer the languages are linguistically, the easier it would be. Languages that look like each other, that sound like each other, are sometimes harder to translate than languages that come from opposite ends of the planet. Why is that? In fact the answer has nothing to do with linguistics and everything to do with history.
Not surprisingly, conflict increases the space between languages, sharpens ideas of difference, calls for translation; while the pressures of economic globalization diminish distances and invite attitudes of indifference. Theserelationships affect how we think about difference in very broad terms — are cultural realities becoming more different from another, or rather blending into some kind of globalized whole? When is difference exciting, and when does it begin to seem overwhelming, opaque, dangerous? We usually think of the opposite of difference as sameness — a reassuring kind of human sameness. But the opposite of difference can be indifference, a kind of apathy and lack of interest in other realities, sometimes the incapacity to feel empathy, to engage with others. These terms suggest existential or philosophical questions — they are also translation questions and they bring me back to my childhood travels across Montreal. My experiences turned me into a translator, someone constantly measuring differences between languages, sometimes fascinated with what seem like differences so huge and solid they cannot possibly be reconciled, sometimes exchanging words as casually as if they were small change. And someone turning this same kind of relentless attention to places, places I call translation sites or polyglot places.
Now I will take you to another such site, this one in today’s Ukraine. The linguistic landscape of Eastern Europe was a formative landscape for my book, shaped as it is by a century of conflict and shifting political regimes. Here, the wounds of history are still legible and languages are vehicles of memory. I will discuss a Holocaust monument in the city of Lviv, called the Space of Synagogues. What made this site particularly affecting for me was the way it used language to give substance to the lived experience of the victims of the Holocaust. In what follows I will be mentioning a few names: Philippe Sands, a British lawyer who spoke last year at the Jewish public library, author of a powerful book called East West Street; Josef Wittlin, an exile from Lviv who in 1946 published a memoir of the city in Polish, Deborah Vogel, a Jewish poet who, unusually for a woman, earned a PhD in Polish literature during the 1930s and then turned to writing modernist poetry in Yiddish.
A traveller to Lviv, transiting through Munich Airport, might react with astonishment to a sign announcing the flight. The sign says Lemberg, the Habsburg name by which this city was known until the fall of the Empire in 1918. Flying there today is like catching a plane for Constantinople.
The author and legal expert Philippe Sands took this flight to Lviv in 2017. He was there to launch the translation of his 2016 book East West Street, a remarkable detective-like investigation that reaches back into the imperial history of the city. It tells the story of the intertwined lives of three Jewish men — his grandfather Leon, Hersch Lauterpacht, the inventor of the term “crimes against humanity,” and Rafael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide.” All three were born in interwar Lwów, then a Polish city.
Sands was adept at conveying his passion for the city, but he was especially effective in communicating this enthusiasm to young people. Because of the circumstances of history, he told them in essence, you may not know of the extraordinary men who were born here or some of the contributions your city has made to modern history. But with his lectures and his book, Sands was trying to correct this neglect. What he was saying to them was: this city has experienced remarkable events, and the memory of these happenings — the bad and the good — also belongs to you. The translation of his book was not only a report on what he had discovered, but an invitation to his Ukrainian readers to make the story theirs.
The import of such an invitation is especially meaningful in a city like Lviv. Today’s Lviv (Ukrainian) has been called Leopolis (Italian), Lemberg (German and Yiddish), Lwów (Polish), Lvov (Russian). The name of the street that the grand Opera sits on, changed from Untere Karl Ludwig Strasse in Habsburg times to Opernstrasse, Adolf-Hitler-Ring and Prospekt Lenina, to today’s Prospeckt Svobody. Lviv’s Jews, once one third of the city’s pre-World War II population and one of the largest Jewish populations in Poland, were obliterated by the Nazis. The Polish residents of the city disappeared too after the War, forcibly resettled in Poland after Lviv became Soviet territory. Lviv is today a Ukrainian city, but its Ukrainian population was a minority until 1945. The new citizens of Lviv have little connection with the historical fabric of the city and its memories.
Travelling through Eastern Europe in the late 1990s, the historian Anne Applebaum remarked that the people she saw on the streets of Lviv did not seem to fit the city they were a part of. There was a disconnect between the look of the population and the grand city they inhabited. Exactly what clues triggered Applebaum’s observation is not clear — but whatever her reasons for making the observation, she underlines an important truth. Like many other Eastern European cities (such as Vilnius, for instance, which only became Lithuanian at the end of World War II), Lviv now has a population of citizens whose urban roots are very shallow. Their knowledge of the city and its past is inevitably partial.
The languages of the past have begun to resound again in the city. Large groups of noisy Polish tourists visit the iconic restaurants, palaces, and museums that celebrate the pre-war version of the city. Somewhat less prominent groups of German-language tourists visit Habsburg sites. And Jewish tourists have begun to return to the city in search of a tragic past. Ghost signs, remnants of these languages, sometimes surface under the crumbling facade of a former shop.
There is a renewed mixing of languages, then, but a confusion over which ones count as insider tongues, which ones are considered mere observers. The poet Iryna Starovoyt worries that explanations of the Holocaust can be perceived as words from the “outside,” and not testimonies that issue from the “inside” spaces of the neighbourhoods and buildings that belong to today’s Lviv. The story of the past, the Jewish history of Lviv, she argues, is not a distant, foreign reality (2018) but a product of the living city — its streets and buildings.
When languages have been eliminated or suppressed, restoring them to public presence becomes all the more powerful. But these translations must be embedded in a collective desire. The Space of Synagogues in Lviv is such an attempt to reinscribe the Jewish presence and its languages into the urban fabric of the city. Two things make this memorial particularly effective: first, the monument was the first instance in Ukraine where commemoration of a Jewish historical site was initiated not by the international Jewish community but by the city administration in cooperation with various community groups, and therefore as a site of shared civic responsibility.Second, the use of the many languages of Jewish experience before, during, and after the war, is a remarkable way of bringing Jewish experience to life, giving it voice, and showing how that voice has been obliged to travel and take up home in new tongues.
The Space of Synagogues
The project called The Space of Synagogues opened officially in 2016, on Staroievreiska (“Old Jewish”) Street next to the main Rynok Square. The Space encloses traces of three synagogues which were all destroyed during the Second World War. This area was allowed to become largely derelict during Soviet time, abandoned rather than preserved. And, so, the project to restore this zone, begun in 2008, was a significant new development in the city’s history. The monument is artfully designed as a minimalist garden, carrying traces of the past and yet leaving empty spaces where absence can be strongly felt.
At the centre of the Space of Synagogues is a row of thirty-nine stone tablets, which resemble tombstones. Some stones are imprinted with grainy images of shops and houses from pre-war Lviv. Others are engraved with quotations from former residents about their lives in the city, their experiences of the Holocaust or the aftermath. These sixteen quotes take visitors on a physical journey as they walk among the stones — and an emotional journey as they absorb the dramas of history as told by its witnesses. In order to see the images and read the text, visitors are required to bend down, to move between the stones, to make an effort to enter into these testimonies. Each quotation is in its original language — German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Dutch, and French — supplemented by English, Hebrew and Ukrainian translations.
These fragments of language evoke both ordinary and extraordinary events. They recall daily life in Lviv before the war, when its many populations shared the spaces of sidewalks and cafés, as they evoke the events of the war and the Holocaust. Each layer of translation carries additional kinds of information, takes the information to a new place.
Two examples: a Yiddish-language poem by Israel Ashendorf is not so much a direct memory of events in Lviv as an imagined return to a “home” that has been taken over by strangers. What more disquieting a feeling than to imagine your own house and find it occupied by people with whom you have no links, who sleep in your bed and cook in your kitchen? The house that Ashendorf’s dreamer returns to has “foreign food” on the table, and has an icon hanging on the wall.
The house will probably be the same / I will push the door / Neighbours will come by / But of my relatives — none / I will see the old furniture / used by new people / In the bed will sleep strangers / foreign food on the table / When I will approach the window / I will see a vase / On the wall will be hanging / a silent icon (Israel Ashendorf, in Yiddish)
This imagined memory evokes the situation of all those whose homes and possessions have been stolen from them and who have been barred from their past by the imposition of new histories and languages.The poem dramatizes a double injustice: the physical space of belonging has been taken away, but also the right to memorialize. What comes of the memories of those from the past who are no longer present to claim the territory? “How does a city ‘house’ the memory of a people no longer at ‘home’ there?” (2006, 8). The Space of Synagogues attempts to enlarge the community of those who are the holders of memory.
Deborah Vogel
The poem fragment by Deborah Vogel illustrates a story lived through layers of languages. Vogel was a Yiddish modernist critic and poet. She was close to Bruno Schulz and conducted an intense literary correspondence with him. She was murdered with her husband and son in the Lviv ghetto in 1942. The following words, engraved on yet another stone, were taken from a text she wrote in the 1930s:
The streets are like the sea: / they reflect the colour of longing / and the difficulty of waiting. (Debora Vogel, in Yiddish)
The quote is in Yiddish, the language that became Vogel’s literary language, but which she learned only as an adult. Yiddish was not Vogel’s native tongue. She came from a Polish-speaking Jewish family, and, unusually for a Jew during that period, earneda doctorate in Polish literature. She was active in modernist circles and, during the 1930s, came under the influence of a Yiddish-language poet, learned the language, and went on to publish both prose and poetry in Yiddish. She was particularly attracted to montage as a modernist technique. Vogel is only now being translated into English, her work recently discovered by young readers able to read Yiddish. Anastasiya Lyubas is one of these readers, a Ukrainian who has learned Yiddish and has published English-language versions of the poems. In 2015, a first translation of Vogel’s work was also translated into Ukrainian. So the spiral of translations continues to grow, taking the words of the past into ever new places.
In conclusion:
“Memory,” writes Eva Hoffman, is a “moral force” for Eastern European writers, who have long struggled with falsifications of the past (2016, 10). As a vehicle of memory, language and translation also carry a moral force, the possibility of restoring realities that have been effaced. What is particularly moving is when languages are restored to their place in the city, when they are inscribed on stones, when they appear on sidewalks and plaques, or as in my final quote on the wooden slats of park benches.
Józef Wittlin was a novelist and translator who lived much of his life in Lviv, before ending his life in exile in the United States. His memoir, My Lwów is an account full of charm, wit, and nostalgia — written with the distinctive irony of the East European writer.
In his portrait of his city when it was Polish, Wittlin remembers the park benches of Lwów, asking what will happen to all the messages etched into them.
The bench is…
Blackened with age and rain, coarse and cracked like the bark of medieval olive trees. Generations of penknives have etched girlfriends’ names on you…
Where are you today? Who, and in what language, is now carving their lovers’ initials on you? (2016, 18)
This park bench is a kind of memorial to his past, but leaves room for the languages of the future. Like the Space of Synagogues, it writes languages onto the surfaces of the city, with love and tenderness and hope.
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