Tongue-tied Eloquence: Notes on Language, Exile, and Writing

ST ANISLA W BARANCZAK Tongue-tied Eloquence: Notes on Language, Exile, and Writing Occasioned by Reading Josef Skvorecky I Among many hilarious, outrageous, sublime, crazy, profound, or otherwise memorable scenes that fill the pages of Josef Skvorecky's unparalleled The Engineer of Human Souls, one brief episode seems to me particularly pregnant with meaning. One of the novel's minor characters, Milan, a recent Czech defector granted asylum in Canada, is throwing a housewarming party. Except for his Canadian girlfriend, all the guests are, not unexpectedly, Czech emigres: Someone is telling a joke about the Prague policeman who drowned trying to stamp out a cigarette a passer-byhad tossed in the river. There is loud laughter. Barbara hands Mi.lan his glass. 'I suppose he's telling jokes?' 'That's right.' 'Well,' says Barbara deliberately, 'couldn't you translate them for me?' 'They're only word games. My English isn't good enough.' 'Then how about making an effort? Your English is good enough for some things.' But Milan ign'Jres her ... ... and, bad conversationalist as he might seem, he is right to do so. On the list of things that are the hardest to translate into another language, jokes come a dose second after rhymed poetry (whereas love entreaties, as Barbara pretends not to realize, are among the easiest, if they require any translationatall). Thisis particularlytruewhenthe jokesare Eastern European, and told anywhere west of the Iron Curtain. Though no intellectual giant, Skvorecky's Milan understands thatinstinctivelyand immediately. More sophisticated minds sometimes need a dozen years to grasp this simple truth. I have in mind the example of a famous Eastern European wit, the poet Antoni Slonimski, who in pre-1939 Polandhad been nearly idolizedbythe readers ofhis side-splittingfeuilletons publishedinevery issue ofthe most popularliteraryweekly. Atthe outbreak ofwarhe took refugeintheWestandspentthenexttwelveyearsinLondon, butin1951, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1989 430 STANISLAW BARANCZAK of all moments, he decided to come back to Poland for good. Asked many years later why he had chosen to do so, he gave a disarmingly frank answer: in England, he was unable to tell a joke. No, he had no qualms about living under capitalism, especially since Stalinism anno 1951 was hardly a more attractive option. No, he had nothing against the English and their ways either: in fact, he was a declared Anglophile all his life. And no, he did not really feel lonely, or materially underprivileged, or socially degraded. What he could not stand was that whenever he tried to tell a joke to an English friend, he somehow was not funny. ~ For a while, he was determined to do anything in his power to succeed. He worked doggedly on his English and prepared all his jokes beforehand , endlessly chiselling their fine points and rehearsing for hours on end; once, before meeting some natives he particularly wished to impress, he stooped as low as to jot down a witticism on his cuff. All in vain; every joke of his was a flop. This would have been unbearable enough for a mere mortal. For Slonimski, who had spent twenty years building up his reputation as the wittiest man in Poland, this was sufficient reason to go back to the lion's den. There, hardships or no hardships, censorship or no censorship, he could at least sit down at his regular table in his favourite cafe, crack a joke, and hear his admirers laugh. II As told by Slonimski, this story of the return of the prodigal joker may well have been a joke in itself - the motives behind his decision were certainly more complex than that - but it says something about the expatriate's experience that usually escapes definition. And it says even more about the experience of the expatriated writer. After all, works of literature, just as jokes, are essentially 'word games,' as Skvorecky's Milan would have it. Easy for Robert Frost to say that poetry is what is lost in translation! Squarely settled in his homeland, he wrote for an audience that shared both his experience and his language, and it was of secondary concern to him just how much of what he intended to say was lost on some distant...