THE IGNORANT IMAGINATION

Czechs have a saying: ‘Kolik řečí umíš, tolikrát jsi člověkem’ (‘You are as many times a person as the languages you know’). Certainly for the Czechs, it has always been necessary for cultural and physical survival to know more than their own language. For many centuries it was German, then Russian last century, and now English is the most popular second language in the country. Of course no one will tell you that it is a good thing to know only one language. Perhaps the main advantage of acquiring fluency in only one other language is that one begins to realise that not everything can be expressed in your mother tongue; not everything can even be translated into it. In the case of speakers of minority languages like, say, Czech or, closer to home, Irish, they are constantly and painfully reminded of this fact. Some monoglot Czechs are acutely aware that whole worlds of ideas and knowledge are closed off from them by their ignorance of English. But people whose mother tongue is English are in a different position. There is a kind of linguistic arrogance which presumes that if something cannot be translated well into English, then its existence remains at best vague and shadowy, with lip-service paid in such cases – English-speakers will politely fantasise about how it must sound in the original, Czech, Estonian, Chinese or Irish.