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Balkan Babel: Translation

Zones, Military Zones
Emily Apter

A
A s the field of translation studies begins to respond to new directions in
transnational literary studies, there has been a foregrounding of topics such
as the “dependency” of minoritarian languages on dominant, vehicular ones; the
links among linguistic standardization, nation-building, and the colonial export
of European languages; the ways in which a global economy reinforces the
imperium of English; the emergence of an international canon of books that are
translation-friendly (in a market sense); and the definition of a “translational
transnationalism” in terms of diversal relations among minoritarian languages.1
This last conceptual area is clearly indebted to the pioneering study of Franz
Kafka by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.2
In a seminal chapter entitled “What Is Minor Literature?” Deleuze and Guattari
analyzed Kafka’s German as a pastiche of the “vehicular” tongue — meaning, in
this case, the impoverished bureaucratese, the hollow state language imposed on
Czechoslovakia by the Prussian state. According to their reading, Kafka sub-
verted the vehicular by freighting it with unwelcome baggage, from Yiddish
inflections to scraps of Czech vernacular. Now, even if the newly edited and
translated Malcolm Pasley and Mark Harman editions of Kafka reveal a very dif-
ferently textured use of the German language from the one characterized by

1. I discuss the term translational transnationalism in more detail in my essay “On Translation in
a Global Market” (in this issue of Public Culture).
2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

Public Culture 13(1): 65–80

Copyright © 2001 by Duke University Press

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Public Culture Deleuze and Guattari, their idea of minor literature has been crucial to defining
the “trans” unit in literary transnationalism.3 In the field of transnational transla-
tion studies, the ramifications are clear: rather than a major language acting as
the general equivalent between two or more minor languages, the translation
process is now conceptualized as occurring within a field of the minor.
Translational transnationalism, as it moves beyond Deleuze and Guattari,
points to a future space-time of translation between, say, Tagalog and Ogoni or
Wolof and Spanglish. And if these exchanges still seem far off, we already have
the example of Michel Tremblay’s Les belles-soeurs, the pioneering work of
Joual theater that was put on at the Edinburgh Festival several years ago as The
Guid-Sisters in Scots translation, or, more recently still, the translation of Irvine
Welsh’s Scottish argot in Trainspotting into Quebecois Joual.4 The British Coun-
cil translation Web site refers us to the collaboration between Martin Bowman,
born in Montreal of Scottish parents, and Wajdi Mouawad, a theater director
born in Beirut and brought up in Montreal, in which they arrived at a particular
orthography and transposed demotic to capture the language of Welsh’s Scots
speakers in Joual. In the following excerpt from the Joual translation, the paren-
thetical numbers refer to the translators’ explanatory footnotes: “J’ai envie d’me
battre (1) tabarnak (2)! J’veux dire (3)! Tu m’connais tsé, j’sus pas l’genre de
grosse plotte tabarnak à charcher (4) des hostis d’problèmes, mais j’étais le
gars avec le câlisse de bat de billard din’s (5) mains et c’te grosse plotte là à face
d’étron (6) pouvait bien se r’trouver a’c (7) le câlisse du bout gras du bat
dans sa câlisse de grosse yeule, si y’avait envie (8) J’suis prète à l’faire (9) tabar-
nak!”5 The notes reveal how the problems typically attending standard language
translation — compensation for nonequivalency, the rendering of sound values
and rhythm, the carryover of sedimented layers of linguistic history and “lost”
inflection — become particularly acute when the transference is between so-
called minor or highly idiomatic languages. Bowman and Mouawad explain:
The translation attempts to reflect the rhythm of the original sentence, but
to do so within its own sound system, certain literal elements had to be

3. For broader applications see, for example, David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature:
James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987). For an example of the new translation, see Franz Kafka, The Castle: A New
Translation Based on the Restored Text, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken Books, 1998).
4. Michel Tremblay, The Guid-Sisters, trans. William Findlay and Martin Bowman (Toronto:
Exile Editions, 1988); Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (London: Minerva, 1994).
5. “The Text in Joual,” in “Trainspotting” at http://www.literarytranslation.com/index2.html,
available as recently as June 2000.

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dropped, (eg. ‘ensemble’, i.e. together, replaces ‘ah mind’, i.e. I remem- Balkan Babel
ber) The main phenomenon to observe here is the use of the expletive lan-
guage to create the rhythm and to observe the use of one of these words
as a verb, i.e. tabarnaké. This creative use of the vocabulary of religious
words, turning what are usually nouns into verbs and adverbs, underscores
the vitality of the vernacular for all the poverty of imagination of the
speaker. We liked the repetition of the hard ‘c’ in tabarnaké, câlisses,
corps, criss, crabes, câlisse as the sound functions to underscore the vio-
lence in the action being described and is captured in such words in the
original as smashin, fuckin, crabs, bits, stanes, cunt, fuckin, ken. In the
Scots the violent effect is reflected not only in the consonants but in
the use of monosyllabic plurals. In other words, the translators here are
trying for an effect based as much in sound as in meaning.6
This translation from dialect to dialect, or from minority to minority tongue,
bypassing (while certainly acknowledging) standard usage, lends substance to the-
oretical speculations about translation’s relationship to transnationalism: it is pre-
cisely a meeting between argots over the bodies of the official tongues from which
they depart. Like the “trans to trans” of transnational affiliations, the bonds forged
between ethnic and proletarian vernaculars in different cultures defy the gold stan-
dard of vehicular languages such as English and French. They also serve inadver-
tently to question the grounds of aesthetic judgment by drawing attention to the
difficulty of distinguishing between vernacular deviations and poetic warpings of
standard language. One reader’s “bad English” or “bad French” will be another’s
high poetry, and, of course, no writer has brought this ambiguity more pointedly
into focus than James Joyce. These tensions among vehicular, literary, and collo-
quial speech define the abrasive edges of translation studies; and it is where these
edges meet—the volatile zones of translation, the zones of linguistic warfare—
that I would situate my own discussion of what I call “Balkan Babel.”
Balkanism is a term wielded by Maria Todorova in her book Imagining the
Balkans as a self-conscious counterpoint to Saidian Orientalism.7 Todorova and
other scholars of Balkanism caution judiciously against regional stereotyping
that equates “Balkan” with ethnic cleansing, bloodletting, a perpetual underground
and mongrel regionalism, “semi-developed, semi-colonial” Europe, “an incom-
plete self of the West.”8 There is nonetheless, in representative literary works from

6. “The Text in Joual,” n. 2.

7. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
8. Maria Todorova in discussion of her book, University of California at Los Angeles, 25 May
2000.

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Public Culture southeastern Europe, a pronounced thematic focus on border wars and fractious
linguistic copopulation. It is from these works that I take my cue in treating
“Balkan” as a synonym of a particular kind of translational transnationalism, in
which emphasis is placed not so much on market determinations of the flow of
minor languages and literatures but, rather, on the question of what occurs semi-
otically and socially when dialects, or marginalized world languages, are in a war
of maneuver unmediated by a major language of position.9
✦ ✦ ✦

A subset of politics at large, with particular agendas and strategic interests, lan-
guage politics defines its theater of war in the space where a military zone may be
superimposed on a linguistic hot spot or translation zone. The expression trans-
lation zone could well refer to the demarcation of a community of speakers who
achieve an ideal threshold of communication (the utopia of Gottfried-
Wilhelm Leibniz, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Jürgen Habermas). But when war
is at issue, it makes more sense to define it as a translation no-fly zone, an area of
border trouble where the lines dividing discrete languages are muddy and dispu-
tatious; where linguistic separatism is enforced by high surveillance missions; or
where misfired, off-kilter semantic missiles are beached or disabled. Construed
in terms of border patrols and military operations, the paradigm of a translation
zone at war may be applied beyond the Balkans to the way in which monolingual
nations police their internal linguistic borders and to revolts against the computer
as a machinic labor force in the economy of global translation. From the market in
pocket translators to the onslaught of universal standards of technological literacy
and the rise of comprador computer dialects that aggressively squeeze out weak
competitors, a language war of the information age is taking shape with a
distinctly bellicose rhetoric. Recent reports of attacks on Internet sites (Yahoo,
Buy.com, eBay) consistently rely on the language of ballistics: assault, barrage,
fortification, siege, bombardment, and the loss of public safety. In this context, the
declaration that “wars between languages are as fateful as wars between men”10 is

9. For a discussion of the marketing of translations of non-Western literature and the historic dif-
ficulties these works have in breaking into the global literary canon, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
“The Politics of Translation,” in Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, ed. Michèle
Barrett and Anne Phillips (London: Polity Press, 1982); Edward Said, “Embargoed Literature,” in
Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts, ed. Anuradha Dingwaney
and Carol Maier (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995); and Emily Apter, “‘Untrans-
latable’ Algeria,” parallax 7 (April–June 1998): 47–60.
10. Ismail Kadare, The Three-Arched Bridge, trans. John Hodgson (New York: Vintage Interna-
tional, [1978] 1997), 71. Hereafter cited as TB.

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truly premonitory and indicative of a present condition in which la guerre de Balkan Babel
Troyes will not, indeed, take place without computer-assisted violence and
defense strategy.
In the Albanian author Ismail Kadare’s 1978 novel The Three-Arched Bridge,
this statement is made by a European monk on his return from a diplomatic visit
to Byzantium. It is spoken to the novel’s main character, a translator who is nego-
tiating the terms of the construction of a bridge that would span rivalrous Balkan
and Ottoman territories.11 Set in 1377, Kadare’s novel uncannily anticipates the
most recent Balkan conflagrations, specifically the way in which the Mitrovica
bridge on the Ibar River in northern Kosovo, flanked by self-appointed Serbian
“bridge keepers,” Albanian militants, and NATO peacekeeping forces, made the
question of partition and permanent secession the order of the day. Kadare’s sear-
ing portrayal of mountain country vendettas in Broken April (1978) is equally
prescient;12 the erasure of Tito’s Yugoslavia and the collapse of Soviet hegemony
have introduced a wild card politics of East-West realignment that enables
ancient ethnic, religious, and cultural feuds to reignite in the guise of modern
mafia warfare.
The Three-Arched Bridge traces how language wars fit into the larger picture
of political misalliance, blood feuds, and border trauma. Balkan babble — a con-
dition of failed semantic transmission — obtains an isomorphic fit with Balkan
Babel, a Tower of Babel turned on its side to form a hapless bridge intended to
ford the unbridgeable gulf between Europe and the so-called East. In the tense
negotiations around the erection of the bridge, multilingualism asserts its impor-
tance at the bargaining table, raising stakes in what is already a lethal game of
diplomatic and cultural one-upmanship. For example, the politics of laying claim
to linguistic superiority is paramount, as when the narrator, a professional trans-
lator in the employ of an impoverished Albanian count, heaps contempt on the
“foreigners” (Turks) by derogating their speech (it is “easier to interpret for
woodpeckers”) (TB, 18). And in another instance: “The new arrivals did indeed
speak the most horrible tongue. My ears had never heard such a babble. Slowly I
began to untangle the sounds. I noticed that their numbers were Latin and their
verbs generally Greek or Slav, while they used Albanian for the names of things,

11. Bernard Lewis has identified this translator as a dragoman or turgeman, an interpreter-
middleman specialized in relaying information between the Holy Roman and Ottoman empires. See
Lewis, “From Babel to Dragoman: The Tortuous History of the Interpreter in the Middle East,”
British Academy Elie Kedourie Memorial Lecture for 1998, Times Literary Supplement, no. 5012
(23 April 1999): 12–14.
12. Ismail Kadare, Broken April, trans. John Hodgson (New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1990).

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Public Culture and now and then a word of German. They used no adjectives” (TB, 10–11). This
confusion issuing from strangers’ mouths is transliterated as broken English:
“This road bad because non maintain, mess complete. Water smooth itself, road
non, routen need work, we has no tales, has instruct, we fast money, give, take.
Water different, boat move itself graciosus, but vdrug many drown, bye-bye, sto
dhjavolos. Funebrum, he, he, road no, road sehr guten but need gut repair” (TB,
13; emphasis in original). The translation implies a corrupt original language —
Slavo-Germanic pidgin—whose broken grammar and encrypted allusions to bad
roads, vengeful waters, and drowning men foretells the contested construction of
the bridge and the ensuing cycle of violent retribution that culminates in the
encasement of a living man in the bridge’s rampart.
If, as some have said, language is a dialect protected by an army, then The
Three-Arched Bridge may be read as a study of what happens when the security
forces protecting the reigning tongue start to lose their strategic advantage and
become vulnerable to the invading force of multilingual language users whose
polyglot idiolect has yet to select a dominant dialect for standardization. Here
this situation relates specifically to the Albanian claim to “first language” status,
a claim that remains active even today in the politics of regional chauvinism. “I
told him,” says the narrator, “that we are the descendants of the Illyrians and that
the Latins call our country Arbanum or Albanum or Regnum Albaniae” (TB, 69).
After informing his listener that Albanians, together with the ancient Greeks, are
the oldest people in the Balkans, with roots in the region “since time immemo-
rial” and with a tradition that has embittered the “newcomers” (the Slavs), the
narrator makes the familiar argument that the Albanian language “is contempo-
rary with if not older than Greek, and that this, the monks say, was proved by the
words that Greek had borrowed from our tongue”— and, he then adds, they are
“not just any words, but the names of gods and heroes” (TB, 70). This linguistic
patrimony is now under threat from the Ottoman language (“casting its shadow
over both our languages, Greek and Albanian, like a black cloud”) (TB, 70). The
-luk suffix, he laments, is pounding the originary tongue like “some dreadful
hammer blow,” and “nobody understands the danger” (TB, 70). It is in the context
of these observations that the sympathetic interlocutor makes the remark about
wars between languages and wars between men.
Kadare’s novel poses the proverbial question, What’s in a name? The insidious
beginning of an embattled condition is the answer, when it comes to the word
Balkan itself. To the narrator’s amazement, the term passes from the Turkish lan-
guage virtually unnoticed into the vocabulary of the Albanians after the count
sells the Turks a stretch of highway: “More than by the desire of the Ottomans to

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cover under one name the countries and peoples of the peninsula, as if subse- Balkan Babel
quently to devour them more easily, I was amazed by our readiness to accept the
new name. I always thought that this was a bad sign, and now I am convinced that
it is worse than that” (TB, 25). The seeding of conflict in the very name “Balkan”
repeats a prior history of Germanic self-appellation: “A century previously,” the
narrator says, “it was the ‘Jermans’ who were coming, they were described as
‘people who talk as if in jerm, in delirium.’ . . . According to our old men, these
people have even begun to call their own country Jermani, which means the place
where people gabble in delirium, or land of jerm” (TB, 27). This embedding of a
story of Babel within ethnic and regional nomination acts as a secret weapon—a
Trojan horse conceit — deployed by Albania’s invaders. Smuggled across the
border in the guise of a commercially motivated translation operation, the Turk-
ish language behaves like germ warfare; impossible to contain, yet capable of
spreading linguistic chaos once released into the atmosphere. Polyglot chatter
breaks out at the bridge — Europe’s symbolic weak link and the physical site of
blood sacrifice — spreading confusion and narrative disorientation. As the Alba-
nian locals lose their ability to distinguish legend from fact, or beginnings from
endings, the “Ottoman hordes” advance upon them, subjecting their “majestic
language” to the “terrible ‘luk’ ” that strikes their native tongue like “a reptile’s
tail” (TB, 183). Here one must caution against a neutral reading of this decidedly
negative portrayal of linguistic Ottomanization in the light of Kadare’s political
orientation. A dissident exile living in Paris since 1990, he is known for his
pronounced pro-Europe, anti-Turkish, and anti-Islamic stance, as evinced in a
polemical pamphlet on “the anatomy of tyranny” in which he refers derisively to
the “baggage of the Ottoman overlords” while longingly prognosticating “a great
rectification of [Albania’s] history that will hasten its union with the mother
continent—Europe.”13
Kadare’s professed commitment to removing the traces of Turkish language
and cultural influence on a future Albania surely render his texts problematic as
exemplars of language politics, if one is committed to warding off the latest iter-
ations of Orientalism. But it is also in their denunciation of the East that these
texts function effectively as symptoms of what they diagnose — a condition of
Balkan Babel defined by the acute anxieties that surround possession of a
discrete language in territories of intense linguistic variegation and border con-
flict. Though not unique to the Balkans, this anxiety is aggravated by East-West

13. Ismail Kadare, Albanian Spring: The Anatomy of Tyranny, trans. Emile Capouya (London:
Saqi Books, 1994), 34. First published as Kadare, Printemps albanais (Paris: Librairie Fayard, 1991).

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Public Culture barriers of untranslatability;14 by the sameness between languages (such as Ser-
bian and Croatian) that have been declared separate by official decree; by the
physical proximity of differential language groups (with a language shift occur-
ring at virtually every train stop); by the historic failure of nationalist linguistic
policy to eliminate discrepancies; and by the proliferation of hybrid dialects that
fall short of qualifying as standard languages. In the Balkans, the vindication
of a language, or even a word, may be a lethal affair, and many writers have
fastened on this problematic as key to understanding not only regional factional-
ism but also the symptomatology carried, for better or for worse, by the term
Balkanization.
The Nobel prize –winning Serbian author Ivo Andrić, whose 1945 novel The
Bridge on the Drina clearly served as inspiration for, if not as the occasion of
rewriting, The Three-Arched Bridge, gives special focus to the responsibility
language bears for making Balkanization a synonym of profound regional dys-
function. Set in Bosnia, The Bridge on the Drina spans several centuries and
replays the smoldering tensions between Orthodox Serbs and Islamic converts.
The fateful construction of a bridge excites the wrath of the boatmen, who
destroy by night what has been built by day, and who, as in The Three-Arched
Bridge, must forfeit the life of one of their own as punishment. As the novel
moves forward to the end of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of civil
war, the politics of blood tribute evolve seamlessly into the politics of occupa-
tion, with local militias doubling as military troops, and vice versa. Violence, as
in the Kadare novel, erupts on the occasion of a diplomatic translation: an old
man from the Turkish side, thought to be a dervish, wanders unsuspectingly into
the Serbian camp and is subjected to interrogation through the intermediary of a
translator with “poor knowledge of the Turkish language.” Intentionally per-
forming a shoddy job, the translator puts “the worst possible construction on
the old man’s exalted phrases” such that they seem to “smell of politics and

14. If at times border wars are fueled by the lack of official recognition accorded small linguistic
differences, in other instances it is the threat of sameness that sparks discord. The political motiva-
tions of linguistic separatism are no more clearly in evidence than in the post-Bosnia decision to
break Serbian and Croatian into separately classified tongues, despite their overriding grammatical
homologies. As George Steiner noted in 1963, decades before the Berlin Wall would come down, lan-
guage divisionism could be most acute where homonymy was greatest. Observing the way in which
“The East German language is developing its own jargon and dialect,” Steiner concludes: “The words
may continue to sound alike, but have contrary definitions. A young East German might come to be
more at home, in the syntax of his politics and feelings, in Peking or Albania, than in Cologne.”
Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, [1958] 1998), 348–49.

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seditious intent.”15 And so the old man is marked for execution, setting in motion Balkan Babel
the tit-for-tat engine of a language war. Turkish soldiers find their opportunity
for retribution when they happen upon a mill attendant in a remote forest area as
he is giving full throat to a ballad of ancient Serbia normally reserved for
“closed houses” (BD, 87). The verse that speaks of a maiden whose lover hopes
to carry a standard for her into battle is particularly offensive to the Turks, con-
vinced that the words maiden and standard have been subversively purloined
from their language. The narrator explains: “In that great and strange struggle,
which had been waged in Bosnia for centuries between two faiths, for land and
power and their own conception of life and order, the adversaries had taken from
each other not only women, horses and arms but also songs. Many a verse passed
from one to the other as the most precious of booty” (BD, 87–88). In the fictional
worlds of Andrić and Kadare, the anodyne practice of linguistic border-crossing
—from the adoption of loan words to the appropriation of a rival country’s verse
— becomes enmeshed in a paranoid psychology of transferential identification
with the other’s words in which each side hears the theft of its patrimony in the
other’s language. Tracked like illegal transients, words become subject to mili-
tary patrol, their border infractions punishable by death.
In Kadare’s novels, the Balkans become a microcosm of a state of civil society
driven by what Manuel de Landa calls “intelligent machines.”16 Only here, de
Landa’s vision of smart bombs and robotic channelers of human will are replaced
in the Balkan context by age-old linguistic technologies, propelling themselves
through maneuvers independent of individual agents. From this perspective, con-
sider specific moments in The Three-Arched Bridge. As East and West, Christen-
dom and Islam, proceed full tilt into battle, the war machine is set in motion by a
“commination,” a gestural speech-act or ritual curse (from the Latin comminari,
to threaten punishment or vengeance). Formally launched by the Turks against
Europe, the commination resembles a machinic technology, built according to
strict rules and safety measures culled from archival manuals. The commination
has the power of first strike, embodying the terrible seriousness of cursing in
Balkan lands. The curse activates a code of honor that exacts blood payment for
the redemption of good name and commits future generations to unrequited war-
fare. Evidence of how this fatal heritage gets passed on to future generations
crops up in The Palace of Dreams, a sequel novel to The Three-Arched Bridge, in

15. Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina, trans. Lovett F. Edwards (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, [1945] 1977), 86. Hereafter cited as BD.
16. Manuel de Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

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Public Culture which the protagonist discovers that his family name is a cursed patronymic
because an ancestor had adopted the name of the “bridge with three arches in
central Albania. . . . built with a man walled up in its foundations,” thus dooming,
for ever after, his descendants to an association with the “stigma of murder.”17
With its grammar of threats and punishments, vengeful cycles and blood sacri-
fice, the commination reveals how war is structured like a language.
In Broken April, perhaps Kadare’s most harrowing novel, this structuralist
vision of tribal peoples bound together in community by a common language of
perpetual war is exemplified to the extreme. The inhabitants of a remote Alba-
nian mountain village, locked into the rules of the besa (code of honor), survive
in a state of permanent war that recalls Pierre Clastres’s theory of “the archeol-
ogy of war,” specifically the case of the Tupi-Guarani Indians, who he claims
“participated in the same cultural model without ever constituting a ‘nation,’
since they remained in a permanent state of war.”18 Operating according to strict
rules of linguistic and social contract, there is zero-sum ambiguity in the moves
each side makes. Each infraction of the laws of hospitality triggers ritual killing,
economized in the currency of truce periods and funeral tithes, debt wound paid
off by human life, or the right to “own a death” redeemed by taking X number of
family hits. The war machine, though reduced to local scale, nonetheless exhibits
the key structural functions attributed by Georges Bataille to military subcultures
in his notes on “The Structure and Function of the Army”: the psychic economy
of the sacrificial victim, mystical corporatism, fealty to the autonomous engine of
destruction, with its power to transform humans into a caste of fabricated beings
called “men at war.”19
Over and over, Kadare depicts war as language — that is, as a transparent
accounting of death’s score, charting wins and losses without affect, or with the
precision and dryness of mathematical notation. This “dead” language — some-
thing on the order of what George Steiner would identify as the “post-linguistic”
condition of inhumanism20 — describes language as pure linguistic technology
geared up for militaristic use. This description is reminiscent, certainly, of Carl

17. Ismail Kadare, The Palace of Dreams, translated from the French of Jusuf Vrioni by Barbara
Bray (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1993), 13–14. Cited passage italicized in the original text.
18. Pierre Clastres, Archeology of Violence, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Semiotext(e),
1994), 55. Translation of Clastres, Recherches d’anthropologie politique (Paris: Seuil, 1980).
19. Georges Bataille, “Structure et fonction de l’armée” (1938), in Denis Hollier, Le collège de
sociologie: 1937–1939 (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 255–67.
20. George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), vii.

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von Clausewitz’s intimation of “combat no longer guided by the ‘will of a guiding Balkan Babel
intelligence,’ ” of war that would “drive policy out of office and rule by the laws
of its own nature.”21 Unlike the messy border wars that prevail in The Three-
Arched Bridge, pitching Ottoman polyglotism against European monolingualism
in a fight that can only end in Balkan Babel, Broken April constructs its paradigm
around a technocratic language of almost digital simplicity: strokes and naughts,
hits and misses, minimal margins of error. In this paradigm, dialects and standard
languages alike are flattened into the Esperanto of intelligent machines.
The Three-Arched Bridge and Broken April offer, respectively, two distinct
models of language war that eventually join up with each other: the first, follow-
ing the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris, characterizable as mafia war; the second,
following the French theorist Paul Virilio, characterizable as Total War.22 Harris
makes careful use of the term mafia, referring not to the “Family” Italo-American
style or, for that matter, to “any other aspect of a hegemonic underworld,” but to
a “perverse commitment to a privileged frame or family, a hidden authoritarian-
ism that cements its vested interest in the preservation of ruling convention.”
“Mafia,” thus abstracted, suggests a logic of “divorced or separated or closed
orders and worlds,” an “invariant code or fate,” leading inexorably to “an institu-
tional self-division of humanity.”23 In Harris’s ascription, “mafia” becomes virtu-
ally synonymous with Balkanization in its most recognizable contemporary
dress; that is, an arms-trafficking, vigilante or guerilla force of organized crime,
politically invested in social apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and border patrol.
When extrapolated to the battlefield of language wars, “mafia” represents
the fortification of linguistic essentialism and the patrolling of creolization.
In this sense, we can discern a fanned out version of the “mafia-effect” in
the “English Only” movement in the United States, or more pointedly still, in
groups that attempt to safeguard the purity of a national standard language.
Consider, in this regard, the way in which a recent essay bemoaning the decline
of French as a global language warns against the auxiliary evil of pidginiza-
tion: “If the fate of French is to become the ancient Greek of the twenty-first
century, the situation of English is even less enviable — that of kitchen Latin —
broken English as the vehicular language is no more favorable to culture as we

21. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-
ton University Press, 1976), 87.
22. Wilson Harris, “Creoleness,” in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of
the Imagination, ed. A. J. M. Bundy (London: Routledge, 1999). Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer,
Pure War, trans. Mark Polizotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).
23. Harris, “Creoleness,” 238–39.

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Public Culture understand it.”24 According to this argument, the preservation of “culture as we
understand it” would chase hybrid tongues underground, forcing them to
assume such tactics of self-defense as camouflage or mottling. This idea of cam-
ouflage could be applied to writers like Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi
who may be seen as ushering in Indian “corruptions” of standard English under
the auspices of vernacular literateneness. Mottling, by contrast, could be used
with reference to the bilingual code-switching of the Chicano writer José Montoya,
whose poems frequently take on the territorial contests between Anglos and
Latinos raging over the freeways, vacant lots, and swimming holes of Califor-
nia. In the poem “Gabby Took the 99,” “wetback” Spanish or Calo may be read
as mottled language. Phrases such as el troque for truck, or El highway 99 blend
in with a landscape that is itself a quintessential translation zone between Mex-
ico and the United States. In another poem “Until They Leave us A Loan,” the
homophonic play between a financial loan and the angry message “leave us
alone” underscores the jarring collision between English and Spanish within
hybrid speech.25
Moving back to the Balkans, we see that mottling appears in the Internet
activism of opposition groups. The (frequently censored) satirical journal Feral
Tribune, published in Split, Croatia, and accessed through the aptly named Web
site http://mediafilter.org/warzone and http://www.feral-tribune.com, mixes Croa-
tian and English in its texts and graphic designs, creating what is, in effect, a
hybrid language media pamphlet accessible to readers beyond the Balkans. Typi-
cal Web pages are rife with anticapitalist, anti-U.S. sentiment: while Mickey and
Minnie Mouse cavort with corrupt politicians, the caption reads “Welcome to
Daytonland.” In another image, the familiar army recruitment shot of Uncle Sam
mobilizes insulting language as activist invective: i want you to explain me
what a fuck is going on here! Feral Tribune’s Slav-inflected English and
Anglo-Slavic puns belong to an arsenal of vulgar, vitriolic, high camp caricatures
deployed in a war against repression at home and indifference abroad.
If mafia war, applied to language, coincides with what Virilio calls an “intesti-
nal” localism, Virilio’s notion of Total War (referring to the universal language of
bunker architecture and antiaircraft shelters that function as “reference points or
landmarks to the totalitarian nature of war in space and myth”) might be keyed to

24. Antoine Compagnon, “Pourquoi le français devient une langue comme les autres,” le débat,
no. 104, March–April 1999: 103 (my translation).
25. José Montoya, Information: 20 Years of Joda (San Jose, Calif.: Chusma House Publications,
1992).

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Nuclear English.26 The linguist Randolph Quirk invented the term Nuclear Balkan Babel
English to designate a language akin to C. K. Ogden’s Basic English (BASIC) —
that is, a language, in his words, that would be as “culture-free as calculus.”
Culture-free as calculus, with no literary, aesthetic or emotional aspira-
tions, it is correspondingly more free than the “national Englishes” of any
suspicion that it smacks of linguistic imperialism or even (since native
speakers of English would have to be trained to use it) that it puts some
countries at an advantage over others in international communication.
Since it is not (but is merely related to) a natural language, it would not be
in competition for educational resources with foreign languages proper
but rather with that other fundamental interdisciplinary subject, mathe-
matics. Nor, by the same token, could its teachers be accused of wasting
resources (as sometimes happens, distressingly, with foreign languages
and literatures) on an elitist disciplinary ornament for the few. The rela-
tions of Nuclear English are less with the ivory tower than with public
convenience.27
Nuclear English, in Quirk’s ascription, advertises itself politically as a force of
democracy, but a democracy aimed at the boardrooms of multinationals. In exe-
cution, it seems to boil down to “restricting modalities,” that is, reducing the inci-
dence of polysemy wherever possible, constraining unconventional or pidgin
grammar, and maximizing semantic intentionality. Nuclear English seems to pro-
mote a denationalized, Taylorized literacy in which signs do not misfire but,
rather, hit their mark with mathematical precision. Carried to its logical end,
Nuclear English is tantamount to a prescription for Total War on linguistic diver-
sity and cultural inflection—nothing short of a nuclear attack on the language of
humans. But the obvious humanist rebuttal may be all too easy. What makes the
idea of Nuclear English rather interesting, it would seem, is that it updates the old
dream of a perfectly standardized, universal language for an age of intelligent
machines.
For what is Nuclear English if not the culmination of intertwining strands of
imperial politics and utopian language philosophy — the former going back to
revolutionary and colonial histories, the latter to the explosion of lingua francas
at the turn of the twentieth century? As regards the revolutionary heritage, Renée
Balibar, Clastres, and the Jesuit linguist Louis-Jean Calvet have traced how,

26. Virilio and Lotringer, Pure War, 2–3.

27. Randolph Quirk, “International Communication and the Concept of Nuclear English,” in Eng-
lish for International Communication, ed. C. J. Brumfit (Oxford: Pergamon Institute of English,
1982), 19.

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Public Culture particularly during the Terror, language squadrons were billeted to rural areas
in a campaign to bring dialect into line with newly established codifications of
French standard language.28 Clastres writes:
The Revolution of 1789, in allowing the triumph of the Jacobins’ central-
ist thought over the Girondins’ federalist tendencies, brought the political
ascendancy of Parisian administrations to an end. The provinces, as terri-
torial units, had each relied on an ancient, culturally homogenous reality:
language, political traditions, etc. Provinces were replaced by abstract
division into departments, intended to break all references to local particu-
larisms, and thus facilitate the penetration of state authority everywhere.
The final stage of this movement through which differences would vanish
before State power was the Third Republic, which definitively trans-
formed the inhabitants of the hexagon into citizens, due to the institution
of free and obligatory secular schools and obligatory military service.
Whatever remained of autonomous existence in the provincial and rural
world succumbed. Francification had been accomplished, ethnocide con-
summated: traditional languages were attacked as backwards patois, vil-
lage life reduced to the level of folkloristic spectacle destined for the con-
sumption of tourists, etc.29
Calvet shows how this French linguistic colonization of itself was extended to the
colonies; he documents the application of French language policies outre mer and
the consequent consolidation of a dominant French culture in territories outside
the Hexagon. He also examines the lack of tolerance for minority languages in
Russia—both before and after the revolution. The doctrine of “one tsar, one reli-
gion, one language,” is transformed by the Soviet regime into the mandate of a
society without frontiers or nations. This “unique culture” was supposed to
evolve in stages, from rastvet (the flowering of different cultures), to sblizheniye
(their coming together), to sliyaniye (the emergence of harmonious unity in a sin-
gle world language).30
In addition to spelling out causal connections between the rise of universal
language ideology and imperialism, Calvet interprets the rise of Esperanto as
a response to the growing divisionism of Europe on the eve of World War I.
28. Renée Balibar, L’institution du français: Essai sur le colinguisme des Carolingiens à la
République (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985); Clastres, Archeology of Violence; Louis-
Jean Calvet, Language Wars and Linguistic Politics, trans. Michel Petheram (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1998). Originally published as Calvet, La guerre des langues et les politiques linguistiques
(Paris: Payot, 1987).
29. Clastres, Archeology of Violence, 49.
30. Calvet, Language Wars and Linguistic Politics, 155–56.

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Nineteenth-century “logothèthes,” he notes, invented around five hundred schemes Balkan Babel
for artificial languages that would transcend the imperfections of natural lan-
guages: Cosmoglossa (1858), Universalglot (1868), Volapük (1879), Weltsprache
(1883), Esperanto (1887), Mundolingue (1890), Dil (1903), Simplo (1911), and
Europeo (1914) were among the most popularly disseminated. Volapük, for
example, sustained twenty-five journals, 283 societies, and an academy.
The idea of Nuclear English reveals the reductive drive inherent in Leibnizian
schemes for a scientific language that were famously castigated by Ernest Renan
in De l’origine du langage (1859) as “mangled, tortured, artificial, painfully con-
structed, and inharmonious,” in short, “plus barbare que l’iroquois” [more bar-
baric than Iroquois]. Even worse than their infelicitous form, he argued, was their
specious pretense to logic: “Premeditated linguistic reforms . . . are often less
logical than humble patois.”31 If Nuclear English derives on the one hand from
Leibniz — from revolutionary standardizations of language, state-sponsored
single-language policies, and lingua franca movements in turn-of-the-century
Europe — on the other hand, it has also been traced (by Alastair Pennycook
among others), to British philosophical traditions of pragmatism, positivism, and
utilitarianism that influenced Ogden’s development in 1930 of BASIC (an
acronym for British American Scientific International Commercial).32 Compris-
ing a vocabulary of only 850 words, boosted by Winston Churchill in the 1940s
as part of a meliorist colonial platform, Basic English aspired to technological
rationalism and mathematical simplicity. BASIC set a precedent for future wars
against linguistic proliferation and prepared the way for future fetishizations of a
supersimplified English vulgate or technological Globalspeak.
Of course, one can argue, it is precisely at the moment when Globalspeak
becomes feasible in the age of intelligent machines that Balkan Babel breaks out
on the borders. In Japan, for example, Babel can be identified in the teenage pid-
gins used to “evade parental surveillance.”33 This code language draws on the
transliteration of English words pronounced with a Japanese accent (wonchu for
“I want you”); pig Latin mixing of product names with Japanese verbs (deniru
for “let’s go to a Denny’s restaurant,” hageru for “let’s get a Haagen-Dazs ice
cream”); and various forms of techno-babble (as in daburu-kurikku mausu for

31. Ernest Renan, De l’origine du langage (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1859), 95–96 (my transla-
tion).
32. Alistair Pennycook, English and the Discourses of Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1998);
Pennycook, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (London: Longman, 1994).
33. Nicholas D. Kristof, “Stateside Lingo Gives Japan Its Own Valley Girls,” New York Times, 19
October 1997, 33.

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Public Culture “double-click the mouse”).34 Here it would seem, the greater the reach of Eng-
lish, the greater the production of “other Englishes” that both undermine and
reinforce monolingual orders.
For English to maintain and enhance its growing grip on international com-
munication, it needs to contain Balkanization by patrolling linguistic breakaway
groups, supporting linguicide or the stamping out of “useless” endangered lan-
guage species, and routinely “cleansing” the language of rebarbative localisms or
mongrel incursions. But already this task is complicated by the latest side effects
of technological literacy whereby hackers—enabled by the Internet—“break in”
and disable the languages and codes by which computers protect themselves.35 In
an era of Internet attacks, the future theater of war, the future translation zone, is
removed to electronic turf and the crucial question becomes, How do we wage
war, make peace, or control the enemy, when we do not even know who or where
the enemy is?

Emily Apter teaches in the departments of French and comparative literature at the
University of California at Los Angeles, where she is also chair of comparative
literature. Her most recent books are Continental Drift: From National Charac-
ters to Virtual Subjects (1999) and The Translation Zone: Language Politics at the
Millennial Pass (forthcoming).

34. Kristof, “Stateside Lingo,” 33.

35. A New York Times editorial on Internet hacking is foreboding: “The Internet is nearly impos-
sible to police, for the same reason that it is so difficult to define. It is not owned or regulated by the
government. Nor is it ‘owned’ by private businesses or individuals. It consists of telephone lines and
countless computer sites linked together in a system through which anyone can navigate anony-
mously. In this environment, freedom of expression, commercial transactions, political activity and
the simple pleasure of gathering information and communicating have come to flourish in ways few
thought possible only a few years ago. These very qualities are what make the Internet vulnerable to
anonymous attack. . . . Even more insidiously, the hackers have apparently enlisted unknowing allies
in the attacks by invading vulnerable computer systems and using those computers to help carry out
the assaults.” Editorial, “Hacker Attacks on the Internet,” New York Times, 11 February 2000, A30.

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