Introduction: Translation in the Service of (De)colonisation

In his most recent book, El Polaco (The Pole), J. M. Coetzee unsettles the dominance of English and the Global North. He draws attention to a plurality of languages that should co-exist, without one overriding the other. By implication, he also promotes the importance of translation. He does this by resisting first publication of the book in what he sees as dreary and oppressive global English. The Pole was written in English but did not get published in that language until 2023 (along with some other stories in July for the UK (2023a), and as a short novel in September for the USA (2023b)). 2022 had been the year of the book’s very first publication, in translated form as a novella, by Spanish-language translator Mariana Dimópulos for the Argentinian publisher El Hilo de Ariadna, in the kind of writing that Rebecca Walkowitz had earlier (2015) famously termed ‘born translated’ literature. The Pole explores unrequited love, language, constant misunderstandings, how English as a common language infringes on relationships and intimacy, and music as another mode of communication. Coetzee’s two protagonists (a septuagenarian Polish pianist and a woman in her late forties from Barcelona) establish and maintain their relationship through English, although neither of them is a native speaker. This common language is one of many impediments to their love affair thriving. Coetzee not only delayed the first publication of his book in English and intentionally chose to publish it first in the Global South, but he also countered the received view of the easy translatability, communicability, and connectivity of languages in general, and English in particular. In an interview promoting his work at the Welsh Hay Festival of Literature & Arts, he was quoted as saying:

I do not like the way in which [English] crushes the minor languages that it finds in its path. I don’t like its universalist pretensions, by which I mean its uninterrogated belief that the world is as it seems to be in the mirror of the English language. I don’t like the arrogance that this situation breeds in its native speakers. Therefore, I do what little I can to resist the hegemony of the English language.