A review of Speaking in Tongues.

JUNE 26, 2025

A few years ago, on the sidelines of a literary festival in Nairobi, a Greek writer and I were talking about language. She was at the point of despair about the limited readability of her work and was thinking about the feasibility of writing in either German or English instead (she was fluent enough in both that some of her other professional work was in these languages). That she wrote in a language with only approximately 14 million speakers meant that the size of her audience was severely limited. German, with more than 130 million speakers, would supercharge it. English, with its 1.5 billion, would launch it into the stratosphere. Her situation was exacerbated by the fact that the market for translations of Greek novels is small: According to the translation database run by Publishers Weekly, there have only been four novels translated from Greek into English in the United States in the last four years.

This kind of linguistic conundrum is the subject of Speaking in Tongues, published last month. The book is a conversation — a written back-and-forth exchange — between the Nobel Prize-winning writer J.M. Coetzee and the Argentine translator and writer Mariana Dimópulos, arranged in four short chapters. Over the course of the book, Coetzee and Dimópulos talk about several issues connected to translation, among them how gender translates — or fails to translate — across different languages, how a person’s mother tongue affects the way they view the world, and the different languages that featured in the writers’ own early lives. For Coetzee, Speaking in Tongues is part of a larger project of fighting the hegemony of English in world literature. It’s a worthy cause, but unfortunately his approach to it is both highly idiosyncratic and highly unproductive.

Is the translator meant to be a cultural mediator? Dimópulos doesn’t think so. The job of the translator is to reproduce everything in the original text, whether racist or incorrect or offensive. To do more than that would be to edit, and the translator should not be an editor. She says, “The ethics of translation are the ethics of closeness.”

Dimópulos and Coetzee, like billions of citizens of formerly colonized countries, are both from a multilingual background. Dimópulos’s paternal grandparents were Greek, but her father, born in Argentina, grew up speaking Spanish. Her grandmother had learned Spanish in Argentina, but, as Dimópulos says, when she was old “she forgot Spanish, a language she had learned when she was about thirty-five but never mastered; I remember going to visit her with my father and just watching them interacting in their tongue, in dialogues I couldn’t understand a word of.” Coetzee has more languages in his background. On his mother’s side, there was Polish, then German, then English. On his father’s, there was Dutch, then English and Afrikaans. He himself grew up speaking Afrikaans and English, in a country — South Africa — that is famous in linguistic circles for having 12 official languages.

One of the most interesting conversations in the book regards the role of the translator when confronted with work that expresses ideas they find distasteful. Coetzee asks if the translator is “free to improve the text where it is clumsy or graceless or obscure?” For Dimópulos, the translator has to be able to create: The aim is not to translate literally, but to give beauty to text. But this does not mean that the writer is free to change things where the “original” writer expresses an unethical thought. She offers the example of Anne Frank’s diaries. The young writer expresses anti-German sentiment when writing about Jewish-German relations. When The Diary of a Young Girl was translated into German for the first time, its translator toned down her words. To Dimópulos, this was wrong.

Coetzee disagrees. “I am not sure that the German translator of Anne Frank was wrong,” he says. “One can argue that, in Germany of the 1950s, when the nation was trying to crawl back from years of barbarism to membership in the circle of civilized nations, though flames of resentment against the victors were still crackling under the surface in some quarters, messages of reconciliation were needed, not messages of hostility. If this was the view that Anne’s translator took, then he or she was acting more as a cultural mediator than as a translator stricto sensu.”

Coetzee had intended for El polaco to be the public original: All further translations of the text were to be made from it, not from The Pole. However, publishers in multiple countries declined to translate from El polaco. “The Spanish text, they said, did not constitute the original, and they preferred to translate from the original.”

Is the translator meant to be a cultural mediator? Dimópulos doesn’t think so. The job of the translator is to reproduce everything in the original text, whether racist or incorrect or offensive. To do more than that would be to edit, and the translator should not be an editor. She says, “The ethics of translation are the ethics of closeness.”

But the most important discussion in the book occurs when they talk about power and translation, and the power that different languages hold in the global publishing industry. It is this subject that led to their collaborating on Speaking in Tongues in the first place.

Dimópulos and Coetzee met when Dimópulos translated some stories by Robert Musil from German into Spanish for an anthology that Coetzee was compiling. Later, they worked together on a more ambitious translation project. Coetzee had written a book — The Pole — in English but had not yet published it because he wanted it to be published first in Spanish, for El polaco to be the “original” text. This experiment was part of Coetzee’s already existing, self-declared mission to fight the dominance of English in world literature. His 2019 novel, The Death of Jesus, was also published in Spanish before being published in English, a precursor to what he wanted to do with El polaco. And so Dimópulos took to “creating” this text.

They came upon an insurmountable problem. Coetzee had intended for El polaco to be the public original: All further translations of the text were to be made from it, not from The Pole. However, publishers in multiple countries declined to translate from El polaco. “The Spanish text, they said, did not constitute the original, and they preferred to translate from the original.” Thus, El polaco “was treated like any other Spanish book in the sense that it was reviewed in Spanish-language periodicals and bought by Spanish-speaking readers,” and had no life beyond that. And this, to Coetzee, was a problem, since it offered further proof that in publishing, English is the most powerful language, valued above all others.

The English problem is not one that is unique to literature. Numerous factors — including the extent of British colonialism, the rise of globalism, and, more than anything else, the value of the American dollar and how the world economy runs on it — have meant that English is dominant across various industries. In the literary world, this has exacerbated a cycle in which Anglophone publishing is more widespread, and commands significantly more money, than publishing in other languages. Even in countries where English is not the most widely spoken language (such as in large areas of Africa), the English publishing industry is often bigger than those in local mother-tongues. This was the cause of my Greek friend’s disquiet; as long as she wrote in Greek, her audience would likely remain minuscule compared to that of authors writing in English.

And so Coetzee decided that El polaco would be his bludgeon against the dominance of English. The novel itself explores the complexities of language. Its two main characters — a Polish man and a Spanish woman — speak English to each other, since that is the language they have in common. But because both speak it as a foreign language, their conversation is often — deliberately — flat and flavorless. At other times, when thrown off course by misunderstanding, their exchanges are humorous, as when the man praises the woman as “heavy.” In Polish the word is used to indicate that a person has substance — whereas in English, as the woman notes, heavy is “reserved for fat people.” Sometimes the man, who is in love with the woman, finds that he cannot express his feelings to her in English so he sends recordings of himself playing the piano to her. She finds these indecipherable. Here we see the risks of people communicating in a language that is not their own, and which they speak because its dominance makes it essential for their careers. They can never see each other for who they truly are in their mother-tongues. The woman wonders if the man is a different person in Polish, a language in which his speech is not stilted.

One wonders if the drive to present El Polaco as the original work is little more than the ego-trip of the writer who, heavy-laden with the weight of literary glory, believes himself to be nobly casting off some of that glory while in fact drawing further attention to it.

As a work of literature, El polaco wrestles with important questions about the limits of human communication. Despite the flatness of Coetzee’s prose, there are moments, particularly when he writes about the Spanish woman’s life, that sparkle. The larger El Polaco project, however, is inherently flawed. First, it is weakened by Coetzee’s choice of language. Spanish is one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world and is the official or national language of 21 countries — largely because, like English, it was forcibly spread through conquest and violence. In much of the Americas, Spanish arrived on the backs of invaders who enslaved and killed millions of Indigenous people. The Spanish crown then imposed its language on the subjects, wiping out or nearly wiping out other languages in the process. English and Spanish are both bullies; Spanish has merely been somewhat less successful in its domination.

Even aside from this fact, it’s significant that Coetzee did not write his novel in Spanish. He wrote it in English, and Dimópulos translated it. It is therefore very different from, say, the decision the American writer Jhumpa Lahiri has made to write only in Italian. Lahiri, in her decision to publish in Italian, didn’t merely get someone to translate her books into Italian. She learned Italian, then started writing in Italian: She made a commitment to producing the original text in a language other than English.

Coetzee claims that the publishers’ refusal to use the Spanish text as the original version of The Pole / El polaco is part of a pattern of English being the most dominant language in the literary world. As he puts it, “I have no doubt that if the book had been composed in Albanian and translated into Spanish, publishers would have been prepared to abandon the original-language principle and commission translations from the Spanish. Why then the impasse? The answer: because the ‘original’ was not in Albanian, a ‘minor’ language, but in English, a ‘major’ language and indeed perhaps today’s master language.” It is an annoying set of hypotheticals. If what Coetzee desired was to rescue the hypothetical Albanian writer, he could have forwarded the Albanian writer’s work to his publisher. If what he intended to do was to rescue Spanish literature by writing a book in Spanish, he would have. He did not. One wonders if the drive to present El Polaco as the original work is little more than the ego-trip of the writer who, heavy-laden with the weight of literary glory, believes himself to be nobly casting off some of that glory while in fact drawing further attention to it.

The project would be more intellectually exciting if Coetzee had published the book in one of the languages of his childhood, whether the suiwer Afrikaans that he grew up speaking and was taught in school, or in the kombuistaal that was rejected by the state — or in one of the many other languages native to South Africa.

The Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, who died last month, famously abandoned writing in English in favor of his native Gĩkũyũ. He did so despite having no history of writing in Gĩkũyũ, and in the knowledge that there was no existing publishing industry of Gĩkũyũ literature. He convinced publishers to publish his books in Gĩkũyũ, then he himself translated them into English. In doing so, he became a fighter for mother tongues, as a well as being a novelist. It doesn’t matter whether the English translation was what was used to translate his books into other Western languages — it made sense that it was, since there were so many more translators who could work from English than from Gĩkũyũ. What mattered was that the true original existed in Gĩkũyũ, thus helping to create a Gĩkũyũ canon of written literature — a meaningful challenge to the supremacy of English literary culture.

Part of my frustration with Coetzee’s project is that there are languages in his past that would have made for a rich experiment had he chosen to write in them. When Coetzee was growing up in South Africa, there was English and there was also Afrikaans. In fact, there were two kinds of Afrikaans. One of them was used largely by the white Afrikaner community to which Coetzee belonged (though his Anglophile parents preferred to speak in English). The other was used by people descended from slaves brought from Southeast Asia to work for the Afrikaner farmers. The first Afrikaans, often referred to as suiwer or “pure” Afrikaans, was accepted by the apartheid government as standardized Afrikaans. The second Afrikaans was relegated to the level of kombuis or “kitchen” language, known as kombuistaal. In South African schools, suiwer Afrikaans was what was taught, not kombuistaal. In 1976, the government decided to make it the compulsory language of instruction in Black schools as well. This sparked the Soweto uprising, in which hundreds of people were killed. These riots against what the Black majority in South Africa considered the language of the oppressor, and the brutal police response to the protests, renewed global opposition to apartheid rule. The project would be more intellectually exciting if Coetzee had published the book in one of the languages of his childhood, whether the suiwer Afrikaans that he grew up speaking and was taught in school, or in the kombuistaal that was rejected by the state — or in one of the many other languages native to South Africa. Doing so would have been a more convincing rebuke of the domination of English, as well as opening up a conversation about Coetzee’s own place in postcolonial literature.

Coetzee has written in English since the beginning of his career. His relationship to the language has not always been antagonistic: As a young man, he has said, he regarded English as liberating him from “the narrow world view of the Afrikaner.” He longed to be published in what seemed to him the “real world”: London and New York. At no point in Speaking in Tongues does Coetzee address directly the violence that linguistic choices have enacted in his own country. Nor does he explore in much detail the specific languages of his childhood and their history. Even in The Pole/El polaco itself, this blindness about the power of languages is stark: For a book set in Barcelona, written by a writer fighting the hegemony of language, it is odd that Catalan does not appear. During Franco’s regime, Catalan was suppressed, and people in Catalonia were forced by the Spanish state to use Spanish as the language of education, media and administration. This is the point Coetzee misses, as he wages his pseudo-fight in a colonial language: that Spanish never needed saving. Hardly less than English, it has already won.