The Linguist

@CIOL_Linguists AUTUMN 2024 The Linguist 15 FEATURES When Adam reveals his Urdu abilities, Anisa is annoyed and frustrated that he's almost better than her, but when she learns German, she doesn't apply that critique to herself. Why? I suppose it is different for a white guy to learn Urdu than for a Pakistani woman to learn, say, English. It's a different context and has to do with prevalent power structures. At the same time, Anisa is frequently oblivious to her own contradictions, and this especially comes out with Adam. For instance, she often appears unaware of her class privilege. I can't be the only reader who came to the realisation, through reading The Centre, that I have internalised other languages' superiority to my own. But which is my language? English? Urdu? Is it about the level of fluency or one's family connection to a language? Some readers miss that subtext and see the book purely as a thriller. I don't mind this as it hopefully means it's not pretentious or didactic, but it's lovely when questions like this come up. And for multilingual or diasporic people, they often do. How can they not? We have complex relationships to what we may call our mother tongues, which may even be languages our parents are fluent in that we barely speak. With these languages, we may have relationships of longing and nostalgia, but also shame and sadness. As you said, languages can connect us to our past. The severing of South Asian people from their languages has often been intentional and connected to a brutal colonial project. But I believe in healing and transformation, and in the idea that things long lost can be recovered and repaired. Your work has been translated into Spanish and Russian. How do you feel about these translations? The Spanish translation of The Centre was interesting because they did in fact use footnotes. In the first scene, when Anisa is cooking karela stir fry, a note says something like "karela is a type of bitter South Asian vegetable". I felt this was unnecessary, but I also gained an understanding that the politics of publishing is different in different spaces. I tried to tell them but they kept the footnotes, and that's ok. There's only so much you can control, and I love my Spanish publishers. Could you tell us about your essay 'Preserving the Tender Things' in Violent Phenomena: 21 essays on translation? I wrote that piece immediately after writing The Centre, and it felt wonderful to be able to explore some of the ideas around language and translation in a more theoretical, somewhat academic way. The anthology is about translation and decolonisation, and the essay explores some of the things we've been talking about: the erasure and suppression of marginalised languages; the importance of considering wider issues around linguistic power structures; the translations that those of marginalised backgrounds are sometimes required to do even when they don't want to, and how, in that context, not translating can be an act of resistance. And it is also a personal essay, about my own life, my journey around languages, literature and translation. What's next for you? I've just finished an early draft of my new book, Good Benny. On the surface, it appears to not be about translation but in some senses it is – for one thing, it's about the languages spoken by animals and by human beings, and communication across these lines. I also recently lost my father to cancer, and the book is about cancer too – and that world, the world of illness, is a strange and disconcerting one, with a language of its own. discusses everything from diaspora communities DIQI © ANDREW MASON

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