Speaking in Tongues - J.M.Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos

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Speaking in Tongues

by
J.M.Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the authors

Title:	Speaking in Tongues
Authors:	J.M.Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos
Genre:	Dialogue
Written:	2025
Length:	108 pages
Availability:	Speaking in Tongues - US
	Don de lenguas - US
	Speaking in Tongues - UK
	Speaking in Tongues - Canada
	Don de lenguas - España

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

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Our Assessment:

B+ : enjoyable look at some interesting questions regarding language and translation

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Literary Review	.	5/2025	Shaun Whiteside
The NY Rev. of Books	.	26/6/2025	K.A.Appiah
The Observer	.	24/5/2025	Anthony Cummins
TLS	.	13/6/2025	Anna Aslanyan
Wall St. Journal	.	1/5/2025	Henry Hitchings

From the Reviews:

"Speaking in Tongues, a dialogue between J.M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos, repeatedly shifts the focus from individual choices to the structural forces that shape translation. (...) Is a perfect translation possible, then ? Coetzee is of two minds, because he’s equally interested in everything that impedes translation. (...) In general Coetzee focuses on the limits of translation, Dimópulos on its possibilities." - Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Review of Books

"The energy of their conversation lies chiefly in Coetzee’s attitude of perpetually troubled thoughtfulness. As they cordially bat around ideas on Kafka’s style or the untranslatability of colour, we glimpse a mind poised on the brink of a philosophical abyss." - Anthony Cummins, The Observer

"The interlocutors cover much ground. There are personal stories and tales of linguistic domination, reflections on the translator's (in)visibility and forays into neurolinguistics. (...) Some interesting questions for example, how certain languages lost grammatical gender--are considered, occasionally leading to illuminating discussions. Mostly, though, we are in well-trodden terrain. (...) This is all well and good, but do we need these maxims reiterated by a Nobel-winning novelist and a reputable translator ? Despite the publisher's blurb calling the book "provocative", it is unlikely to elicit more than a few polite nods." - Anna Aslanyan, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       As authors J.M.Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos explain in their Introduction to Speaking in Tongues, this text: "was written over a period of months by two hands in a dialogue form". While there is a back and forth, each in turn responding to the comments, observations, and arguments of the other, it is not the quick or immediate back and forth of in-person conversation. Most of the entries are also longer -- a page or two at a time.
       The book has four chapters, each focused on a different aspect of language and translation. Perhaps the most interesting is the one on: 'Translating The Pole' -- the novel Coetzee wrote, and which Dimópulos translated into Spanish (or, as they put it in the Introduction: "was turned by MD into a short novel in Spanish entitled El polaco"), as they note that Speaking in Tongues "originated in a work of translation" (The Pole/El polaco).
       As the authors sum up in the Introduction regarding The Pole:

The goal of this project was an unusual one: to make El polaco the "original" text, in the sense that all further translations would proceed from the Spanish text, not the English. This goal was largely thwarted by pressures from the within the publishing industry, but the project allowed us to raise general questions about the secondary status of the translation relative to the primary or "original" text, and indeed about the secondary status of the translator relative to the primary status of the "originator," the author.

       In the chapter on 'Translating The Pole' Coetzee explains a bit more about the writing of the text -- and the various foreign publishers' refusal to translate from the Spanish version (intriguing not least because so much translation into other languages is still second-hand, most often via the English translation of the work). Indeed, the project -- and its successes and failure seem worth a book of their own, not just a chapter, as here ......
       Dimópulos comes to these discussions as both translator -- of The Pole and numerous other works -- as well as "originator", as she has also written several works of fiction. Interestingly, Coetzee, though noting his relationship with a variety of languages, basically ignores his own translation-work, even though he has translated from both Afrikaans and Dutch (notably Wilma Stockenström's The Expedition to the Baobab Tree and Marcellus Emants' A Posthumous Confession). (There are lists of works 'Also by' both authors at the beginning of the book, with Dimópulos' arranged by: 'Fiction', 'Nonfiction', and 'Translation', while the Coetzee-lists only list his works of 'Fiction' and 'Nonfiction'.)
       The first chapter, 'The Mother Tongue', explores in particular 'the dual linguistic life' -- specifically when the 'mother tongue', the first or 'native' language learnt, is a 'minor' language, while a much of life is then lived in a 'major' -- much more widely spoken, often 'imperial' -- language, with Coetzee finding, for example, that:

for many members of the world intelligentsia, the mother tongue is no longer the language in which they do their thinking; yet at the same time in the language in which they think there inheres an uneasy foreign feel.

       So also Coetzee describes his own path -- whereby already both his parents: "had their schooling in English, and learned to read and write English better than they read or wrote Afrikaans", and he became: "an 'English' writer in the sense that I wrote in the English language, though [...] I treated the language as if it were foreign to me". (So also then in discussing The Pole-project, he notes that one of his motivations was that: "I had reached a point in my life where I was seriously concerned about the English language as a global political force, and wished to emphasize my personal rupture with it".)
       The second chapter takes up the issue of 'Gender', noting differences between languages, notably that many languages have gender systems, with English less so than, for example, the Romance languages or German, while some are essentially genderless (the Turkic languages, Chinese, etc.). This makes for difficulties in translation, which the authors discuss, but they also consider what it means for languages to have gender -- and also whether an 'erasure of gender from language' is possible, and how it could be effected.
       The final chapter, 'Words' looks specifically at questions of (literary) translation -- beginning with Coetzee noting that he is helping prepare a novel by Olive Schreiner to be translated into Dutch -- first (shockingly ...) condensing it, before it goes to the translator ("The novel is very long -- too long for modern tastes"), then wondering as to how to treat the: "terms for Africans that African readers today find offensive" used by Schreiner. The issue of 'untranslatability -- of words or concepts in one language that have no equivalent in the one it is being translated into -- also comes up, with Coetzee posing the nice question (generally, as well as regarding translation): "If the word cannot be found, does it really exist ?"
       A slim book, Speaking in Tongues considers many interesting questions and offers much food for thought. Both Coetzee and Dimópulos bring interesting personal experience and opinions -- not least, from their efforts with The Pole -- to the conversation -- though there is certainly room for a great deal more (such as Coetzee speaking more of his own experiences, not as a translated author (he does a fair bit of that) but as translator of others' work). If largely surface-discussion, the engagement here is at least serious and considered; the book remains more starting-point than truly thorough, but is certainly good as such.

- M.A.Orthofer, 1 July 2025

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Links:

Speaking in Tongues:

Liveright publicity page
Harvill Secker publicity page
El Hilo de Ariadna publicity page
Uitgeverij Cossee publicity page

Reviews:

Cutting Edge (Dutch)
The Dial
4Columns
Kirkus Reviews
The Observer
Publishers Weekly
Shepherd Express
De Standaard (Dutch) (scroll down for review)

J.M. Coetzee:

J.M.Coetzee at books and writers
Nobel Prize, 2003

Other books by J.M. Coetzee under review:

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of books dealing with Translation
See Index of Interviews, conversations, and dialogues
See Index of Books by Nobel laureates

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About the Authors:

John M. Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940. He has won many literary prizes, and was the 2003 Nobel laureate in literature.

Argentine author and translator Mariana Dimópulos was born in 1973.

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