things are said in both languages) completely ignores what a natural language
is: the fact that, named thus in order to distinguish it from artificial languages,
it is in reality a cultural construct. Understanding languages through the optic
of connotations is to appreciate that a language is also a history, a culture, a
conception of the world – not merely a dictionary and a grammar.
An example will illustrate the point. It has the advantage of approximating
to my opening utterance. Readers may remember Sartre’s phrase: un
anticommuniste est un chien. The English translation (which is a genuine
translation and does not carry on speaking French in English) reads: ‘an anti-
communist is a rat’.^1 Why this change of animal, which we already come
across in my translation of ‘he made me feel like a worm’? Because culturally
the word ‘dog’, which denotes man’s best friend, does not have the same
negative connotations as the word chien. ‘A dirty dog’ is a nasty piece of
work, ‘a lucky dog’ a jammy so-and-so, ‘a gay dog’ a likely lad. By contrast,
in English and French alike no one has a good word to say about rats. What
the authors of the French edition of the Sundo not realise is that translation,
even in the simplest case (one can scarcely imagine a less problematic utterance
than ‘Chirac is a worm’), is a process which employs a conception of language
as a combination of grammar, history and culture.
This lack of awareness is ubiquitous. It is even the source of a politics. In
April 2003 Charles Clarke, British education minister and notionally a Labourist,
declared that public funds should no longer be devoted to ‘ornamental subjects’
like mediaeval history or classical literature. Such provocations, too deliberate
and insistent not to intimate a policy, earned him some epithets from the
scholarly communities concerned (‘philistine mobster’, ‘intolerant yahoo’ –
the latter being an allusion to Gulliver’s travels, whereby literature takes its
revenge on those who scorn it). In themselves, these attacks did not directly
concern language: neither linguistics (which still enjoys a vague scientific
aura), nor even philosophy (which Mr. Clarke had the good grace to exclude
from his attacks), are directly implicated. But to attack the history-culture
nexus, the cultural past that is inscribed in the English language, out of which
the English language is made, presupposes a conception of language as tool
and lingua franca, a simple instrument for the transmission of information
4 • Chapter One
(^1) I owe this example to Gregory Elliott.