The Dialect of the Tribe is a nine-page humorous short story by Harry Mathews (1930–2017), an American francophone writer, close to Georges Perec, and who joined the Oulipo group in 1973.
It deals with pagolak, a fictional dialect of an equally fictional mountain tribe in central New Guinea, supposedly studied in the 1920s by the Australian linguist Ernest Botherby (Perth, 1869 – Adelaide, 1944). This language is said to have the peculiar feature of being intelligible to neighboring tribes without them understanding the meaning of the words used. Dictionaries thus prove inadequate for comprehending this phenomenon, as do attempts at explanation, to the point where the narrator, like Dr. Botherby, is left to carry out the process himself — in pagolak. The gradual encroachment of an allegedly scientific discourse by another, incomprehensible one in pagolak, creates a comic effect while questioning the translation process, both regarding the performative nature of the result and the untranslatability of the original.
The original publication in 1980 was preceded by the publication of the French translation of an earlier, longer version of the story, which included several details explicitly referring to the author's relationship with Perec, later removed from the final version. Sixteen years later, Mathews reuses the character of Dr. Botherby in Oulipo et traduction: Le cas du Maltais persévérant (Oulipo and Translation: The Case of the Persevering Maltese) for a report on another ethnolinguistic discovery: the Ohos, whose language is limited to the three words "Red equals bad," and the Ouhas, who also can say only one phrase, "Here not there." Botherby's attempt to explain the Ouhas' language to the Ohos leads him to realize that a language can only say what it is capable of saying. This variant refers to a chapter of Life: A User's Manual by Perec, particularly the story of the Austrian anthropologist Appenzzell and his observations about the allegedly poor vocabulary of the Kubus of Sumatra.
The two versions of The Dialect of the Tribe and Oulipo and Translation: The Case of the Persevering Maltese form an intertextual network of fictions united by the common theme of translation issues and by the character of Botherby, alluding to Perec's underlying text about Appenzzell, to the relationship between Mathews and Perec, and their shared practices of writing and translation. This short story, which has drawn the attention of several translation specialists, has been linked to various theses from analytic philosophy concerning the stakes of translation. It also resonates with the pioneering work of anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, stemming from his fieldwork in New Guinea. Finally, it illustrates the broader conception of translation within Oulipo, treating it as a particular case-constrained writing.
Intertextuality The two French versions of the short story
The Dialect of the Tribe was originally published in 1980 in the American journal SubStance and later that same year included, with a dedication to Georges Perec, in the collection Country Cooking and Other Stories. The French translation of this collection, published in 1991 under the title Cuisine de pays, includes a translation by Martin Winckler of the second version of the story, titled Le Dialecte de la tribu.
The original title, The Dialect of the Tribe, is taken from a passage in T. S. Eliot's poem Little Gidding: "Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us / To purify the dialect of the tribe," where the phrase "to purify the dialect of the tribe" is itself the translation of a verse from Mallarmé's Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe: "donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu." The choice of this title, which also echoes Baudelaire's translation of Poe, signals to the reader the central importance of the theme of translation in the story.
The first publication in English was preceded, not without relation to the translation theory issues raised by the text, by the 1979 publication of a French translation by Marie Chaix, in a special issue of the journal L'Arc (magazine) devoted to Georges Perec. This was the first, longer version of the story, titled Abanika, traditore?, referring to the Italian phrase traduttore, traditore ("translator, traitor"). Martin Winckler, the translator of the second version published by Éditions P.O.L in 1991, recounts that this was the first translation project entrusted to him by Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens, "as a trial," and adds that the text had previously been translated by Georges Perec himself. As Dennis Duncan points out, the translation published by L'Arc is by Marie Chaix, and concludes, in pagolak, the Papuan language central to the story, with the phrase "Nalaman: Chaixan Marianu," where the pagolak term nalaman designates the translation, or more precisely "the final result of the [translative] transformation."
The 1979 longer version multiplies explicit references to Perec. It is presented in the form of a letter addressed to "My dear Perec" ("Pereca Georgean" in Pagolak) and signed "Mathewsu Harryan." It mentions Mathews's translation of Perec's autobiographical text Les Gnocchis de l'automne, by homophonic reference to the Greek precept gnothi seauton ("know thyself"), and refers to the text on Roussel co-written by Perec and Mathews, with the comment: "Although the New Guinea text has nothing to do with him, our perverse Raymond would certainly have been intrigued by Pagolak." All these mentions evoking a personal dimension are removed in the second version, which, apart from the dedication (present only in the English version), limits itself to referencing the narrator's participation in a Festschrift (a collection of scholarly writings) in honor of the recipient — this detail serving to reinforce the ostensibly scientific character of the text.
Dr. Botherby The Dialect of the Tribe, just like its first version, Abanika, traditore?, revolves around the narrator's discovery—thanks to Miss Maxine Moon, the librarian of Fitchwinder University—of an article by Dr. Botherby about the language of an isolated New Guinea tribe, the Pagolak.
However, the story provides very little information about the supposed discoverer of Pagolak, limiting itself to mentioning "a certain Ernest Botherby (bless him!)" referred to as "doctor." The name Botherby is likely a nod to Bartlebooth, the character from Life: A User's Manual (La Vie mode d'emploi), who himself refers back to Herman Melville's Bartleby and Valery Larbaud's Barnabooth, but also to Borges' Dr. Brodie, who, like Gulliver, encounters the Yahoos. Botherby's Australian nationality, in turn, through a marked homophony in English where Australia and Austria sound very close, evokes the character Marcel Appenzzell, an Austrian anthropologist in Life: A User's Manual, with whom he shares youthfulness, a taste for solitary explorations, and (implicitly in Mathews's work) a filiation with the works of Bronisław Malinowski.
Beyond the alliterative reference to Appenzzell's native Austria, the choice of Australian nationality for Botherby also helps create a pseudo-scientific realism effect, since ethnolinguistic studies in New Guinea were largely conducted by Australian scientists. Such studies developed after the establishment of the Australian mandate over New Guinea and especially after World War II, whereas the ones from the interwar period were mainly strictly ethnographic, carried out by anthropologists without linguistic training and therefore only produced "naive observations of little [scientific] value." The first rigorous work on the languages of the Sepik Basin — the region supposedly explored by Botherby — was undertaken by the Australian ethnolinguist Donald Laycock in the 1959–1960 period. Moreover, in a 1961 article, Laycock emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between language and dialect in the linguistic context of the region. He considers that the term "dialect" should be reserved for variants of a language that do not prevent communication between speakers and that it should not be used for an oral language without a written tradition, nor for a local language differing from the official one.
Mathews adds a few details about Ernest Botherby in another text published in 1997 and translated into French in 2013, Oulipo and Translation: The Case of the Persevering Maltese. Ernest Botherby, born in Perth in 1869 and died in Adelaide in 1944, was "the scholar who founded the Australian school of ethnolinguistics," for whom "the tribes of New Guinea" were "a favorite subject," and who "rose to fame in the late 1920s after publishing several articles" on Pagolak. A specialist in New Guinea tribes and particularly interested in those who had fled all contact with their neighbors, he began anthropological research at the age of twenty-four, basing his work on that of NIcholas Mikloukho-Maclay, one of the first explorers of New Guinea, Samuel Macfarlane, who explored the Fly River, and Friedrich Hermann Otto Finsch, who explored the Sepik.
Ohos and Ouhas
Botherby's first exploration, reported in The Case of the Persevering Maltese, takes place in the area of the central highlands of New Guinea, near the source of the Fly River. Mathews provides details inspired by travel accounts from the late 19th century, such as that of Samuel Macfarlane:
It is the most linguistically complex region of New Guinea (itself considered the most diverse region in the world in this respect, as nearly 1,000 languages are recorded there, often showing "enormous variation and many unusual features"), where even today, about a hundred Papuan languages, highly heterogeneous, are spoken. In a mountainous valley, Botherby discovers an archaic tribe of "a few hundred individuals, leading a peaceful existence under conditions of extreme simplicity." He names them the Ohos. Their language is reduced to three words and a single expression: "Red equals bad," although they make up for the poverty of their vocabulary by communicating through gestures, notably to indicate directions to Botherby or to express disagreement.
Continuing his exploration, Botherby discovers a second archaic tribe, which he names the Ouhas, whose language, just as rudimentary as that of the Ohos, only allows them to make "invariably the same statement": "Here not there."
A few weeks later, back in the Ohos valley and wishing to share his experience with them, he understands "what every translator learns sooner or later: a language says what it can say, and that's all." Thus, he has no choice but to translate "Here not there" as "Red equals bad." This extreme experience allows Mathews to "playfully contradict" Jakobson's assertion that "languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey."
Pagolak
Le Dialecte de la tribu (French translation), although published earlier, deals with events occurring after the discovery of the Ohos and the Ouhas. This time, it concerns another tribe of New Guinea, speaking a language called "pagolak." The short story takes the form of a letter in which the author reports his discovery of this language after reading a scientific article attributed to Dr. Botherby and titled Kalo gap pagolak, a title meaning "magical transformation of the pagolak." Botherby's article discusses the method used by the tribe speaking pagolak to translate expressions from their language into that of their neighbors—a method that produces translations that are "effective," "intelligible and acceptable," while hiding "the content," the "primary meaning" of the original statements. The kalo gap pagolak is more precisely the transcription of an oral statement by the abanika, the "chief of the word-chiefs" or "Chief of the Chief-Words" of the tribe, although the faculty of translation is not reserved for him: all members of the tribe who speak pagolak are capable of it.