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.
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