Kevin Ahearn asks...

What is Power?

BWS:

With the explosion of a nuclear device, North Korea has convinced itself and many others that this small, backward dictatorship can, with a sudden show of science, become a threatening player on the world stage.

In the coming years, Iran and Saudi Arabia may also be sucked into the same folly: that science and weapons constitute power. History has shown this not to be the case.

More than a century ago, when the planet’s only superpower was the British Empire, the nation that ruled the waves ruled the world. Or so it seemed. Long after the last wooden ship had sunk and the names of English admirals and generals lost to the dustbin of history, it was not cannon and sail that endured, but truth be told, fiction!

Shakespeare and Dickens and Shelley and Conan Doyle have shown that their pens are not only mightier than the sword but sharper and infinitely longer lasting. And when the sun finally set on the British Empire, the words of Wells and Orwell remade the world by means of the English language.

In the new millennium, the most popular symbol of Britain is not a queen or a prime minister but Harry Potter, with Mick Jagger a distant second. Long after the lovely image of Princess Diana has faded into obscurity, the world will still be singing the songs of John Lennon.

It is likewise fiction to believe that the power of the United States is vested in its military or its politics or even its economy: the most impactful aspect of America is its fiction: Superman, Mickey Mouse, Rambo and Darth Vader rule screens big and small around the world. America is the image it projects to the world’s most important citizens: children. Dallas, Baywatch, Law & Order — they are America, and all the nuclear weapons and suicide bombers in creation are not going to change that.

But be advised. For decades, United States’ basketball dominance was unapproachable. Not even an all-star team from the rest of the world combined stood a chance against it. But times change: American overconfidence, complacency, and arrogance gave its competitors opportunities to improve their own game as they studied our weaknesses. Our once-invincible “Dream Team” woke up too late in international play.

Will American and British science fiction ever come to its senses? Forever stagnant, as if trapped in a time warp of its own making, will the language that once envisioned the future be succeeded and surpassed by foreign tongues?

Instead of setting off a weapon of mass destruction, had North Korea created an addictive TV soap opera or published a science fiction novel that stunned the world... Talk about threatening!

Kevin Ahearn

Copyright © 2006 by Kevin Ahearn

You speak the truth, Kevin.

And you touch upon a subject of professional interest to me. What makes a language important in the world? The number of people who speak it? The wealth and power that they — or some of them — happen to possess? Yes, those are practical considerations. But, as you say, they are external and transitory.

Riveting soap operas or science fiction novels? On the one hand it is to smile, to import a phrase. On the other hand, you’re right: any language’s intrinsic value consists in the stories it tells. Might a politically obstreperous but otherwise insignificant province claim world attention by its stories alone? Yes, indeed. As a matter of fact, it’s already happened.

Suppose you told us you were going to learn Greek. Now, modern Greek might be a perfectly reasonable choice, but unless you said otherwise we’d immediately assume it’s ancient Greek. And it’s dead, for crying out loud; it doesn’t even have any native speakers any more, let alone any with armaments or money. And even if the opposite were the case, a lot of good that would do us.

But it does have something that does do us a lot of good: timeless stories we can use to our own benefit. France names streets and public places for its great authors and artists. The city of Chelyabinsk has named a street for Lennon. No, not Lenin; the street is named for John Lennon. North Americans would do well to take heed.

Hasn’t everything been translated? Perhaps, but even the best translations may conceal surprises. Here’s an all-time favorite of mine. It illustrates not only unconscious cultural bias but also the limitations of translation:

“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace...” is — in the 17th-century English — purely and simply an old man’s retirement speech. That’s accurate, as far as it goes; but the original has a double meaning:

The words say farewell and at the same time proclaim a revolution.

The author was writing in the shadow of two of the world’s greatest literary traditions. We ought not to be surprised to hear volumes spoken in a few simple words.

Don