Has English Killed Global Literature?

Chloe Garcia Roberts considers J. M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos’s new book on translation.

By Chloe Garcia RobertsDecember 19, 2025

• Literary Criticism

• Nonfiction

WHEN YOU DRIVE into New York at the height of summer, the highway is framed by what, at first, appear to be low, rolling hills. If you look closer, you will realize that these hills are not hills at all—but, actually, trees and other undergrowth covered by a thick mat of vines. For miles, on either side of the road, stretches a forest of various plant species covered absolutely by these contiguous, leafy vines.

I pictured this drive as I read Speaking in Tongues, the new book-length conversation between Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee and author and translator Mariana Dimópulos about the ethics, philosophy, logistics, and future of literary translation.

The New York landscape seemed apt as a metaphor for the depiction of the English language that emerges throughout the book’s four conversations, or chapters—not only because Coetzee and Dimópulos rue the fact that English is choking global literature (in many cases, as aggressively as a vine), but also because their discussion of language recognizes something I have always felt: its aliveness, its evolution, its desire to consume everything it touches. As Coetzee states in the opening chapter, “Mother Tongue”: “[W]e should not forget that language is always moving, always shedding old ways of saying things and finding new ways.”

From a stylistic standpoint, the four chapters that comprise Speaking in Tongues fall somewhere between the spoken and the written; some sections read as immediate and spontaneous, others as highly polished and deliberate. This mix of registers allows the authors to address literary translation and global literature both theoretically and practically, superficially and structurally, individually and collectively. The authors’ conversations about granular translation decisions and their personal anecdotes about multilingual negotiation sit alongside more abstract discussions of some of the great thinkers in translation theory—Walter Benjamin, Lawrence Venuti, Friedrich Hölderlin—as they sketch the contours of the global publishing landscape.

But this is not simply a book about translation. It is, in fact, a book about the relationship between the familiar and the foreign in the diffuse contemporary Anglosphere, one which is disguised as a book about translation. This sleight of hand is established immediately in the co-written introduction, where Coetzee and Dimópulos assert that Speaking in Tongues is “not a work written by or for specialists.” I initially bristled at this disclaimer, scrawling in the margins, we are disenfranchised enough! and who is more qualified as a specialist in language than a globally lauded novelist and a writer–literary translator?? Yet as I moved through the book, I began to understand that their depiction of language as an entity with its own gravity and efficacy truly does defy the narrow gaze of the specialist—who, by definition, has a profound but limited area of understanding. To me, it seemed the authors were making the case that language itself is too wide, too wild, and too voracious for the specialist to analyze. It cannot be pruned, as discussed in the chapter on the politics of gender and the push to use neutral pronouns in gendered languages. Nor can it be easily or uniformly directed in its growth, as it has both a collective and an individual source, and feeds on the desire of every speaker and writer who contributes to its lexicon.

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Speaking in Tongues is the by-product of an experiment Coetzee and Dimópulos undertook in response to what they depict as English’s “implacable grip on the literary ecosystem,” as another reviewer put it, resulting in an overwhelmingly Anglocentric hierarchy of languages in global literary publishing. To subvert this “gross imbalance” in the order of minor and major languages, they had the first publication of Coetzee’s most recent book, The Pole (2023), appear in Dimópulos’s Spanish translation rather than Coetzee’s original English, and with the title El Polaco. Coetzee elaborates: “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 two had hoped that this move would then force the English-language publishers to translate this text from the Spanish, making the Spanish version the “original.” The idea was to strike a blow at the calcified order of operations; perhaps, even, having El Polaco pass through the sieve of Spanish might flavor other translations of the novel, like how a wooden cask flavors wine. These aims, however, were thwarted. The publishers and their symbionts (agents, publicists, et al.) refused to translate from the Spanish, cementing the primacy of the English version.

In this way, as Coetzee and Dimópulos recount the project of The Pole/El Polaco and its attempted inversion of linguistic custom, the two also unpack the inner workings of English-language publishing. They discuss the extreme disparity between the number of books translated into English and the great torrent of translations coming out of it. They also illuminate the feedback loop of literature in translation: how what is actually translated into English is typically selected on the basis of English-language readers’ proven tastes (a very American If you like X, you’ll love Y! marketing scheme). And they consider how such a selection affects the international literary ecosystem, as authors who write for the English-language market are rewarded with readership, prizes, and prestige. Coetzee notes that the result of English-oriented publishing is “the opposite of an enrichment of language: your translation is more of a mirror of your own culture than any appropriation of something new and foreign.”

Is translation into English, then, helping or making things worse? Coetzee and Dimópulos both seem in favor of the approach proscribed by Venuti’s theory of “hermeneutic translation”: that in order to fight the domination of the destination language, a translator must translate away from the expectations, desires, and dislikes of its readership, and toward the foreignness and freshness of the author in the original language. This reconciliation of the author’s voice and the language they write in will look different in every project, for every translator, but such an approach is the only way to avoid translation as a confining “mirror” (wherein the foreign is stripped of its foreignness) and, instead, to embrace translation as an expansive portal. The issue then becomes not the fact of literary translation into English but how lack of interest in foreign shapes and understandings flattens the selection of what gets translated.

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Dimópulos and Coetzee don’t stop at criticizing present imbalances. Though they briefly discuss other languages, the bulk of the book focuses on English-language publishing and politics—considering, for instance, the existential risk of a future where the domination of English continues unchecked. Discussing a notion the two seem to share of the artist as a creator of their own language, Dimópulos argues that authors, “being extremely conscious of the possibilities and limits of their language, […] write in their own language as if it were a foreign one. They treat familiar linguistic tools as if they were unknown, with extreme care and attention.” So, it follows, the international publishing hierarchies’ disenchantment with “the foreign” is not just killing global literature—it is also killing English-language literature, forgoing encounters that might otherwise open linguistic (and other) possibilities.

“Somewhere, in one of the languages of the world, the exact [perfect] word sits waiting,” notes Coetzee. This is, of course, exactly how “naïve” and “kaput” (two words Coetzee goes on to highlight) entered the bottomless stomach of the English language. One wonders if perhaps this drive to find, possess, and internalize the foreign is part and parcel with the phenomenon of overreach that these two writers delineate. There are no borders to English because it will eat anything—because any encounter with the foreign is an opportunity to internalize it, Englishize it, and thus make it more familiar.

This acquisitiveness is not necessarily a negative phenomenon for the authors. According to Coetzee and Dimópulos, attraction to foreign art and literature is how languages stay alive, renewed by their writers and speakers. What the book warns against is turning away from the foreign, the inclination to make the foreign a mirror of oneself. To read Speaking in Tongues as a general condemnation of the English language, then, would be incorrect. Ultimately, it is a condemnation of cultural incuriosity, the laziness of monolingualism that occurs when one is not forced to encounter the other (you can always find an English speaker somewhere), and the intellectual flabbiness that this imbalance engenders. It is, to quote Coetzee during a discussion of the movement to “degender” language, “a critique of the English language insofar as English is the instrument by which U.S. culture and society understands itself.”

That “insofar” is doing a lot of work in this sentence. Coetzee and Dimópulos are careful to contain their criticism of the English language to the culture and politics driving it; I wonder if it would have been generative—on this “nonspecialist” journey—to follow this culture and its politics back to the winding, tendriled heart of the English language itself. The language has now proliferated beyond questions of borders or location or race, so to focus one’s criticism on the United States and United Kingdom underestimates the scope of English’s spread. In “Mother Tongue,” Coetzee discusses some Icelandic youths he met who saw English, not Icelandic, as the language of their future. He connects this conversation to his feelings of being a stranger in English, despite the fact that he is a writer who writes in English, because it is a language in which he was educated but it is not his mother tongue. So many of us are from somewhere else, and for many, our roots in the language are shallow, often not even a generation deep. English has become a language of strangers as it is a language of empire. And an empire, by its nature, is a society composed of strangers held together by a force. In regard to the English language, it is a force transmitted not just by those living within the physical borders of English-speaking countries but by every one of its speakers—these Icelandic youths pivoting to English or even these two authors, making their case in English. Which makes the problem much thornier and more insidious indeed.

Such a persuasive presentation of a problem as Speaking in Tongues whets the appetite for a solution—or at least progress. What answer, then, to the wails of the well-meaning global literature enthusiast, or (ahem) translator of such literature into English, crying “What then is to be done?” “Memento mori,” these two authors reply. In the same way that meditation on your death can enrich your life, meditation on the foreign and the unknown can enrich the familiar and known. To understand and consider the fact that English ends, will end, and—though it may contain multitudes—does not contain everything is the aim and the action this book asks of its readers.

Speaking in Tongues is a reminder, then, of the paradox of language—its drive and damage, the life it brings and the death it causes. Is it possible, the book asks, to love the language fate has consigned you, while also acknowledging its destructive tendencies? In his concluding remarks, Coetzee muses: “What is the dictionary of a language, after all, but a map of the universe as the universe appears to the speakers of that language? […] If our two dictionaries provide two different maps of the universe, which one is true, or are both false?” To which I say: Can’t both be true? And might such a recognition be the very remedy that we need?