Liesl Yamaguchi, Assistant Professor in the Department of French at UC Berkeley, is a scholar and translator whose work bridges 19th-century French literature, poetics, linguistics, literary theory, and translation. In this interview, Professor Yamaguchi reflects on her path to academia, the interdisciplinary nature of her research, and the creative challenges of translation. She offers a preview of her forthcoming book, On the Colors of Vowels: Thinking Through Synesthesia, which examines the convergence of literary and scientific discourses on synesthesia in the 19th century. With insights spanning from vowel-color correspondence to housing precarity in French literature and the intricacies of translating dialects, Professor Yamaguchi invites readers to explore the dynamic intersections of language, culture, and creativity.
See what classes Professor Yamaguchi is teaching this semester here.
Can you speak about how you decided to pursue academia, as well as your research interests?
It would be hard to say “I decided to pursue academia.” That past perfect tense suggests some sort of decisive break of gratifying clarity, when the truth is that thousands of infinitesimal decisions have led me to where I am now. I’ve just pursued things I value and enjoy and tried, to the best of my ability, to distance myself from enterprises I can’t quite believe in or comfortably support. I pursued a PhD in Comparative Literature on those grounds, and I made very few concessions to what “academia” dictated I should do, essentially because I never imagined “academia” was going to offer me a job. So grad school was pretty great! I threw myself into whatever sparked my interest: the history of harmony, abstraction, Alexander Pope’s rhymes—everything related to rhymes—philosophy of language, linguistics, poetics, sestinas…. The real surprise came when I was offered a job in academia: in Nineteenth-Century French Literature. I’ve been catching up on what I was apparently supposed to learn in grad school ever since.
Can you speak more about your forthcoming book, On the Colors of Vowels? What is synesthesia, and how do you approach it?
Most people have a general idea that synesthesia is a neurological condition that causes some lucky folks to respond to stimuli addressed to one sense with sensations in another senses. Seeing a color in connection with sounds, for example. While these sorts of conjunctions were pathologized as “mental disturbances” in the nineteenth century, discourses of the twentieth century transformed them into signs of genius, and synesthesia came to be associated with exceptional creativity, “enabling” the extraordinary compositions of people like Kandinsky and Scriabin. But there’s a funny catch in this construct: it requires that “genuine synesthetes” be clearly distinguished from everyone else, yet it also requires that the public respond to their “genius”: that the compositions appeal widely. This would seem to suggest that the extraordinary sensations share something with ordinary senses or, put another way, that ordinary senses are sensitive to extraordinary ones’ ways.
My book On the Colors of Vowels approaches synesthesia with this curiosity about the porousness of distinctions between synesthetic and aesthetic perceptions, “genuine synesthetes” and “non-synesthetes.” I look at a specific strand of the discourse—which connects colors with vowels—as it emerges in the nineteenth-century in medical dissertations, poetic treatises, experimental psychology surveys, and even the technical terminologies of musical acoustics and linguistics. What’s facinating about tracing these visual descriptions of vowels through the nineteenth century is (1) the difficulty of distinguishing literal from metaphorical usage (What do they mean by “bright vowels”?), and (2) the centrality of vowel-color correspondence to diverse intellectual projects, ranging from Stéphane Mallarmé’s vision of verse to Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, the universal alphabets of 19th century phonetics, and even the vocalic model of structural linguistics.
In bringing together all of these discourses under the term ‘synesthesia,’ the book calls into question a prevalent move in the humanities, which is to say ‘Synesthesia is something the neurosciences know about, and that’s a different thing, so I’m just going to talk about cross-sensory language or sensory metaphors.’ I understand the impulse to circumscribe one’s area of expertise, but I think the closing off of interdisciplinary engagement in this area is counter-productive. There are many open questions and scholars in the humanities have a lot to contribute to the broader interdisciplinary inquiry into synesthesia. This book is trying to open up that discussion.
I know that you’ve published articles pertaining to poetics and literary criticism, as well as linguistics. Would you say that there are different approaches between the humanities and social sciences, and what are the benefits of using each approach?
I find it strange and fascinating that the science of language (linguistics) should be entirely separated from the study of the language arts (literary studies). People who study lingustics and people who study literature rarely talk to one other, they use different methodologies, and honestly, they really bore one another—even though their object of study in both cases is language! I’m quite interested in both approaches, and I’m especially interested in their historical disciplinary formation, and when the same questions appear in both lines of inquiry, that’s especially exciting.
I saw that you taught French 40 for undergraduates this semester. Can you tell us a little about the topic of this course?
French 40 was an experiment. I teach 19th century French literature a lot, and upon moving to Berkeley it occurred to me that it could be stimulating to re-organize a fairly canonical 19th century French literature class around questions of housing precarity, homelessness and displacement. These themes are all over the 19th century texts— from Balzac’s mendiant de Paris to Hugo’s Gavroche and Baudelaire’s Mendiante rousse — not to mention the mass displacement of Haussmannization. You have characters of privilege looking on suffering characters and not really knowing how to navigate that encounter. I’ve been reading these texts for many years, but these aspects became more salient for me here, and I thought that might be true for students, as well. So I reorganized the class around that theme, and interspersed the 19th century French literary texts with readings about the history of the housing crisis in the Bay Area and housing politics. The idea wasn’t to equate the two situations, just to learn about the how homelessness was imagined in 19th century Paris and to gain some perspective on our present.
I know that you’re also a translator. Can you speak a bit on your translation process?
The difference between being a translator and being a literary critic is like the difference between a politician and being a lobbyist. As a literary critic, you can look at a really complex issue and decide you’re going to hone in on one aspect that’s important to you, and examine it in great depth. As a translator, you see all of these vying interests in the text, on the level of sonority, semantics, politics – and you have to make choices. You have to sense what is most important at each moment for that particular author, in that particular scene, for that particular character. So any translation is, as Edith Grossman put it, a “calculus of compromises.”
Or, to use another analogy, you might say translating is like playing by ear while writing literary criticism is “playing the notes that are written” – a wonderful description of literary critical ambition by a scholar I admire a great deal. As a translator, you don’t even necessarily know how to read music. You just hear it, and you try to create it again on a different instrument.
You published a translation of Unknown Soldiers by Väinӧ Linna for Penguin Classics. Can you tell us a bit about this book?
Unknown Soldiers is a World War II novel about a ramshackle platoon of Finnish machine gunners out on the eastern front. It’s central to Finnish national identity because it tells the story of a very divided nation coming together after the Finnish Civil War of 1918. This is why there are three film versions of it that play on loop on Finnish Independence Day, even though Finnish Independence dates to 1917 and the book is set in the 1940s. Maybe you could say that Unknown Soldiers is for Finland what a book like Huckleberry Finn is to the US, just to give a sense of its cultural centrality.
The hardest thing about translating it was the dialects. The book is written in many different dialects, which are hard to decipher, but that task is dwarfed with the question of how to recreate their effects of the dialects in a global language.
How did you render dialects?
Well, what I said ten years ago was that I tried to craft very specific idiolects – the speech of one that could be recognizable, rather than the speech of a community that would not be recognizable. The dialects bear a function of identification in the book – you know who’s speaking because of the dialect, and there’s nothing else in the text that would necessarily indicate that to you. I had voices in my head for each of the speakers, and very small orthographic features that would correspond to each one. So with time, readers can know who is talking in the same way that you know which friend is calling you based on the precise way they say, “hi,” or, “hello,” or “hey, whassup?”
What I underestimated at the time was the degree to which those locutions of a lower register are place-specific even if they aren’t as intensely local as the Finnish dialects. The most difficult aspect of the translation’s reception, for me, was that readers of British English were often very displeased with the presence of American English slang in the book. While British and EU audiences are quite accustomed to hearing casual American Englishes (in music, on TV, or in film), they are far less accustomed to reading them.
What book would you recommend to everyone reading this interview?
It’s hard to limit myself to one, but When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà is a beautiful book that was recently translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem, and of course I love all of Thomas Teal’s translations of the Finland Swedish writer Tove Jansson: The Summer Book, Fair Play, The True Deceiver…