Speaking in Tongues takes the form of a dialogue between the author J M Coetzee and his translator colleague Mariana Dimópulos. Both have vexed relationships with the languages they work in. Coetzee’s maternal grandfather was a Pole who moved to the United States, where his children grew up speaking German at home and English in public. On his father’s side, he is descended from people who moved from the Netherlands to South Africa and spoke Dutch; when the British took over, his paternal ancestors began using English in public. Dimópulos’s mother was born in Spain and immigrated to Buenos Aires. Her paternal grandparents were born in Greece and also moved to Argentina. The family spoke Greek at home and her father learned Spanish in the city’s streets; as her grandmother grew older, she forgot the little Spanish she had once known. 

The book opens with a discussion of the concept of the mother tongue. Thousands of writers, particularly in the postcolonial world, have a mother tongue, learned at their mother’s knee, and a ‘father tongue’ – the language, usually learned at school, in which they write. Coetzee asks: ‘What is it like to have Guaraní as your mother tongue but to make a living by reading and writing in Portuguese? What is it like to make a living by reading and writing in English when your mother tongue is Zulu?’ 

These kinds of questions lay behind an unusual project Coetzee and Dimópulos devised, involving his novella The Pole. The novella centres on a romance between a Polish pianist and a Catalan woman living in Barcelona; in order to understand each other, both characters must communicate in stilted English. On