Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know," by Malcolm Gladwell.
Is it any wonder why the meeting between Cortés and Montezuma has fascinated historians
for so many centuries? That moment—500 years ago—when explorers began traveling across oceans and undertaking bold expeditions in previously unknown territory, an entirely new kind of encounter emerged. Cortés and Montezuma wanted to have a conversation, even though they knew nothing about the other. When Cortés asked Montezuma, “Art thou he?,” he didn’t say those words directly. Cortés spoke only Spanish. He had to bring two translators with him. One was an Indian woman named Malinche, who had been captured by the Spanish some months before. She knew the Aztec language Nahuatl and Mayan, the language of the Mexican territory where Cortés had begun his journey. Cortés also had with him a Spanish priest named Gerónimo del Aguilar, who had been shipwrecked in the Yucatán and learned Mayan during his sojourn there. So Cortés spoke to Aguilar in Spanish. Aguilar translated into Mayan for Malinche. And Malinche translated the Mayan into Nahuatl for Montezuma—and when Montezuma replied, “Yes, I am,” the long translation chain ran in reverse. The kind of easy face-to-face interaction that each had lived with his entire life had suddenly become hopelessly complicated.
Cortés was taken to one of Montezuma’s palaces—a place that Aguilar described later as
having “innumerable rooms inside, antechambers, splendid halls, mattresses of large cloaks,
pillows of leather and tree fibre, good eiderdowns, and admirable white fur robes.” After dinner, Montezuma rejoined Cortés and his men and gave a speech. Immediately, the confusion began. The way the Spanish interpreted Montezuma’s remarks, the Aztec king was making an astonishing concession: he believed Cortés to be a god, the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy that said an exiled deity would one day return from the east. And he was, as a result, surrendering to Cortés. You can imagine Cortés’s reaction: this magnificent city was now effectively his.
But is that really what Montezuma meant? Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, had a
reverential mode. A royal figure such as Montezuma would speak in a kind of code, according to a cultural tradition in which the powerful projected their status through an elaborate false
humility. The word in Nahuatl for a noble, the historian Matthew Restall points out, is all but
identical to the word for child. When a ruler such as Montezuma spoke of himself as small and
weak, in other words, he was actually subtly drawing attention to the fact that he was esteemed and powerful.
“The impossibility of adequately translating such language is obvious,” Restall writes:
The speaker was often obliged to say the opposite of what was really meant. True meaning was embedded in the use of reverential language. Stripped of these nuances in translation, and distorted through the use of multiple interpreters…not only was it unlikely that a speech such as Montezuma’s would be accurately understood, but it was probable that its meaning would be turned upside down. In that case, Montezuma’s speech was not his surrender; it was his acceptance of a Spanish surrender.
You probably remember from high-school history how the encounter between Cortés and
Montezuma ended. Montezuma was taken hostage by Cortés, then murdered. The two sides went to war. As many as twenty million Aztecs perished, either directly at the hands of the Spanish or indirectly from the diseases they had brought with them. Tenochtitlán was destroyed. Cortés’s foray into Mexico ushered in the era of catastrophic colonial expansion. And it also introduced a new and distinctly modern pattern of social interaction. Today we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds are different from our own. The modern world is not two brothers feuding for control of the Ottoman Empire. It is Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understand each other through multiple layers of translators. Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation.
That sounds callous, because it’s easy to see all the damage done by people like Ana Montes and Bernie Madoff. Because we trust implicitly, spies go undetected, criminals roam free, and lives are damaged. But Levine’s point is that the price of giving up on that strategy is much higher. If everyone on Wall Street behaved like Harry Markopolos and trusted no one, there would be no fraud on Wall Street — but the air would be so thick with suspicion and paranoia that there would also be no Wall Street.
There are many people like my mother, equipped with a set of skills that make them good at talking to strangers. We do not encourage this kind of person to consider police work as a career. But maybe we should. I know my mother. Had she been in Brian Encinia's place that day in Prairie View, the outcome would have been very different. One minute into that traffic stop, she would have realized that this was a young woman with a difficult and complicated life, trying to make a new start. Two minutes in, she and Sandra Bland would have been deep in conversation. Do we want my unprepossessing mother arresting bank robbers? No we don't. But there is much, much more to police work than that. And the world would be a better place if we recognized the impossibility of the task we have given the police and took steps to rationalize their profession. They need our assistance. Let us offer it to them. After all, it is not just Brian Encinia who was bad at talking to a stranger. In one way or another, we all are.
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