Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything (Faber & Faber), by David Bellos

David Bellos is an author who could make anything interesting, engaging and informative. In Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, the Princeton professor addresses communication across the lines of language. Bellos points out that in many previous eras and societies, multilingualism was taken for granted. There was little need for translation in pre-colonial India, where anyone who ventured from his village probably understood enough of three or four languages to get by, or in pre-Reformation Western Europe, where the educated class communicated to each other in Latin. A wise and witty guide to his subject, Bellos stresses that there can never be simply one translation of anything: “All utterances have innumerably many accessible translations,” evidence of the “limitless flexibility of the human mind.”