Bilingual writers reflect on their ‘Mother Tongues’
Learning a new language means more than memorizing a new vocabulary and
mastering different rules of grammar. It also means adopting a new way of
matching words to experience and memory, as “The Genius of Language: Fifteen
Writers Reflect on Their Mother Tongues” (Pantheon, $23) illustrates.
This collection of essays by bilingual authors—most of them immigrants to
the United States—chronicles not only each writer’s life’s story, but
also what editor Wendy Lesser calls “the process of being embraced or
enveloped by English.” As Czech native and contributor Josef Skvorecky puts
it, each writer struggles “to be at home in a language.”
The essays also eloquently explore the links between childhood and language.
“I dwell on all of these childhood memories because German is for me the
language of memory and loss, a linguistic Prelude [to my life],” writes
Thomas Laqueur. The echoes of his German-speaking mother’s call,
“Thomaslein,” for “little Thomas,” still have special resonance, he says.
“Tommy, which is what they called me in West Virginia, has always sounded
silly to me; Tom is just a name; Thomaslein is very sweet,” he writes.
Gary Shteyngart, whose bad dreams contain dialogue in his native Russian,
calls his essay “a child’s farewell to the language that once choreographed
his entire world.”
At times, “The Genius of Language” vividly illustrates particular features
of a certain language, giving readers a feel for its texture.
When Bharati Mukherjee, a native of Bangladesh, learned English, she “missed
the onomatopoeic phrases in Bangla that mimicked the blowing of the wind,
the drizzle of rain and gurgle of waterfalls,” she reflects. “Next to the
drawn-out vowels that made spoken Bangla a euphonic language, English
sounded harshly energetic.”
Luc Sante says something similar about his native French. When he translates
a nuanced French phrase to English, the result, he writes, “is a coarse
cluster of dentals, and it is over in a second and leaves no echo.”
Sante translates one of his favorite French poems to English, and remarks:
“It has none of the music or the magic, in part because of the tendency of
English to condensation and bluntness, away from the silken chains of
prepositional phrases that give French its incantory power.”
For other writers, individual words evoke a feeling or reminiscence that
English cannot match. M.J. Fitzgerald, who lived in Italy as a child, writes
about “a sea whose intensity of blue can only be contained in the Italian
word azzurro. The word blue, an anodyne descriptive term, does not convey
that childhood sea, but azzurro brings it all back.”
At times, the tension between two languages is so complex that a writer
cannot keep them from crowding each other out.
Ariel Dorfman says he labored for months to begin his memoir, unable to
decide whether to write it in English or Spanish. He “could not venture one
word in either language without feeling that I was betraying one or the
other,” he writes. “Whenever I wrote anything about my life, in either
language, it simply sounded . . . false, falso, fraudulent, fraudulento.”
(He ended up writing it in English, then re-writing it in Spanish.)
Dorfman suggests that different languages have unique ways of shaping how a
speaker sees the world. So does Skvorecky, who writes about “the joy, as it
were, of being an additional human being [by] writing in an additional
tongue.”
Amy Tan, a child of Chinese immigrants, takes this idea a step further,
mentioning Benjamin Lee Whorf, the mid-20th Century linguist who said
speakers of different languages have access to different thoughts because of
their different words.
Tan repeats a myth that Whorf helped spread, that Eskimos (Inuit, as we now
call them) have a variety of words for the English word “snow.” Actually,
Inuit languages have about the same number of root words for “snow” as we do
with our “sleet,” “slush,” “blizzard” and so on, as linguist Geoffrey Pullum
showed in his 1991 book, “The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.”
Still the tendencies, if not the vocabularies, of different languages can
reflect different cultural norms about things such as modesty and
individualism. As Ha-yun Jung writes of his native Korean, “The simple
English sentence `I want an apple’ sounds awkward when translated, word for
word, into Korean. A Korean person is much more likely to say something that
could be translated as, `It would be nice to have an apple.’”
“I live on, not feeling whole in Korean or English,” Ha-yun Jung concludes.
“For me, one language is complementary to the other, one always lacking a
capacity that the other has. And I have a fear, constantly, of not quite
being understood in just one language.”
