On Language - Tumblr Posts
“Becoming a writer in a language that is not yours by birth, though, goes against nature; there is nothing organic in this process, only artifice. There are no linguistic “instincts” to guide you on the path and the language’s guardian angels rarely whisper into your ear; you are truly on your own. Says Cioran: “When I wrote in Romanian, words were not independent of me. As soon as I began to write in French I consciously chose each word. I had them before me, outside of me, each in its place. And I chose them: now I’ll take you, then you.” Many who shift to writing in a second language develop an unusually acute linguistic awareness. In an interview he gave in 1979, some seven years after he moved to the United States from his native Russia, Joseph Brodsky speaks of his ongoing “love affair with the English language.” Language is such an overwhelming presence for these people that it comes to structure their new biographies. “English is the only interesting thing that’s left in my life,” says Brodsky. The need to find le mot juste starts out as a concern, turns into an obsession, and ends up as a way of life. These writers excel at the art of making virtue of necessity: out of a need to understand how the new language works, they turn into linguistic maniacs; out of a concern for correctness, they become compulsive grammarians.”
— Born Again in a Second Language h/t @playsuits (via cesaire)
“A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules, a language is a flash of the human spirit. It’s a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities”
— Wade Davis (via linguisten)
In "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" Ocean tells how in Vietnamese the word for missing someone and remembering someone is same...So when his mother asked if he misses her, he flinched thinking she said "Do you remember me?"
I was just sitting and thinking about my own mother tongue. In Hindi too, the word for missing and remembering is the same "याद" (Yaad) the only difference is the change of verb and sentence formation and that's how we know if the speaker is talking about missing someone or remembering someone; "मुझे तुम्हारी याद आ रही है।" (literally meaning 'Your memory/remembrance is coming to me') "मैं तुम्हे याद कर रहा हूँ।" But the sentence is always talking about remembrance. Now that I see, there is no literal translation for "I miss you" because we don't have the word for "missing" someone, all we ever do is remember them and with the memories, they are never 'missing' they are with us through that remembrance. It's like saying "I am not sad thinking about how you are not here anymore but rather I'm remembering the times you were here and I wish things were the same." It makes sense how the word "याद" also refers to 'memories'. To say "I miss you" in Hindi is to say "Now that I feel your absence, your memories are coming to me, you are coming to me, I am remembering to remember you."
on finding escape through foreign languages
1. Ilya Kaminsky (Still Dancing: An Interview with Ilya Kaminsky by Garth Greenwell) // 2. Kamala Das (An Introduction) // 3. @noorunnahar ('bilingual' from yesterday i was the moon) // 4. Kim Namjoon "RM" (excerpt from Vlive 20220409) // 5. @averwonders (excerpt from my little notes diary 'Journal In Verse' // 6. @metamorphesque
12 January. “[…] but also partly because of the fear of betraying my self-perception. This fear is justified, for one should permit a self-perception to be established definitively in writing only when it can be done with the greatest completeness, with all the incidental consequences, as well as with entire truthfulness. For if this does not happen - […] - then what is written down will, in accordance with its own purpose and with the superior power of the established, replace what has been felt only vaguely in such a way that the real feeling will disappear while the worthlessness of what has been noted down will be recognized too late.”
Franz Kafka, from a diary entry dated January 12th 1911, featured in ‘Diaries’. (translated by Joseph Kresh)
Can you recommend some essays about speech or language?
Here are a few essays and articles about language use (off the top of my head). I hope that you enjoy them as much as I do!
How Words Fail by Cathy Park Hong
Politics and the English Language by George Orwell
Of Strangeness That Wakes Us by Ilya Kaminsky
The Meanings of a Word by Gloria Naylor
Mother Tongue by Yoojin Grace Wuertz
Borrowing a Simile by Walt Whitman
Word Order by Lewis H. Lapham
Four Essays by Mikhail Bakhtin
Nature: Chapter IV Language by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Strange Persistence of First Languages by Julie Sedivy
What Do You Lose When You Lose Your Language? by Joshua Fishman
Tiana Clark, from "Maybe in Another Life" [ID in ALT]
Interestingly, part of the reason that, until now, Trump has been supported in Russia is due to translation. If you read the Russian language papers like I do, you’ll notice that the Russian translators don’t verbatim copy what Trump says. Instead, they’ll translate what he’s saying into short, professional, statesman-like statements, instead of what he really says. So instead of “I think nuclear weapons should be way down, and reduced, that’s part of it.”, the Russian audience gets a statement that translates back into English as “I think we’ll start with a substantial decrease in nuclear weapons stockpiles.” When Trump calls something “dumb” or “sad”, the Russian press will have him call it “damned”. “Bad hombres” becomes “armed bandits” and so on.
The Russian support for Trump becomes a lot easier to understand when you realize they’re literally not listening to the same person we are.
“In Somali when we see injustice we say ‘dhiiga kuma dhaqaqo?’ which translates into ‘does your blood not move?’”
— Warsan Shire
“Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” He wasn’t talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth. A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
“Persian, Dilorom told me, had only one word for crying, whereas Old Uzbek had one hundred. Old Uzbek had words for wanting to cry and not being able to, for being caused to sob by something, for loudly crying like thunder in the clouds, for crying in gasps, for weeping inwardly or secretly, for crying ceaselessly in a high voice, for crying in hiccups, and for crying while uttering the sound ‘hay hay.’”
— Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
“The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in all their messy glory and try to figure out what they can teach us about life, the world, and, especially in the case of linguistics, the workings of the human mind.”
— Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language
Do you have any books recs on the philosophy of translation or just really pretty essays on the art of translation in general?
I highly recommend George Steiner’s After Babel, Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words, and Willis Barnstone’s The Poetics of Translation as well as the following essays and articles (most of which are available in Lawrence Venuti’s The Translation Studies Reader 3rd Edition):
Teach Yourself Italian, Jhumpa Lahiri
Writing is an off-shoot of something deeper, John Berger
The Translator’s Task, Walter Benjamin
War in Translation: Giving Voice to the Women of Syria, Lina Mounzer
Preface to Ovid’s Epistles, John Dryden
Hatred of Translation, Nathanaël
On the Different Methods of Translation, Friedrich Schleiermacher
On the Problem of Translation, Friedrich Nietzsche
On Linguistic Aspects of Translation, Roman Jakobsen
“Mother tongues, like any other first love, are very hard to forget. They are loyal and forgiving. Even when our speech shrivels and our writing is plagued with errors. Even when our native letters appear foreign and our native sounds ring forsaken. After all, our mother tongues raised us. They knew us when we didn’t know ourselves. They watched us learn to speak, to write, to reason. They taught us to love and to grieve. They showed us the rules and the exceptions. They know they’ll echo within our walls long after we become guests in our own homes: from the way we will combine the new words, to the way we will whisper the old prayers.”
— Marianna Pogosyan, “Why learning a new language is like an illicit love affair”
“Migrant 3” by Iraqi artist Hayv Kahraman; according to the artist, the cutting of the tongue represents the loss of a language that immigrants and refugees feel after they have left their home country
“Language is also a place of struggle. I was just a girl coming slowly into womanhood when I read Adrienne Rich’s words: “This is the oppressor’s language, yet I need to talk to you.” This language that enabled me to finish graduate school, to write a dissertation, to talk at job interviews, carries the scent of oppression. […] We are rooted in language, wedded, have our being in words. Language is also a place of struggle. The oppressed struggle in language to recover ourselves—to rewrite, to reconcile, to renew. Our words are not without meaning. They are an action—a resistance. Language is also a place of struggle. Dare I speak to oppressed and oppressor in the same voice? Dare I speak to you in a language that will take us away from the boundaries of domination, a language that will not fence you in, bind you, or hold you. Language is also a place of struggle. The oppressed struggle in language to read ourselves—to reunite, to reconcile, to renew. Our words are not without meaning. They are an action—a resistance. Language is also a place of struggle.”
— bell hooks, “On Self-Recovery,” in Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
“Reading a poem in translation,“ wrote Bialek, "is like kissing a woman through a veil”; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what’s between the lines, the mysterious implications.
– Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
The official government institution for preserving the French language is the Académie française and one of my hobbies is actually reading the updates on their website, it’s always so funny. Just lambasting new English loanwords and trying to shame people into using French terms instead. Some examples of their grumpily anglophobic entries:
“There is absolutely no reason to borrow the word backstage when we already have the perfectly suitable coulisses, although we understand your natural affection for the word stage which the British stole from us in the first place.”
“Why use rooftop instead of toit en terrasse? And if we absolutely must use a foreign word for this concept, let us at least borrow a term from a sunny Mediterranean country. Borrowing ‘rooftop bar’ from a nation famous for its abominable weather is absurd.”
their absolute outrage at any wine vocabulary being borrowed and distorted by wine barbarians (“please only use vintage to refer to porto”)
an entry explains that turning “to feel” into the ridiculous anglo-French verb “feeler” is tragic, “especially since ‘feeler’ is already an English noun that could refer to a snail’s ocular tentacles” and if we French don’t show respect for snail vocabulary who will??
My favourite entry:
“ASAP: This abbreviation, which is far from transparent, seems to accrue most of the vices of a language that conceals its contemptuous and comminatory character under the rags of a spurious modernity”
“The Chomskians viewed the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as the vilest slander—not just incorrect, but hateful, like saying that different races had different IQs. Because all languages were equally complex and identically expressive of reality, differences in grammar couldn’t possibly correspond to different ways of thinking. “Thought and language are not the [same] thing,” the professor said […]
In my heart, I knew that Whorf was right. I knew I thought differently in Turkish and in English—not because thought and language were the same, but because different languages forced you to think about different things. Turkish, for example, had a suffix, -miş, that you put on verbs to report anything you didn’t witness personally. You were always stating your degree of subjectivity. You were always thinking about it, every time you opened your mouth.
[…]
There were things about -miş that I liked: it had a kind of built-in bewilderment, it was automatically funny. At the same time, it was a curse, condemning you to the awareness that everything you said was potentially encroaching on someone else’s experience, that your own subjectivity was booby-trapped and set you up to have conflicting stories with others. It compromised and transformed everything you said. It actually changed the verb tense you used. And you couldn’t escape. There was no way to go through life, in Turkish or any other language, making only factual statements about direct observations. You were forced to us -miş, just by the human condition—just by existing in relation to other people.”
— Elif Batuman, The Idiot