Léopold Sédar Senghor is 33 years old in June 1940, when the German army captures him near La-Charité-sur-Loire, in central France. Senghor is far from his hometown of Joal, in West Africa (now Senegal). He has by then blazed a brilliant trail as a student, a scholar, and above all, a writer, but that summer, he is also a recruit in the crumbling French army, and a black soldier. After avoiding being executed by his captors on account of his race, they send him to the Stalag –the internment camp– where he is singled out for harsher treatment. His middle name, Sédar, means "that cannot be humiliated" in the Serer language. Instead, he writes.
From this place of despair, his mind escapes back to his homeland, to his mother. He reaches out to her in the form that will garner him great acclaim: he writes her a poem. He does not pen it, however, in his mother tongue.
The poem in which he addresses her, so far away and so low, so vast his guilt at not being there to support her, is written in French. She would not understand it.
Mother, I hear you're turning as white as the bush in the extreme
winter (…)
I stand before you, Mother, a soldier with bare sleeves
And I'm dressed in foreign words where your eyes see only a collection
of sticks and rags.
If I could speak to you, Mother! But you would hear only a precious chirp
and would not hear
It is in naming his poem that he returns to the Wolof language, with a single-word title: Ndessé. What does it mean? Nostalgia, melancholy, with all those hues you probably can't convey, like the Portuguese and their saudade. Longing is what remains.
His is a dilemma encountered by anyone who writes in an adopted language, or retains his or her own in another setting. Sometimes, the words you need to say and those that others can understand are not the same. There's a language barrier in the way. You'd be hard-pressed to simultaneously speak in two grammars; mix them as you may. Flip a coin, on the one side expression, on the other comprehension.
It doesn't have to be that dichotomy, and people always find ways to communicate all that's needed and desired. Using a common language bridges and creates a new space, and when it doesn't suffice, an explanation of that word or that saying broadens the palette of your conversation. But some tonalities are missing, especially if words are your line of work. The words come to you in a particular language, and all that comes afterward, for better or worse, is a translation.
Sometimes, there are no half-measures; you write in a language you chose or were born with, and in either case, someone you love may be left out. Every step you take further into a language's complexity is a further degree further away from that person. I know a couple, both authors of acclaim: she can read him but can't be read by him, not without translation. There are two passions at play. She has devoted herself to one language, long before she fell in love in another.
In both cases, language is a love story. We fall for the shared beauty and shared meaning of the languages passed on to us, the first words with which we understood the world. We also fall for what we can't grasp at first, slowly uncover its charm, word by word as we learn, drawn to the promise on the bookshelf, a whiff of lyrics, the allure of vocabulary and expression.
It isn't a choice inspired solely by passion, and even romance can have a practical bent. Aren't some languages more widely read? And in choosing, are you a philistine, a betrayer? Does adopting one language mean abandoning another? Sometimes, the language we take on started as an imposition. The variants are too many, too subtle and personal. Just one case to illustrate:
The great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe is best known as the author of Things Fall Apart, one of the most searing critics of colonialism in world literature. It is a book written in English, not in the Igbo of his birth. It allowed a wider audience to read his denunciation, but was criticized by other writers: Was he not entering into a profound contradiction?
He answered his critics in a speech, The African Writer and the English Language: "Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else's? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling. But, for me, there is no other choice. I have been given this language and I intend to use it."
Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o did the same in his first novels, before penning his later work in the Kikuyu of his origins, saying that "language was the most important vehicle through which that [colonial] power fascinated and held the soul prisoner."
Beyond individual opinions, through all the circumstances in the change, a new language isn't merely learned: it has to be embraced. You could not write in a language, write for a living, by mere practicality, without countless time devoted to understanding it, to go from frustration to mastery, time to perceive music in sounds you never knew existed. And as for the language of origin, can that ever be erased?
Czech author Milan Kundera went into exile in Paris in 1975 and was stripped of his nationality in 1979 (it would be returned in 2019). It is while reviewing the translation of his works into French—some of them atrocious—that he further delved into this language, which he would choose to write in from 1995 onward. It wasn't an easy choice to explain, and his best works were arguably behind him.
"Life is short and I preferred my freedom to my roots,” he said in an interview. “If today I only write in French, that doesn't mean that French has replaced my mother tongue. It's irreplaceable: it comes out of my mouth easily before I start thinking. In French, every sentence is a quest, a conquest, everything is conscious, nothing is taken for granted, every word is weighed a thousand times, everything is an adventure, everything is a gamble. The Czech language calls out to me: Come home, you rascal! But I don't obey. I want to stay with the language I'm so madly in love with."
Love is gain, and love is loss. The idea for this chapter came from a conversation with a Scandinavian friend who has never used his first language in writing. He doesn't regret his father's language, he told me, that of the wordsmith to whom a passion for the written word was partly owed. And yet. "You don't regret taking a different path, but sometimes it feels like a loss."
Lost in translation is a catchphrase, yet precisely what falls between the cracks is, by definition, harder to retain. It's a list worth making someday. Here's one I'd jot down: think of Crime and Punishment, a pretty straightforward title that sums up the story arc therein. Yet in Russian criminal is he who steps in the wrong way, or sidesteps, who goes down the wrong path, in a novel where people count their steps all the time, where they watch their step incessantly, and which evokes Dostoyevsky's last steps towards the firing squad, in 1849 (a punishment dramatically stayed).
What is lost? Traduttore tradittore, the Italians famously say—the art of betraying the best you can. Translators, who live between languages, will tell you that their talent lies in choosing their losses well and, hence, in what is retained, brought forth in other words. The balance wrought from loss to preserve the essential allows us to share books no matter their provenance.
What remains harder to restore is the memory in the words, in their rhythm, in the social sharing of a cadence, and its poetry. There are mysteries in some phrases, where meaning does not suffice or wasn't the intent. Sometimes even the writer doesn't know what is meant. But in conveying, always attempting, we prolong the effort to create.
Something always remains. Elif Shafak writes in her essay How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division: "I have often wondered what resides in an accent. Is it a presence – an identity, a trajectory, a history? Or is it rather an absence – an estrangement, a withdrawal, a blank space refusing to be filled? (…) They are an inextricable trace of the paths we have traveled, the loves we have loved and never forgotten, the scars we still carry and which still hurt. But that doesn't mean we are from our accents."
Can you hear an accent on the page? Shouldn't you? That's a question for another day.
Then there is the case of writer and painter José Moreno Villa, an exile from the Spanish Civil War who never saw Spain again. He took refuge in Mexico, and despite there being no language barrier, what he found was oh-so different. Words had grown into different uses on other soil; they were spoken in other ways, or the indigenous roots altogether substituted them. Moreno Villa is fifty years old and riddled with the loss of all he has known. Yet, in seeking to understand, in interrogating novelties, differences, and what they reveal, he begins to make a new home furnished with those new words, expressions, and intonations. "The soul is in the words we use most," he wrote. Sometimes, their provenance is broader than what a single dictionary can hold.
La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano, 1832
* * *
Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every week.
Really interesting piece. I wouldn't say that to choose to write in a second language is to reject your first. But I haven't been in that position or wrestled with the dilemma that Achebe and Kundera did.
The part I find most interesting is considering what language carries beyond meaning, as Elif Shafak pondered. For me, what's spoken or voiced contains extra traces of a person's character and being. Almost impossible to translate or rather transmit through copy.