15: Revision

 The language of the heart.

“Perhaps only migrating birds know -
suspended between earth and sky -
the heartache of two homelands.”

Lea Godberg – Israel.

I always spoke Hebrew but for the past two years, while participating in various writing classes, I switched to English. I think about this a lot, when I struggle to find the right word, the most fitting idiom, an effective way to express an idea. I was not forced into this ambivalent relations it was me and only me who chose to turn my back on my own language. There is a certain measure of loneliness combined with a feeling of freedom that accompanies this choice. As if by distancing myself from my mother tongue I am allowing for more space and the leisure to experience something new, unconfined by the old rules.

Being there it is clear to me that when talking about mother tongue I am talking about more than a language. I am talking about myself at the deepest layers of my being and so I am curious how other writers, who write in a language other than their mother tongue, feel about this. Maybe through them I will gain a better understanding regarding the process of making the choice to write in a “foreign language” the relationship formed between the writer and his language of “choice”. And last but not least, the technical difficulties namely the use of grammar and words; the tools of the trade. 

Generally a very systematic person I start by looking for definitions for both mother tongue and language and identity (Wikipedia of course) many words later I surface up not only thoroughly tired but also very confused.

  So many definitions and observations and the only clear understanding I come out with is that there is truly not one simple characterization that can contain comfortably the wide spectrum of this somewhat fluid term. The definition of mother tongue is highly personal as are the reasons for which people adopt other languages. As varied as are the definitions so are the languages chosen by different writers and the special relationships that develop in the process both between the writer and his new language and the writer and the language left behind. Perhaps the best example of this ongoing conflict are those writers who keep writing in both languages going back and forth like Vladimir Nabokov, who translated many of his own early works into English and other works into Russian. Nabokov metaphorically described the transition from one language to another as a slow journey at night from one village to the next with only a candle for illumination. (Google)

I realize that scholarly definitions are not going to clarify it for me. If language indeed has such immense powers then the only way to try and weigh up the impact it might have on a person whose whole liveliness rotates around words is to listen. And so I continue my search by checking several web-sites and books written on the issue. I listen and re listen to the words expressing conflicts and wonderments and all the while I am searching for myself in other people journeys.

Reading what different writers say I feel how their words are touching me, addressing many of my thoughts and conflicts and make me feel reassured that I am walking on a trail others walked on before me. If it is a journey then language is only the path, the vehicle of transportation to where we really want to go.” and the place where we want to go is the place of our dreams, the place that everybody wants to go: a place of passion and truth and life and death”.  These are the words of Shan Sa (French author born in Beijing), who continue to say “When I started to write, I had to find my French, which was an invented language. No one could tell me, “That word is good” or “that word is bad,” because when I use a French word, I have my Chinese literariness and I have my Chinese judgment of this world."

 

 Words of one of my country’s most respected poets, an icon of the new revived Hebrew,surprise me. She that her stories and poems were a part of my childhood conveys so much frustrations and pain.

“The chime of the needles: Once upon a time –
I called the snow-space homeland,
and the green ice at the river's edge -
was the poem's grammar in a foreign place.

“Perhaps only migrating birds know -
suspended between earth and sky -
the heartache of two homelands.”

Lea Godberg – Israel.

A different angle I find in the words of Ian McEwan, “My mother was never like that. She never owned the language she spoke. Her displacement within the intricacies of English class, and the uncertainty that went with it, taught her to regard language as something that might go off in her face, like a letter bomb, a word bomb...”

My mother too did not own the language she spoke. Being torn from her mother tongue (German) at the age of fourteen she was never really comfortable with Hebrew and yet she never spoke to me in any other language. Her language while not officially banned was to remain her secret refuge. A hint of that I hear in the words of Luc Sante, “The screen language I employ in order to pass unmolested in the land where I have lived most of life without ever shedding my internal foreignness. French is my secret identity, inaccessible to my friends. Sometimes I feel as though I have it all to myself”

Will I ever feel completely comfortable writing in English I wonder as I read these words;

”English was still my very limited inner language, grammatically more or less correct, but idiomatic” Josef Skvorecky

Or Bill Bryson remarks; “The richness of the English vocabulary, and the wealth of available synonyms, means that English speakers can often draw shades of distinctions unavailable to non-English speakers” Mother Tongue Bill Bryson (1990)

I smile knowingly when I read Gary Shteyngart words “When I return to Russia, my birthplace, I cannot sleep for days, The Russian language swaddles me, the trilling r’s tickle the underside of my feet.”  I feel the same way when I go to Israel; the language rolls so easily, the words so accessible. No need to painfully search for them or work hard at making myself understood when one simple word carries a whole world of shared knowledge.

And what about the question of loyalty to heritage and culture, perhaps the deepest conflict associated with language cross over. Ironically my mother mothers’ tongue was not Hebrew, neither was my fathers’. Hebrew was their choice not only of a new language but also new life. So by using a language that does not belong to me I feel like betraying their trust and walking away from what was passed to me to keep and cherish; a legacy that goes deeper than words.

And yet when I listen to all these polished words of people who made writing their life and writing in a “foreign language” their professional choice I realize how each one of them had to go through the same kind of struggle as I do now. The words of  Joseph Conrad  hit home “All I can claim after all those years of devoted practice, with the accumulated anguish of its doubts, imperfections and faltering in my heart, is the right to be believed when I say that if I had not written in English I would not have written at all.”

These words do it, they cut to the chase and finally clear the fog created by so many conflicts and hesitations and frustrations. In the end it is very simple; if I had not written in English maybe I would not have written at all.