A Way Forward
On the value of the mother tongue to memory and the sense of self.
I was at a wedding recently. Amidst the festivities I realized that I had not seen some of the people in attendance for a quarter of a century—so long, in fact, that since everyone is a little bit older, I had to reintroduce myself. Memory is a funny thing.
Among the guests was an editor, a new acquaintance. It was nice to get to know someone I had not met and talk from where I’m at. Since I’m now working on literary translations and books on culture, I talked about the joy of rediscovering books.
It wasn’t the first time I formulated those thoughts in my second language, however a first time in conversation with a friend of a friend. Good thing it was a social occasion, as I didn’t feel the pressure to pitch an editor about the merits of my work.
To read the classics of Italian literature and poetry with an eye on translation is a an intimate process. One where nuance matters. That same nuance we humans tend to miss, even though we might not be able to articulate why and how it’s valuable to us.
I began to research and re-discover Italy’s cultural heritage in the last ten years. After being immersed in the anglophone world for nearly three decades, I wanted to get back to where I had left off with European culture. You may have noticed it’s a focus.
Mostly, I’ve gravitated to Italian programs out of curiosity. I went down a few rabbit holes, and I forgot how I came across Alessandro Barbero’s talks. But I watched them all with pencil and notebook in hand to fill the gaps in my knowledge of history.
Dozens of 1-2-hour videos later, I discovered other cultural programs. Instead of the algorithm, I used the same process I use for books—references and mentions. On I went through the late eighties and nineties to try to understand what happened in European culture during my absence.
Whenever I can, I also pick up books in the original language in my travels. Sometimes I translate my notes, mostly I just write what comes to mind s I listen or read in whichever language conveys it best.
Along the way, I began to feel more ‘myself’ in every aspect of life. The more I read and learned in Italian, the more conscious I became.
As a student of languages, I’ve long known that culture goes hand-in-hand with expression, that words matter, that sayings and stories can lead to insights. However, I had not thought specifically about the role our native tongue plays on memory.
Apparently, the brain uses less power to process our native language, thus making it special. It could be because expertise reduces the amount of brain power we need for a task.1 And we’re experts at what we’ve learned in our childhood.
French-speaking Tunisian intellectual Albert Memmi described “the linguistic drama of those who, no longer able to speak their native tongue, are progressively destined to lose their memory, their past, and thus their future—in short, to exist outside of history, no longer as human beings, but as ghosts.”2
Memmi called it colonial bilingualism. “The disappearance of the mother tongue, and the imposition of the colonial one,” he says, “become factors that fuel a feeling of inferiority and convey psychological ‘illness,’ perhaps even through a compartmentalization of one’s identity.”3
The psychological sense of inferiority comes with physical domination and control, no doubt. But even when we move to a different country, on one side we have our public self, which must express itself in the local language, on the other, the private self, which converses with family and (maybe) friends in its native tongue.
Anyone who crosses a linguistic border almost always does a job of translating the self—a conscious and difficult process.
I compare it to a form of editing. At first, one needs to find the words to express what they mean in a different language. Then the culture gives you the words within which you can express yourself. A robust reading diet is the best method I’ve found to expand vocabulary and engage the imagination to translate oneself outside linguistic boundaries.
All the same, speaking another language is not neutral on the self. It leads to a sort of parallel life where concepts and words change meaning and likely you in the process. Consider how tone is vital in Asian languages, the role of different scripts, and how some cultures use ideophones to convey visual or mental sensations.
I was astounded to find that 250 million people speak French, but only 80 million are native to it in Canada, France, Belgium, Switzerland and the Caribbean. The rest speak it as a second language in the Africa colonies.
Spanish, also in the Romance branch of Indo-European, was easier to see. 575 million people speak it. Of those, 425 million are native, and 150 speak it as a second language. Spanish is the official language in 20 countries—including Spain, 2 Caribbean islands, 7 countries in Central and North America, 9 in South America, and 1 in Africa, in addition to 40 million Americans who speak it in Puerto Rico.
Compare those numbers with Bengali, which is spoken by 275 million people. 155 million in Bangladesh, 95 million in India, and more than 20 million as a second language in places like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates.
In the Sino-Tibetan family, in the Chinese family, 1.3 billion people speak Mandarin. The language has the highest number of native speakers in the world, 900 million. 400 million speak Mandarin as a second language. Contrary to belief, 98 percent of the writing characters are not ideograms. An educated Chinese knows 13,000 of them.
From a colonial standpoint, history tells us that the British Empire was huge; yet French remained the world’s diplomatic language until after World War I. The British Century began after the second world conflict.
English is now the most spoken language in the world with 1.5 billion speakers. However, only 375 million are native to it in the UK, U.S., Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and some Caribbean Islands. Another interesting fact I gleaned is that most English speakers are monolingual.4
The American Century began at the end of the cold war. Many factors contributed to its linguistic hegemony—multinational companies, consumer products and marketing, TV shows (who doesn’t remember ‘Happy Days’? Hey), films, and music.
Every language evolves with use and through culture. Languages have evolved in response to technology. Another pathway for English or Silicon Valley slang, into the world.
However, while the medium may be the message, it’s not automatically true of the language. Italian, for example, has gone from letters to emails and from telephones to chats—techno-gisms—then from text to vocals, still in the native tongue.
Communication, however, has changed its modes—from the permanent, authored form we could trace back to literally the hand of a person, to the dematerialization of digital through a numeric binary code, to multimedia simultaneous forms today.
Hypertext and hypotext have led to the fragmentation of thought. So much so that in many countries around the world we have large swats of people who can read, but cannot understand the meaning of what they’re reading—functional illiteracy.
This evolution is testimony to the impatience around the conservation and nourishment of thought in writing and reading. Perhaps there’s something else going on in the background, something that seems to conflate perception and reality.
It seems to me that once we spend the majority of our time consuming bits of information that tell us how bad things are—news, opinions, slogans, etc.—these things tax our memory and overwrite our sense of self with sadness and anger.
When we’re unhappy we may feel a strong emotion, but as Ginzburg discovered, grief doesn’t help us write well. I came across something to that effect in Natalia Ginzburg’s 1949 essay, ‘My Vocation’:5
“When we are happy our imagination is stronger; when we are unhappy our memory works with greater vitality. Suffering makes the imagination weak and lazy. . . . A particular sympathy grows up between us and the characters we invent—that our debilitated imagination is still just able to invent—a sympathy that is tender and almost maternal, warm and damp with tears, intimately physical and stifling. We are deeply, painfully rooted in every being and thing in the world, the world which has become filled with echoes and trembling and shadows, to which we are bound by a devout and passionate pity. Then we risk foundering on a dark lake of stagnant, dead water, and dragging our mind’s creations down with us, so that they are left to perish among dead rats and rotting flowers in a dark, warm whirlpool.”
Perhaps because in addition to the imagination and fragmentation of language and thus thought, pain also impairs our memory and distances us from our sense of who we are and could become.
Ginzburg’s vocation was to write.6 Mine—and I knew since a very early age—was to interpret and translate. “And there is the danger of cheating with words that do not really exist within us, that we have picked up by chance from outside of ourselves and which we skillfully slip in because we’ve become a bit dishonest.”
That’s her thought on writing. With translation and interpreting work, we must learn to embrace the appropriate words. To do that, we must take in the whole person, her ideas and work, her beliefs and opinions.
But then we must let her go, even as we acquire new words and thoughts to consider. The more words we have as part of our culture, the more precise can be the translation, the more flexible we can be as we separate our sense of self from hers.
I chose translation and interpreting because they’re the rare forms of conversation where listening always comes before talking, even if by seconds.7 Mostly, I’m working on memory, on remembering and seeing what’s visible to the conscience.
Perhaps as I return to that, I will find the optimism of the early days. Perhaps I will find again the value that await me in my native language. Perhaps the change in Italian will meet with the change in me and give birth to interesting thoughts.
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How to Write for the Next Millennium
When Calvino talks about literature, he talks about my literature, his literature, everyone’s literature and the literature that doesn’t exist, and that maybe will exist or maybe not—he put in a good word.
The study focused on polyglots. I cannot imagine speaking ten languages or more, but I’m glad I’m fluent in at least two and can find my way around a couple more. Culture is closely-related to language.
Which language does our unconscious speak? (Italian on Lucy sulla Cultura)
Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Beacon Press, 1991)
Gaston Dorren, Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages (Profile Books, 2019). I also read Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages (Grove Press, 2016). Even though Dorren expends only a couple of pages on Italian, I learned a great deal about Slavic and Balkan languages. There’s a ton of nuance in the interaction of language and politics. For example, egalitarism in Sweden, pacifism in Norway (Norwegian is a democratic language), pragmatism in Luxembourg, regionalism in Frisian and Scots, separatism for Catalan (also spoken in Alghero, Sardegna), war and political repression in the Serbo-Croatian and Belarusian.
Published in Ponte (1949), then collected in Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues (Giulio Einaudi, 1962; translation Dick Davis, Carcanet Press Limited, 1985). I recommend ‘Winter in the Abruzzi’ from this collection of short stories. Einaudi was founded in 1933 in Torino by Leone Ginzburg (Natalia’s spouse), Giulio Einaudi (the son of future President of the Republic Luigi Einaudi), and poet Cesare Pavese.
She also ran for Italian Parliament as candidate for the Independent Left and won in 1983. She was then reelected.
In simultaneous interpreting there are mere seconds between listening and talking. The brain processes information—words, expressions, sayings, cultural meaning—at incredible speed. In that case, ego must take a back seat and let the brain do its work. It doesn’t happen by magic; it comes from practice, immersion, and experience.