The Confusion of Tongues

...Nursing a plastic glass and a Cheddar cube, and straining my vocal cords to outshout those who were straining their vocal cords to outshout me (this seems to be the purpose of crowded wine-and-cheese receptions), I was trying to enlighten my American interlocutor on the subject of cooperative housing in Poland...

...At this very same instant, I was struck by the sudden realization that what I had been saying, perfectly logical as it would have been in Polish, made no sense in English...

...I took a deep breath...

...And anyway, the translation doesn't work...

...As in every translation—for what else is the immigrant's process of assimilation if not an attempt to translate his expressible self into another language and culture?—the net result of your labors is a nagging feeling of incompleteness...

...It is meant to signify how the immigrant, caught between two languages and their two built-in philosophies, uses these two given angles to find a distant resultant: his own position in life and versus life...

...Already, in that moment of strain, spontaneity of response is lost...

...But such liberation from linguistic self-consciousness cannot be easily won...

...The immigrant's brain usually staves off thatthreat by maintaining a steady difference of rank between his two languages: Either the adopted language never fully develops, or the native language gradually shrinks...

...I suppose just about anybody who has ever crossed the frontier line between "e-" and "in-" has at least once experienced a profound sensation of semantic incongruity invading his existence...

...Be that as it may, transplanting yourself into the soil of a foreign language makes you, as a rule, wilt rather than flourish, feel deprived rather than enriched...

...It is the problemof incomplete semantic adjustment, of all that is inevitably "lost in translation" of the self from one language and culture into another...

...Normally, you pay a housing cooperative plenty of cash up front and some 12 to 15 years later you get a place to Uve...

...There is the psychological selfassurance you are robbed of as long as there is the slightest trace of foreignness in your grammar or accent...

...There is the problem of your inner language: If you think in Polish and communicate in English, the effects this has on your mind may be close to schizophrenic...

...There are social situations requiring linguistic spontaneity, the lack of which makes you immediately an outsider, if only in your own oversensitive perception...

...If at some stage one attains, as Hoffman did in her student years, the precarious state of perfect bilingualism, the ideal equilibrium between two languages, this may well result, as we said before, in a literally split personality...

...Hoffman gives a striking example of the specific moment in her life when, vacillating over her marriage plans, she was able to come to diametrically opposed conclusions depending on whether she was thinking of her future in English or in Polish...

...The universal significance and the sheer scope of this kind of formative (or deformative) experience makes one wonder: Where are all the memoiristic accounts and semantic explorations that we might logically expect...

...She has been the ideal case, as it were, for her own clinical study...

...Moreover, as a daughter in a Jewish family that had lived through the Nazi occupation and Poland's turbulent postwar years, she brought along to America a specific kind of sensitivity, one constantly on the lookout to signals of estrangement or maladjustment resulting from ethnic, cultural, and linguistic differences...

...I had been using the right words and expressions, yet each of them had somehow missed the point...

...Stanislaw Baranczak, our guest columnist, is the Alfred Jurzykowski Professor of Polish Language and Literature at Harvard...

...But the excluding "e-" has its antonymous companion, "in-," as in inclusion or immigration...

...Sometimes the worst case scenario takes place: The immigrant irretrievably loses his grip on the first language and never manages to get one on the second...

...The only thing is, you don't own the apartment you've paid for...

...Her book, like virtually every immigrant memoir, is an account of great human interest, even more so because her life is a striking exemplar of an immigrant's American career...

...choosing the Polish of your innermost self wouldmake it impossible for your to record the outer experience of the new world, for it can be adequately named only in its own language...

...This truth, though, has a slightly ominous underside: A genuinely equal fluency in more languages than one would make you the victim of a multiple personality disorder...

...This creates a huge number of specific hurdles, pitfalls and stumbling blocks—from psychological to social—particularly during the period of transition and learning, when the immigrant literally translates his entire mental system from one language to another...

...The coercive state-owned institution whose Polish name I had translated—formally speaking, quite accurately—as "housing cooperative" had nothing to do with whatever a "housing cooperative" might mean in America...

...T]his radical disjoining between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy, draining the world not only of significance but of its colors, striations, nuances—its very existence...

...Multiply this loss by millions of today's variously displaced persons, and you face a problem of global proportions...

...Instead of trapping things in fitting words, I let myself fall into language's trap...

...Finally, as an artistically-inclined child and teenager (just before her family's emigration she was on the threshold of a promising career as a pianist), she represented the type of personality that combines rich inner resources with a strong urge to communicate them to others...

...To begin with, she left Poland with her family at the age of 13—that is to say, at the moment when the immigrant's native language is already developed enough to stay with him for good, whereas his mind is still receptive and flexible enough to achieve a full command of the second language...

...When my friend Penny tells me that she's envious, or happy, or disappointed, I try laboriously to translate not from English to Polish but from the word back to its source, to the feeling from which it springs...

...It is at such moments that it dawns on y ou what emigration is all about...

...After all, not every East European newcomer who landed on this continent as a penniless adolescent with no English to speak of winds up with a Harvard graduate degree and a position as an editor at the New York Times Book Review...

...The words I learn now don't stand for things in the same unquestioned way they did in my native tongue...

...From this point of view, it is particularly interesting that after merely a couple of years spent on this continent she decided, against all logic and despite her initial disappointing experiences with English, to switch from the international language of music to studying literature and eventually expressing herself as a writer...

...Within this general issue, however, the book's most interesting and original theme is that of "a life in a new language," a mind's transition from one language system to another, and its assimilation to the new kind of perception and outlook that the new language entails...

...the gap between the two languages may become "a chink, a window through which I can observe the diversity of the world...

...The word hangs in a Platonic stratosphere...

...In our human Tower of Babel not only poetry, according to Frost, but also identity may ultimately come down to what is lost in translation...

...And what about situations that require speech both intimate and outward, such as lovers' entreaties or quarrels...

...It is the loss of a living connection...

...But you have the option to pay a lot more, also up front, and then, also 12 to 15 years later, you notonlygetaplacetolive, you become the proud owner of it as well...

...But the book is not so much about the author's success in mastering the second language as it is about her difficulty in "translating" herself fully from the first into the second...

...As Hoffman observes in the concluding paragraphs of her book, what seems to be the immigrant's deprivation may thus be viewed, at the same time, as a spiritually enriching experience...

...Hoffman's autobiographic story of growing up in Canada and entering academic and then professional life in the USA provides a number of enlightening illustrations of this reality...

...Obviously enough, after moving his pursuit of happiness abroad, a major operating cost of the enterprise is that in most cases the immigrant faces an uphill struggle with the language he has to learn...

...The reason is simple: Those who might, can't...

...What from one perspective appears a split personality may turn out to be a profoundly advantageous "multivalent consciousness...

...For the sake of brevity, let us call the sensation "the Babel syndrome...

...Writing it in the English of your outward communication would violate the diary's intimate essence...

...There is an old saw about having as many existences as the languages you speak...

...Hoffman's insights into this process are exceptionally illuminating, thanks not only to her keen intelligence and discernment but also her specific background...

...It is extremely rare that a writer emerges among them who is still rooted deeply enough in his native language to realize the problem's significance, while at the same time feeling sufficiently at ease in his adopted language to convey the problem's complexity to those who should realize it: his new countrymen...

...The immigrants themselves are of course those who might have most to say about the losses suffered in this sort of "translation," since they serve both as translators and translated material...

...He had inquired whether it was as difficult to rent an inexpensive apartment in my hometown as it was in the Boston area...

...Triangulation" is the word that appears with peculiar frequency on the pages of this book...

...If only for the price of his anguish he could become perfectly bilingual...

...I had my first touch of the Babel syndrome a couple of weeks after arriving in this country, at some crowded wine-and-cheese reception...

...The irony is that they also are, quite naturally, the least competent to express the multiple dimensions and subtle degrees of the loss in the language that is appropriated by them rather than owned by birthright...

...It focuses on the difficulty of the immigrant's transition and assimilation, viewed from various perspectives at once—cultural, social, mental, and sentimental, to name but a few...

...Even the verb "to own," though again a formal equivalent of its Polish counterpart, referred to two distinctly different notions in the American and Polish contexts...

...Not only are the languages here, Polish and English, incompatible in a strictly linguistic sense (that is, in the sense of all the semantic problems resulting from the obvious fact that any two languages' respective structures never exactly mirror one another...

...The posh associations and immediate availability of the American "condominium" had nothing to do with the drab cubicle of concrete that a Pole is lucky to obtain keys to in his middle age, years after he has shelled out his hard-earned money...

...Well," I said, "first of all, you rather seldom rent an apartment in Poland since, as a nation with a centrally planned economy, we naturally have less apartments than families, so there are no spare apartments to rent...

...I don't know how Penny feels when she talks about envy...

...The value system programmed imperceptibly into the language we speak and think in influences our behavior remarkably—semanticists like Alfred Habdank Korzybski and S.I...

...A million subtle ways in which the new language diverges from his innate ways of naming the world or expressing himself—and thus constantly remodels his already-shaped mentalitycontinue to keep him in a state of anguish...

...What about such seemingly simple undertakings as, for instance, writing a diary...

...the problem is that the signifier has become severed from the signified...

...Why is it that nobody writes about this...

...Writers & Writing THE C0NFUSI0N OF TONGUES BY STANISLAW BARANCZAK Emigré exile, expatriate—there may be more synonyms for these in Roget's Thesaurus, most of them probably beginning with an "e-" or "ex-," those sad prefixes of exclusion...

...the cooperative does...

...A poet and critic, he emigrated to this country from Poland in 1981 and is the author most recently of A Fugitive from Utopia: The Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert...

...Eva Hoffman, as the author of Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (Dutton, 278 pp., $18.95), is one of the rare exceptions...

...Indeed, Lost in Translation calls for a new generic category: It should be called a " semiotic memoir...

...That is, if they don't change the regulations in the meantime...

...Inadvertently, indeed with the best of intentions, instead of communicating some truth I had created a false image of reality...

...Even after the process of self-translation has been completed, the native language, though increasingly forced out by the second, nonetheless stays with you for along time, in most cases forever...

...She must have achieved full proficiency in her second language relatively early, then...

...But only a bilingual person can, by way of comparison, realize and give an account of the extent to which our interpretation of the world depends on the dictates of a specific language system...

...But a transaction of that kind happens very rarely...

...What about the language of your dreams...

...I guess the whole trick is roughly what you call condominium conversion," I concluded, showing off one of my newly-acquired Americanisms...

...Less easy to understand is that the struggle does not end once he has attained some basic proficiency, or even fluency, in the language of his adopted country...

...Hayakawa made us aware of that a long time ago...

...they are also incompatible by dint of their different built-in associations, connotations, traditions, value systems...

...And the extent to which, consequently, not merely individuals but entire nations may differ in their most basic preconceived notions about reality...

...The immigrant's Babel syndrome may be just another name for the ultimate recognition of the human world's maddening yet magnificent plurality...

...Yet there is more to this book than the story of a Polish girl who made good in the United States against all odds...

...The process of linguistic assimilation consists, in fact, precisely in trying to forget the fissure between word and thing, in striving to become, just as the natives are, an unthinking, automatic user of the language with all its semantic and cognitive strings attached...