Stephen Cox | Staff Writer
I couldn’t help but be struck by an exchange I overheard in one of the many hardware shops under Chinese ownership here in Salamanca. Looking on the shelves for household essentials, I overheard a conversation between the shopkeeper and a middle-aged Spanish woman. She began describing what she was looking for in unnecessary detail before, with a sigh of exasperation, the elderly Chinese man interrupted her. “You mean a coat rack?” His little snort of irritation revealed that this was not the first time a customer had been over elaborate, as if the foreign owner of a hardware shop could not be expected to know the correct terms for the goods he was selling.
This led me to consider the nature of language-learning. When you begin to learn a new language, whether at home, school or university, there are countless words you take for granted in your mother tongue yet still don’t know in the language you are trying to master. I am reminded of a retired professor of French in Trinity who used to berate his students for not knowing the French words for parts of the body such as eyelid, earlobe and nostril. If we as language-learners are ignorant of such seemingly basic nouns, is there any hope for expressing ourselves clearly in another vernacular when it matters?
Writers such as Joseph Conrad who become master stylists in an adopted language are the exception. Lesser mortals may eventually become more or less fluent in a second language, but will struggle and sometimes make fools of themselves along the way. I remember hearing about an Erasmus student who caused great amusement in a restaurant here when she asked for “polla” (penis) and not “pollo” (chicken); it would take a curmudgeon not to chuckle at this linguistic slip. Mistakes such as this add to the fun of learning a new language; in English, at least, I find most foreign accents appealing.
Indeed, I have perhaps been dismissive of some languages just because they don’t have the aesthetic appeal of, say, French or Italian. Each language is a unique descriptive instrument with its own quirks and fascinatingly untranslatable words. For instance, ask any native Portuguese speaker what the most beautiful word is in his language and their reply will be, “saudade”. This translates roughly as “yearning” or “longing”, but these words in English don’t begin to describe the range of emotions suggested in Portuguese; I, with little more than a basic knowledge of the language, can’t do better than WordReference.com in this instance.
A recent conversation with an Erasmus student from Poland made me think further. After a lecture on literary theory we were discussing the previous hour’s material. I thought it was interesting that, while she enjoyed the class, she admitted, in perfect English, “I’m not sure I’d have liked what he was saying in Polish.” It should be noted that our lecturer is Spanish, and was of course speaking in his mother tongue. I got the sense from her words that, had she heard a direct translation of the lecture in Polish, his ideas might have come across as pretentious, or at least lacking the same sonorous appeal as in Spanish. The phrase, ‘lost in translation’ is commonplace to express gaps between languages, but this was the first time I had come across the concept of, ‘gained in translation’, as if the same idea or sentence in Polish would positively benefit from being uprooted from its original mode of expression.
Lately I have been shown links to the personal websites of various polyglots, detailing their secrets of language acquisition and the foreign tongues they claim to have mastered. While one person’s fluency in eight or nine languages may at first seem implausible, it is too easy to be cynical. As English-language natives we have it easy. It is common for people in many African countries to be fluent in three or four different tongues. Vladimir Nabokov was trilingual growing up, and even in England indifference to foreign languages is relatively recent; in the past, educated people usually had a grounding in Greek and Latin, and were be able to read literary classics in French, German and Italian. Now we have greater learning resources than have ever been available, I feel we should all make some effort to overcome our monoglot laziness.
When I expressed an interest in Russian to a friend in his second year of studying the language, he informed me knowingly of the verb, ‘starat’sya’, which apparently translates as, ‘to try’, but with an implication of failure in the attempt. Going all-out to prove him wrong is tempting. Until then, the closest English equivalent I can find to this Russian idea comes from our own Samuel Beckett, who wrote in Worstward Ho, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Anyway, perhaps I should remain on more familiar ground before taking such ambitious linguistic projects on board. After all, when in Spain…
