Translation

A paean to English

By Anastasia ⋅ January 14, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

American life had changed him. Now he loved hand tools–oh, the infinite varieties of American tools, each designed for one purpose, just like the vast English vocabulary, each word denoting precisely one thing or one idea.

-Ha Jin,* A Free Life

I’ve started writing in English about ten years ago, when I found that English was the only language my friends wanted to read in. Even the Russian ones, from whom in America, just like from me, our native language bled out slowly. We’d sing and stop mid-couplet because the next word was a word we no longer knew. Like a parasitic chick of a cuckoo, an English word lay in our minds instead.

Some of us sought treatment–a few daily doses of Babel, Gogol, Chekhov, Mandelshtam, Tsvetayeva, Tolstoy, and Pushkin, Pushkin, Pushkin. Others let the mother tongue dry and shrivel. Me, I’ve spent years trying to treat English like another variety of Russian. But English can’t do the things that Russian can. Rhymes don’t come easy. Word order isn’t a matter of tone and style, but grammar. An ear for Russian rhythms is useless. Sometimes, I ditched English and wrote in Russian, knowing I wrote for no one and that I was completely alone. At other times, I just got angry–at English and its ways, at my readers for not understanding, and at myself for failing to make them.

Then yesterday, somewhere between reading Ha Jin and reading Thomas Hardy, I realized that I’ve fallen for this tongue, this Anglo-Saxon Latin bastard that swells and prospers by plundering the languages of this world and taking their best words. I stumbled on this line of Hardy’s in “Neutral Tones”–”And a few leaves lay on the starving sod”–and realized I didn’t know exactly what the word “sod” means. So I went down the Oxford English Dictionary rabbit hole. Sod. Peat. Turf. Greensward. The distinctions between them are the kind of details I would have never thought of (a peat is a slice of soil taken from a bog, but turf must be taken from a dry patch of land; a sod is brick-shaped, a greensward is thin). And, of course, for most of these, the origin might be Pixie, might be Frisian, might be Dutch–but is mostly unknown.

We are alike, English and I. I am Ukrainian by birth and upbringing, half-Russian, half-Jew by ethnic origin and culture, and now an American by choice. I, too, am a mongrel. What better language could I have hoped for to write in?

* In the interests of full disclosure, mentioning now that Ha Jin is my former teacher.