Language

Our words are our emotions, our thoughts, our fears, our motivations, and so many more things, so many more feelings… language is all but a vehicle.

Sometimes, I attempt to figure out my language. I don’t see clear lines – it seems messy, clunky, mixed-up – a strange vehicle of many colors, with stranger things dangling about. Okay, some people have vivid imagination, and see things in images.

Hmm… Matter of dismay for an erstwhile journalist, and a ‘maybe-writer’? Now which writer, in their right mind, would want to be a clunky colorful awkward vehicle, when they could be a zippy little mainstream car? For language is a sharp tool in the toolbox – chiseling out beautiful creations…

But coming out of the images, to explanations…

English is not my first language. Yet, I read and write more easily in English. I often think in my first language, Marathi and often find literal translations from Marathi in my English sentences. Sometimes I notice them, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes, I repair them. Sometimes I notice them, yet leave them the way they are.

A few books I read recently are translations. As I start the one translated from Swedish, I am very aware that it is a translation. Yet, the many characters and the rapid chain of events keeps my attention on the story and soon, I forget it is a translation.  

I read a brilliant Neapolitan series.  I don’t know any Italian. Yet, in the English lines, I hear the melodious slur of the Italian accent.

I sense the ferocity of emotion and truth in the writing. I also sense that the translated lines do not carry the full breadth of emotion and beauty. The characters move to dialect in intense moments. The writer gives the gist, but points it out. I search for gaps, the areas I do not have access to, the entirety I will never be able to experience, the completeness that is elusive. I feel like an outsider.

Or perhaps, that is art in general. Perhaps, we are never able to absorb completely what the artiste intended.

The scope to which we are able to access what the artiste intended may depend on our state of mind, our personal experiences, knowledge, interests, emotions. Certain words leap at us, others go unnoticed, depending on our thought process, experiences, interests, emotions, on a given day.

No two people can read a page the same way.

I find an old French novel by Maupassant that we studied in college. I read a few pages. The language is difficult. I see my fading scribbles in the margins – explanations, in English and French and even Marathi. I don’t want to look at the scribbles. I don’t want to be explained. I want to feel the language. Even if I may not get too far.

I notice what I am doing. I wonder if it is simply stubbornness and inflexibility of old age creeping in. hmmm…

I notice it again. I realize I don’t want to break the movement of his words, the ebb and flow of emotions, settings, the starkness of humanity, woven into nature.

I want to read it as he wrote it, in the language he wrote. I don’t want my notes, my explanations, my teacher’s explanation, to break this Naturalist’s stream of words. Even if there is much I will miss from not knowing vocabulary or context, I feel I have more to gain. Or that is my frame of mind, that day.

My page is up. I realize I haven’t even started what I meant to write. I will have to return tomorrow and write more about the clunky vehicle in my day to day.

I will simply end with this quote I found the other day, scribbled in my journal:

“When the language one identifies with is far away, one does everything possible to keep it alive. Because words bring back everything: the place, the people, the streets, the life, the sky, the flowers, the sounds.”      ~ Jhumpa Lahiri