Two Pieces
translated by Richard Gwyn

The Other Language

I remember when I didn’t yet speak two languages. My mother tongue spoke through me; it took me by the hand and I let myself be guided by it, without question. A bit like breathing. Nobody devotes their time to breathing; air stimulates the lungs and other respiratory tracts while we focus on other things. Likewise, the mother tongue does all the work while we just get on with living. Rather than speaking, we breathe by means of words, we inhale language, which is barely speaking at all. Of course I knew that other languages existed, even at school they taught me another language, but it’s one thing to learn foreign words and phrases in a classroom and quite another to be speaking another language, which implies some kind of inner transformation. Learning a second language puts one’s own into context, it turns the mother tongue into a language, impermanent, like all languages that have ever existed. Translation takes this contextualisation to an extreme. It immerses the mother tongue in the great linguistic broth of the world and delivers yet another blow to our illusions of fixity, rootedness and eternity. Every time we translate a foreign text into our mother tongue, it is impossible not to take the journey – at least to some degree – in the opposite direction; that is, to weigh up the appropriateness of the sentence or paragraph we have just translated, mentally ‘retranslating’ it to check its accuracy within the source text, and it is at this point of ‘suitability ...