Why Learn a Second Language?

If you speak English, why bother learning a second language? After all, English is spoken in most countries now, and it’s spreading. You don’t need French to order a latte in Paris anymore.

But learning a second language isn’t merely about ordering coffee in a foreign country, I contend.  It’s about perspective. Every language is a lens, and if you know just one language, it’s hard to be aware of the lens: you see only the world. Fluency in a second tongue gives you a place to stand outside your own language. From there, you can tell that it is just language, not the world itself nor an exact replica thereof.

Inside two languages

I know what I’m talking about to some extent because I was born to fluency in two tongues. My father was a Farsi-speaking Afghan, my mother an English-speaking American. In my family, we borrowed words back and forth between the languages, but I always knew they could not be combined. Each was a world. When I switched languages I switched worlds.

Shortly after arriving in America, I remember, I hit on a “foolproof” scheme for selling fiction to Esquire Magazine: I would, I thought, take a story already published in the magazine and replace each word with an exact synonym. It didn’t work. You probably guessed that. Looking back, I laugh at the harebrained folly of my scheme myself. Yet no one laughs at the translator, who proposes essentially the same project–to replace each word in a written text with its exact synonym in another language.

What’s in a word?

Translation assumes that humanity has some finite collection of meanings in common and that each language has a word for each meaning. Actually, of course, words denote things people have noticed, and different peoples have noticed different things.

Last summer, I was sitting on a lawn with a bunch of my Afghan cousins, lazing away the summer afternoon. As the light sank, one cousin said, “Let’s go indoors. I’m getting qukh.”

My Farsi has faded somewhat since I left the Farsi-speaking world, and qukh was new to me. “What is qukh?”

“Well,” said my cousin, “you know, how if you sit on grass long enough, especially late in the day, the moisture rising from the Earth makes the fabric of your pants damp?”

Yes.

“And you know how the damp fabric clings to your skin?”

Uh huh.

“And when you pull the fabric away, your skin feels kind of bumpy and itchy?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s qukh!”

Now, this usage may seem so precise and limited that one would rarely find a use for it, even if the word existed in English. But the very next day, driving to Aspen, my back was sweating against the vinyl seat; it made the shirt stick to my skin; and after a few hours I had to pull over because–well, I was feeling a bit qukh. Since then, I have noticed ever so many instances of this phenomenon.

The trouble with translation

But this is really a counter-example to the larger point I want to make.  English could adopt this word, or any word, if English speakers found it useful., becuase that’s what languages do. Once a word comes into English, however, it grows capillaries of meaning that seat it in the living flesh of the English language and the experience of English-speaking people.

This hits me every time I play around with translation. Once, for example, I was trying to translate a ghazal, a sonnet-length lyric, by the 14th century poet Hafez from Persian (aka Farsi, aka Dari) into English. Translated literally, the first two lines of this celebrated poem go as follows: 

If that Turk from Shiraz were to capture my heart
I would give away Samarkand and Bokhara for her Hindu mole.

I suppose it’s no use telling you that in hte original Persian this couplet thrums with mysterious erotic resonance . Few English-speakers will be convinced, especially about the Eros.

But why is so much lost? After all, practically half the words in this couplet are names. They sound and mean the same in English as in Persian. Samarkand, Bokhara, and Shiraz are cities you will find on any English-language map. And even in English, Turks are Turks and Hindus Hindus.

Some translators fuss with synonyms to inject rhythm and rhyme into the lines, hoping to recapture the music of the original. It’s no use. At the end of the day, you’re still left with that Turk. And that mole.

And that’s the problem. The Western ear comes to this couplet with associations drawn from Western history and literature. In this world, ever since the Crusades, “The Turk” has coded to “brutal menace on the eastern frontiers of Christendom.” In real life, Turks include men, women and children, young and old, but in the network of English-language associations, “The Turk” is fundamentally male: a brawny, scimitar-wielding male.

In the Persian network of associations, “the Turk” is more complicated. Even there, the label brings power to mind, Turks having formed the ruling aristocracy of every Muslim society from Delhi to Istanbul for eight hundred years, but it’s not a shadowy Other looming beyond the borders, it’s “our own” familiar power elite, kings presiding over courts, and queens too, doling out patronage and favors. You might say that in Hafez’s world, “Turk” evoked a feeling roughly like “American” might do in today’s industrialized West.

And in all those same societies, Persians commanded an authority of their own, based on a supposedly more ancient cultural sophistication. They contributed poetry, art, perfume, an appreciation of gardens—and Shiraz epitomized the romantic Persian city. It was the Venice of the Persian world.

Samarkand and Bokhara may be mere place names to the Western sensibility, but to the Asiatic ear, they evoke the same mythic splendor and decadent luxury aroused in the West by such names as Byzantium, Babylon, or Rome. “Hindu” filters into the Western sensibility through the British colonial experience, but for Persians Hindus were within “our own” familiar civilization, interlaced with “us,” highly relevant and yet –exotic. An analogous figure for Westerners might be the Japanese: clearly industrialized, clearly “modern,” and yet … exotic.

Finally, there’s that mole. We Westerners don’t go for moles. No, no, don’t argue with me,  we just don’t. It’s no better if they’re Hindu moles. No mole at all is the look we prefer. No accounting for taste. Frankly, thirty years ago, I never would have guessed that stylish young American women would one day sport tattoos or that guys would find tattooed women attractive.

In short, to convey any hint of what Hafez was up to in that famous couplet of his, a translator might have to go with something like this:

If that American in Venice were to coo “I love you too…”
I would barter Babylon and Rome for her Japanese tattoo.

But would that really count as a translation? You see the problem.

Kaleidoscope world

And the problem goes beyond vocabulary. A view of the world is embedded in the very structure of a language, any language. Pronouns, for example, have no gender in Farsi. A religious statement never forces or lets you assign a gender to God. In French, by contrast, even bicycles have gender; as do abstract ideas, and their modifiers must conform. What do fluent speakers of this language see? I have trouble imagining.

In Turkish, I am told, the first vowel in a sentence determines what all the other vowels in the sentence will be.  Change the first word and the whole sentence sounds different. Hmm.

Tahitian consists almost entirely of separate word-parts that stand alone. You need a whole sentence to express all the meanings that English can pack into a single highly inflected compound verb.

By contrast, Finnish (my mother’s first language) lets you combine more or less any number of word-bits and affixes to create single words that express what would take whole sentences to say in English. Juoksentelisinkohan, a combination of seven little word-parts, is a single word that means “I wonder if I should run about aimlessly?”

A French teacher in Colorado once said to me, “My students keep asking ‘How do you say this or that in French’ and I’m at a loss because the real answer is, “You don’t.’”

Creating meaning together

Today, we’re all doing high-stakes business across the globe with speakers of other languages. These interactions are always conducted in somebody’s second language or through translators. I hope I’ve demonstrated that translation has some limits. Virtually no message can be mapped directly from one language to another because the act of translation severs countless capillaries of assumptions and understandings that wed that message to its entire cultural context.

Any encounter between two languages involves an intersection between two whole frames of reference. Fluency in a second language cultivates an ability to put oneself in another point of view. Monolingualism make it more difficult to see that one even has a point of view. Communication, I think, can occur only when both parties are able to imagine the existence of another whole frame of reference. Only then can they approach a conversation as an exploration in which the two parties build a common meaning together.

And that is why, in my opinion, the world would be better off if all of us knew at least two languages—any two.  

Translations

Here are a few poetry-things I’d like to share.  The first is a poem by Khwadja Abdullah Ansary, an indirect ancestor of mine who lived in the tenth century or thereabouts.   He wrote in Farsi and Arabic. This poem was written in Farsi and can, I think, be found inscribed on a wall of his tomb in Herat.  

To Want

Know my friend,
That human sorrow springs
from these three things:
To want
before it’s due,
To want
more than your destined share,
To want
for yourself what belongs to another.

And here’s the first stanza of a poem by Jalaludin Balkhi, more commonly known as Rumi:

Conflict 

Conflict boils down to
disagreement about names.
Turn the page to meaning
and the controversy wanes.
Differing perspectives
on the same essential truth
is what divides the Muslims,
Zoroastrians and Jews.

Finally here’s a quatrain by the poet Khallili, who died just a few years ago:

Satisfaction  

The wellspring of comfort is
the company of friends.
Separation from the group is what
makes dying difficult,
But we get together, all,
in the earth’s heart one day
So life and death are not so
different in the end.