Translations

As a child we learn language innocently.  We are surrounded by it in its entirety, and we begin by plucking out of the air magic words like “mama” which brings us what we want; powerful words like “no”, which change the course of our world; and subtle, mysterious words like “why?” which are the first steps towards deeper mastery.

As adults we are afforded no such luxury.  Learning a language is usually a chore.  Ideally we would like its effects without the need for the effort; instead we must begin at the beginning, start with the simple words and simple structures.  There is nothing unreasonable in this, but it does mean that the language is hopelessly biased for us, canted towards those first few mumbled phrases.

Unlike the child, we cannot learn neutral words like “no” and “why” alone.  The have to be accompanied by their cohorts, the nouns and verbs which make concrete a language.  Inevitably the first such names and actions that we we learn carry us to a particular corner of the linguistic landscape.  We understand the language through them, and we live longest with them, until those first phrases become like our family, something you just have to accept and live with, an inheritance of nature and nurture.

So, for example, among my many half-completed attempts to learn French, there was a course whose first few vocabularies seemed fixated on the military.  Grammatical points were illustrated by characteristics of soldiers, or the deeds of emperors.  Whether this was part of some Napoleonic legacy, I cannot say; but it has certainly tinged my view of the language.  Even today, French has something of the army and empire about it, which makes me feel that it and its speakers still long for the fin-de-siècle civilisation that died in the mud of Flanders.

My view of German has been similarly shaped by tutorial books.  One of them, quite properly, concentrated on the declensions of nouns, and required me to learn lists of various classes of them.  Because of the nature of the German language, many of these are very basic, earthy words: words like field, beak, salmon, stove, brother, maid, bride and sword – words which almost spell out a fairy tale by themselves.  This impression of Germans re-enacting timeless myths from pre-history was reinforced not only be reading another grammar set entirely in the spiky Gothic typeface, but also by an early immersion in Grimm.  Today the German scene seems to me to be populated entirely with figures out of Wagner, himself an inhabitant of a world full of dark forests, elves and curses.

Happily my first attempt at learning Greek has been rather more beneficial.  I used an old Linguaphone course, little changed since the early 1960s.  In it the characters all appeared to be perfectly groomed jet-setters, eternally buying clothes, eating out, and sightseeing. Subsequent books have tried to correct this misapprehension with dreary Athenian tales of work and politics; but I have kept faith with that deathless land of beautiful people preoccupied with the important things in life – like whether to have red mullet or gurnard, whatever that is.  It is one world that I have no desire to translate back into modern, brutal reality.

(24.12.91)

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