BarcelonaWhen I was nine, I studied the list of irregular German verbs during recess. When I was twelve, I spent a good part of my weekdays on a magazine to learn English. A few months ago, I took up Japanese again after more than ten years and I can once again confirm that learning a language brings me genuine and somewhat absurd happiness (it is obvious that Japanese will be of no use to me) and at the same time an indescribable frustration (I know that I will never be able to fully master it). People often ask me how many languages I speak and I say that I speak one and barely: Catalan. It is not false modesty, it is just that passive language is one thing – the one we understand by reading or squeezing it out – and active language is quite another – the one we can produce by speaking or writing – and therefore there are languages that I can read without difficulty but that I do not speak fluently. This is also frustrating and makes me feel like an impostor. I know that I am not the only translator who trembles at the prospect of translating a living author and having the publisher decide to take him to Catalonia and propose a joint presentation.
Another question I am often asked is whether I read in other languages. Somehow, it is assumed that if you can bypass the translator and go straight to the original text, you get to a deeper and more authentic truth about the text. And in part it is true: translators are not to be trusted; there are good ones and terrible ones (and how can you find out what kind of translator they are if you don't speak Russian or Swedish or Greek?). But even good translators only give us a version, their own, of that text. And despite knowing all this, I read very little in other languages. Why? Because as much as I can read German or English perfectly, the text does not reach me in the same way, it does not "touch" me in the same way. It is one thing to understand the words and the meaning, and another to have those words touch psychological chords. It's a problem of the emotional bubble. Let me explain. Inside our brain everything is interconnected: the neurons in charge of language are not only distributed in different areas of the brain, but they are also connected to non-linguistic content. When I hear a word, not only the semantic part is activated, but also associations of all kinds, semantic, but also phonetic, sensorial or linked to personal memories.
Thus, for example, when I read "perpetrate a kiss", I read the other usual collocations of the verb perpetrate (typically, "perpetrate a crime"). Or if I read that "thoughts bubble up" I can almost feel them boiling. In the same way, words refer us to personal memories; for me, for example, words raft either jar They remind me of my mother, who is the only person I know who says them and, therefore, they resonate with me in a particular way. In other cases, the link is not so direct and clear, but without a doubt, having lived in Catalan, words like we drip either scold They have a much more powerful shock wave than their English equivalents (trickle, scold), even if we understand what they mean. So, even if we have a (hardly attainable) total mastery of the language (that is, of everyday registers and also of formal ones), we will never be able to create false linguistic memories and we will never be able to capture the text with the same emotional involvement.
Capturing a sentence with all the nuances
But it is true that reading originals captures something ineffable, the untranslatable idiosyncrasy of the text and the language. One of the things that fascinates me about learning other languages are the fleeting moments in which you suddenly feel that you are really grasping a sentence with all its nuances: doing so implies leaving yourself, your culture, your way of understanding the world, the routine of your syntax, to force your synapses and become someone. Beyond the somewhat stupid (as well as false) topic that the Inuits have dozens of words to refer to the color white, there are many examples of how each language is molded according to what its people have needed to express throughout their history, which is reflected not so much in lexical features as in syntactical ones. I, as a speaker of Catalan, strongly envy German the capacity for abstraction that its mechanism of substantivization allows (we reintroduce once and for all the it
Perhaps I like languages because they articulate memory and, therefore, identity. And the more languages you know, the more aspects of yourself you can discover.
