Some Thoughts on Foreignness

Though well used now to writing poetry and prose in two languages, I still come to French and to English with a sense of discovery. They are always more than one thought, as are the worlds they name and offer.

I am ‘between’ languages in that I translate occasionally from several languages into French and from French and other languages into English. I am mostly conscious, however, of being ‘in’ two languages, day by day, moment by moment.

The strangeness of a foreign language: the whole of reality sounds different, its rhythms have changed, another syntax has articulated it in a way unsuspected before. A foreign language presents itself as a complete system. Its speakers seem to utter it with the perfect ease of the unfallen Adam and Eve. It comes to one as a poem.

The expression ‘the gift of language’ takes on a new meaning. All those worlds offered by the thousands of languages that surround us.

As well as presenting another world, a foreign language presents a different idea of what language is. All the workings of French suggest that language is seen by its speakers as sited in its own world above reality so as to observe, understand and raise it into the scholarly intelligible. (Think of empreintes digitales as opposed to finger-prints, or un hebdomadaire rather than a weekly.) English exists in the successiveness of time, of events, in the close gripping of the real, even when engaging with the most elevated thought. Though both descriptions are no doubt only partly exact.

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