Mother Tongue

I’m translating from Italian to English.

But is English my mother tongue? Since my mother’s mother tongue was German, her first words to me, her infant daughter, were undoubtedly in German, but I don’t consider that my mother tongue.  It might be so in a sense, for I probably absorbed it as I did my mother’s milk. But most of my life I have spoken, heard, read and written in English. I have never used many of the words I encounter as I leaf through a book, but I recognize them. They are part of my life, of my experiences. How many words do I know in English, even unaware I know them?

While German might in a sense be my mother tongue for I still understand it, I can read it and speak it to some extent. But what I have mostly spoken, heard, read, written throughout my life is English.

And now there is also Italian. Which is undoubtedly my children’s mother tongue although they also feel at home in English.

Today, though, I am translating an article for my son. I am translating from Italian into English. I find a word that means more or less the same thing in that other language. But is it what is really meant?

Yes, I think it does mean more or less the same thing. But as I put it down on paper, it seems to come alive and raises a questioning head. In its wake come a host of other words with similar meanings that are however not quite the same. Which one has the same lilt or a sound that accompanies its meaning? The words start vying with each other for that one place on the page. They are, what John Berger calls, confabulating. They jostle each other. They try to elbow out the other words as they assert their primacy, their right to be in just that place.

John Berger would say they are confabulating. He reminds us that a language cannot be reduced to a dictionary or a stock of words a click of a mouse will call up on the internet. A language consists of living words. Aside from those words that have a cultural significance, to be taken in their specific context.

A spoken language, he reminds us, “is a body, a living creature, whose physiognomy is verbal and whose visceral functions are linguistic. And this creature’s home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate.” It is what underlies a word as it has come down to us through the centuries.  This is why an acronym has given up its life and is simply a collection of dead letters.

 “True translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal.”

(quotes and references to John Berger: Confabulations, 2016)