By Eric Le Roy
Bruegel’s ‘Tower of Babel’
Content 18+ My Budapest-based friend and colleague Artem (I refer to him so much you might think he is just my alter-ego or imaginary friend like a teddy bear or ghost in the forest) shared the following information with me recently:
“My gym trainer told me that English is a language of idiots as it is very simple, very ‘flat’ and doesn’t have the means to express things in such a manner as Hungarian, where you have different words for different cup sizes, e.g. csésze , bögre, pohár, korsó – that it represents the span from 1dl cup to a pint.”
Far from being offended, I empathize with the trainer, even if I am not terribly interested in cup sizes (unless we are speaking of female breasts), although when living in England I always knew to request a ‘pint’ of beer and never a ‘half pint’, especially near Closing Time. Artem suggested that the trainer’s harsh criticism reflected his ignorance of English at an advanced level, but I don’t think that fully explains it.
Nor do I believe it is about having a lot of words with various subtle shades of meaning to describe cups or saucers. For instance, I am told that Eskimos (now called Inuits by the more ‘sensitive’ folks in places like California where they used to sell Eskimo Pie Ice Cream bars in supermarkets) have about 18 different words to describe ‘snow’. In China there are almost as many derivatives of the word ‘bamboo’. It depends, I suppose on your surroundings. If your life is dominated by certain elements, you are bound to see nuance more than someone simply trying to find the train station.
But I don’t think it’s about that either. To me, language is all about sound. The sound of both the exterior and interior of the word. Some words possess an intrinsic beauty in every language that others don’t. For example, in Italian, spring is called ‘primavera’ (primavera). It is magical. In French, ‘J’taime’ (Je tem) is more beautiful than the German “Ich liebe dich’ (Eesh leebeh deesh) or the Italian “Ti amo” (which sounds like a short for ‘ammunition’ or ‘Alamo’). In Italian, ‘Ti voglio bene’ ((Tee vol yo benny) sounds better (to an English ear, although the literal meaning: “I want you well” doesn’t make much sense.
And anyone who has seen the famous American Civil War film “Gone with the Wind” will remember Rhett Butler’s tough-shiit-and-good-riddance farewell to Scarlett O’Hara when she implores him, “But what will I do?” And Rhett replies, oh so famously: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
In German it goes like this: “Ehrlich gesagt, mein Lieber, ist mir das völlig egal.” In Italian, it is
“Francamente, mia cara, non me ne frega niente.” Oh, well.
One other thing. In Europe they say ‘Ciao’ ALL THE TIME. ‘Hello’ is ‘ciao. “Goodbye’ is ‘ciao’. In American English, ‘chow’ (which is what ‘ciao’ sounds like) means ‘food’ – usually in a military or prison setting. As in “Chow Time.” So when I was in Italy and Germany, etc., and everyone said ‘Ciao’ 20,000 fucking-sucking times a day, I thought I would lose my mind – as monotonous repetition has always done to me. Chowchowchowchowchochowchowchowchow. Insanity.
But who knows? Maybe “OK” has the same effect on some people. OKOKOKOKOKOKOKOK
I studied German once in depth, and I will always remember a sentence in our workbook: “Dann laufen die hektische Kinder uber die Schnee bedeckten Felder. (Then the excited children ran across the snow-covered field.) The sound of the German is resonant and evocative. German words such as ‘Wanderlust’ and ‘Wunderkind’ are unsurpassable. So is ‘Schadenfreude’ (the joy taken in other people’s suffering). In “The Waste Land”, Eliot prefaces his poem with: ‘Frisch weit der Wind, der Heimat zu. Mein Irisch Kind, wo weilest du” (The wind blows fresh toward the homeland. My Irish child,where are you waiting?”)
The heavy soul in the poet Rainer Rilke proves the beauty of German. It does NOT sound like Hitler screaming at the masses. It has a deep, deep wellspring of brooding magnificence, a solemn reaching into the spirit. I know this and I barely knew German !!! How did I know? Because I did. I heard the language, I heard the soul.
The French singer Edith Piaf’s great song, “Non Je ne regrette rien” could not be sung to the same effect with English words. Nor “The Vie en Rose.” These are French songs. They cannot be duplicated in English. No doubt there are similar songs and poems and phrases and simple words in Hungarian which possess such inner and outer beauty. No language has a monopoly on beauty.
I listened to these Hungarian poems this evening, spoken in their native language. They start calmly and become impassioned. I do not understand a word, but I sense the almost unrestrainable passion in them. Listen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCYehlLVGAQ&list=PLUu93OidM4Y3BEoNFdbss5fdpTHiT-Fvl&index=2
But I confess that, as I listened and watched the speakers, I was also looking at the English subtitles, and, in truth, I was grading out the poem according to the beauty and effectiveness of the English. Frankly, some of it sounded great in English, but a Hungarian would curse at that. Who could blame him? Language is a personal thing among all other personal things. It is embedded from birth, and its sounds – even in infantile nonsense words – carry hidden inarticulate meanings and evocations. When I was a child, I had nightmares, and I heard the language of nightmares. I heard words like “Dr, Durding drowned in the Potomac” and “Uncle Mack is in a coma” and “Yesterday Uncle Mack died of cancer.” – and I didn’t know what the words meant and yet I DID know what they meant – they meant something terrifying. So did joyous words, inarticulate mumblings or slobber-words that are at the core of sex and unshackled, manic bliss.
Listen to the English words taken from this poem by Christina Rossetti called “Goblin Market”
Evening by evening Among the brookside rushes,
Laura bowed her head to hear, Lizzie veiled her blushes:
Crouching close together In the cooling weather,
With clasping arms and cautioning lips,
With tingling cheeks and finger-tips.
“Lie close,” Laura said, Pricking up her golden head:
We must not look at goblin men, We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed Their hungry thirsty roots?”
“Come buy,” call the goblins Hobbling down the glen.
I wonder how these haunting lyrical words sound in another language? Would they duplicate, gain or profane the magic of the English language here?
And listen to Shakespeare’s farewell to the English theater in his play The Tempest:
“ Prospero speaks to Ferdinand and Miranda
You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay’d: be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex’d;
Bear with my weakness; my, brain is troubled:
Be not disturb’d with my infirmity:
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose: a turn or two I’ll walk,
To still my beating mind.
It is not possible to exceed this in English or any other language. The lilting sound of Dylan Thomas, the precision and subtle reaching into the abyss of Larkin, even the thunder in Kipling’s “If” – they cannot be exceeded or, for that manner, translated. Indeed, poetry has been defined as ‘that which cannot be translated.’
Yet I also know – and I know it because I love more than definitions; I love the soul in the language – I know that the same levels of beauty, meaning, passion, and despair can be achieved in every language on earth. Rap music, for that matter, can communicate the powerful emotions of life on life’s terms. Urban, not pastoral. But indifferent to the concept of pastoral peace? Not really.
A child’s nursery rhyme can do the same: Believe it or not:
“ East Side, West Side, all around the town
The tots sang “ring-a-rosie”
“London Bridge is falling down”
Boys and girls together
Me and Mamie O’Rourke
Tripped the light fantastic on the
Sidewalks of New York”
If that doesn’t capture the New York City of long ago, I can’t imagine what would.
And this apparently simple one:
Ring-a-ring o’ roses,
A pocket full of posies.
A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all fall down”
Believe it or not, this is about Death during the time of the Bubonic Plague.
Nothing can exceed this. But the question is: can these emotions so powerfully rendered in one language be deconstructed, shifted to a second or other language, and then reconstructed? Many attempts have been made, and some translators (the great unsung heroes of literature) have made a brave attempt, often amazingly successful. If Murakami can be translated into English in a way that confers on us the authentic Murakami; if Pushkin can be rendered as Puskin in Spanish or Hungarian, then we are onto something. But it must be remembered that direct translation is impossible. It can’t be done that way.
The translator must have total knowledge of both languages and their cultures and also the historical time frame of what is being translated. He//She must possess total and accurate sensibility as to the nuances, idiomatic turns of thought, colloquialisms, slang, and biases of both cultures and languages. An impossible task? Almost.
Almost. But it can be done.
Perhaps this is why Music is universal and why it transcends many of the stumbling blocks encountered in trying to make the intimacies of one language available to native speakers of another. Music is like an instant hit: cocaine more than alcohol, to use a crude example. Painting and sculpture might be said to share the same qualities of instant recognition. But it isn’t true really. Look at Asian art, listen to Asian music (not tainted by Western influence), look at Asian architecture – and you will see creation stemming from, no doubt, similar or even identical passions but realized in different forms. Is Japanese or Chinese loneliness or ecstasy that much different from that of Mississippi small town folks walking by the river on a hot summer evening – or East End Cockneys after a night out in a familiar public house – or Russians celebrating the beloved Birthday of some friend – or a Mexican playing guitar to his mistress – or a Polish man at the funeral of his wife – or a Russian or Ukrainian person in agony after the death of children in war? Are these emotions different among these people?
Or are they shared? Universally?
I would argue that the universality of common experience is true. And yet the Mississippi couple is not comfortable in Tokyo and the Japanese couple is not at home in the Mississippi Delta. That’s the way it is, and it expresses both the unifying and the separating, even alienating, truth of language. My poetry is not yours. My song is not yours. My kind of beautiful woman is not yours. And yet we all sing and think in lyrics and fall in love. The end result is universal; the roads leading there are strange. “Rich and strange” to quote my Shakespeare. Language is symbolism.
. So the poems and songs, the paintings in museums just as the precision of wildness and careful planning and symbolism on cave walls too many years ago count reflect a commonalty so obvious I am surprised anyone still tries to deny it –and the language itself enunciates the personal symbols – well-understood by the users and impossible to understand by the outsiders – that convey the secrets of shared experience and cultures; shared dreams and the actual realization and too frequent destruction of those dreams.
The Hungarian experiences life and death in the same way the American, Mexican, and Korean does. But her songs are different, and this must be respected without judgmental interference or silly value-related biases.
So if you say: spring (or springtime) or primavera or Frühling (German) or the printemps (French) or tavasz (Hungarian) – the secret is within the secret itself. Language is so profoundly personal as to be untranslatable at the most basic level of our separate lives, our disparate existence. But it can be united in sublime moments. Just as when a war ends or a baby is born.
Language is symbolism, I repeat. Symbols for thoughts, and these current thoughts of our passing realm act as emblems of earlier thoughts, and so it goes right back to when the human tongue first found a way to stop grunting and began thinking cognitively, and articulating the same, ultimately even in metaphor. Language joins us together; it also separates us, sometimes tragically.
As a man, I say this. Women with foreign accents appeal. Greatly. Why? It is because they seem different. Voulez vous coucher avec moi, ce soir? – sounds a lot sexier than “Would you like to have sex with me tonight?” Or “Willst du heute Nacht mit mir schlafen?” What could sound worse than the English or German? But in French….
Or the English “butterfly”. In Italian it is ‘farfalla” (expressed ‘farfallllllla’ – as if they are not wishing to finish the word too fast but really play it to its fullest effect. “Mommmmma Mia!”. Not ‘Moma mea’ – as in English. In German the word is “Schmettering”. Bloody, horrible. “Cinderella’ is “Aschenputtel” REALLY fucking horrible.
Yet Rilke writes this , and, trust me, there is nothing better:
“Herbsttag
Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.
Befiel den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein.
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.”
Can you hear it? I can. And my German is not good.
But I hear it and I love it. And so my answer to the Hungarian trainer is, “Yes, you are right. But don’t be narrow, my friend!”
The Hungarian trainer is absolutely right, But so is the trainer in Poland and Argentina and Iceland and Uruguay. We all have the right to seek beauty, to wander into the surf and fog-filled dreams of Its surpassing medicine when we find our sunrises and sunsets which rise and fall differently, depending on when we wake up and where we live. But…in the end it’s mostly the same, n’est pas? Or “Non ’e vero’ ? Or “befejezi??
Word to the wise, fellows: Wives all want the same things from their husbands: good man, good father, good provider, good lover. The Celtic women felt the same. So, I suspect, did the neanderthal ladies. Language was both the music of seduction and complaint, of final warning and final fear. Does the modern French woman in Marseille feel so many different things from the Hunter Gatherer woman? Or the hotel cleaner in New Jersey? Or the shop assistant in Brooklyn?
You may say yes; I say No.
Husbands want the same things from their wives.
Language is the deck of cards we place upon the table. The song we sing for the dead and in the name of love. The Hungarian language is therefore a thing of beauty for those who recognise themselves only, really and truly, in that language. It doesn’t mean that English is ‘flat’ and in any way ugly, defective, or inferior.
We also sing. Does the robin completely understand the sparrow? The crow the nightingale? The eagle the hummingbird?
They all give vent to their natural sounds – public and private: Songs of birth and sobs of death: what the birth, what the nurture, what the brief kindness of the mother’s worm-filled beak, before the devouring and all encompassing sky and the endless songs of hello and goodbye on the tip of every tongue.
