Language and teachers
Aug. 27th, 2008 09:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sheenaghpughBeen re-reading a little book called Five Essays on Translation (ed Katja Krebs & Christopher Meredith, pub. University of Glamorgan, ISBN 18405411202) which arose from a conference on the politics of literary translation at my uni in 2003. There's an essay in it called "Sleeping with the Enemy" by the writer and translator Grahame Davies, in which he talks both about the ethics of translating from a minority language into a majority one and about the effect bilingualism, and the act of translating, have had on his own writing.
He has something fascinating, and to me unexpected, to say about the potential effect of a charismatic teacher. Though he grew up bilingual, Welsh was not the first language in his home, and his first writing, in his teens, was in English:
"In my sixth-form college I came under the influence of one of the few other welsh-speakers there, the twice-crowned Welsh-language poet Bryan Martin Davies. He was the first poet I'd ever met. [...] he asked me if I wrote and I showed him the juvenilia I was writing in English. He encouraged me to write in Welsh and taught me how to write poetry. [...] By my early twenties, whatever may have been the language of the community where I happened to live, the intermixing of the Welsh language into the emergence of my creativity and into what Jung would call the "differentiation" or perhaps "individuation" of my personality as I grew into adulthood meant that it was only in Welsh I could express myself creatively. For academic or non-creative prose, English was the best medium but for creativity, it had to be Welsh."
He goes on, "I have a good friend who comes from a far stronger Welsh-speaking background and with whom I habitually speak Welsh. However, she can only write poetry in English. The reason? She came under the influence of a charismatic English teacher in her teenage years and her creativity is now inextricably wedded to English." Davies suggests from this that "learned behaviours during the crucial period of differentiation of the personality can override quite powerful environmental and societal pressures".
I don't know about all the Jungian stuff (whenever I see names like Jung or Freud or their jargon, my mind automatically translates "mumbo-jumbo"). But I think it's a fascinating thought that the influence of a powerful teacher could extend even to the point where the language of the teacher becomes the natural language of the activity being taught. I can see how this might be; in 1968 I was listening to a French music station on my transistor radio (because at 17 I was nuts about the songs of Brassens and Aznavour) when a newsflash cut in and the announcer said "Robert Kennedy est mort assassiné" and to this day, I can't think of his death in any language but French, because that was how it imprinted on me.
Later Davies talks about how, in recent years, poems have begun "coming" to him first in English and puts this down to the amount of literary translation he has been doing, both of his own work and of others' - "the process of translation into English has proved a bridge across which my creativity has travelled so that it is now becoming increasingly comfortable on the other side of the linguistic divide".
I'm not entirely sure about this either. My father was a teacher of English, in England, most of his life, but his home language, the one he spoke to his monoglot mother, was Welsh. (He didn't think to teach Welsh to me, with the result that I could only talk to my grandmother through him as interpreter, a fact to which I attribute my lifelong interest in learning languages...) Now, 87 and almost completely deaf, he can hear Welsh, which he hasn't spoken regularly for decades, far better than he can English. That suggests to me that early influences - earlier than the teenage ones Davies cites - may be buried but come back later when you don't expect them (though Davies is only middle-aged).
I've never been as bilingual as Davies; I have translated mostly out of other languages into English. The influence of translation on me has always been to make me look more closely at my own language and what can be done with it by those who look at it fresh. I have done a little translation from English into German, and once while living there for a while I did actually get the length of writing a published poem in German. It was also a pastiche of the style of a particular German poet, Stefan George, and I've never been sure that this wasn't really the deciding factor that caused it to come to me in German. Never happened again though....
I translated it into English later, but it wasn't really the same poem. What's interesting is that I can still recall the German version but not the English one. Here's the original for anyone who's interested (complete with slightly archaic syntax and uncapitalised nouns because that's George's style). I'll try to hunt up the English version later and put it in, just to see what happened to it on the way.
Das blonde mädchen ward des fürsten frau
- das bracht die alte hexe fast von sinnen.
Sie schieden vor dem schloss: es grinste grau
doch regen rieselte von allen rinnen.
Sie wollte sagen "bleib" und sagte "geh";
sie wollte hassen, was sie liebgewonnen.
Das wasser kam vom dach herabgeronnen
scharf wie das glück und glänzend wie das weh.
Das leere schloss war weit wie nie zuvor;
sie fühlte, wie sie sich im raum verlor.
Die wände nahten sich; das schloss ward klein
und schrumpfte stumm zu einem sarge ein.
He has something fascinating, and to me unexpected, to say about the potential effect of a charismatic teacher. Though he grew up bilingual, Welsh was not the first language in his home, and his first writing, in his teens, was in English:
"In my sixth-form college I came under the influence of one of the few other welsh-speakers there, the twice-crowned Welsh-language poet Bryan Martin Davies. He was the first poet I'd ever met. [...] he asked me if I wrote and I showed him the juvenilia I was writing in English. He encouraged me to write in Welsh and taught me how to write poetry. [...] By my early twenties, whatever may have been the language of the community where I happened to live, the intermixing of the Welsh language into the emergence of my creativity and into what Jung would call the "differentiation" or perhaps "individuation" of my personality as I grew into adulthood meant that it was only in Welsh I could express myself creatively. For academic or non-creative prose, English was the best medium but for creativity, it had to be Welsh."
He goes on, "I have a good friend who comes from a far stronger Welsh-speaking background and with whom I habitually speak Welsh. However, she can only write poetry in English. The reason? She came under the influence of a charismatic English teacher in her teenage years and her creativity is now inextricably wedded to English." Davies suggests from this that "learned behaviours during the crucial period of differentiation of the personality can override quite powerful environmental and societal pressures".
I don't know about all the Jungian stuff (whenever I see names like Jung or Freud or their jargon, my mind automatically translates "mumbo-jumbo"). But I think it's a fascinating thought that the influence of a powerful teacher could extend even to the point where the language of the teacher becomes the natural language of the activity being taught. I can see how this might be; in 1968 I was listening to a French music station on my transistor radio (because at 17 I was nuts about the songs of Brassens and Aznavour) when a newsflash cut in and the announcer said "Robert Kennedy est mort assassiné" and to this day, I can't think of his death in any language but French, because that was how it imprinted on me.
Later Davies talks about how, in recent years, poems have begun "coming" to him first in English and puts this down to the amount of literary translation he has been doing, both of his own work and of others' - "the process of translation into English has proved a bridge across which my creativity has travelled so that it is now becoming increasingly comfortable on the other side of the linguistic divide".
I'm not entirely sure about this either. My father was a teacher of English, in England, most of his life, but his home language, the one he spoke to his monoglot mother, was Welsh. (He didn't think to teach Welsh to me, with the result that I could only talk to my grandmother through him as interpreter, a fact to which I attribute my lifelong interest in learning languages...) Now, 87 and almost completely deaf, he can hear Welsh, which he hasn't spoken regularly for decades, far better than he can English. That suggests to me that early influences - earlier than the teenage ones Davies cites - may be buried but come back later when you don't expect them (though Davies is only middle-aged).
I've never been as bilingual as Davies; I have translated mostly out of other languages into English. The influence of translation on me has always been to make me look more closely at my own language and what can be done with it by those who look at it fresh. I have done a little translation from English into German, and once while living there for a while I did actually get the length of writing a published poem in German. It was also a pastiche of the style of a particular German poet, Stefan George, and I've never been sure that this wasn't really the deciding factor that caused it to come to me in German. Never happened again though....
I translated it into English later, but it wasn't really the same poem. What's interesting is that I can still recall the German version but not the English one. Here's the original for anyone who's interested (complete with slightly archaic syntax and uncapitalised nouns because that's George's style). I'll try to hunt up the English version later and put it in, just to see what happened to it on the way.
Das blonde mädchen ward des fürsten frau
- das bracht die alte hexe fast von sinnen.
Sie schieden vor dem schloss: es grinste grau
doch regen rieselte von allen rinnen.
Sie wollte sagen "bleib" und sagte "geh";
sie wollte hassen, was sie liebgewonnen.
Das wasser kam vom dach herabgeronnen
scharf wie das glück und glänzend wie das weh.
Das leere schloss war weit wie nie zuvor;
sie fühlte, wie sie sich im raum verlor.
Die wände nahten sich; das schloss ward klein
und schrumpfte stumm zu einem sarge ein.
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Date: 2008-08-27 10:35 am (UTC)languages
Date: 2008-08-27 02:02 pm (UTC)Re: languages
Date: 2008-08-27 03:28 pm (UTC)Found the English version....
Date: 2008-08-29 06:43 am (UTC)Rapunzel's Witch
The blonde girl married one of those young princes
who always turn up in the fairy tales.
That sent the old witch almost from her senses:
the day she turned her out, the castle walls
grinned greyly, but rain drizzled from the gutters.
She wanted to say "stay", but she said "go",
and now she has her whole life left to do
nothing particular, nothing that matters.
The empty rooms seem wider than they were;
she feels as if the space would swallow her,
and then the walls close in; her hands touch stone
and try to find the door, but it is gone.