A French girl studying to become a translator told me, “It’s easier to do some things in a foreign language, and it’s harder to do other things. It’s harder to be intimate, and it’s easier to get men.” In German and English, she didn’t have a pre-constructed barrier against men; she was less inhibited because she didn’t have the habit of inhibition. “I’ve always had to break up in English,” I told her, “but I sure do get pretty when I stop speaking it.” We laughed and clinked our beers.
A co-worker once told me, “In Spanish I could be the person I wanted to be.” I told her I was in French. She was moving to Barcelona in the fall to fake-marry her boyfriend from study abroad so she could have European residency. She said fake marriage was fun.
You need photo albums to show the feds, so you throw parties all the time: fake cake, fake party favors, fake pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. She’d visited Barcelona once since her year abroad, and it hadn’t been as magical. That was over, and she knew it was.
To be yourself is a rare feeling, like a confluence of wind and water. And language.
In Robert Roper’s recent “Nabokov in America,” he recounts the author’s first years at Harvard: “Meanwhile, he was half out of the living sea of his Russian, half into the dimensionless American air.” He echoes Isaiah Berlin, who felt shipwrecked in England: “I feel a curious transformation of personality when I speak (Russian) — as if everything becomes easier to express, & the world brighter and more charming.”
My grandparents spoke Yiddish and then Russian, my father spoke Russian and then English and I speak English and then French and Spanish. And here in France, I too feel like unchecked cargo: unstuck, unreal.
If I can’t be vulgar in French, am I still vulgar? If I can’t be mean, what am I?
Yet I love the gnomic, half-mystical way foreigners speak, incapable of subtlety. They don’t “like,” they “love.”
What does it mean to switch languages? A German professor once told me it would be easier for me to learn German and then read Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel than to read him in English. He said German was analytical; the French say French is analytical.
And what of us who leave our language? In Paris, in a chokehold of loneliness, I wrote. It had never come like this, and maybe never will again, fine and measured in a language that wasn’t my own.
Translated to English, my tone sounds barebones, blinding: “Narcissism becomes necrosis: You smile when I ask if being a good person means I will have a good life. It is raining. We are in the metro. You have decided we won’t get dinner.” English is the cold comfort of lost empire.
In her recent foray into Italian, “In Other Words,” Jhumpa Lahiri writes, “What does it mean to give up a palace to live practically on the street, in a shelter so fragile?” For Samuel Beckett, French let him write without style. For Eugene Ionesco, writing a pronunciation manual of French for the American student taught him the theater of the absurd: Once he chose words for their phonemes, he could write without meaning.
This poverty is luxury. I struggle so hard to speak in French that the world doesn’t matter: There’s just me and silence, or else me and words. I always used to tell men, “You don’t know me.” It seems like that’s all I ever said, just like it seems all I ever overhear French people say is, “He does things a lot, and they’ve got things there, whatever. I mean.” And unroped from English, stranded at sea, it’s true: In Spanish or French, the truth drowns in silence, and the real me’s all my own. It’s harder to be myself in French, but it’s easier to be myself in France. No one can really tell me otherwise.
Ann Manov is a UF French, English and Spanish senior. Her column appears on Mondays.
