The Genius of Language:
Fifteen Writers Reflect on Their Mother Tongues
Edited by Wendy Lesser
(Pantheon, 256 page, $23)
The historian Thomas Lacquer, born in Turkey to German Jews who
escaped their country in the wake of WWII, recalls being urged by
his parents as a three-year-old to learn Turkish so that he could
communicate with playmates in Istanbul.
“Let them learn German, I supposedly said; Turkish ‘ist eine
hässliche Sprache.’”
Entitled “Prelude,” Lacquer’s is by far the most poignant of the
15 essays in Wendy Lesser’s collection The Genius of Language:
Fifteen Writers Reflect on Their Mother Tongues.
“German was my mother tongue,” writes Lacquer. “I mean this
partly in the usual sense — my first language was German. But it
is also true that I spoke it almost entirely with my mother,
grandmother and their woman friends…. I dwell on all of these
childhood memories because German is for me the language of memory
and loss, a linguistic Prelude…. My German is
frozen, amber-like, not only in pre-war history but in
childhood…”
The Lacquer family was uprooted again a few years after his
comment about the Turkish language, only to land eventually in the
coal towns of West Virginia, where his parents continued such Old
World traditions as arranging lit candles on the
Tannenbaum (until neighbors warned them that American fir
trees, cut a month in advance, could well go up in flames).
Lacquer evokes “a childhood produced by the children of
nineteenth-century Jews, who imagined the land of Goethe and
Schiller with little of its reality or recent history.” He recalls
that the family spoke German at the dinner table until he left for
college because his grandmother claimed neither to speak nor
understand English. “This was clearly false,” he writes. “She read
English papers and watched English TV — but feigning ignorance
allowed her to maintain the fiction of otherworldly incompetence
that she seems to have cultivated all her life and that kept her
entirely out of public view…”
Lacquer’s grandmother was the youngest of six children, born in
the waning of the Biedermeier era. She spoke French (this,
apparently, she admitted without shame) and played the piano well.
“She and my grandfather lived for music,” writes Lacquer, “which
they played four hands. They had heard Brahms conduct, early in
their lives together, as well as many of the other great German
conductors of the nineteenth century… My grandmother could do
all sorts of needlework. But she could not — or at least did not,
in anyone’s memory — so much as boil an egg.”
He writes that she remained in Germany until December 1939 on
the grounds that she did not want to leave her Bechstein grand
piano. “In America, she dressed and acted like a lady of a distant
century,” he writes, “seemingly unaware that the world around her
had changed…. The first of my fantasy Germany’s is hers. The
words I associate with her are Es geht rapide bergab —
‘things are going rapidly downhill’ — something she said about
herself from when she was in her late seventies to when she went
gaga in her late nineties.”
From his father the young Thomaslein, as his mother then called
him, learned curses (in the most traditional sense of the term),
such as: Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selvst
vergebens (“With stupidity the gods themselves fight in vain”) and
what Lacquer refers to as “the ridiculously quaint” Was glaubst
du das ich bin, ein Dukatenscheisser?, with which he
approached his wife every month when he paid the bills
(translation: “What do you think I am? Someone who s—ts
ducats?”).
Of the sayings his father hoped he would remember, Kant’s
categorical imperative was foremost — recited, according to
Lacquer, with a “special tone of reverence”: Handle nur nach
derjenigen Maxime, durch die du zugleich wollen kannst, daß
sie ein allgemeines Gesetz werde. (“Act as if the maxim of
your action were to become through your will a universal law of
nature.”)
Lacquer also recalls that Donnerwetter (“thunder
weather”) “was the prelude to an explosion of my father’s anger and
was often followed by noch ein mal (‘once again’). This
malediction was frequently associated with the threat that if we
continued to misbehave my mother would call my father, who would
then say ein machtwort — literally, a “word of power,”
but really more like the definitive warning of the super-ego.”
Since another of the family sayings was Quod licet Jovi, non
licet bovi (Latin having an authority at least equal to
German), which meant “What is allowed to Jupiter is not allowed to
the ox,” writes Lacquer, “the ‘thunder weather/words of power’
combo carried a certain mythological terror,” noting that the Latin
expression was used mostly to explain “why my reading of the
categorical imperative was mistake in holding that the maxim for
some action of my father’s included him…. I thought this was
fudging on the universality principle but got nowhere with this
line of argument.”
One word Lacquer says belongs to both his parents is
Unsinn (“nonsense”; “absurdity”), recalling that,
“Mache keinen Unsinn (“Don’t do anything stupid”) was the
standard caution before my going out on a date. It did not apply to
my driving, which was impeccable, but to ‘parking’ on one of the
hundreds of miles of strip mine roads around where we lived and
necking the evening away. (There was nothing else to do in Beckley,
West Va., but this nonsense had other things to recommend it.)”
He finally reminisces about how his mother kept a copy of
Heinrich Heine’s complete poems on her night table, which she read
most days of her life, “Die Lorelei” being her favorite:
Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedueten,
Daß ich so traurig bin,
Ein Märchen aus uralten Zeiten,
Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.
(“I do not know what it means, that I am so sorrowful; I cannot
get out of my head a tale of the most ancient of times.”) “This is
roughly how I feel about things German in general,” writes Lacquer.
“A fairy-tale built of projections and fantasies and memories that
I cannot erase and that leave me melancholy.”
AUTHOR LUC SANTE, WHO came to the United States with his parents
from Belgium as a child, writes in his delightful essay “French
Without Tears” that his family attempted at first, as many
immigrant families do, to create a language bubble for him. “When I
watched cartoons on Saturday mornings, the whole family would
gather for Pepe le Pew, the Gallic skunk forever making romantic
advances to horrified black and white cats: L’amour, toujours
l’amour…”
While, during his first year of school in the United States,
Sante’s mother drilled him in French for an hour when he got home
every day, he recalls that the family’s efforts to remain
francophone were ultimately in vain. “The family language was
progressively mongrelized,” he writes. “While keeping the
pronunciation and syntax of French it became
franglais.”
His observations about the language itself are particularly
astute, as exemplified by his explanation of why French is so
susceptible to puns. “French does not necessarily have fewer sounds
than English, but the protocols governing their order and frequency
make their appearances predictable — hence the profusion of
sound-alike phrases and sentences, which fueled Surrealism and
ensure the ongoing appeal of Freudian and post-Freudian ideas in
the French speaking world: Les dents, la bouche. Laid dans la
bouche. Les dents la bouchent. L’aidant la bouche. Etc. These
phrases, which sound exactly alike, respectively mean ‘the teeth,
the mouth’; ‘ugly in the mouth’; ‘the teeth choke her’; ‘helping
her chokes her.’ You don’t need to have been psychoanalyzed by
Jacques Lacan to see from these examples how language can assist
thought in swiftly tunneling from the mundane to the taboo.”
He then discusses his father’s love of reading and of the French
language, particularly its precision. He recalls how the contents
of his father’s bookshelf in America “He was a stickler for le
mot juste, that very French , very positivistic idea that
there is one, and only one, exact word capable of expressing a
particular idea in a particular circumstance,” writes Sante. “Style
for him was a matter of both precision and elegance, which were
entwined in any case.”
Sante says his father also inculcated in him as “the very model
of elegance” the conclusion of Cyrano. The dying hero
announces to his friends that quelque chose que sans un pli,
sans une tache/J’emporte malgré vous (“something
spotless and unwrinkled, that despite you I’m taking with me”). He
lifts his sword, proclaims et c’est; the sword drops from
his hand and he falls into the arms of his companions. Roxane
kisses his forehead and asks C’est? Cyrano opens his eyes,
recognizes her and says, smiling, Mon panache.
Curtain.
“Panache literally means the plume of a hat, as worn by a
seventeenth-century gentleman,” writes Sante, “but it also means
what it does in English, only more so. Thus we have the pun in the
last breath of life, the expression of wit as an exemplary act of
heroism, the manifestation of a principle in the very utterance of
its name.”
Sante has similarly keen observations to offer on American
English. In college, Sante found what he thought was the “authentic
music of the American language, in the prose of Dashiell Hammett,
Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. ‘They threw me off the hay
truck about noon,’ the opening sentence of The Postman Always
Rings Twice, seemed to exemplify in nine words all the highest
virtues of American prose. It was plain, unadorned demotic speech,
resolutely laconic and flat, containing a while landscape of gas
stations and bus depots and bars, of dollar bills and cigarette
butts and spit, stuff I had encountered in daily life that seemed
to stare down literature and dare it to cross the line in the
dirt.”
WHILE MANY OF THE OTHER essays in The Genius of Language
are considerably weaker than these two, there is some fine writing
scattered throughout the collection. Gary Shteyngart, who was born
in Russia and emigrated with his parents to the United States in
the 1980s as a school-age child, writes that he found himself cut
off from his peers by more than just the language barrier. He
remembers himself as “doubly handicapped, living in a world where I
speak neither the actual language, English, nor the second and
almost just as important language — television. For most of my
American childhood I have the wretched sensation that
fin-de-siècle Yalta with its idle, beautiful women and
conflicted, lecherous men lies somewhere between the Toys ‘R’ Us
superstore and the multiplex.”
Leonard Michaels’ essay on Yiddish is also well worth reading,
as is Amy Tan’s on Chinese. A few fall flat, such as Ariel
Dorfman’s overwrought musings on Spanish and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s
rather predictable diatribe on the African tribal language Gikuyu.
Bharati Mukherjee’s essay on Bangla also lapses into knee-jerk
anti-Colonialism at times, but she provides the collection with
perhaps the most beautiful closing line — ironically indebted as
it is to Western literature: “For a writer, the melting of a mother
tongue is the Madeleine, the way back, and the way in, an early
loss with the deepest memory, the mother of all plots.”
