I can’t stop thinking about the question that titles Anna Babel’s TedTalk, “Who counts as a speaker of a language?”. Babel studies “the relationship between language and culture” and in doing that, she has a lot of questions to ask. What does it mean to speak a language? At what point do we become ‘fluent’?
It’s always been swings and roundabouts for me with German. At this point, I’ve lived in Germany for nearly seven years and been learning the language for 10. I call myself fluent, even in the face of my continued fumbling mistakes. Doctors’ appointments, lawyers’ consultations, newspapers and novels and ordering at the coffee shop - it’s all fine in German. But I’m secretly glad when someone catches a bit of my accent and excitedly switches to English. I resist doing certain things in German: work, write, date.
Authors who choose to write in their second language inspire me, though. I started to wonder recently if I would want to try it. I ask myself if I can find the right words and if the results will be ok. To ease into it, I started translating a few of the poems from my book, Everywhere, Twice, into German.
In translating my poems, I’m also translating myself - my ideas, style, and personality as a poet.
By translating them, I look at my poems through a new lens. I allow them to morph and take other shapes as the second language allows and demands, and I question what I was trying to say and what kind of cultural translation is needed. A professional translator or native speaker might do a better job, but that’s not really the point.
Beautifully, I’m discovering places where German crept into my English poems unnoticed or forgotten. I wrote a line in a poem named ‘Translated from the Portuguese’. (That’s writer’s license - the poem was only written in English until now.) The final words are:
warning / all those who don’t know / themselves out here
This is a quote, unattributed, from a memorial plaque laid into the rocks at Cabo de Sao Vicente in southwestern Portugal. The plaque is in Portuguese and German, in memoriam to a young person who seems to have died there accidentally. The turn of phrase on the plaque means ‘to be unfamiliar with’ something; translated literally into English, it becomes ‘to not know oneself out with’. I used this transliteration for the English poem. Now, it returns back to German and loses its abstraction. It refracts; its meaning rebounds back and forth between the two languages.
In my poem ‘Inheritance: Emmental’, I spend dozens of words trying to capture what German can say with one or two clever compound nouns: Alpenglühen, Abendröte. Alpenglühen is a noun that means “alpine glow”. Until you’ve caught a glimpse of Alpenglühen at the right hour when the sun lights up the mountains just so, you can’t really know what it is and why it needs its own word.
The Heldenplatz in Vienna made its way into my poem ‘For Svenja, Maximilian, and Egon’. In English, I decided not to name the location and wrote:
what are you, if not / neat, tidy? / a heroes’ place / polished, quiet?
Helden means “heroes” and Heldenplatz, the heroes’ place (and in the Viennese context, the name of an important and historic city square). Once translated back to German, the line loses the mystery but gains the tangibility of place.
In translating my poems, I’m also translating myself - my ideas, style, and personality as a poet. I now wish that I knew how my poetry feels in other languages that I don’t speak. But this process of bringing them to life in a second one is a nice start, and it makes me feel a connection to German that I haven’t felt in a long time. Translation gives another voice to both me and my poems. Determining who “counts” as a speaker of a language is deeply tied up with identity. As I translate my poems, I feel like I “count”.
For fun (and especially for anyone else who is EN/DE bilingual), here are one of my poems from Everywhere, Twice and its brand-new German translation. Thanks, as always, for reading.
Unsolicited Recommendations
Window Swap, for when you’re bored of your lockdown view. I looked out the windows of Joey in San Francisco, Melissa in Brooklyn, Nyne in Enkhuizen, and Susanne in Berlin.
Herald of Spring - a few recipes from Anna Jones to welcome the season.
A story about Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, pioneering anthropologists and early champions of the idea of gender as a social construct.
Questions to Ask in your second language.