Bone-Tongued

In my mother tongue, the word for “inarticulate”—косноязыкий—means, literally, “bone-tongued.” It’s the physicality evoked that compels me: the hard, smooth quality of the tongue rendered as a bone in the mouth, the whole apparatus capable of grinding words into dust like a mortar and pestle.

My speech is imperfect in all my languages. I mean this literally: I have trouble enunciating individual sounds. In English, the “v” in “convince” inevitably comes out closer to “w” (but not the “v” in “inevitably,” just to be inconsistent). In my mother tongue, Russian, the “r”s don’t fare very well, and long, multi-consonant suffixes get flattened out, hammered hard by that bit of bone in my mouth, that knobby thing. It’s possible that I think too fast, or rather, in a manner too compressed, metaphoric, and complete for the patient stringing together of subjects, verbs, and objects into a sentence, and then another, and then one more. Allegedly, John Ashbery wrote the way he did in an attempt to capture the speed and flow of thought. I may be trying to speak ideas best expressed in metaphors, for which, of course, the roots of words suffice.

Or—maybe I have my mother’s tongue. Hers was—and is—a bare-bones language, used to explain things that happened or can be made, hard, to describe trivial realities, the skeletons of existence. I grew up being asked to “Go get onion.” —“How many?” (me, standing over a sack of onions in the pantry). “I don’t know, a couple,” and the chances of not having to make another trip 50/50 at best.

It has long been held as an axiom in the translation trade that one should translate into one’s mother tongue—to the effect that all of us who were translating into something other than that felt like we needed to explain ourselves at length and, ultimately, insufficiently. Finally, someone pointed out that the thing about the mother tongue is precisely this: it’s the language of mothering, baby-talk, the language of the kitchen and the skipping rhyme, the language in which one counts to three and talks to animals. The language of conventional wisdom. The one in which one swears. Not necessarily the language of poetry. Or scientific inquiry.

My own mother tongue is, in several essential ways, corrupted. It’s the language of the aggressor. The language of assault and brutality. Russian swearing has been usurped by the language of prisons, the terminology of sexual violence in which verbs describe actions done only to women or special classes of men reduced to subhuman status. Russian is a language of hierarchies built and enforced by violence. Adopting swearing, as a woman, means accepting the place reserved for me in that hierarchy, as a subhuman.

I have no problem swearing in English, and so I do.

My second language, Ukrainian, was for me the language of books. I learned it by reading, as soon as I learned to read. At the time, the paradox of it was that my parents, generally reasonable if not especially articulate people, managed to buy into the Russocentric view of Ukrainian as a language spoken by rural, uneducated, and (therefore) church-going folk. It was the language of the market, the train station, the village witch, and the crazy cat lady next door. Almost always—the women’s language. Men who spoke Ukrainian were unimportant, irrelevant. (In this, one cannot ignore the colonizing function of the Russian language). And yet, while it was not the language to be spoken by an urbane daughter of the intelligentsia like myself (aspiring intelligentsia, in retrospect), Ukrainian was the language in which I could access sought-after, essential literature.Ukrainian was the language in which I encountered the Greek myths and Walt Whitman’s free verse. One Hundred Years of Solitude was in Ukrainian, and so was Fahrenheit 451. And Fiddler on the Roof.

Right about the time when I started to develop my own notions of what it meant to be cool (after I graduated from high school, I’m ashamed to admit), all the cool things seemed to come in Ukrainian: music to listen to, books to admire, poems to memorize. My cool friends, people I wanted desperately to be like, spoke Ukrainian. They were Ukrainian, too, in a way I did not feel I was.

I was a good girl, and I never tried to run away from home. Instead, I escaped into Ukrainian.

It wasn’t hard. Suddenly, I even had an excuse for being bone-tongued. At my university, I was being schooled in the ever-elusive pronunciation of English, and if my articulatory base (the arrangement of face muscles in a specific language) failed to adjust sometimes—well, with eight hours of English a week that was only understandable.

I was also in love for the first time. The novelty of the experience, the discovery of another person amalgamated with my ongoing discovery of the Ukrainian language. I was new: I was being seen for the first time as an object of love and I was spoken to—and spoke—this still-new language. It made me feel like I could be anyone—I could invent myself, I thought, cut whatever I wanted from the cloth of my literary studies, my books, my boyfriend’s words.

I couldn’t, of course. And I never actually met my boyfriend’s parents. He certainly met mine, which resulted in an unflattering remark from my father about the young man “not deigning” to switch to Russian in his presence. Thinking back on it—what a set piece of colonialism that was: my father, a government man who had to fight for his position of respectability, denied what he saw as his due by the provincial upstart, as he must have seen my boyfriend. I wonder, also, why I never got to meet my boyfriend’s parents—was my Ukrainian too bone-tongued, accented, embarrassing?

When I finally left home, it was to become a linguistic immigrant again—a writer in English. I married an American, but more importantly, I married a writer. I married into The New Yorker, The West Wing, and The Lion in Winter. Also, Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, Kissinger’s memoirs, and the art of the essay. An entire discipline—Composition and Rhetoric—that had been absent from my experience entirely.

I translate into English. I write in English. My Instagram feed is in four languages. There are things I cannot bring myself to say in any language other than English. For example, “I do not enjoy the company of my mother.”

I have an ineradicable accent in English. Maybe this is why I keep moving, keep going to new places: in a new language, I can be forgiven for sounding funny. I still need to be forgiven. My accent makes me want to hide: behind the written word, out of earshot. For years, every time I spoke to a new person, I would be asked where I was from—the implication being that I didn’t belong, couldn’t possibly belong where I lived. The bone of my tongue, then, became a stylus: when I don’t want to speak, I write, I translate. Translation is an art of elaborate mimicry. It is the safest place I know.