Translator, Adulterer

I used to wonder whenever I met couples what they were like when they were alone. I assumed they behaved differently alone together, that they shared a secret private life, a life of shorthand references to oft-mentioned stories and of solid, true explorations of whatever was most important to them, whatever defined them. I used to wonder what they saw when they looked at each other's faces, what they understood in the cadences of one another's voices, what meaning each of them bore for the other in their material details alone. I was fascinated by this projection of the intimacy between them and by the fact that although I could see them, I would never see them as they saw each other.

There is, however, no intimacy to rival that between a speaker and her native language. Sometimes I imagine English fitting me as skin, not just covering me but holding the spilling and glistening parts of me together, making a solid out of so much liquid and slime. Other times, I picture English as a liquid or gas itself, a lake, the air of a city. Too, I like the image of a small, curled thing, a kitten or a bird, snuggled within me, wrapped tight against the curve of my skull. Closer than any confidant is what makes confidences possible, and lying closer to me than anything else is English.

This is not to say that I feel affection for English itself; rather, that English is inseparable from what I experience, constituent in all my evaluation, interaction, emotion. And so none of these spatial metaphors really works: English is not a reed I whistle through, not a being within me, nor a layer around me. I don't know how to figure it, exactly, except to say that its sounds transcend sound. I cannot peel the words back.

If this intimacy exists between each speaker and her language, then learning a foreign language is the closest we ever come to being inside someone else's head. When first introduced to us, a new word has no meaning, seems random: why should "langweilig" mean "boring" or "marrant," "funny"? They shouldn't for any particular reason, and the first time we hear them, they don't. A new language is a mess of sounds that we have no particular attachment to. But with enough repetition, those sounds become words and those words become...objects, states, causes, effects, loved ones, lost ones, memories, stories, desires: the trail of our fluency.

In those moments when we start to hear a foreign word as a meaning but still remember when it was just a sound, when we speak a language proficiently but not instinctively, it is as if we are entering someone else's mind but without having to leave our own. We feel what it might mean to be a French or German or Arabic or Japanese speaker but we feel too a certain thrill that no native speaker feels. We have broken out of ourselves. Suddenly, the features that seemed so foreign are suffused with a familiar blush.

Put another way, learning to speak another's language is like sleeping with someone else's lover.