Many Mother Tongues, Language After Trauma & Matrescence

My mom likes to point out, in a loving manner, when there has been a longer-than-usual interval between newsletters. My apologies to her, and to all of you as it has been a whirlwind few weeks of full-on life stuff but also a handful of wonderful language-related things, publications, events, planning and more!

I have been back and forth the past few weeks with the publisher for the Polish translation of Mother Tongue Tied (more info to come soon). It has been a process I still can’t wrap my head around. People ask if I translated the book myself and every time I answer, my eyes get wide and I say in disbelief there is no way my Polish is at a level I could translate my English work. It has been a humbling experience to read the translated words in my “mother tongue” and not know so many of them, the idioms and expressions that so easily come to me in English, technically my third language but my dominant one.

I was recently listening to Maggie O’Farrell on NPR about her new book, Land that is about her Irish heritage. O’Farrell was born in Ireland but left as a child and she mentions in the interview that claiming Irish heritage is tricky for her:

I can't listen to myself in my very British voice saying the sentence I'm Irish, just because it just sounds grating to my ear, and probably I'm sure to other people's, too. So I think it's a strange thing. You know, I think anyone who doesn't grow up in the country they were born in or has maybe an accent at odds with their name, as I do, there's always a sense of a kind of ghost self that walks along beside you.

That is what I felt reading the Polish translation of my book: as if a ghost self, one that could have written this in Polish was walking along beside me. Although, as a friend pointed out, but then would I be raising my children multilingually if I had never left Poland?

A couple of weeks ago, my children and I all sat the first module of the Level 1 British Sign Language exam. As I have mentioned before, it has been an incredible experience learning a language alongside my children and a stark reminder how challenging, all-consuming and vulnerable it can be. I am hoping to one day write a longer essay about what learning a new language, especially a sign language, has felt like and how it is simultaneously intuitive, and for lack of a better word, “foreign”. But it is hard to put into words what it feels like to learn to coordinate your hands and your lips with your thoughts while also maintaining the appropriate facial expression and as a hearing person, ensuring my voice is off in order to immerse myself fully in the sign language and to respect Deaf culture.