I've an incredible urge to learn a new language. I staff the language resource center where students come to do their drills. Students in the intensive Chinese and Japanese language learning program spend almost as much time here as I do. We banter back and forth as they come and go. Sometimes they teach me words and phrases and I grow hungry for more. Right now I could do with all the nuance and newness of a different language, a fresh perspective, a completely new persona. Learning a language is the closest we come in this life to being reborn.

All this is part of an internal discussion I began back in February over my relationship to language.

25 February 03
French Lessons by Alice Kaplan completely enchanted me. Criticism first: the first few chapters are pure, inwardly focused, humorless autobiography. In general I think autobiographical childhood recollections are difficult to write well, and even harder to write truthfully and well. Kaplan admirably decided to write truthfully, though I found it hard as a reader to relate to her cool telling of her childhood self. In chapter two she describes the sudden death of her father when she was eight. In fiction not the place to put such an emotionally charge event, but maybe that's the luxury of a memoir?

The book gets interesting when she goes to boarding school in France and begins to paint the rich bilingual pun of her life. She lends tidbits of her academic knowledge. "Literature is essential to survival and impossible to understand. Literature lies and tells the truth about lying. Writing is the opposite of making something present. Writing is effacement." I don't really understand any of that, which is proabally why I like it so much.

I especially like her bit on Andre, one of her French boyfriends. He breaks up with her because, essentially, their words are different, thus their worlds are different. She wonders why a French word she says isn't the same as a French word he says. I answer because there is a lifetime of emotional and contextual significance associated with that word that is there for him, while she has little more than the translation. Two people need to have the same relationship to the language they communicate with in order to fully understand each other.

I had a similar experience with one of my Spanish boyfriends. We practiced language together, he to learn English and me to learn Spanish. Our relationship lasted until he started getting bad marks in his English class for having an American accent. He asked me to speak in a British accent to help him. I agreed to try, but it was impossible. Acting it on stage is one thing, but using a fake accent to build a relationship with was disastrous. I couldn't be my North Dakotan self, and I couldn't be my new Spanish personality. I was a perverted amalgamation of the different language personalities I had acquired.

"Inside our language is our history, personal and political," Kaplan writes. True it is on many levels.

French is what spurred, or was merely present and therefore associated with, Kaplan's coming of age. As was Spanish for me. Only after reading her book do I understand what it was to move to a foreign country at 18, grow-up and sort myself out in a different language. In high school I was incredibly shy. I wouldn't answer the phone and was deathly afraid of calling strangers, even just to make a reservation or check the balance in my bank account. In Spanish I could do everything I had struggled with as a shy young adult. A great unbuttoning.

Kaplan writes about writing, which made me realize that many of my desires are the desires of writers. Don't ask me what that means. But it is a sort of abstract dedication, a fetish, an obsession. And isn't that what higher learning really is? Not ambition at all, just abstract dedication and obsession.

She interestingly point out that autobiography is an impossible genre where the more you try to confess the more you lie.

She is concerened with how speaking good French is important in her academic life in the United States. "Is it just the furtive way academics seek social status?" she questions, "Or is it us feeding into French/European disdain for Americans, which makes us struggle against American ethnocentrism.

Some more quotes:

"Writing isn't a straigt line, but a process, where you have to get in trouble to get anywhere." (Write when your disturbed, she says.)

"The fact that we don't have as many words forces us to say more. The simplicity of our communicaiton moves us, we're outside of cliche." (We don't take it for granted like we do our own language, ideas in our native tongue . . . It is a way of airing ourselves, our souls.)

"Learning a language parallels that shift in identification, when you're able to feel close to a character in studying a language that isn't you." (Her punctuation is interesting, does she mean a character that isn't you, or a language that isn't you?)

Besides a bad auto-biographical start, Kaplan has a neat collection of moments of wisom and understanding to pass along. Indeed anyone who has learnt a language out of desire or necessity can identify with many of her struggles and discovered treasures.