Reading in two languages

Anyone who reads in two languages knows the small jolt of switching. You finish a chapter of Modiano in the evening, go to bed, and the next morning pick up an English novel over coffee. For the first page or two the English feels oddly loud. The sentences are shorter than you remember, and they seem in a hurry to tell you what happened.

Then the ear adjusts, and you stop noticing. The jolt is still worth paying attention to, because it is the closest most of us get to hearing our own language from the outside.

What travels

A great deal crosses between French and English without much loss. Plot travels. Argument travels. A joke about a bad dinner party will survive almost any translator. What tends to stay behind is smaller and harder to name, the weight of a word in its own culture, the rhythm a sentence has because of where its stresses fall, and the social temperature of the words people use to address each other.

The tu and the vous are the classic case. English has no way to show, in the grammar of a single sentence, that two characters have just crossed from formality into intimacy. A French novelist can do it with one pronoun. The English translator has to choose between losing the moment entirely and inventing a gesture, a first name, a hand on an arm, that the author never wrote.

Every translation is a list of small decisions about what to give up.

Then there are words that are not hard to define but hard to place. Esprit de l'escalier, the clever reply you think of on the stairs on your way out, has an English equivalent in meaning and none in charm. Dépaysement means something like disorientation in a foreign place, but it can be pleasant, even sought after, which disorientation rarely is. These are the words people put on lists of untranslatable terms. The real difficulty is less glamorous. It lies in ordinary words that look identical in both languages and carry different freight. Sensible means sensitive. Actuellement means currently. A reader who moves between the two learns to distrust anything that seems too easy.

Writers who switched

Some writers have tested this from the inside. Samuel Beckett wrote En attendant Godot in French and then made the English version himself. He said French let him write without style, or at least without the habits his English carried with it. When he translated his own work back, he did not reproduce it word for word. He rewrote it, because a sentence that was spare in French could turn flat in English, and the other way round.

Nabokov went in the opposite direction, from Russian to English, and later translated Lolita back into Russian. In the afterword to that edition he wrote with some bitterness about how much had been lost, as if the language he had grown up with no longer fitted the book he had written in his second one.

These cases are extreme, but they describe something every bilingual reader feels in a smaller way. Each language makes some thoughts easy and others awkward. French invites the long sentence that turns back on itself and adds a qualification before it closes. English prefers the plain declarative, with the qualification saved for the next line. Neither is better. Reading in both makes the habits of each visible, and that visibility is a kind of education in itself.

The reader in between

Living between languages also changes how you hear the one you write in. After a year of reading mostly in French, English prose can start to sound bossy. After a summer back in English, French can seem to circle a point it could simply state. Both impressions are partly true and partly a sign that the ear has been retuned.

For a publication that works in both languages, this has practical consequences. We do not translate the pieces we link to in the Review. A French essay stays in French, an English one in English, and a reader is trusted to meet each on its own terms. A summary in the other language would be more convenient. It would also flatten exactly the differences that make reading across languages worth the effort.

There is a pleasure here that is hard to explain to anyone who reads in only one tongue. It is the pleasure of meeting a familiar idea in unfamiliar clothes, and recognising it a moment later than you would at home. That slight delay, the half-second between seeing and understanding, is where a lot of the best reading happens.