Wednesday, June 01, 2016
The Mother Tongue
"'What Remains? The Language Remains': A Conversation with Günter Gaus," in The Portable Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 3-22 (at 12-13):
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GAUS: Yet I should like to ask you whether you miss the Europe of the pre-Hitler period, which will never exist again. When you come to Europe, what, in your impression, remains and what is irretrievably lost?Bernard Lewis, Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian (New York: Viking: 2012), p. 96:
ARENDT: The Europe of the pre-Hitler period? I do not long for that, I can tell you. What remains? The language remains.
GAUS: And that means a great deal to you?
ARENDT: A great deal. I have always consciously refused to lose my mother tongue. I have always maintained a certain distance from French, which I then spoke very well, as well as from English, which I write today.
GAUS: I wanted to ask you that. You write in English now?
ARENDT: I write in English, but I have never lost a feeling of distance from it. There is a tremendous difference between your mother tongue and another language. For myself I can put it extremely simply: In German I know a rather large part of German poetry by heart; the poems are always somehow in the back of my mind. I can never do that again. I do things in German that I would not permit myself to do in English. That is, sometimes I do them in English too, because I have become bold, but in general I have maintained a certain distance. The German language is the essential thing that has remained and that I have always consciously preserved.
GAUS: Even in the most bitter time?
ARENDT: Always. I thought to myself, What is one to do? It wasn't the German language that went crazy. And, second there is no substitution for the mother tongue. People can forget their mother tongue. That's true—I have seen it. There are people who speak the new language better than I do. I still speak with a very heavy accent, and I often speak unidiomatically. They can all do these things correctly. But they do them in a language in which one cliché chases another because the productivity that one has in one's own language is cut off when one forgets that language.
It is only in my mother tongue that I can say exactly what I want to say, and in the way I want to say it. In any other language I am restricted and constrained by the limitation of the words and idioms available to me.Related posts:
