Between Languages

Three languages and none of them is home. Igbo is the one I spoke first. It lives in my mouth like a song I learned as a child and can hum but not always sing — I know the melody, the shape of it, but the words slip sideways when I reach for them. My parents spoke it to each other and to me and I replied in English, which is the immigrant child's betrayal and also the immigrant child's survival. You speak what the world around you speaks. You keep the other one for later. Later has come and I am clumsy in it. English is the one I work in, write in, argue in, dream in on good nights. My English is good. People say this, and they mean it as a compliment, and I receive it as one even though I was born in Peckham and went to school in Peckham and the English is as native as the rain. What they mean, I think, is that I speak it without an accent they can place, which is their confusion, not mine. French is the one I chose. I lived in Lyon for two years, teaching English at a lycée, and the French came slowly and then quickly and then stopped, somewhere around fluent-enough. I can order wine. I can argue with a landlord. I can read Le Monde with only occasional dictionary consultations. I cannot tell a joke. Humor is the last thing a language gives you, and French humor in particular is a locked room and I do not have all the keys. My parents wanted me to be a doctor. This is not a stereotype. This is a fact. My father is a doctor. My mother is a pharmacist. My brother is a doctor. I am a translator, which my father once described as "a doctor of words" in a generous moment and has not repeated. Translation is the art of betrayal. Someone wrote this and they were right. Every translation loses something. The question is what you choose to lose and what you choose to keep, and this decision is not technical — it's moral. When I translate a legal document I lose beauty and keep accuracy. When I translate a poem I lose accuracy and keep the feeling. When I translate a menu I lose nothing because menus don't have feelings, except in France, where they do. I translate between French and English, mostly. Corporate documents, legal contracts, the occasional literary piece that pays badly and satisfies deeply. My Igbo sits in the corner of my work, unused professionally, used every Sunday when I call my mother and she asks me how I am in the language she thinks in and I answer in the language I think in and we meet somewhere in the middle, which is where we've always met. Three languages. None of them is home. All of them together — the creaking, imperfect house of all three — that's close.