A passage on my friend Roddy Schrock's blog (http://www.thing.net/~roddys/blog/) puts a nice slant on my revulsion at my fellow Anglophones here in HK:
'The book Where Europe Begins is just what I've been looking for,' says Roddy. 'It's written by Yoko Tawada, a native of Japan who has been living in Hamburg for years, and now writes primarily in German, but occasionally still in Japanese. This book resonates deeply with me. It's a poetic study of the veils of culture and language that we all wear, and the way language begins to fall apart a bit when living in a place where your old language doesn't function anymore, not only in the practical sense that no one else speaks it, but also with a visceral impact in the way current ideas, memes, to be discussed are of a different breed in this other culture.
I think she sees language as being a murky swamp that doesn't get enough sunshine. Her frustration with it is summed up in the line, "Often it sickened me to hear people speak their native tongues fluently. It was as if they were unable to think and feel anything but what their language so readily served up for them." I've never been so aware of that frustration before this most recent return to the United States, and am reminded of it every time I turn on the television.'
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-02 08:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-02 09:28 pm (UTC)A passage on my friend Roddy Schrock's blog (http://www.thing.net/~roddys/blog/) puts a nice slant on my revulsion at my fellow Anglophones here in HK:
'The book Where Europe Begins is just what I've been looking for,' says Roddy. 'It's written by Yoko Tawada, a native of Japan who has been living in Hamburg for years, and now writes primarily in German, but occasionally still in Japanese. This book resonates deeply with me. It's a poetic study of the veils of culture and language that we all wear, and the way language begins to fall apart a bit when living in a place where your old language doesn't function anymore, not only in the practical sense that no one else speaks it, but also with a visceral impact in the way current ideas, memes, to be discussed are of a different breed in this other culture.
I think she sees language as being a murky swamp that doesn't get enough sunshine. Her frustration with it is summed up in the line, "Often it sickened me to hear people speak their native tongues fluently. It was as if they were unable to think and feel anything but what their language so readily served up for them." I've never been so aware of that frustration before this most recent return to the United States, and am reminded of it every time I turn on the television.'