I teach a very strange North Sea Germanic language called “English” to other people for work. I teach other people’s languages to myself for fun. Spanish and Norwegian are my mainstays, but I dabble intermittently in Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, and French, and would be very happy to properly learn Scottish Gaelic one day. I don’t call myself a “polyglot” because I don’t go barging into Sjømannskirkene or taquerias trying to make Youtube content. I am just someone who can speak a couple of foreign languages passably well and read semi-comfortably in a handful more, made easier because Norwegian is just what Yorkshire dialect would be like if 1066 never happened and the others are all in the same Romance family. I think that my work and my fun have done something to me as a writer of fiction, and today I want to try to articulate what that “something” is.
A discussion question to start with: does it mean anything that both Stéphane Mallarmé and James Joyce were enthusiastic learners of foreign languages who made their livings as English teachers? I want to say that it does. Mallarmé claimed to have learned English just to read Edgar Allen Poe, and spent decades teaching the language in lycees, by most accounts not very well (he apparently made his poor uncomprehending pupils translate King Lear). Joyce, who taught English at Berlitz schools in Pula and Trieste, is supposed to have known up to thirteen different languages; when he was nineteen years old he even wrote a fan letter to Henrik Ibsen in Dano-Norwegian. Together they are probably the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ most famous exponents of the pun, the mishearing, the mondegreen as fundamental tools of ostensibly “serious” literature, and their works revel in sound’s ecstatic possibilities. Mallarmé plays in one poem with the homophony of the French “cygne” (swan) and “signe” (sign), and in his Divagations wanders around repeating to himself the cryptically suggestive phrase, possibly a hangover from a lifetime teaching English prosody, “La Pénultième est morte” (“The Penultimate is dead”). Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, has his Neolithic double-act of Mutt and Jute say things to each other like “Ore you astoneaged?” I think this is a sensibility that the teaching and learning of languages readily cultivate for those open to it.
