“Speaking in Tongues”

Elena Ferrante, Eva Hoffman, and Zadie Smith

I have recently discovered Elena Ferrante, an Italian author whose uncluttered prose reminds me a lot of Elizabeth Strout. I have read The Lost Daughter - the book is much better than the movie and that is saying something. I loved the movie. In the movie you do not get the internal dialogue you get in the book. And that internal dialogue has to be some of the best writing about being a mother I had ever read. It was frighteningly accurate, the way she shows how the overwhelming love of motherhood is an all consuming wave, that at times feels like it will hold us under while the waters churn around us. But without it we are equally cut adrift from ourselves, these selves which are now so essentially tethered to humans moving outside of us, making their own lives - I clearly am unable to leave my prose uncluttered.

I have also read My Brilliant Friend, the first book in her Neapolitan Quartet and found it just has unsparingly accurate in her observations of life-long female friendship, again showing us the bivalent nature of intimacy, almost always about to overcome us.

I am now on The Story of a New Name (second book in the Neapolitan Quartet) and I was suddenly struck, in the same way I was when I first read Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation, how central language is to identity. Ferrante’s Italian is translated into English by Ann Goldstein. Frequently in the text there is reference to I said this in dialect, she said this in dialect, I said that in Italian, he replied in Italian. I wondered a) whether in the original Italian she would have just written straight in Neapolitan dialect or Italian and the reader would see the point being made for themselves or b) whether the switching between the two, depending on context and interlocutor, is something she makes explicit in the original too. (Something for me to google at 2am!)

The power of language and dialect and accent to mediate, to constitute, social relationships has long fascinated me, and was the topic of my PhD. Power and position and desire and recognition and comfort and alienation are all present in the voice and how it takes shape in language. Reading Ferrante is was nice to be reminded of my previous intellectual interests.

I wrote long and hard on Monday, and my brain has been feeling pretty tired since then, so instead of writing something new for Babel this week I thought I’d share the preface to my thesis; a long extract from an essay by Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books, called “Speaking in Tongues”, which she wrote in 2009. I often referred back to it while working on my thesis, because I wanted the texture of what she writes about to be the texture of what I was trying to capture academically. Language as interstitial.

Hello. This voice I speak with these days, this English voice with its rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place – this is not the voice of my childhood. I picked it up in college, along with the unabridged Clarissa and a taste for port. Maybe this fact is only what it seems to be – a case of bald social climbing – but at the time I genuinely thought this was the voice of lettered people, and if I didn’t have the voice of lettered people I would never truly be lettered. A braver person, perhaps, would have stood firm, teaching her peers a useful lesson by example: not all lettered people need be of the same class, nor speak identically. I went the other way. Partly out of cowardice and a constitutional eagerness to please, but also because I didn’t quite see it as a straight swap of this voice for that.

My own childhood had been the story of this and that combined, of the synthesis of disparate things. It never occurred to me that I was leaving the London district of Willesden for Cambridge. I thought I was adding Cambridge to Willesden, this new way of talking to that old way. Adding a new kind of knowledge to a different kind I already had. And for a while, that’s how it was: at home, during the holidays, I spoke with my old voice, and in the old voice seemed to feel and speak things that I couldn’t express in college, and vice versa. I felt a sort of wonder at the flexibility of the thing. Like being alive twice.

But flexibility is something that requires work if it is to be maintained. Recently my double voice has deserted me for a single one, reflecting the smaller world into which my work has led me. Willesden was a big colourful, working-class sea; Cambridge was a smaller, posher pond, and almost univocal; the literary world is a puddle. This voice I picked up along the way is no longer an exotic garment I put on like a college gown whenever I choose – now it is my only voice, whether I want it or not. I regret it; I should have kept both voices alive in my mouth. They were both a part of me.

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