Translating the King’s Secret Missives

This is part four of a dialogue about the book Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language [2] between the author, Katherine Russell Rich, and Christine Kenneally, author of The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language [3]. Read part one here [4], part two here [5], and part three here [6].

Hi Chris,

Wow! You had a whole semester of incomprehensible Gaelic? Sounds divine, and I mean that somewhat literally. What is it that makes language you can’t understand seem powerpacked with transcendence, or at least, profound meaning? The Catholic Church was hip to this for years, as you allude to. I completely understand your father’s wistfulness for Latin, having grown up Episcopalian with the King James Bible and its beautiful, often impenetrable Elizabethan verse. “And the Word was made flesh”—who knew what that meant, but I wanted to see it.

In India, I discovered lots of variations on this principle. When I was there, from 2001 to 2002, a right-wing Hindu extremist party had come into power. The first thing they did when they got up and running was to jettison Persian words from their vocabulary, because they were reminders of the Muslims, and replace them with Sanskrit. They did this so densely that people sometimes had a hard time understanding what they were saying. Which, of course, was the point. By making themselves unintelligible, the Hindu party members’ message came through loud and clear: They were elevated, wise, speaking with the force of God. (Sanskrit is the language of the Vedic texts [7].)

One more example of the power of cloaked language: Three months into my stay, I was invited to spend Christmas Eve at the palace in Udaipur. It was me, some nervous-looking aides de camp, and the Maharana, the king, who, though 5’3” with A.V. crew glasses, could make anyone quail just by glancing at them. Periodically throughout the evening, barefoot retainers appeared at his side bearing envelopes on silver trays. The Maharana would hold up a finger, silence would fall on the room, then he’d open the envelope, nod, and toss it back. I’d been there long enough to have heard the scuttlebutt that he had a network of spies throughout the land who reported on what all citizens were doing at all times. I was wide-eyed, convinced I was seeing his mechanism of power—secret missives from the spies. Six months later, when I was invited to dinner a second time, my Hindi was firing and I got a better idea of the kind of private communiqués that were actually being exchanged. Servants scurried in with cell phones on trays, and he’d pick them up. “Just add more ghee,” the Maharana was saying. “Yes, more ghee. It will make it much better.”

Speaking of beautiful verse, I love your line “Maybe worshipping a language from afar allows us to dally with the ineffable?” And what do you think about this idea—perhaps when speech is unintelligible, it revives our infant state, when the gods of the nursery, our parents, stood above us and spoke in mystifying, cooing tones. “Ohwiddlebaabeeishungry” could have meant anything: “I am the invincible God of all gods, possessor of white liquid in a cylinder.”

Moving to a different form of indistinct language—gesture— I was reminded of how entwined language is with movement by your book, The First Word, and the study by Susan Goldin Meadow that you discuss, finding that kids who gestured when they explained how they’d solved a math problem could remember more vocabulary than kids who didn’t. When I was first studying Hindi, my teacher would sometimes get me to pace the room when I’d recite a homework assignment. The results were always remarkable. I’d be jamming, pumping the words, until I sat down for the next part of the lesson, when the flow would ebb. The motion of my body could alter, if only temporarily, my grasp of the language. Later, in India, I discovered the opposite: that the language itself—with only the weight of breath, of words—seemed to be able to change my very body.

In your earlier post, you mentioned how, fairly early on in my stay, I’d be seized by a conviction late at night that my face had changed, that it no longer looked like my own. At first, I’d jump out of bed at 3 a.m., panicked, to check, and there was my same old face, just a little pastier at that hour, looking back at me in the mirror. But several months later, one night the face that stared back was no longer the one I’d known. The eyes were the brackish green of an old well, the nose was flat, not high and proud, the skin browned from the Rajasthani sun yet sallow. The eyes squinted at me, and for a minute, the old face flickered back, and then it faded. And that was the last time all year I saw it.

Several years later, I discovered that my perceptions had adjusted to the beautiful, fierce, desert features all around me, and I’d come to look strange to myself by comparison. But there was also an actual, physical aspect to the alteration. “Your [face gets] very much changed by language,” Alton Becker, a linguist, later explained. Each language has one central vowel, he said.—in French, it’s uuu; in English, it’s the schwa sound. “It’s that central place that shapes your face at rest,” he said. So language can subtly alter the positioning of the muscles in your face, at least for a time. And there’s this, too: Humans—monkeys too—have a mirror neuron system, which automatically downloads other people’s gestures into your brain. You imitate others without meaning to, an impulse leftover from infancy, when, unable to speak, you used imitation to learn.

In a foreign country, then, you begin to absorb the characteristic body language without meaning to. In France, you make a quick moue then blow out air—pah—an expression of Gallic resignation. And if you’ve stayed away along time, you do this for a while after you get back home, and look weird. In India, within months I couldn’t speak Hindi without wobbling my head, like everyone else. I loved the communal choreography of the motion, the way it put people in sync. And at times, my facial expressions were softer than they’d ever been in New York, but in an instant, they could turn haughty, diffident, regal. “Like all India flowing through me,” I wrote one night, trying to describe the sensation of being corporeally possessed by language. Even now, when I speak Hindi, it musters the old body language. I think you can see evidence of that change in the video [8] for my book.

A few last notes, on the subject of diversions: Yep, the local gym where I lived was indeed run by gangsters. Nope, I never did find a way to take up exercise in Udaipur, unless you want to count hightailing it from stampeding sacred cows. And yes indeed, now that I’m squarely back in the West, I’ve lost that otherworldly disdain for fun that I had for a time. This dialogue proves it—I’ve had a lot of fun exchanging ideas with you. Thanks very much.

Yours,
Kathy