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hollyzijderveld's review against another edition
dark
funny
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide, Blood, and Sexual harassment
emsemsems's review against another edition
5.0
‘The language learning I want to talk about is a sensory bombardment. It is a possession, a bedevilment, a physical takeover; it is streams of sounds pouring in and striking off scattershot associations in a manner so chaotic and out of control that you are taken by the desire to block your ears—except that even when you do block your ears, your head remains an echo chamber. ‘
The moment I finished reading Barton’s book, I knew it’s a book that I am definitely going to read again at some point later. Barton’s book deserves more than 5 stars. If I think of Kawase Hasui’s ‘Night Sea’ right now – I will have to say that Barton’s book deserves more stars than the bright splatter of stars against the pitch-black skies in that painting. And then even more, and more. While I’ve always had an endless admiration for the art of literary translation, Barton’s writing just made me love everything about it even more. There is so much humanity and intimacy involved in the art of translation that is so often overlooked. Learning and practising language(s) are lifelong acts. Fluency is an illusion because language is not a ‘fixed’ thing.
‘Another place where people burdened by a sense of the inescapable mire of inauthenticity might seek refuge is in the bosom of another culture. Your own language is irrevocably sullied, you feel; there is too much irony, fraudulence, and you have been too deeply steeped in it. You need a new start. You need a retreat—which, as Barthes characterizes, the foreign environment obligingly provides: The murmuring mass of an unknown language constitutes a delicious protection…’
‘I still remember the illicit delight I felt at reading about the evolution of Yukio Mishima’s “bad habit,” his insatiable appetite for pictures of wounded, melancholic, muscular men in the mold of St. Sebastian, and the abject horror he had felt, after swooning over a picture of what he thought was a strapping young knight, at discovering that it was in fact Jeanne d’Arc. I liked the extremity of it all, this whiff of austerity and bleakness that I sensed there, as in the Haruki Murakami and Kenzaburō Ōe novels I’d been reading at A’s instigation. Japan seemed like a place where everything was a secret, until it very much wasn’t, and that was attractive to me.’
The word, ‘otaku’ is a strange one. I suppose essentially it means a ‘nerd’, but then it could either be affectionately said, endearing, or even derogatory. It reminds me of a ‘radio interview’ of ‘Yonezu Kenshi’ (a musician I came to like a few months ago) , and he mentioned that he’s an ‘otaku’; and because I like his music, I instantly associated that word with something ‘positive’. ‘Otaku’ doesn’t have to be just about ‘anime’ and/or ‘manga’. And I think if you’re not some kind of ‘otaku’, then you probably don’t enjoy or love anything very much. But I suppose ‘otaku’ has that strange connection to the act of loving something enough to make you ‘unproductive’, which is probably why our capitalist society constantly makes us think of it as something ‘bad’/socially immoral – to quote Barton, ‘chronic reclusiveness, something close to a mental illness’.
‘…if we do define being a geek in terms of finding yourself socially impaired in some way, then we should also stipulate that the payoff is the richness of that inner world, and that the same can maybe be said for standing in between cultures. So maybe in some way I am a geek…because I can make these silly jokes to myself and laugh at them in a way that other people would find incomprehensible, and I’m a geek because I pay some form of social toll. But probably especially I’m a geek because I feel that even if it alienates me in the circles in which I move, that seems like a fair price to pay for what I’ve gained in return.’
Judging from her writing, it’s hard to deny that Barton loves ‘Japan’ – if not literally, then literarily, linguistically, and even ‘spiritually’. And I think that’s the most intimate and sincere way of loving a ‘place’. I am obsessed about how meticulous Barton is about her expression of her feelings about well, just about anything. Does being an experienced literary translator grant you that kind of ‘skill’? Or do you just have to never stop practising/embracing being a more considerate, empathetic, and sensitive person?
‘For a long time, and particularly of late, it has worried me that I don’t love Japan in the way other people around me do; that all I really like is the language. Now it comes to me that the language has never been anything other than a collection of people, real and fictional, whom I’ve felt assorted affections for. If I’ve loved Japanese, I’ve done so because I’ve loved the glimpses of people I’ve caught through it. Which is why, I suppose, my feeling for Japan and its language has always been hot, and embodied, and inappropriate; it has been atsu-atsu. In this moment, at least, I can stand behind it and say not just this is how it has been, but that is probably how it will always be.’
It’s interesting to me that Barton wrote about the reality show, ‘Terrace House’. I used to watch it with someone I no longer speak to anymore. We didn’t finish it, and so I didn’t end up watching/finishing it either. And after all, it’s one of those shows that is only bare tolerable, and at least absurdly funny when you watch it with someone else. We didn’t watch it to the point where the ‘couples’ were matched up so I was unaware of ‘kabe-don’ scenes Barton referred to. A tricky term as it could either be used in a romantic/sexual sense or a rape-ey/aggressive way depending on the people involved and how they feel about each other. At first glance, it seems just like as a rice ‘dish’ to me – like ‘ten-don’ (rice with fritters) or ‘una-don’ (rice with eel).
‘In the Japanese reality TV show Terrace House, a contestant who shows early and consistent signs of being a sexual predator and whose actions subsequently provoke an arguably overdue Japan Times article entitled “It’s Time to Talk About ‘Terrace House’ and Consent,” responds to the appearance of a new contestant he finds very attractive and has previously deemed A5-rank, a grade given to the finest quality of wagyū beef, by saying that maybe he’ll kabe-don her tomorrow: “If the moment to do a kabe-don presents itself,” read the English subtitles, “I’ll take it.” You’ll mean you’ll kabe-don her and ask her where she wants to go on a date? asks one of the other male contestants. “If you’re going to kabe-don, you can’t go asking,” the sexual predator replies: “You’ve just got to do it. You go, ‘You’ll go with me,’ and then, DON.” He reaches out his hand to an imaginary wall to demonstrate. Sitting on my bed watching this on my laptop, I find that I’m making a prolonged retching noise.’
A few years ago when I was on the tube late at night, very tipsy, with a bunch of friends, one of them had asked me to say something random in Swedish (for the life of me I can’t remember why). And I said something like ‘I fucking love strawberry ice cream, but I really don’t like you very much’. I don’t even like strawberry ice cream much. Coincidentally there was a Swedish woman sitting right in front of us, and she understood perfectly what I had said out (too) loud; and she couldn’t stop laughing. And then she quickly apologised, and/but I got so embarrassed that I, too, apologised (but way too much). On a different occasion, when I had an emergency check-in at a hospital in Stockholm a few years before that, one of the nurses (who was speaking English basically flawlessly) kept apologising to me about how his English is awful while helping me carry my 17kg worth of stuff (mostly books). I don’t know why we involuntarily keep 'apologising' to each other unnecessarily. As in like – there shouldn’t be so much ‘pressure’ forced upon to act or process of learning languages/communication in general.
‘The conventional, monoglot sense of what it means to be bilingual, trilingual, and beyond does not permit of difficulties in self-rendering, let alone existential crises or identity trauma. We prefer to believe unthinkingly that what it means to be yourself across different cultural-linguistic contexts is clear-cut: you say the same things translated across your various languages. That the reality is often hugely different is something to which the majority of those who speak another language with some fluency will testify: a survey of over a thousand bilinguals found that two-thirds attested to feeling “like a different person” when speaking different languages. To imagine a language means to imagine a life-form; to assume that you would be the same person in different languages, when not only the norms and rules but most likely also your social status and domains of experience and proficiencies within those languages are likely to be at least slightly if not fundamentally different, seems, when examined, plainly bizarre.’
The ending of the book reminded me of [b:Checkout 19|58386758|Checkout 19|Claire-Louise Bennett|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1630346616l/58386758._SY75_.jpg|87473457] by Claire-Louise Bennett. I can’t really talk about it without spoiling anything – but basically, it’s just a very brief and passing incident that sparked similar reactions/events in both books. Also in Bennett’s book, (although not quite the same as Barton’s) the protagonist had a passionate rant sesh about the nauseating common/national preference for a homogenised way of speaking at the very end of the book, and that I suppose is another thing that made me compare the two books (even if it’s just the little things).
‘…even though my colleague had in a roundabout way just called me gross, I didn’t feel insulted so much as I felt slightly sorry for him. This wasn’t just because I guessed there was a sour-grapes element to this response of his, after having been dealt a backhand slight by his girlfriend; nor was it just because I really liked the way Japanese sounded, and listening closely to and imitating (I felt these two actions to be intimately intertwined) the profile of Japanese sounds and people was one of the greatest joys that I had…I felt sorry for my colleague because I knew full well that my accent had come from undergoing a second infancy, which had been nerve-wracking, full of irritation, and necessitated making myself vulnerable, and I felt like I saw through his words to a simple declaration that he wasn’t prepared to make an idiot of himself like that. That he couldn’t bring himself to pad around, yochi-yochi, while everyone watched; wasn’t prepared to crash into a wall now and then, and to risk the uncanniness of being a semi-professional parrot.’
Barton's extremely attentive and meticulous way of writing gives the book a similar structural characteristic as that of a well-written book of fiction. It begins by introducing the characters, slowly, and so well done that it’s not overwhelming, and then connecting the ‘stories’ to/about them as well as to herself/the narrator. The 'stories' are so seamlessly woven together. Her soft vulnerabilities and her some rather strong personal statements are introduced to us (the readers) in the book so beautifully and tenderly through such a beautiful composition; and at least I, as a reader, do not feel quite deserving of it. I need everyone to read this. But having said that, you might have to be a bit of an ‘otaku’ to properly cherish it all. I was planning to read this alongside Daniel Hahn’s book, [b:Catching Fire: A Translation Diary|59207113|Catching Fire A Translation Diary|Daniel Hahn|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1647634442l/59207113._SY75_.jpg|93344606] but I was so ‘immersed’ in it that I forgot about Hahn. Also, I especially love how the chapters are arranged – never too long to allow my mind to stray and lose attention; but not so short that the stories don’t carry enough of anything. It was an absolute treat of a book/read, and most of all – it makes me miss Japan (maybe not Barton’s ‘Japan’, but the ‘Japan’ of my own no matter how much smaller it may be in comparison to hers).
‘Every interaction is a brush-up against these edges, an improvisational performance around the fundamental crevice that separates us, which stirs up the hope of our union as it spotlights our great distance. Yes, every conversation is a dance: if this isn’t eros, I do not know what is. It is not that this dance is only available to the learner; the problem is rather that the seasoned dancer has forgotten what it is they are doing. “Language is a skin,” says Barthes. “I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”’
And to conclude, I’d like to link ONEW’s cover of Kira Kira which was mentioned in Barton’s book. I don’t know if this is the exact song she was referring to (as it may as well be a different song that shares the same song title/name), but this just happens to be a song that I’ve been listening to quite a bit lately, so even if it wasn’t, at least to me – this is my ‘Kira Kira’ song .
anasofia_'s review against another edition
5.0
“As the parable tells us, success is reserved for the man who builds his house on the rock. Nowadays I think that maybe I’ve known always somewhere deep down that I couldn’t live for long on any rock. What took me longer to figure out was that living on the sand didn’t have to be just a running away or an experience of permanent overwhelm. That the topsy-turvy place between languages and cultures, which has been a site of humility and triangulation and self-knowledge, of absurdity and inanity and the best source of creative fertility, can also offer, paradoxically, a kind of safety”.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
jola_g's review against another edition
4.0
Yum-yum: the sound of Jola devouring Polly Barton's book, often feeling euphoric, albeit not liking it as much as she wished.
Too much Polly Barton and Ludwig Wittgenstein, too little Japan. This is my general impression after having read Fifty Sounds (2021). The issue I had with this book was the distance between me and Polly Barton. Sometimes she was either...
⟹ Too far, hiding behind Ludwig Wittgenstein and his theory of language, which is enthralling, but I found her fascination overwhelming, especially in the first part of the book.
⇒ Too close. I would prefer more observations on Japan to the snippets of Polly Barton's love life. I was looking forward to basking in the sounds of the Land of the Rising Sun, not necessarily eavesdropping behind the author's bedroom door.
I was not thrilled by Polly Barton's self-indulgence and her tendency to feel victimized, nonetheless there were things in Fifty Sounds which I absolutely adored. Most importantly, the creative idea behind the book which gave it a unique, poetic structure: it consists of fifty vignettes, each devoted to a different Japanese onomatopoeia. I also admire the author's erudition and her linguistic skills. Frankly speaking, I fell in love with Fifty Sounds at the stage of reading the blurb for the first time and bought the book immediately after it had been released which goes to prove how infatuated I got.
I think Fifty Sounds will appeal more to the readers who are into the philosophy of language, teaching and learning foreign languages and translation than to those keen on Japan. The hunger of the latter might not be fully satisfied. As for Japan, Polly Barton is in a love-and-hate relationship with this intriguing country which attracts and repels her at the same time. The story of her affair with Y, a Japanese teacher, encapsulates that. It constantly feels as if she were enamoured of someone distant, cold and demanding but concurrently bewitching: I am in a pseudo-romantic relationship with Japan, which is jealous, intense and full of burning, flailing ego. Her fixation is not blind though. For instance, she wonders why Japan, being such a well-off country, accepts so few asylum seekers.
Besides, I loved the author's writing style and her reflections on learning a foreign language. They are not only spot-on but also beautiful. Just a few examples:
The language learning I want to talk about is a sensory bombardment. It is a possession, a bedevilment, a physical takeover.
If language learning is anything, it is the always-bruised but ever-renewing desire to draw close: to a person, a territory, a culture, an idea, an indefinable feeling.
My body was alive with the sounds it had collected up throughout the day. When I shut my eyes in bed at night I was souped in them, sounds that hovered between known and unknown, as if comprehensibility were not in fact the currency in which my brain dealt any more, and what was being processed was rather the rhythms.
Needless to say, the best way to put Polly Barton's opinions on Japan, the Japanese and their language to the test would be to simply go there. Hopefully, I will do it in the future, provided Oscar Wild was wrong when he declared: In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people… The Japanese people are… simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.
David Burliuk, On the Beach, Japan.
Too much Polly Barton and Ludwig Wittgenstein, too little Japan. This is my general impression after having read Fifty Sounds (2021). The issue I had with this book was the distance between me and Polly Barton. Sometimes she was either...
⟹ Too far, hiding behind Ludwig Wittgenstein and his theory of language, which is enthralling, but I found her fascination overwhelming, especially in the first part of the book.
⇒ Too close. I would prefer more observations on Japan to the snippets of Polly Barton's love life. I was looking forward to basking in the sounds of the Land of the Rising Sun, not necessarily eavesdropping behind the author's bedroom door.
I was not thrilled by Polly Barton's self-indulgence and her tendency to feel victimized, nonetheless there were things in Fifty Sounds which I absolutely adored. Most importantly, the creative idea behind the book which gave it a unique, poetic structure: it consists of fifty vignettes, each devoted to a different Japanese onomatopoeia. I also admire the author's erudition and her linguistic skills. Frankly speaking, I fell in love with Fifty Sounds at the stage of reading the blurb for the first time and bought the book immediately after it had been released which goes to prove how infatuated I got.
I think Fifty Sounds will appeal more to the readers who are into the philosophy of language, teaching and learning foreign languages and translation than to those keen on Japan. The hunger of the latter might not be fully satisfied. As for Japan, Polly Barton is in a love-and-hate relationship with this intriguing country which attracts and repels her at the same time. The story of her affair with Y, a Japanese teacher, encapsulates that. It constantly feels as if she were enamoured of someone distant, cold and demanding but concurrently bewitching: I am in a pseudo-romantic relationship with Japan, which is jealous, intense and full of burning, flailing ego. Her fixation is not blind though. For instance, she wonders why Japan, being such a well-off country, accepts so few asylum seekers.
Besides, I loved the author's writing style and her reflections on learning a foreign language. They are not only spot-on but also beautiful. Just a few examples:
The language learning I want to talk about is a sensory bombardment. It is a possession, a bedevilment, a physical takeover.
If language learning is anything, it is the always-bruised but ever-renewing desire to draw close: to a person, a territory, a culture, an idea, an indefinable feeling.
My body was alive with the sounds it had collected up throughout the day. When I shut my eyes in bed at night I was souped in them, sounds that hovered between known and unknown, as if comprehensibility were not in fact the currency in which my brain dealt any more, and what was being processed was rather the rhythms.
Needless to say, the best way to put Polly Barton's opinions on Japan, the Japanese and their language to the test would be to simply go there. Hopefully, I will do it in the future, provided Oscar Wild was wrong when he declared: In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people… The Japanese people are… simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.
David Burliuk, On the Beach, Japan.
questingnotcoasting's review against another edition
I thought I'd be more interested in this. It's more philosophical than I want. Not knowing any Japanese certainly makes it harder to understand what Barton is describing, in terms of how the language works and I just know I'm never going to be rushing to pick it up.
foggy_rosamund's review against another edition
4.0
Each chapter in Fifty Sounds takes as a starting point a mimetic word in Japanese, i.e. a word that evokes a sound or, more broadly, a physical sensation. Japanese has a wider ranger of mimetic or onomatopoeic words than English, such as mushi-mushi, the sound of being steamed alive, or yochi-yochi, the sound of tottering like a small child. Barton uses these words to explore her fifteen years spent in Japan, as well as the ways in which we use language and what language learning feels like. She goes to Japan to teach English as a 22-year-old, and is placed in a rural school on a small island. Over time her relationship to Japanese and Japan develops and broadens: while very young, she has a relationship with an older married man, Y, and his influence helps her to develop her Japanese, but when she leaves him, her relationship to Japanese deepens as she learns new words obsessively and throws herself into language. I really enjoyed the experience of reading this book: the chapter are brief and engaging, and capture the mixture of overwhelming and fascinating that characterise immersing in a new language. Barton is often funny, self-deprecating and her work is full of anecdotes.
On a sentence by sentence level, I sometimes found her writing clunky: she uses clauses like "in fact" and "any yet" far too often, and her paragraphs can repeat the same thoughts, but she usually saves herself by providing a moment of insight or an interesting thought about how Japanese language works. She tries to distance herself from fetishizing Japan, something that is a common problem for outsiders in Japan, and I think she succeeds most of the time. Strangely, though, at times she seems blame her own emotional distress on elements of Japanese culture and society while it seemed that her problems were more to do with her age and loneliness. One of my biggest problems with this book was the way in which she wrote about learning a second language -- she chooses to learn Japanese and to immerse herself in Japan, but she doesn't acknowledge that many people learning a second language, especially English, don't have that choice. For immigrants and refugees the kind of immersion she chooses is forced, and speaking a second language poorly can have real consequences. Fifty Sounds is more interested in language-learning as a source of pleasure and intellectual curiosity, and that makes it pleasurable to read, but I wonder if different experiences of language-learning should have been acknowledged. That said, Barton does approach much of her work with nuance, and I found this book entertaining and vivid. The hook, of focusing on specific mimetic words, is really effective, and I appreciate how Barton balanced emotionally honesty and raw feeling with an exploration of words and learning.
On a sentence by sentence level, I sometimes found her writing clunky: she uses clauses like "in fact" and "any yet" far too often, and her paragraphs can repeat the same thoughts, but she usually saves herself by providing a moment of insight or an interesting thought about how Japanese language works. She tries to distance herself from fetishizing Japan, something that is a common problem for outsiders in Japan, and I think she succeeds most of the time. Strangely, though, at times she seems blame her own emotional distress on elements of Japanese culture and society while it seemed that her problems were more to do with her age and loneliness. One of my biggest problems with this book was the way in which she wrote about learning a second language -- she chooses to learn Japanese and to immerse herself in Japan, but she doesn't acknowledge that many people learning a second language, especially English, don't have that choice. For immigrants and refugees the kind of immersion she chooses is forced, and speaking a second language poorly can have real consequences. Fifty Sounds is more interested in language-learning as a source of pleasure and intellectual curiosity, and that makes it pleasurable to read, but I wonder if different experiences of language-learning should have been acknowledged. That said, Barton does approach much of her work with nuance, and I found this book entertaining and vivid. The hook, of focusing on specific mimetic words, is really effective, and I appreciate how Barton balanced emotionally honesty and raw feeling with an exploration of words and learning.
kyotomylove's review against another edition
For nearly 40 years i am obsessed with Japan and i am obsessed with everything concerning language. Never in my wildest dreams i would have thought that this book would bore and annoy me. I tried several times to get into it, but the whining teenage voice of the narrator made it impossible. I am deeply disgusted by this book.