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anasothershelf's review
4.0
Fifty Sounds alludes to the 5 x 10 grid system used to organize Japanese syllabaries by the phonemes that comprise them, something akin to Western alphabetical order. Polly Barton adopts this concept to produce fifty vignettes about her life, headlined by a Japanese mimetic, a way-marker of her language and cultural immersion journey. The book is a deeply personal, self-indulgent memoir heavily influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. Despite delving into linguistics and philosophy, Barton’s witty and relatable narrative remains approachable and inviting to the reader. At certain moments, it feels like trespassing through places and moments that you have not been invited to. Even so, I can’t help feeling a special pull towards translation and languages, “a rope leading all the way back” to a childhood learning a foreign language, to adulthood as I pursued my studies at University, and, finally, to a career I briefly dipped my toes into.
Full review here: https://thelagomfiles.com/2021/06/17/the-languages-that-speak-to-us/
Full review here: https://thelagomfiles.com/2021/06/17/the-languages-that-speak-to-us/
benrogerswpg's review
4.0
This was an absolutely breathtaking book.
A perfect meld of part Japanese language book, part Japanese history, and part memoir.
Written by one of my favorite Japanese --> English translators.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
I loved the 50 words and their meanings too.
Polly's writing is so well done. Descriptive, artistic, and almost poetic.
An excellent companion book to [b:Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan|260944|Learning to Bow Inside the Heart of Japan|Bruce Feiler|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1425768516l/260944._SY75_.jpg|2536303] - both books had a lot of parallels.
Polly's way of writing is something unique. I found the content of this book very open and candid. Barton has a way with words. I also really loved reading about different Japanese customs and traditions, cultural differences between US/UK and Japan, and how language is used.
I got a lot out of this, and learned a lot of new Japanese words along the way!
4.6/5
A perfect meld of part Japanese language book, part Japanese history, and part memoir.
Written by one of my favorite Japanese --> English translators.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
I loved the 50 words and their meanings too.
Polly's writing is so well done. Descriptive, artistic, and almost poetic.
An excellent companion book to [b:Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan|260944|Learning to Bow Inside the Heart of Japan|Bruce Feiler|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1425768516l/260944._SY75_.jpg|2536303] - both books had a lot of parallels.
Polly's way of writing is something unique. I found the content of this book very open and candid. Barton has a way with words. I also really loved reading about different Japanese customs and traditions, cultural differences between US/UK and Japan, and how language is used.
I got a lot out of this, and learned a lot of new Japanese words along the way!
4.6/5
queenofglitches's review
The author is very upfront about her background in philosophy and it shows throughout the book. I have essentially none and this made the book honestly a bit too challenging for what I ultimately wanted. The structure is interesting, and I enjoy the focus on Japanese onomatopoeia, which is something that does not get discussed enough.
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
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 .