Both during and after my time in Korea, I’ve turned this seemingly accusatory comment over in my head, often to no avail. The challenge of deciphering the comment’s assumptions paralyzed me. What did it mean to speak Korean like it was “my” language? Could I ever claim full ownership over a language beyond my native English?…Continue Reading What is my Language? by Eugene Lee
Your therapist is a non-native speaker and recent immigrant. Will you see her?…Continue Reading Beyond Barriers by Min Cheng
I was very excited to hear about Confluences for many reasons. Language is also culture, and having more resources at the College in a variety of languages is imperative for community representation and growth. I’m personally delighted because I’ve been working on learning Spanish for a long time, although I still wouldn’t call myself bilingual. (I know, this is embarrassing given my age and the opportunities afforded me to learn it.) I anxiously await that moment of discovering I’ve truly become bilingual that Min Cheng described in her article of April, 2018. It is thrilling to have a College publication now with articles in Spanish and English to help me work toward that goal….Continue Reading The Archival History of Multilingual Publishing at Amherst College by Manda Pizzollo
My urgency to create in 2015 the First Year Seminar “Crossing Languages and Living in Translation” comes from my own language crossings: my own perils and triumphs as a translator and as a culture intermediary, a person straddling more than one otherness. There was a time when nothing in my schooling told me that my home language was a treasure. So, at Amherst I created a course to bring multilingual students to the realization that their home language is a treasure, and that they are not alone in feeling ambivalent, and perhaps even conflicted and depressed by the pressures of assimilation and linguistic suppression. There was a time when my own developing excellence in public, profitable, powerful mainstream English became the standard I would use to devalue and reject that dear home language I had put aside to focus on English acquisition. So, at Amherst, I created a course to make that mechanism of self-devaluation visible, and to invite students experiencing a similar pattern to rehearse and enact their own interruptions of the numbing spiral.
…Continue Reading Fragments from a Letter by Benigno Sánchez-Eppler
I have lost the habit of writing in Urdu ever since I left Pakistan, but in lieu of someone’s request and because of my love for the language, I begin this essay on the subject of Urdu language and literature. By language, I mean not only Urdu’s history, but also its colloquial use and its poetry and prose. According to my humble opinion, this Mughal tongue is plagued by difficulties today. Modern society has consigned Urdu’s past glory to oblivion. Its sweetness and its propriety, its refinement and its multiple literary forms, are all in decline, something which is blatantly attested to by today’s youth. The pearl-like forms of its words and its perfection of expression, the semantic neatness and richness of certain words, and the undulating flow of the language are some of its distinguishing characteristics.
…Continue Reading The Rise and Fall of Urdu Language and Literature by Harith Khawaja
I’ve always loved the story of how my Uncle Wilson chose his name. It only took a few months of living in America before he realized white people could never get “Woo Jin” right. The “W” always came out too harsh and their tongues would flop sloppily around the J – too loose to capture that sound somewhere in between a “Ch” and a “J.” Sometimes, he would correct them, slowly unfurling each syllable, careful to tap his tongue against the roof of his mouth just right. It never seemed to help, and he couldn’t tell whether it was for lack of trying on their part, or the English language itself to blame, its letters and sounds unable to reconcile themselves with his Korean ones.