On borrowed words Book

The LA Review of Books published an essay by Ilan Stavans in which the writer and translator reminisces about his Memoir of Language: On Borrowed Words. Born in Mexico to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Stavans was raised with two native languages: Yiddish and Spanish. When he was a young man, he left Mexico to work on a kibbutz in Israel; later he married an American and moved to New York. Reflecting on his "lives" in Spanish, Yiddish, Hebrew and English--- the translator engages in self- translation:

"I firmly believe that how one perceives the world in any given moment depends on the language in which that moment is experienced. Take Yiddish, which is, at its root, a Germanic language, but is strongly influenced by Hebrew. It also features Slavic inclusions. These distinct elements give the language a taste, an idiosyncrasy. The life I lived in Yiddish was defined by the rhyme, the cadence of the sentences I used to process and describe it. But this wasn’t my only life. I was born in 1961 in Mexico City into an immigrant enclave of Eastern European Jews, and so began speaking Spanish right alongside Yiddish. I have two mother tongues — di mame loshn and la lengua materna. Both shape my viewpoint. Eating in Spanish — dreaming, loving, and deriving meaning from life in that language — all these actions differ from their counterparts in Yiddish. The taste of things is determined by the words used to express it."

In Spanish, he feels unconstrained. He says he waves his arms more but the lyrical quality of the language grates on him. English, being much more “rigid and logical,” is preferably to think in, he says. But, he always prefers joking in Yiddish. He says the rhythm of the language lends itself to joking around. While liturgical and metaphysical, Hebrew is the language for praying…And I love his words that The taste of things is determined by the words used to express it.

More here--wonderful book, wonderful thinker.