Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton

Review by Eleanor Updegraff

There are many ways in which to learn a language. For some of us, it starts at school, obediently repeating sounds enunciated by our teacher, despite having little sense of what they mean. Others might turn to foreign languages later, applying themselves to textbooks or conversation classes, even using an app. And then — by far the hardest, yet in some ways the most rewarding — there is the method of total immersion.

In her memoir, Fifty Sounds, Polly Barton takes this — the process of immersive language learning — and brings it to life. Through an ingenious structure and style of writing that is both down to earth and curiously poetic, she plunges us, her readers, into her memories, creating a richly layered and haunting account of what it is to live and work between two languages. Barton is best known as a translator of Japanese, yet despite her self-effacing portrayal of the writer as a bit of a language geek, this book is anything but a simple ode to the benefits of language learning. Instead, it goes deeper, probing the limits of shared human experience. It asks how the languages we speak — and what we understand words to mean — can inform not just our identity, but how far we will mould ourselves to fit in. How our lived experiences can mirror the process of translation, each one breaking and remaking us in a form whose essence may be the same, but on the outside looks very different.

At the edge of twenty-one, a newly minted Cambridge graduate, Polly Barton found herself on the way to Japan, where she was due to take up a teaching post on Sado, a small island lying off the west coast in the Japan Sea. Instantly busting one of the myths popularly spread about translators, or indeed anyone who speaks multiple languages, Barton is surprisingly candid about her reasons for going to Japan in the first place — this was not the result of ‘a calling’, nor was it love at first sight. Instead, her move was riddled with setbacks and reads like more of an escape. ‘I was a mess at Cambridge’, she tells us, with the disarming frankness that will soon become characteristic of the book, and her application to the teaching programme was initially prompted by a boyfriend. And while a certain amount of serendipity might be expected in any such story, Barton continues to be staunchly unsentimental about things: ‘The feelings that I’ve had towards Japan have always been hopelessly ambivalent’. And yet here she is, writing a memoir deeply entwined with this, her second language and country. To call it a love–hate relationship would be to trivialise the matter. Instead, it is complex — and unmistakeably real.

The fifty sounds of Japanese, from which the book takes its title, are, as Barton explains in her preface, the gojūon, a grid-like system by which the kana — the constituent, syllable-like parts of the language — are ordered. (In actual fact, linguistic reforms mean there are now only forty-six kana left — a fine example of how language is a living thing.) But while the gojūon may provide a handy framework, allowing the book to be divided into fifty chapters of varying length, Barton has chosen to rewrite the grid, filling its spaces with her own sounds. These are all mimetics, or sound-symbolic vocabulary, of which Japanese has an astonishing number: up to five times more than Indo-European languages, and possibly second only to Korean in volume. Not only is Barton fascinated by the existence of these onomatopoeic words — part of what she later terms ‘the precise tactility of the Japanese language’ — but they each hold a deeply personal meaning for her. Thus does ‘min-min’, the term given to the sound of cicadas, come to represent her early days of total incomprehension in Japan: ‘the sound of the air screaming, or being saturated in sound’; ‘chiku-chiku’, a pricking type of pain, to mean also ‘the ugliness of learning a language as a native English speaker’; and ‘don’, a word used to indicate the sound of a hand slamming a wall, to prompt a chapter on the world of manga and how it can be translated.

Through leaps of association that are both individual and accessibly logical, Barton lets us into an entire swathe of her relationships — with languages, with countries, with friends and lovers and colleagues. All are centred on Japan, of course (she worries at one point, and even argues with her brother, about whether she has become too obsessed with her new language, unable to think or talk of anything else), and build up as complete a picture as any I have ever encountered of what it is to speak, think and exist in a different language and culture. Japanese has to be a fairly extreme example for native English speakers — my own experience is with German, which could hardly be more different — but Barton is generous with her feelings, expansive in her mindset, touching on emotions and experiences that anyone who has delved deep into a language will understand. From feelings of complete and utter linguistic isolation to the exhaustion of being ‘forever poised on the knife-edge’ of being able to speak fluently yet lacking the foundation of having grown up in a language, to the exhilaration of the honeymoon period in which previously unknown words suddenly start to make sense, she lays it all out in prose that strikes a chord.

Though Fifty Sounds is composed as a series of vignettes, it is bound by the chronological narrative thread of this linguistic journey, which is tightened or loosened as the author requires. A student of philosophy who is also clearly well read in fields such as semantics (she provides a ‘multimedia mixtape’, or eclectic bibliography, for those who want to take things further), Barton is not immune to the occasional digression into higher realms. Thus a potted introduction to Wittgenstein’s theories is included as the author prepares to leave for Japan; attachment theory is discussed — albeit briefly — as she struggles to find her place in the world, feeling like two different people and at home in neither Britain nor Japan; and there are even a few cameos by Roland Barthes, who figures large in another Fitzcarraldo title, Kate Briggs’s seminal work on translation, This Little Art.

Although the author does let us in on her work as a translator, particularly in the final chapter (the book in question here is Barton’s recently published translation of There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job, a whip-smart novel by Kikuko Tsumura), she is far more concerned with what language means for us as people, and thus makes reference not to Barthes’s many observations on her profession, but most notably to his understated definition: ‘Language is a skin.’ That we should choose to clothe our thoughts, feelings and even actions in words is part of being human, yet as Barton makes so abundantly clear here, language is not merely a tool we use to communicate, but a lens through which we view the world – an inextricable part of our identity.

Language, and this way it has of shaping our lived narratives, is the core theme of a recently published novel, Kamel Daoud’s Zabor, or the Psalms, and the subject of an illuminating essay by its translator, Emma Ramadan. In it, she writes about diasporas, about the state of ‘in-betweenness’ that comes from being excluded from a parent’s language and all the cultural associations, not to say collective memories, that go along with it. So often language is seen as power — and indeed Zabor, the protagonist in Daoud’s novel, uses French in an attempt to flip a very particular narrative: if he writes about his Algerian village and its inhabitants in the language of their former colonisers, he believes he can save them from death – yet its absence, in the form of total or partial incomprehension, is perhaps equally potent. It is this, the way in which language can both open and close entire worlds to us, that Polly Barton grapples with in Fifty Sounds, a wrangling of formidable proportions that is conveyed with humility, humour and grace.

Even putting aside the thorny issue of language and its wider implications, Fifty Sounds is imbued with a haunting quality that comes largely from the relationships it details. ‘Detail’ is perhaps the wrong word — despite her apparent candour, Barton still keeps the reader at bay (a reflection, perhaps, of her ongoing relationship with Japan/Japanese), to the extent that she rarely gives names to the people she writes of, opting instead for a mystery-enhancing capital letter. All the same, we are given enough intimate glimpses of her affair with Y, an older, married-but-separated teacher on Sado, to ache along with her as the relationship soars and then crumbles, picks itself up out of the rubble and staggers along at infrequent intervals over a decade.

At times it is almost impossible to untangle Y from Japan – a complex conflation to which Barton freely admits — but there is an intense element of truthfulness here which is in part what makes Fifty Sounds so wonderful to read. It may deal in the complexities of language, but its author is eminently real and likeable, someone who writes of heartbreak as well as hiragana, someone to whom we can — in some way, at least — relate. Because haven’t we all, at some point, mixed up a particular experience with the person it was shared with? Isn’t life made up of a series of overlapping events, its appearance more akin to a hazy grey composition than a neatly ordered black-and-white grid divided by straight lines?

And so we are back at the gojūon again, and what it is — or isn’t. Just like a language and the systems used for writing it, Fifty Sounds both is and isn’t many things. It is a memoir, but an unusual one, a biography that does away with conventional structure and shapes itself instead to fit its author’s character and interests. It is a discourse on language, but an accessible one — a book that draws deeply on philosophy and linguistic science but applies itself to real life in a singular manner. It is a coming-of-age narrative, the story of a doomed romance, a book about letting go of safety nets and familiar systems, of living through depression and great change and coming out the other side not necessarily stronger, but different. It is a book for which it is almost impossible not to fall — to read this is to empathise with its author and, more miraculously, to feel oneself listened to in return.

If there is a word for this feeling, it probably exists in Japanese. Barton writes of ‘shi’kuri: the sound of fitting where you don’t fit’, but it is not this, nor anything approximating the other sounds teased out in this fiercely intelligent, deeply felt memoir. The fifty-first sound, then, is one for which I have no name: the sound of Polly Barton’s astonishing book resonating with my own experience, and making me feel — long beyond the time of reading — unusually, wholly, understood.

Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, 14th April 2021