At page 124 of Polly Barton’s Fifty Sounds, I found myself smiling impossibly wide, reading out loud to the empty room: “Kyuki-kyuki . . . The sound of a pen writing on a whiteboard.” Part of the joy that pervades and grows in reading this “memoir-dictionary” is in its subtle invitation to speak: to feel, as the author says, the “sensory bombardment” of encountering each new word, and the world that arrives with it. Written in fifty essays that each orbits off—sometimes tangentially, sometimes straightforwardly—from one of Japanese language’s vast selection of onomatopoeic words, the book generates a curious, sensual portrait of Barton’s life in Japan as a young woman, informed by the Wittgensteinian notion of language being defined by its utility, and in similar spirit to Lyn Hejinian: “Language . . . nearly is our psychological condition.” Through explorations of how the myriad self comes to match and distinguish itself from the world in words, Fifty Sounds creates an ecstatic realm of what happens in, between, and across languages—and the people who speak them.
Barton is a prolific translator from the Japanese; her repertoire includes Akutagawa winners like Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden and bestsellers like Misumi Kubo’s So We Look to the Sky, as well as English PEN Awards for Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are and Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job. Though we’ve spoken to her in the past about her translation work, I wanted to hear more about the linguistic and textual discoveries that catalysed this desire to work with language, in the quiet and admiring affinity between all people who love words and their secret conspirations. I spoke with Polly on-screen in our opposing time zones; she answered my questions in thoughtful bursts of speech that carried with them a vivid, various nature, her hands occasionally gesturing at the immeasurable distance between us, that which only language can attempt to breach.
Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Did Fifty Sounds begin in its current structure?
Polly Barton (PB): Not at all. I started working on it when I’d just got back to the UK after years of living in Japan, and at first, it was just notes for essays about the Japanese language. The inclusion of the onomatopoeia happened quite naturally, but the “fifty sounds” structure came about when I started writing the proposal for the [2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions] Essay Prize; I wanted to do it as a way of consolidating my thoughts, because I felt like there was meat in there and I was really enjoying writing about it, but it was kind of all over the place.
But the more I was writing, the more this concept started coming to me, and it seemed so out there that even while I was writing, I was thinking, can I do this? Can I write a memoir in fifty essays about Japanese onomatopoeia? Still, the callout for the contest said, “rewards ambitious writing,” so I was like, they want ambitious, I’ll give them ambitious. It’s funny because I am so grateful for that structure. It was just a crazy idea I hit upon, but I think it was very good for me to have that as a constraint, to start over fifty times—so I could do some sections like prose-poems, and a couple bits that are more academic.
XYS: Freedom dressed up as a constraint. There are definitely pieces that feel as though they could be portioned into separate texts, but because all the sections are encompassed in the umbrella of one experience, it feels cohesive.
PB: I don’t know if I intended this, but the experience of being in Japan, and learning Japanese, was so chaotic to me. I think a lot of people who learn a different language when they grew up and live in another culture—particularly one where they’re visibly different from most people around them—do have this real panoply of conflicting experiences, and the book is about embracing chaos in a way.
XYS: Not only did the theme of onomatopoeia present an idiosyncratic way to enter the text, and place it in a realm of linguistic fascination, but the writing also vividly created that visceral experience of speaking, of feeling each word take you into the language. In that sensorial way, do you believe that onomatopoeic words place a directive on the imagination?
PB: I do think that. The way I conceive of it first and foremost is a directive on the ways you express yourself, and then there’s the way that shapes your perceptions and your experiences, so inevitably, it does come to shape the imagination—what you are spontaneously thinking about, or turning your attention towards. One of the first instances in which I came to notice the real plethora of onomatopoeic words used in Japanese was in describing food, as in really casual conversation between friends: oh, when you bite into this, it’s really crunchy. The inside is really flaky, etc.
Obviously, it’s not that English is totally lacking in those words—maybe they’re more grammatically diverse and thus less conspicuous—but I think that, for the most part, food adjectives are the preserve of real foodies, or professional chefs. Whereas my sense was that, in Japanese, the wide range of words used to describe food was just part of the average vocabulary. So in that sense, it was discovering that this was a practice of paying attention to these things and describing them, which then does feed into the imagination and how you conceive of things, necessarily.
XYS: I think Japanese onomatopoeia is emblematic of communal behaviour in a lot of ways; I was curious to whether it was a way to behave empathically without putting oneself in the middle of other people’s experiences.
PB: Absolutely. That feeling is what was behind what lies behind the “sara-sara” chapter towards the end, where I’m in this relationship with this woman, and she is using this word that is so sensorial, so direct . . . In one way, it feels personal. Intimate, in a sense. But it is also exactly not giving of yourself. That’s not something that I can do, but I wish I could—being able to communicate in terms of your bodily sensations, without bringing in thoughts or emotion; the idea that it would be a really great glue between people makes total sense.
I often think this kind of thing about karaoke. That karaoke is the perfect social glue for a culture that sort of prizes community without actually having to sit and give of yourself. I’m not saying that people in the UK sit in the pub and generally give of themselves—in fact I think they very much don’t do that. But I’ve had this experience coming back from karaoke and feeling really close and bonded with these people, but I know nothing about them and they know nothing about me, other than how we sang.
XYS: Watsuji Tetsurō once said: “We discover ourselves in the cold by feeling the cold.” I think this intuition fits into Fifty Sounds’ structure of these onomatopoeic words as chambers for memories, individuals, sensations, emotions, where you feel the words by discovering yourself in them. In the book, you talk about Japanese’s “precise tactility”—did you feel that there was any correlation between that tactility and a word’s phenomenological capacity?
PB: There is, in part. I mean, it’s hard—I have such problems generalising about Japan and Japanese because immediately the caveat pops into my head—but there is a lot of vocalising sensation in Japanese, and it’s especially noticeable to the learner because often that takes the form of just one word. So those are immediately the most recognisable—like “Oh! She said ‘cold’.” Those are the things you start off participating in.
I think there was a sense of the discovering of myself in this new culture, within this sensation, and it felt like such a joyful contrast to this academic setting that I come from. I was watching this documentary the other day about the Spice Girls, and it was talking about how the nineties was the decade of irony. In the early 2000s, when I was at university, it was really noticeable that every utterance had to be super witty, super ironic, you had to be very detached from it, it had to be full of this complex, artificial persona that you build. So just to be sitting around and communing about the fact that we were all sweating like bastards or whatever, it did feel like a discovery of something new—of a totally new culture, but also of a returning to a self that mattered more than all of that posturing.
XYS: In the book’s process of self-discovery, there’s also attention paid to identity’s fluidity and vulnerability between languages—wherein a small shadow is cast upon the self’s presupposed consistency under the onus of “social survival.” By social survival, do you mean assimilation?
PB: I think there are different degrees of assimilating. In both good and bad ways, I did not feel like I was assimilating well in the UK when I was growing up. But I also think that I was, within the broader spectrum, assimilating very well. Every social setup has different gradations of social acceptability, and the fact that I was so conscious of not fitting in made me very aware of what I had to do to get by. When you don’t have the linguistic or cultural knowledge—and in Japan, appearance also came into play—I was immediately in the outermost circle, which brought into question: at what point are you actually on the outside of society? Like, at what point do you belong in some nominal way?
XYS: Regarding assimilation, then, do you think it affects your translation work?
PB: I do. I grew up being an observer of people around me, and I think a lot of that later was trained on trying to understand. I was more of an observer than the participant, which I think is strangely mirrored by the act of translation—that you are aware of what’s going on and somehow participating in the same space, but at the same time, you are not the articulating force. It’s a comfortable place for me.
There’s also this sense that translating from Japanese gives me the feeling of engaging with the language on some intimate level, without the difficult stuff that engagement brings within society. You have this connection with the text; you really ingest it, allowing it to become a part of you. I feel a sense of responsibility with it, but I’m not responsible for producing it—it’s the connection without the panic.
XYS: This is Wittgenstein’s question: Does one need to imagine something to mimic it? And isn’t mimicking just as good as imagining?
PB: I definitely don’t think you need to imagine something in order to mimic it. My sense is the mimicking comes first, and with that ability comes the complete capacity to involve the content of that mimicry in your thoughts, in your language. At least for children learning to speak their native language, it’s through mimicry that it becomes a part of your language.
Mimicry is just a bodily experience. If you spend time with language learners, it’s clear that what they’re doing is just repeating. Then at a certain point, they will repeat something and receive a certain reaction, and that’s how things fit into place. It’s irrational, and that is exactly why it has been left out from philosophical views of language for so long. It’s too much at odds with the picture that we want to have about ourselves of being rational or logocentric, driven by intelligent thought in a way that sort of separates us from the rest of the animals. In science, it’s a bit controversial to embrace that messy or unglamourous way we come to be in the world—this idea that the imagination and the rational stuff is a refinement of the animal qualities, and there’s no clean break between any of it. That the kinds of things we think of as being expressions of rational thought or practice are actually just reiterations of social practices, which don’t actually have that much pure rationality behind them.
It makes me think about technology, somehow; we live in a society that prizes technology, and so some of our identity is linked to the fact that we are participating in its complex scheme. I occasionally feel, as I think many do, a sort of self-righteousness or accomplishment—a pride of being in the twenty-first century. But could I recreate any part of it alone? Absolutely not. Occasionally, something will go wrong for me with an appliance or whatever, and it just becomes clear to me how little I know about anything mechanical or technological. I think a similar idea applies to our practices in the linguistic sphere. We look at this great edifice as though we are reproducing it from the ground up every minute, whereas actually, we’ve just inherited it, and we use it unthinkingly, and we do very little of the work of building it. Although unlike with technology, the work of creating language is far from a rational exercise in the first place.
XYS: Of course, in our native tongue, we get to be careless almost all the time, and we rarely ever speak, at least in daily sense, with this idea of building. When we’re speaking a new language, however, it’s vital that we do. There’s a subterrain of trepidation that runs along Fifty Sounds, a fear of committing a social error or putting oneself at the risk of infantilisation or humiliation. After that, do you think the carelessness of language is a gift?
PB: I definitely think carelessness is a gift, and a privilege. That said, there are strains that come with being a native speaker, and I think my experience of speaking English is not one of total comfort, but there are definitely contexts in which I’m not worried about what people are going to think of the way in which I’m expressing myself. I have more or less the full use of my language, as well as sufficient cultural knowledge to be able to evaluate the risks and social parameters. I think using language in that setting can feel great, really free and freeing, creative and fun. I have experienced that in miniature in Japanese, and it’s been wonderful as well, but obviously my abilities are compromised. There’s definitely a part of me that would like to just press a button and have the knowledge and abilities in Japanese that I have in English, and to just rattle off.
Something that I think about a lot with translation is that what is dangerous as a translator is not the things that you know you don’t know, but the things that you don’t know you don’t know—allusions or intertextual references that just totally pass you by. That’s what was really scary to me, when I couldn’t evaluate the risk. In English, I make social blunders all the time, but somehow it felt like I could at least carry out a risk assessment in my head, whereas in Japanese it was just utterly obscured, because I didn’t know the factors at play.
XYS: What is the relationship between language and fear?
PB: I think it’s much like the relationship between language and life. The fear in going about speaking language feels like something I come up against relatively constantly, and I could definitely live a life where I minimise that to a much greater degree, but I don’t. It’s not a good thing or a bad thing; that’s just how it works with me. Language is a source of great fear, but it’s also a source of great joy and connection, and it feels really important to keep putting myself through that. It comes down to self-expression. Sometimes I feel like I would rather never speak to anyone ever again, particularly in Japanese, but then the kind of urge to express myself always wins out.
XYS: In some portions, you describe your affinity with Japan by way of your love for one man, who became a sort of synecdoche of the nation. Do you think that loving across languages can be more vivid, or kinetic, or passionate, because not only are you exchanging individual minds and feelings, but also a nation of feelings?
PB: I absolutely do think it can be more vivid and exciting. For me, the creativity that was required in communicating meant that you don’t fall back into cliches. It puts you into contact with the miracle of communication—when so often it fails. At least in the early stages of being involved with someone, that’s thrilling. This also touches on the idea of having so much to teach one another; even just explaining a very boring word—if the other person is fascinated—can be a great conversation. There’s more material to draw on.
XYS: Could you talk a little about the idea of people as material to draw from?
PB: I think you need a genuine interest in one another as people; otherwise, novelties wear off, or you start to understand your objectification. Thinking about British people I’ve dated, I feel like there’s a big body of topics that aren’t ever discussed, due to an assumption that it’s almost uncouth to talk about them, because we all know where we stand. When I was in Japan, it was the opposite. Sometimes it would be really frustrating—I don’t want to have a conversation about cultural differences, I just want to set the table. But at the same time, in terms of material, anything could be interesting. More fundamentally, there was something quite respectful to be asking—how does this strike you, or what do you do in this situation, or what do you think about that? It’s respect, and curiosity—which for me is the very kernel of love, or any sort of relationship.
My worry is that—in theory, you’re both from the same culture, the same upbringing, the same background, and you could put that stuff aside and talk about more complex things, but my sense is that the reality often is just running out of things to say.
XYS: Isn’t there something dangerous in treating people as staging grounds for fascination?
PB: Yes. It does get dangerously close to that point of exoticisation, when fascination doesn’t feel equal. Is it less dangerous if the fascination runs both ways?
I’m thinking of something I saw on Instagram the other day that went something along the lines of: “‘You’re so mysterious,’ says the man who hasn’t asked me a single question.” There are degrees of danger in fascination; I worried when I was in my relationship—that I wasn’t that into him, but it was Japan. But I think if you’re there and interacting with someone as a human, and cultivating genuine interest . . . I guess only you can really judge whether you’re acting in good faith, ultimately. And maybe your view on that shifts over time.
Towards the end of the relationship I wrote about in the book, we both spoke in Japanese. And I’ve met a lot of women who conduct their relationships entirely in their partner’s language, often in a country that isn’t their own. Then the power dynamics—which are always there anyway—start to seem more serious.
XYS: Earlier I asked about the relationship between language and fear. Now I would like to ask you about the relationship between language and magic.
PB: I touch on this in the book, but it seems to me there’s a lot of magic in words, and in looking at words outside the situations in which they’re used. But I think both in literature and in learning, the real magic comes when you see language used in a dynamic way, where it becomes a part of this whole system that connects people and has the power to sweep you along with it. For some reason I’m thinking about the sea: this realisation I sometimes have—when I’m in it—of its enormous power: that it’s not the land that borders the sea, but the sea is connecting the land. That links up with the real magic of using language to me—being part of something so enormous. It has nothing to do with me, and yet it’s right here, and so perfectly specific. I’m really interested in that point at which the very minute becomes totally universal. I’ve always thought that Fifty Sounds, if it were successful, would get so minute and so into my own experience, that it could become universal.
Polly Barton is a writer and Japanese translator based in the UK. In 2019, she won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for her debut book Fifty Sounds, a personal dictionary of the Japanese language. Her translations have featured in Granta, Catapult, The White Review, and Words Without Borders, and her full length translations include Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki (Pushkin Press), Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (Tilted Axis Press/Soft Skull), and There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura (Bloomsbury).
Xiao Yue Shan is a poet and editor. The chapbook, How Often I Have Chosen Love, was published in 2019. The full-length collection, Then Telling Be the Antidote, is forthcoming in 2022. shellyshan.com.
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