Bilingualism has been the norm for most of history. The educated Romans spoke Greek, the Europeans spoke Latin, the Russians spoke French, and now everyone speaks English in one way or another; even when, confusing words of three letters, they write “sex” in the entrances, meaning something completely different.
The fact that two languages fit in our head does not mean that they can also get along with each other just as easily. A foreign language pretends to be a servant, but becomes a master. I experience this Hegelian dialectic every day when I live in America. Here in me, as in Pechorin, there are two people. One says what he thinks, the other does not think what he says.
In Russian, I usually manage to say whatever I want. But with the Americans, their language speaks for me. My philologist and I call this dialect “Have a nice day”. It turns out that in a foreign language it is easier to be banal than a boor. Jokes cannot be translated, even if you really want to. Monologue gives way to dialogue. Less cotton wool, more cardboard. Grease needs wit.
Math doesn’t mean anything. Familiarity does not exclude but implies politeness. Brodsky did not believe for a long time that one could say stupidity in English. This, of course, is not so, but, in my opinion, you never succeed in getting drunk in English. It is not surprising that, speaking in a foreign language, you gradually cease to recognize yourself. Language stealthily creeps into the soul even when it is not there, as happened with the Moscow News* newspaper. It differed from other printed organs of the Brezhnev era in that it could speak without saying anything, in several languages at once. From it I managed (had to) find out what is called in English “leader of socialist competition” and “transitional red banner.”
All this ended when a real American was taken to the editorial office. Without changing the content, he so perfected the form that the newspaper got that free spirit, which eventually made it the flagship of perestroika. Scientists say that every language forms its own Universe, traveling through which we cannot help gaining intelligence and tolerance. For me, however, it is more important that for a third of a century in America I was convinced that a foreign language changes the attitude towards the native. Only in New York, where there are more languages than the UN, did Russian reveal its own uniqueness to me. What are the diminutive suffixes capable of conveying such a range of emotions that the restrained and muscular English never dreamed of.
A foreign environment sharpens the flair for one’s own language. We are involuntarily afraid – to forget, to spoil, to mix. Perhaps that is why the purest Russian prose and the most virtuoso Russian poetry were written by Dovlatov and Brodsky, who lived in America. Sometimes it even seems to me that soon they will have to be translated into new Russian. This thought came to my mind when I told the Moscow interviewer: “I love to eat delicious food.” “Top products,” he wrote, “form my trend.”
* The newspaper has been published since the 1930s in Moscow in several languages and distributed in 54 countries. In 1980, its Russian-language version appeared, the editor-in-chief of which in 1986-1991 was Yegor Yakovlev.