Fifty Sounds: A Memoir of Language, Learning, and Longing - Hardcover

by Polly Barton (Author)

"The language learning I want to talk about is sensory bombardment. It is a possession, a bedevilment, a physical takeover," writes Polly Barton in her eloquent treatise on this profoundly humbling and gratifying act. Shortly before graduating with a degree in philosophy from the University of Cambridge, Barton on a whim accepted an English-teaching position in Japan. With the characteristic ambivalence of a twenty-one-year-old whose summer--and life--stretched out almost infinitely before her, she moved to a remote island in the Sea of Japan, unaware that this journey would come to define not only her career but her very understanding of her own identity.

Divided into fifty onomatopoeic Japanese phrases, Fifty Sounds recounts Barton's path to becoming a literary translator fluent in an incredibly difficult vernacular. From "min-min," the sound of air screaming, to "jin-jin," the sound of being touched for the first time, Barton analyzes these and countless other foreign sounds and phrases as a means of reflecting on various cultural attitudes, including the nuances of conformity and the challenges of being an outsider in what many consider a hermetically sealed society.

In a tour-de-force of lyrical, playful prose, Barton recalls the stifling humidity that first greeted her on the island along with the incessant hum of peculiar new noises. As Barton taught English to inquisitive middle school children, she studied the basics of Japanese in an inverse way, beginning with simple nouns and phrases, such as "cat," "dog," and "Hello, my name is." But when it came to surrounding herself in the culture, simply mastering the basics wasn't enough.

Japanese, Barton learned, has three scripts: the phonetic katakana and hiragana (collectively known as kana) and kanji (characters of Chinese origin). Despite her months-long immersion in the language, a word would occasionally produce a sinking feeling and send her sifting through her dictionaries to find the exact meaning. But this is precisely how Barton has come to define language learning: "It is the always-bruised but ever-renewing desire to draw close: to a person, a territory, a culture, an idea, an indefinable feeling."

Engaging and penetrating, Fifty Sounds chronicles everything from Barton's most hilarious misinterpretations to her new friends and lovers in Tokyo --and even the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein's transformative philosophy. A classic in the making in the tradition of Anne Carson and Rachel Cusk, Fifty Sounds is a celebration of the empowering act of learning to communicate in any new language.

Back Jacket

"Witty, exuberant, also melancholy, and crowded with intelligence - Fifty Sounds is so much fun to read. Polly Barton has written an essay that is also an argument that is also a prose poem. Let's call it an oblique adventure story, whose hero is equipped only with high spirits, and a ragtag band of phonemes."
--Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

"It's a vivid excavation of language and memory, a dizzying odyssey through the struggles of immersion and language learning, and a deeply humane love letter to a country that helped shape who she is today."
--Florentyna Leow, Japan Times

"Both memoir and cultural study, Fifty Sounds is the record of Barton's attempts to grapple with the Japanese language. . . . Like falling in love itself, the experience of learning Japanese . . . is intimate, humorous and painful."
--Lamorna Ash, Times Literary Supplement

"Every adventure [Barton] has--culinary, sexual, or emotional--adds to the depth of her vocabulary. . . . Fifty Sounds is a delightful, granular account of communicating across languages, as Barton gradually becomes able to consider the world not in a new light, but with new words."
--Laura Waddell, Scotsman