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60
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
67/100Critics
53/100Scholars
Author:
Polly Barton
Publisher:
Liveright
Date:
March 15, 2022
For anyone who has ever yearned to master a new language, Fifty Sounds is a personal account and a resource for learning to think beyond your mother tongue.
What The Reviewers Say
In Barton’s revelatory and candid memoir, she frames her experiences in Japan in 50 dictionary entries, journeying through her vulnerabilities, otherness and identity in a foreign place and finding solace (and humour) in writing. One of the most powerful stories is about a death she witnesses, entitled 'uwaa: the sound of the feeling that cannot be spoken'. Grappling with emotion through the medium of language is, however, what Barton does best..
... begins slowly and not particularly engagingly, focusing more on the mechanics and fickleness of language. Whilst Barton’s ideas around translation and its slipperiness are interesting, it felt at times a little dry. However, when she brings in the human element, as she moves to Japan to work as a teacher and embarks upon an affair with a man senior to her both in age and in her work, the book really gets going. It becomes less about the abstraction of language and more about how the process of learning and absorbing another tongue is inflected by those we learn it from, and how we learn it. The katekanas work well here, as they show how another language can be made to fit but can also describe the shape and the feeling of something that cannot be expressed easily in one’s native tongue.
Throughout the memoir, Barton’s intelligence and erudition come across in every sentence of liltingly beautiful prose. As it is in her translations, her writing here is also unapologetically British.
Barton’s centring of doubt in her narrative – doubt about her linguistic skills; doubt about her relationships with people she meets, and with the country itself – brings nuance to her account of learning a language outside the classroom. It is doubt that eventually makes her a successful Japanese translator..
