Is our experience of the environment defined by our language?

If so, will my world become a bigger place if I can master the language?

Learning a language is a lifelong pursuit, particularly if it is not one’s mother tongue.

I can remember many occasions when I first leant an English word or an expression, at a coffee table over a crossword, at a dining table during an erudite conversation, or mostly, on the bus while reading a book. Some words are my friends, they twirl around my head under the sunlight and sing in the darkest night; others are elusive, they avoid my curious eyes, unwilling to reveal their true identity; a small minority of words are detestable, and I refuse to give them any status in my lexicon.

The first book I was able to enjoy in English was Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Like the eyes of the English Patient that travel through the stone walls to the distant past and distant country, Ondaatje’s poetic voice opens up a passageway into a world of passion, beauty and intrigue. Since then, I have read many books in English with the aid of a dictionary.

However the ultimate test for language is poetry and it has taken me longer to start appreciating poetry in English. I found the first poem I like accidentally in a book titled Einstein’s Heroes, which tells the life stories of Newton, Maxwell and Faraday, and how their scientific discoveries inspired Einstein. At the end of one chapter, the author quotes William Blake’s:

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

 I was delighted at my discovery of a great poem, unaware that this is the first stanza of a well-known poem by a famous poet.

Living in an English environment, I often crave for poetry. However this is not an appetite that can be easily satisfied. A friend of mine took me to Bell Shakespeare’s performance, and I slept through the entire session. Indeed, there is no shortage of material or opportunities, but I feel like the Ancient Mariner:

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

While I am yearning for poetry in English, I cannot help remembering that reading poetry used to be a very enjoyable pastime.

When I was young, we had half day shifts at school. For the other half, I was often locked inside our flat for safety. I still dream of the dark staircase of 17 steep steps, fearful of the perilous forces leering outside the gate which was locked from the inside and outside, and fortified by a wooden pole. Alone at home, I spent my time listening to the radio, reading books, and playing a toy guitar the size of a ukulele. Among my books were a series of ancient Chinese poems, sorted according to the dynasty. I enjoyed the series so much that they had became badly stained and lost some of their back pages.

Reading poetry is a physical experience for me: every word is a musical note, the lines set the rhythms, I can feel an invisible hand strumming the strings of my heart, and the vibration goes to not only the frontal lobe but the limbic part of my brain. Poetry is revelation, epiphany, thoughts unfolding through precise words in an elegant sequence. A straight line between two dots, poetry is a time warp, through which we arrive before departing, then without knowing, we are spiralling on the road again. It provides the clarity of seeing through the triviality and discovering the essence of this life. As a child, I learnt that a poem is something to read, to listen to while reading aloud, to contemplate, to memorise and to recite. A good poem can be relished over a long period of time.

My early encounter with philosophy was solely through poetry, since in ancient Chinese tradition there was little formal distinction between philosophical and literary thought. Two thousand years ago, Zhuang Zi, a prominent philosopher and poet, dreamed that he was a butterfly.  When he woke up, he wondered if it was him dreaming of becoming a butterfly, or it was a butterfly dreaming of becoming him. This story must be the best rendition of Descartes’ dreaming argument. Interestingly I learnt about it in one of Li Shangyin’s poems from the Tang Dynasty, rather than from a philosophy book.

A recurring theme in Chinese poetry is the ephemeral nature of life against the eternal nature of the cosmos. In the winter of 208AD, Cao Cao, a warlord and one of the central figures of the Three Kingdoms period, wrote a poem right before the Battle of Red Cliffs. The first 4 lines of the Short Song read:

Raising the glass, time to lament a song,

For no one knows if life is short or long.

Life is but the morning dew,

Past days many, future ones few.

Another major theme in Chinese poetry is a desire to seek solace in the changing beauty of nature, and find peace in a secluded life in an idyllic setting, a reflection of Lao Zi’s philosophy of man as an element of nature. One early example is Tao Yuanming of the Eastern Jin Dynasty (~300BC), who wrote: “A tethered bird longs for its old woods; a trapped fish misses its original waters…  Having been confined to a cage for an eternity, again I am returning to the embrace of Nature.” The identification with nature is featured strongly in the poetry of Li Bai from the Tang Dynasty. In Drinking Alone under the Moonlight, he beckons the moon and invites his own shadow to form a party of three for drinking and dancing. In another poem he finds unwavering friendship in a mountain, while the birds and the clouds have deserted him.

China has a long history of poetry and philosophy. Through poetry, ancient expressions and teachings are embedded in Chinese language and do not become obsolete.

I try to understand my difficulty in connecting with poetry in English. Is the difference between English and Chinese such a barrier that it renders the poeticism hardly transferrable from one language to another?

English is rule based. While there are exceptions, English generally follows clear grammatical rules, categorisations and definitions. Chinese is context based. There are rules, but they are largely based on custom and convention. Some English words bear the emotional weight, for example, the word ‘long’ when it means to miss something desirable. But such words are much more common in Chinese. For example, there is the character ‘thirst’ in the word ‘yearn’. Many Chinese words evoke poetic imagination. A Chinese expression that means indelible literally says ‘engraved on the bones and etched in the heart’. Thinking in English, have I lost some emotions and lyricisms that I would have experienced in the Chinese context?

Umwelt is a German word that means ‘the world around us’. As humans, is our Umwelt defined by our language? And if so, will my Umwelt reduce in size if I have fewer words and expressions to define it? Many migrants suffer from a dull muteness. We are not silent because we do not want to speak, but because we have nothing to say.  Living in a foreign linguistic environment, the rich context of our original language is lost, and not replaced by an adequate new vocabulary. As a result, not only our ability to articulate our feelings has been reduced, but also our ability to experience and perceive the reality.

I also wonder if my difficulty stems from the difference in aesthetics that affects one’s ability to fully appreciate poetry in a different literary tradition. Chinese poetry promotes aesthetic suggestiveness, not articulateness, and its power relies on evocation, rather than imitation.

Tradition is water, we are fish. A fish out of water, I understand what it means to be thirsty, how it feels to long, for something in the past, in the distance, or that no longer exists. I crave for the intelligence and the inspiration in poetry. A fish out of water, I refuse to become an amphibian or a reptile. As an optimist, I want to be a bird instead. Each new word is a new feather, and it takes time to learn to flap the wings. When I have gathered sufficient courage, I might take the leap of faith and write a poem. It will no longer be about the charted water, and it definitely won’t be about mud or cave. It will be about the treetop, the wind, the sunshine, the blue sky and all the freedom that flying can offer.