Author(s): Polly Barton

Literature | Read our reviews! | Japan | Fitzcarraldo Editions

In this dazzling debut, Polly Barton reflects on her experience of moving to the Japanese island of Sado at the age of twenty-one and on her journey to becoming a literary translator. Written in fifty semi-discrete entries, Fifty Sounds is a personal dictionary of the Japanese language that draws together a variety of cultural reflections - from conformity and being an outsider, to the gendering of Japanese society, and attitudes towards food and the cult of 'deliciousness' - alongside probing insights into the transformative powers of language-learning. Candid, humane, witty and wise, Fifty Sounds is remarkable work that takes a transparent look at language itself, lifting the lid on the quietly revolutionary act of learning, speaking and living in another language.

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THOMAS'S REVIEW:
The Japanese language differs from English in having a delineated category of mimetic words which are recognisable as such due to their pattern and use. Polly Barton uses a sequence of fifty of these onomatopoeia, from giro’ to uho-uho, to structure a memoir of her developing relationship with Japanese and with Japan, from going to teach language on a small Japanese Island when she was twenty-one to her eventual career as a Japanese literary translator and now writer. Because language is inextricable from every other aspect of a person’s life in any society, the book, as well as exploring the philosophy of language, so to call it, in a thoughtful, straight-forward and practical way, covers all the other aspects of Barton’s life in this period as well, including her uncertainties, errors, embarrassments, affairs, failings, awkwardnesses, and misfortunes, with unflinching honesty and companionable insight. After all, all stories are stories of language before they are of anything else. Barton found that, as she learned to structure her thoughts in Japanese instead of English, she was undergoing a change of personality as well. “It was as if what had been watching me all the time was my language: I had clung to it as the thing that shaped me, but now I was finding that a looser relationship with the language, perhaps having a looser shape altogether, was strangely healing.” She notes that a survey of bilingual people found that over two thirds attested to feeling like a ‘different person’ when speaking different languages. Language is a social phenomenon more than it is a verbal one, language is “inextricably entwined with behavioural practices and social roles,” and we often forget that the ever-present underlying nonverbal control of exchange is more basic to language than its verbal features. “Language is performative and communal. It is a means of ‘passing’ more than it is a means of expression,” writes Barton “Understanding is not an internal switch flicked that nobody else can see: if you don’t act upon an instruction, if you don’t behave in the required way, you are not understanding. To comprehend within a particular culture means to act upon that culture’s rules for understanding. To mean something by what one says is to be participating in a community-wide game governed by rules.” As she gains proficiency in Japanese, Barton begins to feel a slippage, so to call it, in the idea of herself. “Maybe this original ‘me’ which figured in my thinking was more nebulous, more tied to English than I realised,” she writes. “For the moment, I was saved from total assimilation by the inaccuracy of my mirroring, which was why I was able to feel more or less myself. But if I continued to get better, I reasoned, there might come a time when there was no longer room for the me I recognised.” Language is learned by, and operates through, copying, and has the cultural function of inducing conformity in its members. “Although chameleonship is outwardly derided and disdained, it is implicitly not only accepted but actually demanded.” As Barton shows, language is both a tool and a threat, but more, really, the medium in which we must negotiate the parameters of our individual and collective identities. The immersion in another language can provide insights into both the complexity and the fluidity of those identities. 

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Review: 'Witty, exuberant, also melancholy, and crowded with intelligence - Fifty Sounds is so much fun to read. Barton has written an essay that is also an argument that is also a prose poem. Let's call it a slant 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

'This book: a portrait of a young woman as language-learner, as becoming-translator, as becoming-writer, in restless search of her life. It is about non-understanding, not-knowing, vulnerability, harming and hurt; it is also about reaching for others, transformative encounters, unexpected intimacies, and testing forms of love. It is a whole education. It is extraordinary. I was completely bowled over by it.' - Kate Briggs, author of This Little Art

'It seems fitting, somehow, that this marvelous study of the expansiveness and precarity of human communication is so woefully ill-served by a literal description of its contents. As in all great works of genreless nonfiction, all of the subjects Fifty Sounds is putatively "about" - Japan, translation, the philosophy of language - are inspired pretexts for the broad-spectrum exercise of an associatively vital and thrillingly companionable mind. This is a gracious, surprising, and very funny debut from a writer of alarming talent.' - Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction

'Fifty Sounds explodes the redundancy of the phrase "I'm learning a language," showing us that the experience is more akin to relearning reality and who we are in it. Barton writes of being "souped" in the sounds of speech and a new place, but also in what is not said or written. She beautifully recreates the monumental intuition and exposure required to immerse oneself in a new mode of living, and the quantum levels of attention required to translate literature. It chimes and charms, a resounding wonder about identity, communication and love.' - Jen Calleja, author of That's All We Have Time For

'Polly Barton is a brilliant, learned and daring writer and Fifty Sounds is a magnificent book. Through her eddying philosophical vignettes, Barton creates a unified work of extraordinary wisdom and vitality.' - Joanna Kavenna, author of Zed

'I loved this book and learned a lot from it, especially about subjects I thought I knew about - place, displacement, language-doubles and the double-selves we have when we move between our languages. It's not just just that it's winningly-written, insightful and formally exciting, though that would be enough. It's that it's genuinely gripping: forthright, inventive, personal, and fizzing with ideas.' - Patrick McGuinness, author of Other People's Countries

Prizes: Short-listed for Edward Stanford Travel Writing Prize 2022 (UK). Long-listed for Ondaatje prize 2022 (UK).

Author Biography: Polly Barton is a Japanese literary translator. Her translations include Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda, There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, and Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki. She won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Fifty Sounds. She lives in Bristol.