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

Barton, Polly

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1324091312 ISBN 13: 9781324091318

Verlag: Liveright, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

“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.Fifty SoundsIn 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.”Fifty SoundsFifty Sounds

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Polly Barton is a translator of Japanese literature and nonfiction. She studied philosophy at the University of Cambridge before travelling with the JET Programme to teach English in Sado Island, Japan. She won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Fifty Sounds.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Fifty SoundsEveryone Knows Your Mother Is a WitchJapan TimesTimes Literary SupplementScotsman

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Liveright
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1324091312
• ISBN 13: 9781324091318
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 350
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland