From Polly Barton's Fifty Sounds (2021)
a Japanese translator's experience of nobi-nobi: the sound of space
“I’m certain that physical spaciousness did contribute a lot to the sense I had of being able to slip off the edge of artifice and fall straight into eternity, but that wasn’t all it was. It was also freedom from the known. {…}
…the intense feeling of liberation I began to feel was undeniable, and the liberation was mostly from judgement. No longer surrounded by pronouncements that I understood, I let the critic in my head float away and suddenly I found I could do and saythings simply because I wanted to. More, as if the obligations clouding my vision washed away, I was far clearer on what the things I wanted to do actually were. 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 profoundly healing.
This development was surprising to me, but perhaps it’s nothing to wonder at when we consider that the languages with which we grew up, most particularly if we have grown up with just one, are the building material through which our very selves are constructed. ‘Language is not the only medium through which existence is transacted,’ writes Rachel Cusk; ‘it constitutes our central experiences of social and moral content, of such concepts as freedom and truth, and, most importantly, of individuality and the self; it is also a system of lies, evasions, propaganda, misrepresentation and conformity.’”
Also:
“‘Very often a desire to write is a desire to live more honestly through language,’ notes Cusk. In writing, one can be at a remove not only from the observing eye of society, but also from the somatic memories attached to conversation.
Another place where people burdened by a sense of the inescapable mire of inauthenticity might seek refuge in is in the bosom of another culture. Your own language is irrevocably sullied, you feel; there is too much irony, fraudulence, and you have been too deeply steeped in it. You need a new start. You need a retreat - which, as Barthes characterizes, the foreign environment obligingly provides:
The murmuring mass of an unknown language constitutes a delicious protection, envelopes the foreigner (provided the country is not hostile to him) in an auditory film which halts at his ears all the alienations of the mother tongue: the regional and social origins of whoever is speaking, his degree of culture, of intelligence, of taste, the image by which he constitutes himself as a person and which he asks you to recognize. Hence, in foreign countries, what a respite! Here I am protected against stupidity, vulgarity, worldliness, nationality, normality.
Immersed in the world of a different language, the subtle alienations are gone, leaving only the huge, obvious, undeniable ones - and even those feel tolerable, because we know them to be utterly beyond our control.”