Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Sing

Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Sing: Encounters with the Mysteries and Meanings of Language
Daniel Tammet (2017, Little Brown Spark)

       Most of us could see, given the right squint, the roundness of three or the pointiness of K, or even the dog shape of the word 'dog', facing to the left; that's the kindergarten level of synesthesia. Daniel Tammet's native synesthesia is somewhere around Ph.D. level by comparison. In addition to instant calculation of squares, cubes, and calendars, "...I kept a list of words according to their shape and texture: words as round as a three (gobble, cupboard, cabbage); pointy as a four (jacket, wife, quick); shimmering as a five (kingdom, shoemaker, surrounded)." And imagine the thrill of 'lollipop', with its embedded '1011', a nice round multiple of three!

       This savant-wizardry came along with epilepsy and Asperger's syndrome. The mental landscape of Tammet's childhood was so full of sensation that he had a very poor grasp of spoken language--it just didn't register with him. Mercifully, his high school German teacher invited him for a weekly conversation, throwing him a lifeline that gave him a better grasp of ordinary social intercourse. Still, he says, "I learned my mother tongue self-consciously, quite often confusedly, as if my mother were a foreigner to me, and her sole language my second."

       The first essay in this collection reprises parts of Tammet's 2007 memoir, Born on a Blue Day, which was a world-wide best seller. But what would he do for an encore? Was that book a singularity, as some English-language reviewers suggested, or did he have more to say? Well, one thing that happens when your memoir succeeds is that people begin to write to you as though they know you; one such correspondent was a young Frenchman whom Tammet would fall in love with and go on to marry; they now live in Paris. He also summoned the nerve to send off his book to Les Murray, an Australian poet whose poetic language stems from a strain of autistic-savant creativity that Tammet found profoundly resonant. Tammet went on to become his French translator.

       Translation turns out to be a part of his natural vocation. Because of the way his mind works, Tammet is conversant in something like ten languages, including Icelandic and Esperanto. Iceland, it turns out, has authorities charged with making official judgments about what children can be named; he gives us an essay on what 'purely Icelandic' means, and how that changes through time. He goes to meet Esperanto speakers, who live in the paradox that they have to sell their universalist vision in their other native tongue. 
 
      His experience of being treated as a linguistic curiosity (not to say freak show) gives him a sympathetic bond with the Esperantists, as well as those who devote their passion to reviving or preserving the native tongues of Mexico or the Isle of Man, perhaps the ultimate quixotic pursuit. "Fifty years ago, many new words needed coining to match modern island life: the elders of the recordings had never ridden in a car or airplane, owned a computer, or gone to university."

      Tammet has other wonderfully informative conversations with deaf people who joined the Deaf community by learning ASL as adults; people who make the Bible the first written book in obscure languages; and socio-linguists who record and study phone conversations. He also makes a larger point about translation's relationship to literature, which came to him while reading Anna Karenina in English. "Something had worked itself in my head. All literature, I finally realized with a jolt, amounted to an act of translation: a condensing, a sifting, a realignment of the author's thought-world into words." Yes, he can do this. Yes, he's a writer. And his thought-world is a fascinating place.

January, 2019