the mother tongue
No language is the mother tongue. Writing poetry is rewriting it…. A poet may write in French; he cannot be a French poet. That’s ludicrous…. The reason one becomes a poet…is to avoid being French, Russian, etc., in order to be everything…. Yet every language has something that belongs to it alone, that is it…. French: clock without resonance; German—more resonance than clock…. French is there. German becomes, French is.
Marina Tsvetayeva
February 25th, 2006 at 10:45 pm
what an interesting statement: “No language is the mother tongue”…i’ve just been having a lengthy e-mail debate with my father about identity etc
and asked him the same question you asked someone at yr wits talk about who he was before he had a name…whether he was “german” then…
he maintains that he was, but that’s neither here nor there…poor marina…she was also hounded and done in by the secret police eventually, wasn’t she?
or suicide after all the horrors…
if german becomes & french is…then what is english?
english is a rabid, voracious, indiscriminate consumer of other languages…i don’t know that it really has a particular nature of its own…it’s a greedy, ravenous tongue…
March 3rd, 2006 at 4:05 pm
Hmmm..YUM!
March 3rd, 2006 at 4:31 pm
and what language might that be in i wonder?