An ocean in an archipelago of languages!
The people of Helsinki speak Finnish. Mostly. A minority speaks Swedish as a first language, but they all speak Finnish as well. So when you go to the grocery store, you speak Finnish. A lot of my friends – mostly through my wife – have French as a first language (my wife is a MASTER of French linguistics). I speak Icelandic to my wife, but she speaks Swedish back. Some of my wife’s friends (no, I don’t really have any friends) are Czech. They speak Czech. One of the biggest minority languages in Finland is Somali. My wife’s name is Nadja, which may make officials in government offices think she’s Somali – so sometimes her government mail is in Somali. The books I read are mostly in English or one of the nordic languages, Swedish, Norwegian or Danish. Or Icelandic, when I get my hands on one. I used to have a friend here, an Icelandic visual artist, but he’s since become somewhat of the artist-vagabond-globetrotter and is never around.
I don’t speak Finnish. I work at home and it’s a very difficult language that I’ve not even had (or given) time to learn. I can read a bit of French but I don’t understand it spoken. No Czech. A part of my work is translation, either poetry for the sake of poetry or something else for the sake of the money (mostly, though sometimes I get to translate something good). I translate from English, Swedish, Norwegian or Danish into Icelandic, and (grammatically) simpler things from German. Most recently I’ve been trying out translating from Icelandic to English.
And thus I sometimes feel strange in my own language, as I feel strange in all other languages around me. I’m an ocean in an archipelago of languages (excuse my metaphorizing). Sometimes I talk swedisms. Or even occasional finnisms (which is weird since I don’t speak Finnish and it’s very far from Icelandic). I say more weirds than words at times. And at times writing becomes interestingly difficult, and at other times it’s irritating – one is easily irritated when not in basic understanding of one’s lingual surroundings, when one starts losing the grip of one’s own tongue.
None of this is helped by reading language-orientated poetry. Bruce Andrews don’t heal this. Nor does Nada Gordon, Anna Hallberg or Jordan Scott. They just make me feel weirder.