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A Memoir of Language, Learning, and Longing
by Polly Barton
For anyone who has ever yearned to master a new language, Fifty Sounds is a visionary personal account and an indispensable resource for learning to think beyond your mother tongue.
"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.
Divided into fifty onomatopoeic Japanese phrases, Fifty Sounds recounts Barton's path to becoming a literary translator fluent in an incredibly difficult vernacular. From "min-min," the sound of air screaming, to "jin-jin," the sound of being touched for the first time, Barton analyzes these and countless other foreign sounds and phrases as a means of reflecting on various cultural attitudes, including the nuances of conformity and the challenges of being an outsider in what many consider a hermetically sealed society.
In 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."
Engaging and penetrating, Fifty Sounds chronicles everything from Barton's most hilarious misinterpretations to her new friends and lovers in Tokyo ―and even the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein's transformative philosophy. A classic in the making in the tradition of Anne Carson and Rachel Cusk, Fifty Sounds is a celebration of the empowering act of learning to communicate in any new language.
"Though Barton gains fluency in the language, she rarely feels anything like comfort within the language or its society...But she's also philosophically fascinated with the relationship between language and identity (she has a few thoughtful and self-deprecating riffs on Wittgenstein) and consistently looks at her experiences in Japan with candid uncertainty. A refreshingly honest and novel look at the nuance and revelatory power of language." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Barton sifts through 15 years of delectable anecdotes—moving through her career from wide-eyed English teacher to literary Japanese translator—in this inventive debut...Filled with linguistic surprises and a quiet intellect, this is sure to delight language learners and literary readers alike." - Publishers Weekly
"Both memoir and cultural study, Fifty Sounds is the record of Barton's attempts to grapple with the Japanese language...Like falling in love itself, the experience of learning Japanese...is intimate, humorous and painful." - Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"The philosophical explorations of linguistics may be esoteric for some readers, but many can relate to Barton's journey of finding her place in the world. Readers who are fascinated by the art of translation or stories about living between cultures will find much to unpack here." - Library Journal
"Witty, exuberant, also melancholy, and crowded with intelligence – Fifty Sounds is so much fun to read. Polly Barton has written an essay that is also an argument that is also a prose poem. Let's call it an oblique adventure story, whose hero is equipped only with high spirits, and a ragtag band of phonemes." - Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch
This information about Fifty Sounds was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Polly Barton grew up in west London and studied philosophy at the University of Cambridge before travelling with the JET Program to teach English in Japan. Her translations include Spring Garden by Tomoko Shibasaki and Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda.
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