Excerpt from Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Other versions of this scene: My sister admits to feeling annoyed by the language of poetry, which strikes her as nonsensical and therefore vaguely offensive. A young student of poetry writes, "Whenever I read a modern poem, it's like my brother has his foot on the back of my neck in the swimming pool."

It seems that once we've plaited the sounds of language together with messages and intentions, we can no longer live in language's liquid, musical state. We can't tolerate it when meaning is withheld from us.

As infants, we're able to float underwater without drawing water into our lungs, but when we outgrow the bradycardic reflex, being tossed into water leaves us sputtering, gasping, feeling that we're drowning. This is the sputtering I see in the man in the library, in my sister's hostility toward poetry. The need to shake off the foot on the back of the neck.

There are psychologists who study the threat we feel at the unraveling of meaning. A threat to meaning, they say, can come at us from any direction: nonsensical strings of words; a surreal painting that bends the laws of reality; a reminder of our own mortality. Any of these can leave us feeling unsettled and disoriented. These scholars say we are driven to maintain meaning at all costs; when meaning frays, we use whatever is at hand to restore a sense of order. Sometimes, we reach for traditions and codes of conduct, or take refuge in what we presume is a shared identity. (Reading a story by Kafka, for example, has made some study volunteers more willing to punish a woman charged with illegal prostitution; thinking about death has provoked others to support nationalist groups.)

Perhaps our language teachers are right to control the drip of a foreign language. Maybe it's true that we would drown in a fast-moving current of meaningless sound.

But it occurs to me that incomprehensible language carries within itself the seeds of its own restoration. When meaning frays, there is always that other thread that runs, intact and orderly, through language. It's there in the rhythms and regularities of syllables, stressed or unstressed, and in the rules of the tango between vowels and consonants. We can feel these rhythms in our bodies, recognize their patterns and motifs, repetition and departure. In poetry, these cadences are mastered and shaped by the most skillful of human songbirds. The poets among us are the ones who know the most songs and who sing the most intricate melodies. If we listen to their poems as birds might, relieved of our preoccupation with message, we may hear the beloved music of our language on display, intensified, toyed with, subverted, stretched taut to its quivering point. Poetry is what makes the language sing: Here I am. Know me.

Perhaps my repeated immersion into new languages, which extended into conscious memory, tamed for me the threats of meaningless language. As a child, I listened to Czech, then German and Italian, then French and its bossy sibling, English, with ear cocked like a little bird learning the songs of its relatives, whether adoptive or not. On the kindergarten rug, I remember belting out songs whose words had not yet clumped into solid shapes, but this made the songs no less joyful to sing. Back then, language offered itself as laden with astonishments, discoveries not yet made. Some of these discoveries were as unsettling as gargantuan rabbits. But they came cradled on the rhythms of a familiar, beloved language-music, and this felt like protection enough.

I still seek out this sensation of language.

In my life right now, there is a family from Syria I have come to love. Their Arabic speech is a boiling stream around me. Occasionally, I consult a program on my computer to retrieve useful bricks of their language. But mostly, I want to prolong this feeling of bobbing around in Arabic, letting my ear become attuned to its patterns. I want Arabic to be poetry before it becomes weighed down with meaning.

Excerpted from Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy. Copyright © 2024 by Julie Sedivy. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.