Last week in this column, I addressed the trials and tribulations of bringing up a child to be bilingual — both for parents and children. As anyone who has been down that road knows, it's what Japanese people would call shinan no waza (an arduous task).
Since writing that piece I have read a new book by Mary Besemeres and Anna Wierzbicka. "Translating Lives" (University of Queensland Press, 2007) is a fascinating study — seen through the personal experiences of 12 bilingual people — of the gains, losses, thrills and heartaches of growing up with two or, in some cases, more languages.
Reading these personal histories, which cover tongues as diverse as Korean, Polish and Portuguese, among others, brought home to me how enriching (and often frustrating) the multilingual experience is. Another language is a complex metaphor that covers all emotions and the modes of communicating them. It is not only that we say things differently in another language; we frequently say different things. In other words, we are different people: We have another self; but that self only expresses itself in another language.