January 21, 2011
A few years ago I read Budapest: A Novel, by the renowned Brazilian musician Chico Buarque. The story of a man who falls in love with Magyar—and its proxy in the form of a seductive tutor, Kriska—the novel contains scant information about Budapest. But it is original in its depiction of a Brazilian who wants a new identity and to fashion it in a language unrelated to his origins. The adventure begins when Jose, a ghostwriter on his way back to Rio from a conference in Istanbul, must disembark in Budapest because of a terrorism scare. Like another novel about selfhood and language—the allegorical Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy, where the conference-bound narrator gets on the wrong flight and winds up in some Babel that may also be Budapest—the opacity of the language overwhelms him. Then bewilderment becomes infatuation.
Is it an exaggeration to say that a second language can provide us with a new self? Read more...