Montag: (Q2) How many languages do you speak? What is your language of preference? How much of the poet is in the "she" of "Polyglot?" How does your experience with languages inform the line in "Harvest" (p. 52) which says the immigrants' language "is a low, dark hum."
Benet: In my life, I learned many languages (Hungarian, Romanian, German, French, Russian, English, and Italian). Some by choice, others by necessity. Of those I speak fluently only one now: English. But there was a time when I spoke fluent Hungarian and Romanian. And French. A long, long time ago, I wrote poems in Romanian and French. And, naturally, in Hungarian. I went to a German Kindergarten and had private German lessons, too. When I was 9 years old, I found a book my parents had that was all about the Nazi concentration camps. I was horrified by the pictures, by the images of what I thought back then to be unbelievable cruelty. I told my mother that I no longer wanted to keep learning the "Nazi language" and to my surprise, she let me drop the lessons. It wasn’t until much later that I found out why: she wanted to keep me from finding out that we were Jewish, to spare me having to deal personally with the rampant anti-Semitism that still characterized the culture in which we lived. But back to your question. I learned many languages, but speak few. I speak none without an accent, as if none could be my native tongue. I suppose the poem "Polyglot" is a distillation of my experiences with languages and the necessity of having to learn new ones. As for your question regarding the line in the poem "Harvest" that refers to the "low hum," well, that "hum" is not immigrants' language - it’s the men talking while they work in the fields and the child overhearing it from a distance. If you want to get fancy about it, perhaps you can make a distinction such as the gender gap: men keeping to their tasks in the field (to the sowing and reaping), and the women at the edge, nurturing the men and the children. But that’s reading something into it, when the point in the poem is to merely invoke the image of distances - not to comment on them as such. Montag: (Q3) How is it that you came to write poetry in a language that is not your native tongue? Benet: I write in a language that is not my native tongue because I forgot my native tongue - because I have no native tongue - because English is what I speak now. Continued at BENET INTERVIEW - 3, below
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