The silence of polyglots by Julia Kristeva

Not speaking one's mother tongue. Living with resonances and reasoning that are cut off from the body's nocturnal memory, from the bittersweet slumber of childhood. Bearing within oneself like a secret vault, or like a handicapped child -- cherished and useless -- that language of the past that withers without ever leaving you. You improve your ability with another instrument, as one expresses oneself with algebra or the violin. You can become a virtuoso with this new device that moreover gives you a new body, just as artificial and sublimated -- some say sublime. You have a feeling that the new language is a resurrection: new skin, new sex. But the illusion bursts when you hear, upon listening or a recording, for instance, that the melody of your voice comes back to you as a peculiar sound, out of nowhere, close to the old spluttering than to today's code. Your awkwardness has its charm, they say, it is even erotic, according to womenizers, not to be outdone. No one points out your mistakes, so as not to hurt your feelings, and then there are so many, and after all they don't give a damn. One nevertheless lets you know that it is irritating just the same. Occasionally, raising the eye-brows or saying "I beg your pardon?" in quick succession lead you to understand that you will "never be a part of it", that is "is not worth it", that there, at least, one is "not taken in". Being fooled is not what happens to you either. At the most, you are willing to go along, ready for all paprenticeships, at all ages, in order to reach -- within that speech of others, imagined as being perfectly assimilated, some day -- who knows what ideal, beyond the implicit acknowledgment of a disappointment caused by the origin that did not keep its promise.
Thus, between two languages, your realm is silence. By dint of saying things in various ways, one just as trite as the other, just as approximate, one ends up no longer saying them. An internationally known scholar was ironical about his famous polyglotism, saying that he spoke Russian in fifteen languages. As for me I had the feeling that he rejected speech and his slack silence led him, at times, to sing and give rhythm to chanted poems, just in order to say something.
When Holderlin became absorbed by Greek (before going back to the sources of German), he dramatically expressed the anesthesia of the persona that is snatched up by a foreign language: "A sign, such are we, and of no meaning / Dead to all suffering, and we have almost / Lost our language in a foreign land" (Mnemosyne).
Stuck within that polymorphic mutism, the foreigner can, instead of saying, attempt doing -- house-cleaning, playing tennis, soccer, sailing, sewing, horseback riding, jogging, getting pregnant, what have you. It reminds an expenditure, it expends, and it propagates silence even more. Who listens to you? At the most, you are being tolerated. Anyway, do you really want to speak?
Why then did you cut off the maternal source of words? What did you dream up concerning those new people you spoke to in an artificial language, a prosthesis? From your standpoint, were they idealized or scorned? Come, now! Silence has not only been forced upon you, it is within you: a refusal to speak, a fitful sleep riven to an anguish that wants to remain mute, the private property of your proud and mortified discretion, that silence is a harsh light. Nothing to say, nothingness, no one on the horizon. An impervious fullness: cold diamond, secret treasury, carefully protected, out of reach. Saying nothing, nothing needs to be said, nothing can be said. At first, it was a cold war with those of the new idiom, deired and rejecting; then the new language covered you as might a slow tide, a neap tide. It is not the silence of anger that jostles words at the edge of the idea and the mouth; rather, it is the silence that empties the minds and fills the brain with despondency, like the gaze of sorrowful women coiled up in some non-existant eternity.