I have many times ignited what looked like spontaneous street festivals by hailing groups of people on the sidewalk in the language I heard them speaking. They frequently stop, return the greeting, and then start hobnobbing with the people in my group, leading to laughs, the exchange of addresses, dates for later on, and, I suspect, even more! I’ve never understood the joy of bagging a bird or a deer and watching it fall to the ground. My joy is bagging strangers from other countries with the right greeting in the right language and watching them come to a halt and become old friends at once.
The material payoffs of learning foreign languages are many and predictable, though perhaps a bit surprising in their scope. In early 1990 a friend told me he was looking to fill a job paying $650,000 a year; qualifications: attorney, knowledge of Russian, and willingness to relocate to Moscow. I prefer the psychological payoffs of studying foreign languages – pleasures so keep you could almost call them spiritual.
They joy of a true mathematician escalates as he moves from algebra to trigonometry to calculus. Likewise, the joy of the true language lover escalates as he advances from what I call “Foreign 1” to “Foreign 2.” Foreign 1 is interpreting or translating (interpreters speak, translators write) from your native language to a foreign one. Foreign 2 is doing it from one language that’s foreign to you to another one that’s foreign to you.
You are permitted to feel like Superman when you pull off such a feat. You are not permitted to act like Superman, nor are you permitted to let on that you feel like Superman. You mien should approximate that of a bored New York commuter telling a stranger how many stops there are between Grand Central Station and New Rochelle.
The best Foreign 2 feeling I ever had was interpreting for Finns trying to communicate with Hungarians. Finnish and Hungarian are widely hailed as the most difficult languages in the world. They’re related to each other, but not in any way that’s
helpful or even apparent. There aren’t five words remotely similar in the two languages, and a Hungarian and a Finn can no more understand each other than can a Japanese and a Pole.
I long nurtured a dream of house lights coming up in the theatre. The theatre manager comes to centre stage and says, “Is there a Finnish-Hungarian interpreter in the house?” I wait until he repeats his request louder so that everyone in the theatre will get a load of those qualifications. I then, in the fantasy, grudgingly make my presence and, by implication, my suitability for the assignment known. I rise and approach whatever emergency it is that requires my linguistic talents, while those hundreds of theatre goers gasp at their relative inadequacies.
Something like that actually did light up my life for an evening and then some. I was invited by a well known woman broadcaster to join another couple who had invited her and a guest to a Madison Square Garden horse show. I’d never dated her before. I felt outclassed in the glamour department, and I was uncomfortable as we four wound our way through that upper crust crowd looking for our places.
Suddenly I was spotted by Anna Sosenko, lyricist, writer, theatre producer, and dealer in the memorabilia of show business worldwide and down through the ages. Anna wrote, among other biggies, the song “Darling, Je Vous Aime Beaucoup.”
“Hey, Barry,” Anna yelled out over the crowd from about twenty rows away. “Can you come by my studio next week? I need you to translate some Ibsen!”
Remember what that sudden spinach infusion did for Popeye’s biceps in the animated cartoons? That’s exactly what happened to my standing in the foursome after Anna’s outcry. My date and her friends turned to me. “Ibsen? You translate Ibsen? Where did you learn to translate Ibsen?”
They may very well not have known what language Henrik Ibsen wrote in. Never mind! You don’t have to be absolutely sure which country a prince is a prince of in order to show respect, as long as you’re sure he’s a real prince. Likewise, with Anna Sosenko doing the yelling, everybody was convinced I could bring Ibsen to life in English.

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