Dear Readers,
Last month I wrote a substantial essay and promised to continue doing so from now on. I made that public promise in the hopes of a) forcing myself to write more in that vein, and b) demonstrating the efficacy of making such a vow in order to keep one's resolve. This month, instead of b), I stand as an example of c) namely how the unexpected can derail even the firmest of intentions. I had to spend most of April watching my father die, so for this month’s newsletter, I offer:
Portraits in Polyliteracy – Ivan Arguelles (1939-2024): 85 Years of Language Learning
My father spent all too much time in the hospital over the last three years of his life. No matter how sick he was, he always kept a stack of half a dozen books by him, books such as Homer, Virgil, Dante, and the Dhammapada, all in the original languages, with grammars like X An Introduction to Pali as well. The staff always marveled to have someone in his condition reading anything, let alone such “difficult” books. The truth of the matter though is that far from experiencing the reading of such books as “difficult,” he had long since discovered the secret of transforming the expenditure of effort into learning and using languages into a source of energy instead.
My father got a head start in language learning since he was raised speaking not only English, but also Spanish (by his parents) and/or German (by his grandparents) at various stages during his boyhood. The first language he studied was Latin, which he began at the age of 14 when he entered 9th grade. He immediately fell in love with it and found it easy and fascinating due to its obvious relationship with Spanish. At this same time in his life, he and his identical twin brother, feeling that their father was pushing them to compete with each other in their many fields of interest, decided to divide them up so as to avoid this cause of strife between them. My uncle, who must have had any and all of the same “language genes” as my father, gave up languages and literature and true to his word never developed any facility with tongues despite having an international career. Meanwhile my father gave up drawing and playing the piano as he entered adolescence and instead used grammars such as those in the Teach Yourself series to teach himself other Romance languages such as Italian and Romanian.
My father majored in classics at the University of Chicago, beginning the study not just of Greek but also of Sanskrit there. He began graduate school in classics as well, but soon switched to library science instead. Thereafter, as a cataloger of Romance languages first at the New York Public Library, then at the University of California, Berkeley, for the next forty hears he was able to continue working with and expanding his knowledge of the entire Romance branch of languages by keeping abreast of publications in them. Italian was always a particular love of his (he lived and taught there when I was a toddler), but he has a diachronic reading knowledge of every manifestation of this branch.
Until his early 30’s, my father aspired to learn more exotic languages and so explored Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Persian, and Hindi. He kept these last two on simmer for years, occasionally dipping further into them, but refrained from learning more languages for decades so that he could spend his time reading literature in those he knew already, and then putting the images and references from the texts he read into his own poems, for his true vocation in life was poet.
At age 61, he took early retirement, in part in order to turn himself into an Indologist, and over the past twenty-four years he has developed his abilities to read both classic texts and modern novels not only in Sanskrit, Hindi, and Bengali, but in half a dozen other Indic languages. He also studied some Tamil and other Dravidian languages, but not to the point of being able to read them.
The list of languages that he knows well enough to read literature in them for pleasure includes:
A) The entire Romance branch of the Indo-European language family (Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, Provencal, Catalan, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian); medieval languages (Occitan, Old French); and dialectical variants of Rhaeto-Romance, Ladino, Corsican, Sicilian...
B) Diachronic Greek (Homeric, Attic, Koine, Byzantine, Modern), which he has always said also simply “feels” like a Romance language though he knows that it is not.
C) Major members of the Indic branch (Sanskrit, Pali, Awadhi, Braj Bahasa, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Marathi, Sinhala, Nepali). In addition, he can decipher Germanic languages (German, Dutch, Swedish) used as reference languages, but not read them for pleasure.
The main technique he has used to learn languages has been to read aloud, both textbooks (he favors grammar translation methods), and then literature thereafter. He has never made use of pedagogic audio materials or even of written exercises. In understanding his method, more important than technique is his overarching conceptual framework of learning entire the entire Romance branch and at least most major members of the Indic branch of languages. In this fashion, each language complements the others and the ensemble weaves a tapestry that is the whole diachronic branch.
Not only in his language learning, but even more so in his use of languages for reading literature, my father was my role model for polyliteracy.
With best regards,
Alexander Arguelles
