Babel No More (39 page)

One note about hands and speaking. Even in monolinguals, scientists have observed that arm movements (and other movements) and spoken language are controlled in the same part of the brain. Graham’s finger-rubbing gesture, which mirrored Ziad Fazah’s odd head-scraping gesture in the Chilean television video, may be more than a gesture. It may also be an
indication that this part of the brain is constantly stimulated.

As lovers of patterns, hyperpolyglots are attached to languages as structures, as well as to memories of encountering those structures. “I can’t imagine not knowing French—it would just be impossible to me. I’ve known French my whole life, it would be such a blank,” Alexander said to me. Cutting languages back because he doesn’t
have time is painful for him once he’s gotten to know and respect them. Hyperpolyglots also know what they can remember and what they can’t—a sort of metamemory about what they’ve known once and what they never have.

“I know whether it’s a word that I have known and have forgotten,” Graham Cansdale said, when I visited him in his Brussels office. He mused for a moment. “‘Rabbit.’ I know that
I have learned the Arabic word for ‘rabbit,’ but I cannot think for the life of me what it is. But ‘crocodile,’ I know that I have never come across that word in Arabic.”

If you want to be skillful at languages, you should find your tribe.

The hyperpolyglot tribe is finding itself and becoming unlost. It’s cohering as a real community online, on blogs and on forums like
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com
. There they can express themselves directly, demanding to be admired because they’ve touched a common thread that runs through languages that, otherwise, wouldn’t be known. One of their gathering places is on YouTube, where more and more people are posting videos of themselves speaking in multiple languages (though whether they’re reciting, reading, or actually speaking fresh lines,
it’s hard to tell). The community there is nascent, but growing. The videos have the tenor of a warrior’s posturing to opponents or perhaps to aspirants. The message is, Here’s the gauntlet you’ll have to run if you want to join this tribe.

Finally, if you want to improve at languages, whatever the method is, stick to the method. Or as Rainer Ganahl puts it, “At a certain point, you have to tolerate the absence of quick success.”

On one of the days on my trip to Bologna, while I was walking down Via Malcontenti, a very unurban shade of blue caught my eye. It was a raft, pulled up next to a canal. In fact, a number of rafts were lined up, crowded with passengers. To float down a canal in the middle of Bologna! The murky brown channel of water, called the Moline, ran through a narrow urban
canyon. Since the canal turned a corner about two hundred meters away and disappeared, I assumed the raft trips would be going under the city itself. I hurried to the join the rafting party and was soon putting on a fire engine–red spelunking helmet, tipped with a hand-crank headlamp, that the passengers wore. Men in hip waders held each raft in place as I approached the canal by scrambling over
railings, rafts, oars, other rafters. About two dozen of us had settled in when some women in my boat snickered; heads turned. Two latecomers clambered into our boat: a young man in jeans and a ratty shirt, and a young woman with long, dark hair, wearing a miniskirt and high heels. Would she puncture the raft climbing across it? Would she topple across
the assembled laps? For every wife who hoped
she would was a husband who hoped so, too.

After our boatman pushed us off, we settled in for a leisurely sail. But the canal narrowed and the speed of our tiny craft increased, and without rudders or oars the boat began to spin. A murmur went up from the rafters. The young man was shouting something at me, pointing at my head.
Attento! Attento!
he cried. I looked over my shoulder to see the
column of a bridge rushing straight at me. I held out a hand to catch the brick and stone and push us away. I smiled at him—thanks. No time for introductions, though. The raft now swung in the other direction. He readied his stick to push us off while his girlfriend smoothed her hair and checked her polished toenails. Behind her, a column on the opposite side of the boat was headed straight for her.
I pulled out my new Italian word:
Attento! Attento!
She ducked and the stone brushed by, as the canal sucked us down.
Grazie,
she said.

Beyond the bridge, the water slowed, and the rafts were tethered in a cluster so that we could hear a short lecture about the waterways of Bologna. Afterward, we resumed our float, and I wondered, what other hidden depths of the city would we be privileged enough
to see? By then I knew the name of Gerolamo, a musician, and Xenia, an economics student.

No sooner did I settle in for a long drift than the rafts were pulled along a landing. Get out, we were ordered. Next to us, the canal poured through a chute opening and fell, who knew how far. Headlamps whirred, their beams fluttered into the dark, the cranking of hand generators swallowed by the roar of
the water disappearing through a grate into the city’s guts. We climbed out of the rafts and shuffled along a corridor, up eight narrow stone steps, nearly as steep as a ladder, the passageway strangely quiet as the sounds of the falling water faded. Were we moving to a higher or lower level? Would we be met by rafts on the other side to continue our journey? The beam of my headlamp stabbed in front
of me. We turned, climbed more stairs. I expected the stairs to turn downward. Why were we still going up? A metal door flashed open. I plunged through it and found myself on some Bolognese street. I pulled off my helmet and saw that the skies were darker and streetlights more yellow than the ones I’d left. We paused to get our bearings. “I’m going to teach you something about your own city,”
I
told Gerolamo and Xenia. Via Malcontenti was nearby, and when we reached the corner with the plaque, I pointed up at it and told them a little about Mezzofanti.

“Wow,” Gerolamo said. “That’s incredible.”

Yes, it’s
incredible,
isn’t it? I thought. Incredible that someone could do what he wanted in so many languages. Incredible that someone could spend his lifetime accumulating more languages
than twenty ordinary people would use in theirs. Incredible that his hometown had done so little to commemorate his passage through this life.

Every morning,
“Buongiorno!”
in the Archiginnasio’s manuscript room had brought new boxes with bona fide treasures: the unpublished manuscript in which Mezzofanti analyzed the Codex Cospi, or the description of Luiseño, written by Pablo Tac, a young student
from Southern California. I found lists of languages. Not one but six of them, scattered among different boxes, undated, untitled, and unusable. Surely they were Mezzofanti’s—they were written in the cardinal’s cramped handwriting that by then was dancing in my dreams. But the lists were inconsistent. One had 24 languages, another 123. They could have been books in his library or poems for the
Accademia Poliglotta
. Two lists didn’t even mention Latin or Italian.

Then, on my last day in the archive, I found something entirely unexpected. There was one final box, what the
inventario
labeled as “miscellaneous.” After days of looking at files and flat pages, I was surprised to see, when I opened the lid, squarish lumps. My heart jumped. I took out a lump. It was a block of paper, about
three inches long and one inch wide on each side, wrapped in dry paper and tied with red waxed string. I untied the string’s tiny knot and peeled back the cover. It contained a stack of thin paper slips, darkened with age. On each slip of paper was written a word with a corresponding word in a different language on the reverse.

Flash cards? Is that was these were? Was this the Holy Grail that
Starchevsky said he’d found?

“It does not appear that the Cardinal possessed any extraordinary secret,” Charles Russell wrote, “or at least that he ever clearly explained to any of his visitors the secret process, if any, which he employed.” Some, like the Russian Starchevsky, ignored this and sought one anyway.

The universe had been smiling on my mission. I had discovered the ponderous reality
of the
massimo poliglotta
’s language learning.

In Mezzofanti’s own time, his methods must have seemed sensibly industrious. Today they dazzle us only by their vigor and persistence. Mezzofanti himself once said that, even as an adult, he learned languages like a schoolboy: writing out words and verb conjugations and memorizing them. He made good use of his time, making it more abundant. He talked
to himself in his languages while he was alone. He read dictionaries, catechisms, vocabularies, and literature of great variety. He sought people to talk to, and he took notes on their conversations. He also translated among his various languages. Labors and games, routines and diversions, he invented or discovered them all. And whatever his method was, he stuck to it. The story of his life said
he’d been rescued from carpentry. If his language life had really been such drudgery, one wonders whether it amounted to a rescue at all.

Discovering hard work is a disappointment if, like Starchevsky, you were looking for Bolognese potions or gnostic formulas. But hard work, a superior ability to switch among languages, and an excellent memory for language don’t disappoint if you have the advantage
of some neuroscience with which to understand it. So what did Starchevsky take home with him? I’m confident that it was nothing,
nada, awan, nashi, niente, niets
—it was linguistic snake oil, the Russian’s attempt to dig up hyperpolyglot relics to sell under his own counterfeit brand.

Most of the flash cards were in Mezzofanti’s hand. The first was labeled as Georgian; the next one, thinner, was
Hungarian. The librarians, as surprised by the discovery as I was, became alarmed at seeing me unpack them all at once to take a photograph and excitedly pantomimed that I could examine only one packet at a time.

The paper was brittle, the string dry, the wax seals of another set of cards crumbling. In all, I counted thirteen packets, all different sizes, for Georgian, Hungarian, Arabic, Turkish,
Persian, Algonquin, Russian, Tagalog, and three unlabeled sets in Arabic writing. Some packets were thin—there were only twenty-two cards in Armenian. But the Russian cards made a stack ten inches thick; Tagalog (though not in Mezzofanti’s handwriting) was three inches thick.

Stack of flash cards from the Mezzofanti archive.

Box of flash cards from the Mezzofanti archive.

One reason that Mezzofanti and people like him are so fascinating is that they seem to have leapfrogged the banality of method. They don’t learn languages; they “pick them up.” They don’t sit down and read lists of words; they absorb them. We hope that the methods are magic, and that if we adopt those methods too, we might achieve great things.
The truth is, Mezzofanti and others haven’t escaped the banality of methods at all; they make the banality more productive. Their minds
enjoy
the banality. The nature of the methods themselves doesn’t seem to matter. Johan Vandewalle told me something that bears repeating: “Whatever the method is,” he said, “stick to the method. That’s the method.”

Think of the polyglot spectacle that Mezzofanti
became: the popes and the cardinals, the poets and the emperors, the Russian princesses, the Texan colonels and the German barons. Then imagine him shuffling home through the quiet arcaded streets, flipping through his Tagalog verbs, and blowing out the candle. It’s difficult to hold these two images together. But this little collage is an instructive reminder: before there was a myth, there was
a man whose pleasure in language never faltered, and because of that pleasure—with no hope of future rewards—he would do what he did, leaving no followers and no intellectual heirs, no students. As certainly as he’d lived, he was gone, leaving us with our fascination and few answers. A miracle? No, a parable.
Parabole
.
Parábola
.
Npumua
.
Līdzība
.
Mfano
.
Ddameg
.