L2 Journal, Volume 4 (2012), pp. 214-229 http://repositories.cdlib.

org/uccllt/l2/vol4/iss2/art2/

The Gift: Synesthesia in Translingual Texts

NATASHA LVOVICH

Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York

E-mail: [email protected]

This interdisciplinary article explores the relationship between multilingualism and synesthesia (neuro-
psychological blend of senses) using textual data from several translingual authors—writers who write
in their non-native language (L2). I briefly summarize the existing research on synesthesia, primarily
its relationship to language, cognition, and emotionality, and share my own multilingual synesthetic
perceptions exemplified in my published work. I theorize that ‘translingual synesthesia’ is a complex
cross-modal metaphor and a spontaneous imagistic ‘device,’ possibly enhanced by or concurrent with
multilingualism, which allows writers to transcend cognitive and linguistic realms and to embody L2
with personal imagery while simultaneously creating an aesthetic effect of “de-familiarization of the
word.” Applied to language learning and teaching, synesthesia lends a view into learners’ diverse
subjectivities and their lingua-cultural and lingua-emotional dispositions, which can be modeled by
language teachers.

_______________

“A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles,

Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes:
A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes
Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles…”

—Arthur Rimbaud, Voyelles (1973, p. 78)

“HOW DID IT BEGIN WITH YOU?”

In his novel, The Gift (1991), one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, the multilingual
Vladmir Nabokov, describes his synesthesia in the following dialogue:

How did it begin with you?

- When my eyes opened to the alphabet. Sorry, that sounds pretentious, but the fact is,
since childhood I have been afflicted with the most intense audition colorée.
So that you too, like Rimbaud, could have—
- Written not a mere sonnet but a fat opus, with auditive hues he never dreamt of. For
instance, the various numerous ‘a’s of the four languages which I speak differ for me in
tinge, going from lacquered-black to splinter-gray—like different sorts of wood. I
recommend to you my pink flannel ‘m’. I don’t know if you remember the insulating
cotton wool which was removed with the storm windows in spring? Well, that is my

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Russian ‘y’, or rather ‘ugh’, so grubby and dull that words are ashamed to begin with it…
(p. 74)

These evocative and nostalgically tainted lines do sound elaborate and pretentious—and
indeed excessively tedious for an unenlightened reader, who might attribute that fictional
conversation to one of those Nabokovian “delights of stereolinguistic and visual
stereoscopy” (Beaujour, 1989, p. 102). While Nabokov’s “recommendations” of his
“auditive hues,” especially of his “pink flannel ‘m’”, might be interpreted as a literary device,
I must admit that the above-quoted dialogue did not sound figurative, literary, or un-
authentic to me. The fact of the matter is that Nabokov expressed the ‘reality’ of my mind as
well: only his colors were all “wrong!”
In 1994, in the process of writing my doctoral dissertation, a collection of
autobiographical narratives of a language learner combined with Second Language
Acquisition theories, I discovered a word to call my life-long inner experiences, similar to
Nabokov’s: Synesthesia. In line with this paper’s discussion, I undoubtedly owe this
revelation to my own “gift for tongues” and to what might be called the multilingual
advantage, which allowed for this “out-of-body experience.” Once, in a casual conversation
with a friend, also a linguist and a remarkable erudite, I tentatively mentioned, sounding to
myself like a lunatic, that my A is magenta, B is bright blue, and number ‘two’ (2) is green—
that my words, letters of the alphabet (or sounds), and numbers are colored…I was prepared
to be laughed at, but instead I was directed to my former compatriot Vladimir Nabokov’s
memoir, Speak Memory (1989).
Reading and re-reading Nabokov’s novels and studying his introspective account of
synesthesia led to several transformative intellectual and personal affinities in my life: one of
them was the discovery of Elizabeth Beaujour’s Alien Tongues (1989), both the book and the
person, which marked the beginning of my emerging interest in translingual literature.
Another was a pressing need to investigate my own synesthesia and an intuitive belief that
there may be a connection between my colored perception of language and multilingualism,
in one way or another. So, from Nabokov and Beaujour I dug into Barton Johnson’s
Synesthesia, Polychromatism, and Nabokov (1974), which in turn took me to Alexander Luria’s
Mind of a Mnemonist (1968) and to Oliver Sacks’s essays on unusual neurological conditions,
Anthropologist on Mars (1995). Sacks led to neuroscientist Richard Cytowic’s The Man Who
Tasted Shapes (1998) and to historian Kevin Dann’s Bright Colors Falsely Seen (1998). The
synesthesia quest culminated with the discovery of a group of people, my fellow synesthetes,
who took their colors of the days of the week so seriously that they founded The American
Synesthesia Association1 and I have been a member ever since.
Like with Nabokov, “it began” with me “when my eyes opened to the alphabet (1991, p.
74),” but I became aware of synesthesia, of the term and the phenomenon, and of its
omnipresence in my life in languages during my adulthood —from tentative conversations
described above to epiphanies like this one, in my second year of immigration during a
teaching contract in Canada:

I thought everybody knew what I meant when I said in Russian six is yellow (shest’), but
my Canadian students whom I was teaching Russian in a “crash course” did not seem to
understand. They looked at each other, perplexed: what a crazy teacher they had! She did
not know how to drive, she spent her life reading, and she firmly stated that six is yellow.
I guess they referred that one more oddness to the general “exoticism” I represented for

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them and never took this weird idea seriously. Only much later I realized that my color
associations did not necessarily coincide with other people’s, and that for the most part
people don’t think in colored words at all, like I do. Once, driving among canola fields all
covered with bright yellow flowers with one of my Canadian cowboys, I heard him
saying, “Look, Russian six is growing! (Lvovich, 1997, p. 11)

As in the case of Nabokov, my numbers/letters/phonemes are colored, varying in hues,

textures, and spatial characteristics in every language I speak, producing images with an
emotional undertone. Thinking of a particular word makes me spontaneously visualize a
colorful image (completely unrelated to its semantics), like this one: “In English, six is
whitish, fuzzy, dull glass; in French creamy in color and substance. In French, Lundi is pale
wax pink; in Russian, Ponedel’nik is grayish and dull, and Monday is in orange-red-brown
gamma” (1997, p. 12). Working on my dissertation, later published as a book of personal
essays, The Multilingual Self (1997), it became clear to me that synesthesia played an especially
palpable role in what is commonly called a “talent for languages” –language aptitude—
serving the function of a natural and individually crafted mnemonic device, an idiosyncratic
tool to store and retrieve words. In the chapter, Confessions of a Synesthete, I am attempting to
articulate my conjectures:

The colored images accompanying my…language learning must have facilitated the
language acquisition, “sensorily” providing extra support to this creative process.
Memory, among other mental activities, is the obviously affected area since the
synesthetic ability could be used as a mnemonic device. I figured that out long ago, long
before I learned the word synesthesia. This capacity to recall words thinking of their color
or imagining them pending in the air, while examining their shape, smoothness, position
in space, or feel at touch I termed “good visual memory.”…For example, I recently
learned the word, resilient: a brownie with a cutting silver edge. Its sensory image will call
for the word. The semantic meaning, like in my dreams, seems to be living its own life
and is not really connected to the image of the word form. (1997, pp. 13-14)

I attended annual American Synesthesia Association conferences and meetings, I

networked with scientists and researchers from various disciplines, and I read their work,
while continuing my own scholarly and creative pursuits. Over the course of more than a
decade I started nursing ideas on the relationship between synesthesia and multilingualism
and to lay some tentative ground for theorizing these conjectures.

WHAT IS SYNESTHESIA?

Synesthesia is a highly idiosyncratic neuro-psychological phenomenon defined as a blend of

senses, which could be displayed in a variety of cross-sensory combinations: depending on
the specific senses involved, synesthetes “taste” shapes, or “see” music, or attribute color to
personalities, to name just a few examples. The synesthetic perception described by
Nabokov (1991) of a “pink flannel ‘m’’ or my “yellow six” is perhaps the most common
synesthetic case called color-lexical synesthesia (grapheme/phoneme/digital)—and it is the one
that most directly relates to language. According to the latest estimate by San Diego’s Center
for the Study of the Brain and Cognition, color-lexical synesthesia’ s incidence is one in 200
people (Ramachandran, 2003).

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Although the phenomenon has been known for centuries, it was first mentioned by the
nineteen century scientist Sir Francis Galton (Duffy, 2001, p. 25), then glorified by French
symbolists, proclaimed as “the spiritual in art” by Wassily Kandinsky (1977), and finally it is
in the last two decades or so that synesthesia has been studied by neuroscientists and has
become a cutting-edge research topic. Using functional MRI and experimental methods,
neuroscientists have found that synesthesia is not a “nebulous” poetic or mystical apparition
but a consistently experienced life-long perception—hypothetically the effect of cross-wiring
in the brain. More specifically, color-lexical synesthesia may be the result of cross-activation
between the areas of the brain processing language and those processing color (see, for ex.,
Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001).
Fascinating studies of types and individual features of synesthesia have been proliferating
in research centers and universities throughout the world; I will mention here only a few
relevant areas. Developmental psychologists point to the role of neonatal synesthesia during
brain maturation in infancy, when senses begin to separate from “the sensory soup” (Van
Campen, 2008, p. 30) in the process of “pruning” (Maurer & Maurer, 1988, Maurer &
Mondloch, 2004). Studies in genetics (see, for ex., Baron-Cohen et al., 1996) indicate that
synesthesia is hereditary, as in Nabokov’s case. New ideas on synesthesia and creativity in art
and music, in multi-media and computer technology and in many other fields have been
multiplying, and multi- and inter-disciplinary research involving synesthesia is growing. The
unanimous consensus is that although neuro-psychological synesthesia is an endowment of
only a few, it is an invaluable window into complex workings of the human mind (see, e.g.,
Cytowic, 2002, Cytowic & Eagleman, 2009).
In the absence of studies and literature focusing directly on the relationship between
synesthesia and multilingualism/second language acquisition, there is little, if any,
understanding of synesthesia as a psycho-linguistic phenomenon. I have recently come
across a citation to my book, The Multilingual Self (1997), where my synesthesia has been
called “increased synesthesia” (Tokuhama-Espinoza, 2000, pp. 92-93)—clearly, an
oxymoron—presented as some conscious mental manipulation in which multilinguals like
me “assign color” to words (ibid). The author then poses a question as to whether or not
this mnemonic device comes naturally with multilingualism or must develop as an “aid.” While I
am grateful for some attention to the issue from the L2 profession, it is my sincere hope that
the “stained glass”2 of synesthetic perception will allow for a rich, simultaneously broad and
subjective, view of the multilingual mind. Textual data from translingual writers and their
explicit descriptions and insights on synesthesia, from their autobiographical accounts as well
as from other genres, appear to be the only available data and resource, at this point. I will
complement these resources with my own synesthetic history, as a multilingual and a writer,
and use the experiential/heuristic methods to explore these phenomena from the inside and
outside, for synesthesia is an inalienable part of my “multilingual self.”

BEYOND MNEMONICS: SYNESTHESIA AS PERSONAL CODING FOR

LANGUAGE PROCESSING

My discussion of synesthesia will be undoubtedly dominated by the “czar” of translingual

writing, Vladimir Nabokov—not only because of his synesthetic “Gift” and his imaginative
work with language(s), but also thanks to his genius of intro- and retro-spection and to his
keen scientific mind as an entomologist/lepidopterist, who observed, collected, classified,
and analyzed data. Along with his butterfly collection and his work as a phenomenologist

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and a natural scientist, Nabokov described and analyzed his own mental workings: eideticism
(rare “photographic” or sensorial memory), dreamwork, and other (para)psychological
phenomena he experienced, including synesthesia. Growing up multilingual—English,
Russian, and French—was a natural part of his experiences embedded in his mental life, and
his multilingualism is omnipresent in his autobiographical narrative and his fiction, whether
in creative or in analytical form. Akin to his butterfly classification, here is how he
describes/classifies his ‘translingual synesthesia’ in Speak Memory (1989):

…a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group [of letters] also includes hard g
(vulcanized rubber) and y (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the
ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites. I am puzzled by my French on
which I see as the brimming tension-surface of alcohol in a small glass. Passing on to the
blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k. Since a subtle
interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the
light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl… m is a fold of pink
flannel… (p. 34)

In this and other descriptions of his synesthesia, Nabokov the writer uses personable
and emotionally imbued images, such as ‘y’ as “sooty rag,” “I am puzzled by my French
‘on’” and the “fold of pink flannel” as ‘m’. At the same time, Nabokov the scientist
systematically classifies and organizes his synesthesia, by color groups and languages. In his
memoir, he also emphasizes that his synesthetic images are differentiated by letter shapes
and capital versus lower case letters and explains how Russian letters representing the same
sound as English or French ones are of “duller tone,” for example the Russian II is
described as “gouache” green while the Latin ‘p’ is “unripe apple’ green (p. 35).
To this he adds an account of his first synesthetic “aha” moment when, as a child, he
was playing with alphabet blocks and declared that the colors of the letters were all
“wrong”—a statement familiar to every synesthete—which led to his mother’s
acknowledgement of her own synesthesia (Nabokov, 1989, p. 35). Nabokov implies that his
synesthesia may be hereditary, but he also makes a connection to his learning environment
and emphasizes that his mother validated and encouraged his sensory experiences and
exposed him, from his early childhood, to various visually creative activities, such as playing
with her jewelry and painting (Nabokov, 1989, p. 36).3
All that being said, Nabokov himself did not overtly discuss the relationship between his
synesthesia and his linguistic development or his memory processes. However, in the
Russian version of his memoir, Drugie Berega (1954), he classified his synesthetic perceptions
of letters as a rainbow system corresponding to the colors of his Russian alphabet, for which
he coined his own acronym, BËEIICK3 (B is red, Ë orange etc.), and in Speak Memory (1989)
its parallel in English letters/colors is KZSPYGV. In his analysis of Nabokov’s synesthesia,
Johnson concludes that, just like in nature there are two kinds of rainbows, the primary and
the secondary, Nabokov’s rainbow acronyms represent mirror images of each other, with the
Russian rainbow symbolically representing his primary literary creation and the English
one—his secondary (Johnson, 1974, p. 94). That hermetic, almost cabbalistic view of the
workings of his bilingual mind point to the significance the writer attributed to synesthesia in
his linguistic and creative performance.
Nabokov’s insights into the colors of his languages are echoed by other bilingual
synesthetes. Alexander Luria’s subject, the multilingual mnemonist Solomon Shereshevsky

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speaks about the Yiddish word ‘mutter’ as producing “an image of a dark brown sack with
folds, hanging in a vertical position” (Luria, 1968, p. 89); Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant
and a polyglot, “Born on a Blue Day,” describes his synesthetic images as directly related to
his “gift of tongues,” (2006), and Pat Duffy, the U.N. Language Program teacher and writer,
herself a synesthete, reports several accounts of language learners who use synesthetic
images for learning or translating (2005). She describes, for example, the visual-kinetic
experience of Laurent Schlemmer, a journalist and a translator: “Whenever I translate a
sentence from French into German…I inwardly see the sentence and also fly above it with
the verb that has to move to accomplish the translation.” (p. 17). A surprisingly similar
experience involving the connotation of this German structure is echoed in Claire Kramsch’s
report of a multilingual student (“…because of the verb at the end…it just has this beauty in
it…” (2009, p. 38), as well as of a few others who perceived “sound shapes” (Jakobson &
Waugh, 1987) of their foreign languages with “emotional entanglement” (Kramsch, 2009, p.
37).
Curiously and by all means not coincidentally, these highly emotional synesthetic images
of language have been used by bilinguals who are not necessarily writers, in texts that may
not be considered literary or poetic. Regardless of the type or degree of strength of these
individuals’ synesthesia, these examples demonstrate their awareness of synesthetic imagery
as a way to process, memorize, and recall language, as a cognitive tool or a mnemonic
method used for various language-related tasks. However, if psychological synesthesia can be
considered a tool or a method, it is not a tool consciously used, but perhaps a mental call for
a heightened awareness of what is already there, the software of the hard-wired synesthetic
mind.
Although synesthesia’s role as a mnemonic tool appears obvious, its significance for
language processing definitely surpasses mnemonics in complexity, going beyond the role of
“memory aid.” During creative mental processes exemplified above, synesthetes’ minds
spontaneously create colored (and colorful) personal imagery in the form of elaborate
synesthetic metaphors that Duffy calls “personal coding” (2005). Most importantly, she goes
on to ask the following question: If a few individuals code language with personal imagery,
how do all human beings code language? After all, as Raymond Wheeler and Thomas
Cutsforth note, “…There is no such thing as image-less, sensation-less meaning…” (as cited
in Duffy, 2005, p. 43).

SYNESTHESIA, METAPHOR, AND TRANSLINGUAL CREATIVITY

We often forget that synesthetic metaphors are commonly used in every day language to
describe sensations via cross-modal associations, for example, sharp cheese, velvety voice, or
white noise. Cross-modal metaphors are not eyebrow raisers; somehow they make perfect
sense to us. Most recently, the study of neurological color-lexical synesthesia has revealed its
links to language processing in significant ways and paved the way for our understanding of
why it is so. Via his study of synethesia, the neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran (2003)
hypothesized that cross-sensory synesthetic connections are universal, which led him to
believe that there might be a neurological basis for emergence of abstract conceptualization
and metaphoric language.
He replicated an experiment first performed in the 1920s by investigating a possible link
between visual patterns and word sounds and showed his subjects (non-synesthetes) two
visual shapes, one smooth and rounded and another sharp and angular calling them ‘booba’

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and ‘kiki’ (see Appendix). When he asked subjects which one was ‘booba’ and which one
was ‘kiki’, the overwhelming majority assigned the rounded shape to ‘booba’ and the angular
shape to ‘kiki’. Therefore, they connected the visually sharp inflexion with the sound, as the
brain performed a cross-modal abstraction. Ramachandran hypothesized further that this
connection may be related to motor and facial functions (pronunciation) and concluded that
the brain’s perception of the sharpness of the sound and the sharpness of the shape could be
at the origin of abstract thinking and language (2003).
Another highly regarded researcher of synesthesia, Lawrence Marks, and his team at Yale
University, make a similar conjecture about the visual and auditory correspondences found
in synesthetes and non-synesthetes (Martino & Marks, 2001). He points to the theory of
phonetic symbolism (that suggests that the sounds of speech have meaning) and concludes
that in some sense, we are all synesthetes, for we share a universal foundation for meaning
making, abstraction, and encoding language, and that synesthetic metaphor creates these
correspondences (Martino & Marks, 2001).
If synesthetic metaphor is indeed paleo-linguistically universal, then its idiosyncratic
function in cognition, thinking, learning, and writing is especially significant for creative
process, in particular creative writing in L2.
In that vein, it is important to make a distinction between what is called ‘literary
synesthesia,’ used as a literary device, and synesthesia proper, called ‘psychological
synesthesia,’ or ‘neuro-psychological synesthesia’, specifically color-lexical synesthesia (or
chromesthesia) exemplified by Nabokov, a spontaneously occurring mental phenomenon.
While this distinction seems clearly delineated, it may be more fluid when we consider
linguistic creativity.
For example, in Bend Sinister (1973), Nabokov makes a synesthetic claim on behalf of his
protagonist, Krug, who “…mentioned once that the word ‘loyalty’ phonetically and visually
reminded him of a golden fork lying in the sun on a smooth spread of pale yellow silk…” (p.
87). Since we already know for a fact that Nabokov was a natural (sometimes called
‘congenital’) synesthete, we can assume that these images are the ones that Nabokov
experienced “neurologically,” in his mind’s eye. However, we can only speculate about how
the visual sensory pictures were rendered into language, the writer’s L2, and how they were
transformed into layered alliterations designed to evoke in the context of the novel a
positive, trustworthy feeling about an old reliable friend (Maximov), honest but simple and
stiff, whose own definition of loyalty, by contrast, “…was limited to its dictionary
denotation” (p. 87).
In his unique piece on Nabokov’s synesthesia (1974), Barton Johnson (1974) theorizes
that Nabokov used his psychological synesthesia in his creative writing rather rarely—and
instead he emphasizes the writer’s use of polychromatism (the usage of sensory images), of
which his literary synesthesia was a part. He further states that Nabokov’s innate
psychological synesthesia may be a cognitive tool for the expansion of his creativity, all of
which is closely related to his other gifts, which fed into it, such as his exceptional eidetic
memory. Deeply preoccupied with the subject of memory and introspection, Nabokov
himself thought of his synesthesia as a central mechanism and the genesis of his creative
imagination, as it is reflected in the title of Nabokov’s novel, The Gift (1991).
Transcending senses in the imagistic play with language, translingual writers are also
transcending languages. Parallel to the awareness and synchronic use of sensory options,
Nabokov’s unique use of language, his “stereolinguistically “meshed world” and “word golf”

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is described by Beaujour (1989) as “polyglot synthesis”: “Nabokov’s great advantage was his
bilingual’s awareness of option and his sensitivity to the potential for de-familiarization
provided by even the slightest variants in levels of usage and vocabulary” (p. 105). She
speculates further that Nabokov’s “psychological synesthesia…may be heightened by
bilingualism” (p. 103) and attributes it to the principle of “dual coding” approach to
language and cognition—an image system and a verbal system—and its three-store bilingual
version: one store for conceptual representations and knowledge of the world, the “image
system,” and a “verbal system” for each language (Paradis, 1981, as cited in Grosjean, 1984).
This hypothesized three-store system organizes the information “in a synchronous or spatial
manner, combining visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and other sensory components of nonverbal
information into integrated wholes so that different components of a complex thing or scene
are available at the same time in memory” (Beaujour, 1989, p. 21). Echoing Paradis (1981),
Beaujour adds that the bilingual model might be more complex, that there may be parts of
the linguistic system beyond the level of meaning which may be “blended, subordinated, or
coexist in various proportions” (p. 22)—some sort of multi-layered geology in which
languages, images, and senses form what Nabokov called “the foam of the brain-wave,” the
metaphor of the distance traveled from thought to words (Nabokov, 1973).
Data from recent neurolinguistic research on mental representation of language in
bilinguals certainly reflects this subjective complexity. In her comprehensive review of
several neuroimaging and behavioral studies and representational models, Ellen Bialystock
(2001, p. 103) warns against “simple dichotomies” of mental representation of language in
bilinguals, specifically regarding the relation between the languages and the meaning system.
Her discussion of several models of the “three-store” solution, with variations in subsets
(independent vs. integrated lexicons and separate vs. combined representations) includes an
important one by Kroll and her colleagues (as cited in Bialystock 2001, p. 102), which
proposes that lexical representations for two languages are independent, but conceptual
systems are shared, with the first language functioning as a mediator that diminishes with
increased L2 fluency. Given the shortcomings of available research methods and the
diversity of individual variables, types of bilinguals, levels of language proficiency, and so on,
Bialystock emphasizes the significance of multidimensional models and not “simple
dichotomies” (two languages, one semantic system) and suggests that “multiple
arrangements can even coexist in the mind of an individual speaker” (p. 103).
This underlying idea of “multiple arrangements,” reflecting layers, blends, and geology
that transpire through Beaujour’s (1989) analysis of translingual writing and through the
voices of L2 writers themselves, finds a similar reflection in the ‘blended space theory’
advanced by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2002) which sees the conceptual mind
naturally working as a metaphor, with mental spaces from different strata (for example,
moral and political) blending and merging. For bilinguals, these concepts may come from
different lingua-cultural, social, historical, interactional, and personal scripts, with new
conceptual structures emerging as a result of this blending, forging networks and blended
spaces to signify new, idiosyncratically connotated and embodied realities in L2. Translingual
synesthesia—not coincidentally a metaphor—may be a cognitive path to a blended space or
the blended space itself—the system of ‘personal coding’ for language (see p. 6). Although
we will never know for sure, it is possible that for Nabokov the path for embracing ‘loyalty’
in English lay via the word’s synesthetic perception: an image of a mythical un-attainable
‘golden fleece’ shining on the elegant royal silk—several archetypal scripts from childhood
stories and fairytales blending into a vision of friendly, human, and “humane America”

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(Nabokov, 1989, p. 38) and of the world. To validate these and similar speculations about
language, thought, and creativity in synesthetic bilingual minds, more research using
experimental and qualitative methods is needed in cognitive and neuro-science.

SYNESTHESIA AND LANGUAGE EMOTIONALITY:

FAMILIARIZATION/DE-FAMILIARIZATION

Situated in the blended liminal space—that we will tentatively call translingual writers’
interlinguality (Zoric, 2010)—is the linguistic form itself whose effect is often poise,
“oddness,” “foreignness,” “over-correctness,” or the feeling of somewhat archaic use of
language4. In her elaborate discussion of Nabokov’s language, Beaujour (1989) makes a
crucial correction: it is not the “foreignness” but his bilingualism, the conscious usage of his
multiple linguistic repertoire that creates the stylistic effect we call Nabokovese, with the
twists, the neologisms, the alliterations, the arresting seemingly incompatible vocabulary
combinations, the transplantations of (Russian) wordings and of morphology, the bilingual
puns, often in heavily loaded cultural context (p. 105). See for example the following line
from Bend Sinister (1973): “Yes, of course—how stupid of me,” thought Krug, the circle in
Krug, one Krug in another one” (p. 39) [‘krug’ means ‘circle’ in Russian]. Artistic/linguistic
code-switching in Nabokov’s texts is often accompanied by sensory code-switching: “The
car vanished while the square echo of its slammed door was still suspended in mid-air like an
empty picture frame of ebony” (p. 60).
What is the nature of this creative perceptual-polyglot practice? Given that writing is by
definition a deeply emotional and creative process, writers who make a choice to write in
their non-native language are often, quite paradoxically, motivated—and not restrained—by
the emotional estrangement and liberation that the “step-mother tongue” provides. Some
unconsciously shy away from political trauma, like the National Book Award laureate Jerzy
Kosinski, who, as a child, got separated from his family in Nazi occupied Poland and
eventually suppressed Polish and Russian, the languages of his childhood (Teicholz, 1993);
some others, like Nancy Huston, who left Anglophone Canada to become an acclaimed
French writer, had to escape personal/family circumstances. These writers evoke ‘clean’
words of the second language, devoid of anxieties, memories, and self-loathing—the
freedom that Steven Kellman (2000) calls “emancipatory detachment” (p. 28) and Eva
Hoffman (1999) terms “fertile detachment” (p. 50), which spurs their creativity and allows
them to ‘play’ with meaning and linguistic form using to their advantage their position as
“outsiders”—of history, language, culture, and of lingua-cultural scripts. The interplay of
inside-outside, of detachment and engagement, and of exilic drama is a great advantage, what
Hoffman calls “the bonus” (p. 50) of translingual writing, epitomizing the general notion of
literary creativity deriving from the sense of estrangement—from being a generic “émigré de
l’intérieur.”
The aesthetic effect of this psychological and linguistic exile expressed in multi- and
inter-lingual inter-sensory code-switching is akin to what Russian Formalists of 1920s led by
Viktor Shklovsky (1965) called “ostranneniye slova”—the “de-familiarization of the
word”—the poetic effect produced by the word’s ‘foreignness’, famously adopted as a poetic
device by Russian futurist poets, such as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov and
the absurdist Daniil Kharms. In Shklovsky’s (1965) conceptualization, this ‘foreignness’
would occur as a result of existential displacement and would manifest itself in using
tortuous language or in placing situations in incompatible semantic or cultural contexts. He

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stated that the “…poetic language must appear strange and wonderful; and in fact it is often
actually foreign: the Sumerian used by the Assyrians, the Latin of Europe during the Middle
Ages, the Arabisms of the Persians, the Old Bulgarian of Russian Literature” (p. 22) .
Curiously, the word “ostranneniye” (slova) is in itself a double-entendre, for its
etymological origin derives from two Russian roots: ‘stranniy’ (strange, odd) and ‘strana’
(country). Thus it is possible to trace back in Russian history this semantic over-
generalization from ‘foreign country’ to ‘country’ with its underlying connection to
displacement and oddness.
Although Shklovsky’s method has not survived as a literary technique, its principle of
estrangement and of linguistic “unhomeliness” is widely applied to modernist poetics and
arts. Translingual writers’ expression of ‘ostranneniye slova’ (which I earlier called
‘interlinguality’) carries this form of estrangement, in a variety of ways, as individuals develop
“verbal strategies unique to their own experience rather than follow a predictable pattern of
creativity” (Zoric, 2010, p. 204). The use of synesthesia, from this perspective, appears as an
idiosyncratic form of stylistic de-familiarization—an arresting effect achieved by the ludic
function of opening up a second-order semiological chain where the word’s signifier (the
acoustic or graphic image) together with the signified (its semantics) acquire a new “tri-
dimensional pattern” (Barthes, 1972, p. 114). If ‘six’ is not only a numerical concept (1) and
a graphic/phonetic form (2), but also an image of something yellow (3), then the Saussurian
dyad, the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second one. Similar to the semiotic
interpretation of myth by Roland Barthes, synesthesia creates two semiological systems, but
as opposed to myth, whose meaning must be appropriated, synesthesia is idiosyncratic and
therefore “neologistic.” To use one of my earlier examples, my Canadian students were
puzzled by my “yellow six” and were only able to make sense of it (and appropriate it) using
their own associations (yellow canola fields). The semiotic system created by synesthesia is
more akin to psychoanalytic dream interpretation where ‘latent meaning,’ the signified in a
Freudian semiological system, underlies the second-order meaning—behavior.
In translingual texts, the latent meaning of a synesthetic image is perceived as
“estranged,” i.e. it is de-familiarized and stands out for the reader, while the multilingual
author is simultaneously familiarizing him/herself emotionally with the “unfelt” second
language, ‘embodying’ it in the process of affective connotation—via synesthesia.
In her book, Emotions and Multilingualism, Aneta Pavlenko (2005), using the available data
from neurolinguistics and the research on multilinguals’ autobiographical memory,
conceptualized the theory of language embodiment. She theorized that words, sounds, and other
units of the native language in the process of first language acquisition and socialization,
become not only denotated conceptually but also connotated emotionally with what she calls
‘affective linguistic conditioning’. In other words, they become associated with sensory
images and personal memories, and acquire an idiosyncratic personal meaning—i.e. they
become “embodied.” As for the learned second language, Pavlenko explains further that
adult second language learners may not develop an emotional representation of L2 unless
they become immersed in it and emotionally and socially invested, which may eventually
“elicit strong visceral responses” to L2 words in “a life-long enterprise” (p. 156). See, for
example, this description by Luc Sante:

In order to speak of my childhood I have to translate. It is as if I were writing about

someone else. The words don’t fit, because they are in English…The word ‘boy’ could

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not refer to him; he is ‘un garçon’…Similarly, maman and papa are people; ‘mother’ and
‘father’ are notions. La nuit is dark and filled with fear, while the night is a pretty picture
of a starry field… (1999, p. 261)

Along similar lines, Eva Hoffman (1990) explains how her native Polish (embodied)
concept of ‘river’ was “a vital sound, energized with the essence of riverhood…” and how
her English (un-embodied) ‘river’ seems “cold” by comparison, “a word without aura” (p.
106).
Symptomatically, these examples involve the most basic concepts of the surrounding
world in relation to self, whose linguistic relativity preoccupies multilingual writers to the
point that it “may threaten sanity” (Besemeres. 2002, p. 50). Because of this, Hoffman (1990)
calls herself a “living avatar of structuralist wisdom” (p. 106) whereby she implies that the
Saussurian semiotic principle of the union between the signifier (form) and the signified
(content, semantics) has been severed and she describes her linguistic fragmentation as the
disjoining condition in which the L2 word is drained “…not only of its significance but of its
colors, striations, nuances—its very existence” (p. 107) (please notice here the word
“colors”).
Because of this torturous condition, in the course of their lives, translingual writers
pursue the “life-long enterprise” of the “deepening investigation through familiarization”
(Hoffman, 1990, p. 62) attempting to break through the second language “numbness,”
which entails hard work and emotional investment into their writing and identity, pursuing
the “familiarization” toward L2 embodiment. In this process, translingual synesthesia may be
an idiosyncratic interlingual mechanism of emotional “translation”—second language
embodiment. Since synesthetic images are consistent and stable, as confirmed by numerous
experiments conducted by neuroscientists, color and word “correspondences” may turn out
to be the affective conditioning, which Pavlenko (2005) describes as a way for L2 to be
viscerally “appropriated” at the neurological, psychological, and emotional levels: “unfelt”
disembodied words are coded into a familiar personal “colorful” imagery. Whether or not
synesthesia as affective conditioning/tool of familiarization indeed “embodies” L2 mediated
by the “colored” native language “spreading” to it, or L2 is “chromesthesized”
independently, only more research will reveal.

MODELING SYNESTHESIA: IMPLICATIONS FOR APPLIED

LINGUISTS AND TEACHERS

In his recent book, My Dyslexia (2011), poet Philip Schultz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for
Poetry, described his torturous childhood as a dyslexic who couldn’t read or transform
words into sounds; learning a foreign language was out of his reach. When he was eleven,
Schultz invented a character that could read and write—a boy like himself. He describes
imagining the taste and the sound of letters and creating rhythmic units as meaningful
sentences. Infatuated with the musical form of language while “translating” words into
sounds (embodying language), Schultz learned to read and later turned this creative method
to teach others.
Early in my language teaching career in Moscow, I used to play a game of “Chinese
portrait” with students in my French class. Students had to think about a person, usually a
classmate, in terms of music, color, literary genre, weather, or even furniture. I would have

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them practice hypothetical structures (“Si cette personne était un animal, quel animal serait-
elle?”) and I would write on the board the list of answers, creating an imaginative “portrait”
of compounded personal associations—psychological and cross-modal metaphors and
connotations. As “Chinese” as it sounds, with just enough components coming from a
variety of symbolic cues, we constructed a perception of a person that was quite
recognizable (the game ends when students guess the person).
In retrospect, I understand that even before I was consciously aware of the workings of
my synesthesia, it had always been a quiet but omnipresent companion in my journey with
languages—and in my attempts to invite others on board. Although natural (congenital)
synesthesia is a gift offered gratis to a few selected individuals and cannot be taught, induced,
or proposed as an artificial mnemonic device, it is an invaluable insight—a gift not to miss—
into ‘multilingual dasein,’ being in the world at the intersection of language and self. Can we
turn the gift—or the idea of the “gift”—into action?
In her Multilingual Subject (2009), Claire Kramsch discusses published translingual texts
and language narratives written by students which make a convincing case that learning a
language is a deeply intimate personal journey, filled with individual metaphoric
representations of language and of learning and with psychological, visual, and often sensory
symbolic forms, which help learners re-signify and re-negotiate meanings between languages
and “selves.” Curiously, students’ samples in her qualitative study are often reminiscent of
synesthetic metaphors, demonstrating idiosyncratic, often emotional ways to code language,
in parallel to the examples of translingual synesthetes discussed in this article. Kramsch calls
on the profession to pay attention to learners’ “subjectivities,” that must be developed and
modeled by teachers as “symbolic action” (p. 191), which would propel them onto the path
of lingua-cultural and ‘lingua-emotional’ introspection, language awareness, and literacy.
Recently I witnessed a fascinating multi-modal educational experiment at the New York
School of Visual Art entitled, Found in Translation: A Typo-Philharmonic Conference, where SVA
graphic design students and NYU music students demonstrated the fusion of arts, senses,
and of artistic literacy performing a typography class assignment called ‘visual music.’ Their
teacher, a musicologist and a graphic designer, Olga Mezhibovskaya (not surprisingly, a
bilingual), asked her students to represent their favorite songs in typographic design and to
“…return to the un-separated media, back to the beginning of thought, before the word was
formed, before language recognized itself as language, before the printing press, before
calligraphy, before pictograms…back to acoustics, raw perceptions, to the blurry vibration of
thought and emotion, back to gesture, back to sound…” (Mezhibovskaya, 2011). The result
was a creative performance of visual and musical languages merged in cross-modal
metaphor, which looked and sounded as naturally as Nabokov’s (1989) “pink flannel M” or
‘loyalty’ as a “golden fork,” with a colorful typographic “notation” on the screen and the
corresponding musical composition, featuring the “typographic sound” produced by music
students on violin, flute, guitar, and bassoon.
“Listening to the printed page” (Mezhibovskaya, 2011) was an exercise in multimodal
and multilingual imagination in the spirit of true “semiodiversity” (Halliday as cited in
Kramsch, 2009, p. 21), where the Vygotskyan “aesthetic zone of proximal development”
(Vygotsky, 1971) fostered the creation of personally coded cathartic meanings, transcending
senses and cognitive realms—transcending conventional languages.
The Found in Translation project is an excellent model for interdisciplinary, multi-media,
and ecologically-oriented pedagogical scenarios in our language programs, where learners

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would be encouraged to delve into literary and poetic forms and write language narratives to
examine their linguistic selves reflectively and creatively and use diverse non-verbal, possibly
artistic, ways to create and to represent their language identities.
Such an approach would not be possible of course without inspiring language teachers,
true believers and role models themselves. An illuminating modeling example of this kind is
described by Brigitta Busch (2010), an Austrian applied linguist, who researched a complex
multilingual situation in South Africa and was instrumental in teacher training and re-
examination of school language policies. She used a multimodal approach called ‘language
portraits’5 which consists of a questionnaire, a personal narrative, and of coloring in a body
silhouette, where different colors would represent ‘linguistic dispositions’ defined as
“knowledge of language varieties, registers, and pragmatics…emotions linked to linguistic
practices” (Busch, 2010, p. 284). This “personal language profile” activity was used with
teachers, to elicit the awareness of their multilingualism and of their complex language
identities, and then with children, who thoroughly enjoyed the coloring activity and were
able to represent symbolically the literal embodiment of their languages/codes in the
silhouette. Color and its location in the body, representing languages, attitudes, and often
hard to express emotions, become bearers of meaning, creating an additional semiotic dyad,
similar to the one we have seen in synesthesia. Having to think about language visually and
not only linguistically shifts the attention from pre-conceived linear definitions and pathways
to truly open, imaginative personal discourse.6
Synesthesia models just such a path.

NOTES

1 American Synesthesia Association (http://synesthesia.info) was created in 1995 to promote education and
research of synesthesia and to provide means for the people who experience and/or study synesthesia to be in
contact with each other.

2 “Stained glass” motif is one of Nabokov’s favorite childhood memories and one of the main tropes in his
autobiographical writing.

3 Developmental psychologists believe that all children experience synesthesia but lose that ability in the
process of “pruning.” However, it is possible that children who are exposed to visual arts and are engaged by
their parents in conversations and activities that validate and encourage their synesthesia would keep it
throughout adulthood. Luria (1968) notes that all children may perceive days of the week as colored—which
coincides with my very first memory of synesthetic perceptions. Like Nabokov, in my childhood, I was
exposed to visual arts, painting, drawing, art museums, and theatre—activities noted as concurrent with
synesthesia.

4 The perception of translingual writing as simultaneously “native” and “foreign” may have something to do
with monolingual readings of multilingual texts and with “the symbolic power exercised by the use of this and
that language variety…” (Kramsch, 2008, p. 322). In her discussion of Kafka’s multilingualism, Kramsch
identifies Kafka’s “idiolect” and word play that come from his creative and cultural “de- and re-
territorialisation” (Deleuze and Guattari as cited in Kramsch 2008, p. 324) as a way of using German language
as a “third language,” thereby creating an effect of alienation for monolingual readers.

5 Originally ‘language portraits’ was developed by Krumm (2008) as a language awareness exercise.

6 For the extension and implications of this view to the educational context, see: Cenoz, J. & Gorter, D. (Eds.).
(2011). Multilingualism in school contexts. The Modern Language Journal, 95(3).

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APPENDIX

Booba and Kiki

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