Mother Tongue, Amy Tan

"The talk was going along well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like, "The intersection of memory upon imagination" and "There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus'--a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother." (Mother Tongue- Amy Tan)

Amy Tan is an Asian American writer who earned BA and MA in English and linguistics at San Jose State University. The paragraph below (and its Arabic translation) shows the nature of Tan's relationship with her mother and the different Englishes the mother and the daughter use: 

    And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, “why he don’t send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money.

    And then I said in perfect English, “Yes, I’m getting rather concerned. You had agreed to send two weeks ago, but it hasn’t arrived.”

    Then she began to talk more loudly. “What he want, I come to New York tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?” And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, “I can’t tolerate any more excuses.”

(Mother Tongue-Amy Tan)

الترجمة:

    وأمي كانت تقف في الخلف تهمس بصوت مرتفع: «لما هو لم يرسلوا الشيك، مر أسبوعان بالفعل. إذًا هو يكذبون علي، ويفقدوني أموال.» فقُلت في لغة إنجليزية سليمة: «نعم، لقد زاد انزعاجي، فلقد اتفقنا على أن تُرسل الشيك منذ أسبوعين، لكنك لم تُرسله بعد.»

    ثم بدأت نبرة أمي في الحديث تعلو: «ماذا هو يريدون مننا، سأذهب إليه في نيويورك وأواجهُ أمام رئيسه، أنت اخدعني؟» بينما كنت

أحاول تهدئتها وجعلها تخفض صوتها وأنا أُخبر السمسار: «لن أتقبل منك مزيدًا من الأعذار.»

(اللغة الأم- إمي تان)

ترجمة: مريم عصام Mariam Essam

راجعه: إسلام أحمد Islam Ahmed

Amy Tan and her mother