Babylonian nights

One of the best things about my time in academics is the wonderfully diverse, multicultural, multinational and multilingual circle of friends it has given me. Living in London has only amplified that further. Until recently I shared this house with 4 others, none of whom spoke the same mother tongue. Amongst the people I consider my friends I can quite easily count about a dozen different nationalities. The world really has become a global village. Our only common denominator, our lingua franca, is English. I am not saying it is all the Queen's English but it serves us well enough. Without English many of the precious friendships I have would have never gotten beyond the stage of a Babylonian mime act. Last night I got a taste of what that world could have looked like.

Together with a friend -indeed one of the English speaking variety, though she more than holds her own in Dutch as well as half a dozen other languages- I went to see a very special performance of A Midsummer Night's dream. The play was performed in 8 different languages of which I can boast only 1 at best! And that one is in "Shakespearean" so perhaps it is more accurate to claim none. Astonishing. The actors seamlessly shifted from one language into another leaving the audience to wonder what had just been said. Thank goodness we had bought the programme book with synopsis beforehand! Of course the point is not at all to understand every word (most likely even in all-English Shakespeare performances most people don't manage that!). It was kind of liberating in fact to just sit back and simply let things unfold before your eyes. The motions, the expressions, the costumes, the dances; they all conveyed the magic of the story without much need for words. However, once the lights came back on I suddenly felt very grateful again for having been given the gift of English!