Contexts Editor

I was browsing Facebook the other day, when I came across these words “En el idioma extranjero, las palabras no tienen infancia.” They were attributed to somebody I’d never heard of before, Emine Sevgi Ozdamar, and for a while they danced about inside me. Eventually, of course, I had to convert them to English, “In the foreign language, words are without a childhood.” I suspect the original language, of the meaning these words convey, was German, although their author is originally from Turkey but moved to Berlin when she was a young adult. I had to have these words inside me in my mother tongue because I knew they were saying something important to me about how it feels to speak in Spanish, a language I entirely acquired as an adult. The image I often use is that for me communicating in Spanish feels like skating on thin ice – precarious and lacking in the sufficient depth and accumulated layers of meaning required for secure forward motion – but speaking using “words without a childhood” somehow felt closer to more adequately describing what is going on. I often experience a kind of meaning gap, as I speak in Spanish, that there’s something I’m just not getting or, at the other extreme, a kind of meaning overload, in that there’s something I’m communicating excessively and unintentionally due to my limited connotational capacities. Of course, these phenomena occur in my native tongue but are somehow much less frequent and less pronounced. Talking of tongues, Ozdamar, while writing about how she adapted to her new language, German, quotes a Turkish proverb, “the tongue has no bones” and is more agile and less rigid than the rest of our bodies while taking on the new, such that perhaps what one loves about learning a foreign language is precisely the journey, in which you make a lot of mistakes on the way, but you “turn the words left and right, you work with it, you discover it”.

Many people, when approaching me to ask about the Barcelona Symposium, have added that they have been taking, or intend to take, Spanish classes during the coming year. With registration and the call for papers portal now open in the three working languages of the Symposium, English, Spanish and Catalan (http://www.gasi-bcn2020.com) things are heating up and the time to put our tongues to the test is less than a year away. The symposium will take place in two venues, a civic centre and a school, both based in the Sants neighbourhood, a traditional working-class area of the city, once a small separate industrial town. No doubt, it will be a challenge to work between different languages and venues.

At the current UN Climate Action Summit in NewYork, I heard Greta Thurberg berating her adult audience, “Yet you all come to us young people for hope, how dare you!”. Hope, these days, is in short supply, so it’s prescient that this issue centres on three contributions, plus subsequent reflections, by Smadar Ashuach, Ido Peleg and Earl Hopper, to a panel on hope in GA at a recent conference. In addition, there’s a refreshingly open and honest interview by Rob White of next year’s Foulkes Lecturer, Sue Einhorn. We also have the second concept originally written for the Group Analytic Dictionary (GAD) project. This time we have Rachel Chejanovsky on mind in GA. Hope in GA usually arises from engaging in open exchange and dialogue and the authors and editors of the GAD project are very keen to receive feedback and engage in dialogue on their work in order for this collective project to evolve. With dialogue in mind, I am delighted that important dialogic work between people from the Ukraine, Russia and Germany, at two conferences in 2015 and 2017, is reported on here in German by Stephan Alder. There’s also reports from some fascinating GA work being undertaken in Poland at a series of workshops entitled “Poland on the Couch”. Finally, I would like to thank Harold Behr for choosing to send to Contexts an unpublished piece he found, “buried” in his archive, by Adele Mittwoch, to include as a tribute to her memory.

Peter Zelaskowski
peterzelaskowski@gmail.com