The Broken Wings

A detour to my views on Languages

“Oh, Lord God, have mercy and mend my broken wings”, says Salma to her beloved Gibran after she knows she’s going to get forcefully married to someone she has never met, and let go of her only love she has ever known.. Gibran.

The Broken Wings is a story of Gibran’s love to Salma, the only child of a wealthy man, making her a prey to men who seek the wealth of her father after his death. The story takes place in Greater Syria and Lebanon back in the 1900’s, and it shows the oppression women had to face in a masculine society. Not much has changed since then, progress is there for sure, but the mentality is more or less the same.

I’ve read the story in Arabic, which makes it more beautiful as the imagery and scenery Gibran has depicted are simply wonderful. The words I discovered made me ask myself ” There’s even a word for that? “.
I admit, I’m not the most appreciative person when it comes to languages, I believe having a one common world wide language brings us closer together, communication after all is how we find a solution to whatever problem we face, and languages come as a barrier. English is simple and straightforward, the reason why I prefer using it during my writing on this site, it reaches out to a wider audience. But nevertheless, I cannot but admit that other languages might have a wider range of vocabulary than English, and hence a deeper insight while using them, and Arabic is surely one of them, making it a beautiful language, not the most practical though. The German language for example, tends to make more sense and logic in some cases than the English language. On the other hand though, English is a practical language, being used everywhere from education to banking to international affairs, making it easy to pick up, and in our fast pace times of speed and progress, we seek for something practical and easy to use in our everyday life.

So how do I view languages? Well, I believe that learning Arabic in depth, like any other language, is more of an artistic thing nowadays. Similar to painting or learning music theory, you gain a lot for sure, a way to be more expressive, but if we’re searching for a mean to communicate with each other, we better be simple and search for a common ground that everyone can relate to without confusion, it’s up to us to decide which language should this common ground be, but I think we all know what’s the right and reasonable common ground/language to adopt today.

Back to the story, The Broken Wings is a tour into love and sadness, it has been translate into several languages and I am pretty sure the authors who translated it made an excellent job. I recommend giving it a read, in whatever language you find it, and do give a feedback, I’d love to know whether imagination in one language can be unleashed as strong as in another.