Through the Language Glass, Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

In one of his loveliest but most enigmatic poems, Heinrich Heine describes the yearning of a snowy pine tree for a sunburned Oriental palm. In the original, the poem runs like this:

Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
Im Norden auf kahler Hoh’.
Ihn schlafert; mit wei?er Decke
Umhullen ihn Eis und Schnee.

Er traumt von einer Palme,
Die, fern im Morgenland,
Einsam und schweigend trauert
Auf brennender Felsenwand.

The quiet despair of Heine’s poem must have struck a chord with one of the great melancholics of the Victorian period, the Scottish poet James Thomson (1834-82, not to be confused with the Scottish poet James Thomson, 1700-48, who wrote The Seasons). Thomson was especially admired for his translations, and his rendering remains one of the most oft quoted of the many English versions:

A pine-tree standeth lonely
In the North on an upland bare;
It standeth whitely shrouded
With snow, and sleepeth there.

It dreameth of a Palm Tree
Which far in the East alone,
In mournful silence standeth
On its ridge of burning stone.

With its resonant rhymes and its interlocked alliteration, Thomson’s rendering captures the isolation and the hopeless fixity of the forlorn pine and palm. His adaptation even manages to remain true to Heine’s rhythm while apparently following the meaning of the poem very faithfully. And yet, despite all its artfulness, Thomson’s translation entirely fails to reveal to an English reader a pivotal aspect of the original poem, perhaps the very key to its interpretation. It fails so decidedly because it glosses over one grammatical feature of the German language, which happens to be the basis of the whole allegory, and without which Heine’s metaphor is castrated. If you haven’t guessed what that grammatical feature is, the following translation by the American poet Emma Lazarus (1849-87) will make it clearer:

There stands a lonely pine-tree
In the north, on a barren height;
He sleeps while the ice and snow flakes
Swathe him in folds of white.

He dreameth of a palm-tree
Far in the sunrise-land,
Lonely and silent longing
On her burning bank of sand.

In Heine’s original, the pine tree ( der Fichtenbaum) is masculine while the palm ( die Palme) is feminine, and this opposition of grammatical gender gives the imagery a sexual dimension that is repressed in Thomson’s translation. But many critics believe that the pine tree conceals far more under his folds of white than merely the conventional romantic lament of unrequited love, and that the palm may be the object of an altogether different kind of desire. There is a tradition of Jewish love poems addressed to the distant and unattainable Jerusalem, which is always personified as a female beloved. This genre goes all the way back to one of Heine’s favorite psalms: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion… If I forget thee [feminine], O Jerusalem, may my right hand wither, may my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth.” Heine may be alluding to this tradition, and his lonely palm on her ridge of burning stone may be a coded reference to the deserted Jerusalem, perched high up in the Judaean hills. More specifically, Heine’s lines may be alluding to the most famous of all odes to Jerusalem, written in twelfth-century Spain by Yehuda Halevy, a poet whom Heine revered. The pine tree’s object of desire “far in the East” may be echoing Halevy’s opening line, “My heart is in the East, and I am in the farthest West.”

Whether or not the poem is really about Heine’s despair at reconciling his roots in the Germanic North with the distant homeland of his Jewish soul is a mystery that may never be resolved. But there is no doubt that the poem cannot be unlocked without the genders of the two protagonists. Emma Lazarus’s translation transfers this sexual basis into English, by employing the pronouns “he” for the pine tree and “her” for the palm. The price Lazarus pays for this faithfulness is that her translation sounds somewhat arch, or at least artificially poetic, since in English it is not natural to speak of trees in this way. But unlike English, which treats inanimate objects uniformly as “it,” German assigns thousands of objects to the masculine or feminine gender as a matter of course. In fact, in German there is nothing the slightest bit poetic about calling inanimate objects “he” or “she.” You would simply refer to a Palme as “she” whenever you spoke of her, even in the most mundane chitchat. You’d explain to your neighbors how you got her half price in the garden center a few years ago and then unfortunately planted her too close to a eucalyptus, how his roots have disturbed her growth, and how she’s given you no end of trouble since, with her fungus and her ganoderma butt rot. And all this would be related without a hint of poetic inspiration, or even of self-consciousness. It’s just how one speaks if one speaks German-or Spanish, or French, or Russian, or a host of other languages with similar gender systems.

Gender is perhaps the most obvious area where significant otherness is found not just between “us” and exotic tropical languages, but also much closer to home. You may spend nine lives without ever meeting a speaker of Tzeltal or Guugu Yimithirr. But you would have to go to great lengths to avoid meeting speakers of Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, Polish, or Arabic, to name just a few examples. Some of your best friends may even be gendered. Are their thought processes affected by this aspect of their language? Could it be that the feminine gender of the German Palme affects how a German thinks of a palm tree even beyond the artifice of poetry? As surprising as it may seem, we shall soon see that the answer is yes and that there is now solid evidence that gender systems can exert a powerful hold on speakers’ associations.

“Gender” is a loaded word these days. It may not be quite as risque as “sex,” but it runs the risk of engendering serious misunderstandings, so it is helpful to start by clarifying how linguists’ rather dry use of this word diverges from that of everyday English and also from that of some of the trendier academic disciplines. The original sense of “gender” had nothing to do with sex: it meant “type,” “kind,” “race”-in fact, “gender” has exactly