The word's the thing …

… On Self-Translation - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… it isn’t enough to learn a language; one must internalize it, make it fully one’s own. We internalize a language when we organize the world around us based on its parameters. It isn’t that we know words to describe things but that things come to us through their respective words. This is only achieved through time, by letting oneself be absorbed (and, maybe, absolved) by a language’s metabolism.