“When one learns another language, one acquires another soul”
-Bernard Karlgren
My next Liberty Snake was painted on the theme of immigration. It sports much more language than the others in this series. There is the slogan side of the snake, with its “Don’t Tread on Immigrants,” but while completing the design I decided to include the word for “immigrant” in myriad languages within the undulating lines of the patterns on this snake.
I chose mostly languages that had physically beautiful scripts, like Bengali, Hindi, and Chinese. More familiar languages were those using Roman or Greek alphabets. For most of these I simply used the online Google translator.
While writing all these scripts it made me almost viscerally aware of the enormity of human knowledge and how much of that is inaccessible without knowledge of the language. Not only were most of the scripts available not readable to me, there were many others not even represented in translator. What about Mayan, for instance? It was humbling to say the least. Even with my knowledge of Chinese and a sampling of many others, there is so much more wealth of sounds, knowledge, and culture within humanity, it seems a pity that our life spans are so short as to not be able to acquire and understand more of them. And how sad a nation that does not value this cultural wealth!
The patterns were painted with acrylic paint, stencils, and linoleum prints on muslin. The snake is approximately twelve feet long.
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