When I heard about the “Live Translation” feature of Apple’s newly released AirPods, what came to mind was my first night out in Berlin more than 20 years ago. I was just out of college, an American on a research scholarship plunging headlong into German. In the crowded warmth of a smoke-filled bar, amid music, laughter, and the blur of jet lag and alcohol, I tried to keep up with conversations that constantly threatened to outpace me. I pieced together what I could from the fragments I understood, leaning on gesture, tone, facial expression, and context to bridge the gaps. My replies, halting and imprecise, were limited by what I was able to say. What would have flowed effortlessly in English—and what a pair of earbuds could now make frictionless—demanded improvisation and an almost electric alertness.

I remember telling a German literature student about my undergraduate thesis on Paul Celan and only half-following her enthusiastic response, which, I gathered, had something to do with a product for which her home region was famous. How might this relate to the Romanian Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor? Then it struck me, just in time, that she’d misheard my pronunciation of his name as Porzellan. I nodded along at the interesting things she must have been saying about porcelain.

As the night went on, I began to enjoy a peculiar freedom in being cut off from the full range of my native eloquence. Thrown back on reduced resources, I had to reach for blunter, more elemental means of expression. Without the usual layers of tact and verbal finesse—those elaborate structures that so often serve as buffers against self-exposure—I found myself speaking with a rawness that was both humbling and une