Globe Oranges -- a story

Many years ago, a student arrived on the first day of class with a very small infant in her arms. When her turn came to introduce herself, she said she had studied in [country x] for a semester and come back with a little [country-xian]. Which got me thinking. . .  and marked one of the first steps toward a short story I wrote sometime later. "Globe Oranges" was published in Bellingham Review in 2004. It's only tangentially about study abroad, but it is about maps, and how we understand the world, and words, and what we can make for one another. Click here to read the whole story. It's not brand new, but it's one that's stayed with me.


--Thanks to the editors of Bellingham Review for their initial hospitality.

My Grandmother's Dictionary Stand

My grandfather was a woodworker, and one of the things he built for my grandmother was a dictionary stand. It has shelves for smaller books and a hinged, inclined top to hold a large book open. In their different ways, my grandparents both loved words. My grandfather was a storyteller who regaled guests at our wedding with a cautionary tale about doing a post-mortem on a dead calf en route to a dance when he and my grandmother were still newlyweds (we married on their 56^th anniversary). My grandmother was a reader and a writer of long, many-paged letters on yellow legal pads, letters that spread into the margins and around the corners and occasionally onto the envelopes. 

When my grandmother died, I received the dictionary stand. It is a perfect piece of furniture. It carries for me family legacies of wordsmithing and of making things by hand--and it is darned useful. It holds books I've had for years, close to hand. The fat dictionary that came with the stand is opened far more frequently than it would ever be on an ordinary shelf. The stand holds the first Spanish-English dictionary I bought in college, at the recommendation of a professor who became a mentor and good friend.

I use online dictionaries. I go to the library and use big, fat, old printed dictionaries. There are new editions of some of my dictionaries, and I covet those. But adding new entries generally means letting some fall by the wayside--for instance, the most recent Pequeño Larousse ilustrado no longer has a full page of fencing diagrams. So I want to add to my collection, not replace anything. From a practical standpoint, translators need old dictionaries as well as new: not everything we work on was written last night. And dictionaries, like other books, also accumulate the marks of reading, and that's important, too.

I'm working on a new translation project today, so out comes that Spanish-English dictionary, and by chance I find a pencil underlining from a previous project. I'm surprised I remember--it's just a little squiggle under the word--except that it was a word in one of the many proverbs included in The Potbellied Virgin, proverbs that were both a challenge and a puzzle. Those proverbs have left their traces, too. I think I'm more inclined to look for proverbs and sayings since working on that novel, both to use them and just to think about them. Certain sayings and favorite words become part of a family's legacy as well. My husband and children, who otherwise speak no German, have all learned one of my other grandmother's favorite sayings. I tuck it, in spirit, onto my dictionary stand along with the books.

Drawing a Face on the Balloon

My son brought a balloon home from school with him this week, bright yellow. He played punching bag with it, he made obnoxious noises with it, he bounced it against the ceiling and retrieved it again. The first night, he drew a face on it. Last night, he added hair. 

My bedtime reading last night was "More Than Gone," the first story in Ethel Rohan's collection, Cut Through the Bone. (I haven't read the rest of the book yet.) "More Than Gone" is about a widow who carries a balloon home after a child's birthday party. The balloon may be company of a sort, or another sign of absence, or both. And it gets a face, too. 

The other books I read this week were Room, by Emma Donoghue, and Voltaire's Calligrapher, by Pablo de Santis (translated by Lisa Carter).  I read the first third of Room and was hardly able to sleep, my mind running circles after Jack in his routines. What I most admire in the novel is the consistency of voice and of perspective. Donoghue's creation of a language for Jack--precocious in some ways, limited in others--is wholly persuasive, and absorbing. (There are balloons in Room, too.) And the world created is both real and unreal.

With my students, I've been reading short stories, rounding out the survey course as the term winds down--"Talpa," by Juan Rulfo, and "Los funerales de la Mamá Grande," by Gabriel García Márquez. Since one of the most common questions I get, if I happen to mention that I teach Latin American literature, is "Oh, do you work on García Márquez," I asked the class how many had read any of his work before. Not many, as it happened. A few hands went up, but only halfway. It's a big class, and some of them are shy. But more than that, they weren't sure if their reading counted: a number of them had read One Hundred Years of Solitude, but they hadn't read Cien años de soledad. "Only in English," one of them mumbled. Meaning, I read it, but I didn't really.

Gregory Rabassa's translation both is and is not García Márquez's novel.

Part of what continues to draw me to translation (as translator and as reader) is that unresolved tension, the copies of copies that both overlap and diverge. Voltaire's Calligrapher is a book continually preoccupied with copies, simulacra, masks, disguise, imitation. (Also, a serendipitous addition to my Argentina reading challenge list.)  No balloons there, but the company of reproductions that both shelter and betray their originals.

Presence and absence and empathy, even if illusory, and that squeaky marker sound drawing a face on a squishy balloon:  more reasons I read.

Found time (found poems, found stories)

If I'm careful on my class prep/writing days, I can just fit in a run between the time when I get too stiff to sit at the computer any longer and the time I need to pick my son up from school. (If I'm overwhelmed or disorganized, I end up working up to the last possible minute, skating in to retrieve a reproachful looking child--not quite the last one in the breezeway, but nearly.) I do a certain amount of lecture preparation and article revision in my head while running. Of course, I also soak up the sun or, more often, wave to the other zealots trudging through the steady northwest rain. Today I made it, class notes and run, on a perfect, sunny spring day, with the tulips just overheating into saucers and the sawdust path almost dry in places.

Two years ago, my aunt and uncle sent us one of Mimi Williams' wonderful linoleum prints for our anniversary. [check out some of her work here] Titled "Stolen Moments," it's perfect for us: a woman reading a book, one hip leaning against the counter, her back to a pile of dishes in the sink. The print hangs proudly above our fireplace, the woman's eyes permanently averted from our kitchen clutter as well as hers. It welcomes me home, directing my attention to where it properly belongs (reading, art, family).

But I want to think of those moments (hours?!) spent running or reading--and writing, and translating--as found, not stolen.   Alicia Yánez Cossío has talked in numerous interviews about writing at night, after her five children were in bed and her other obligations for the day concluded. Writing time then becomes escape time, treat time (though there's still the question of fatigue).

One of my daughter's assignments this week was to create found poems from the dialogue in the novel they're studying in school. I think of a found poem as more serendipitous--wow! look at that irresistible collection of words out of the blue!--but it's an intriguing thought, to come at the book from another angle, to see the words on the page as somewhat arbitrarily arrayed, and thus open to rearrangement.

My "found" poem for the week? The student who came up after a class on César Vallejo, bubbling over in her eagerness to show me and my teaching assistant the tattoo on her back dedicated to the Peruvian poet. A genuine fan, no revision required.

There's always a story waiting somewhere.

Teachable moments: vosotros and thou

Every spring, the U. of Oregon hosts some 1500 high school language students and their teachers for Foreign Languages and International Studies Day (FLIS). They attend performances and short workshops on folksongs, food, poetry, jokes, family life, handy vocabulary for getting lost, for not getting lost. . . the list goes on (on the UO website), so I won't. But what a chance to show off, right?

And what a chance to get another generation of readers thinking about translation and the choices it demands. This year, I talked about some of the challenges in translating jokes (which draw on cultural knowledge and, often, cross-cultural stereotypes), wordplay, and regional usage variations. In particular, what to do with what is described, in Alicia Yánez Cossío's Más allá de las islas, as "el difícil tiempo habéis" and "el inusitado empleo de la voz éis." That is, the verb forms that go along with the second-person pronoun vosotros (normative in Spain, bizarrely out of place in Ecuador).

Gratifyingly, I had a standing-room crowd. More gratifyingly still, they were engaged in the topic, ready to ask questions, to share ideas. Roughly half of the 35 or 40 present raised their hands when I asked if they were Spanish students. All of them allowed as how they were learning the vosotros form. "We have to," one called out, with a little edge in her voice.

Translating, I pester colleagues, friends and relations with questions-- what do you think this means? would you ever say. . . ? Talking about word puzzles and quibbles is one of the secret (or not so secret) pleasures of translation. It is also an occasion to air pet language peeves. So, queried about "el difícil tiempo habéis," one of my long-suffering informants, a linguist colleague I greatly admire, groaned at my question about that "difficult" tense. "Can we stop calling it that hard vosotros form?" he begged. "Please?"

Well, as it happens, no. Not always.

The point isn't that it's any harder to learn to use vosotros than it is to use tú. The point is that the character in the novel adopts the form in order to show off, trying to make herself sound more like a priest and give her impromptu sermon an authority it doesn't deserve. And, making it funnier, she can't maintain the pose for more than a few sentences. The point is the jarring--and funny--mix of Spanish varieties, a mix that can't be ironed out in translation without losing something important.

I finally called it "the difficult thou tense," and elsewhere referred to the character's "antiquated and pretentious grammar."  

I hope the students left with a chuckle and, more than that, with a sense of some of the choices that contribute to any translation they might read. With apologies to anyone whose teaching life is made a little harder by the joke.

Travel Journal (Peru, 1987)

Today, for the second time this week, I saw a hummingbird perched on one of the spindly maples by the jogging trail. They haven't graced the white-flowering currants in my yard this spring the way they have in past years, so perhaps they've moved. The currants are nearly done blooming by now. Maybe it's just been so rainy that I haven't been outside, and missed them.

As I was thinking about migratory hummingbirds relocating across town, and congratulating myself that all my zigzagging to dodge the deeper mud pits was surely adding at least a mile to my workout, I met up with a friend. This friend is much fitter than I am--when she says "running," it's not a euphemism for creeping lope--but I tried to keep pace. She's planning a trip to Peru. I've been to Peru so, when asked, I naturally tried to offer advice. Huffing and wheezing all the while, for greater drama and impact.

None of it practical advice, of course. I was twenty, traveling on my parents' dime and my parents' planning efforts. When she asked if we made hotel reservations in advance, I didn't have a clue.

But I remember the trip. I used to keep detailed travel journals, trying, at the end of each day, to mentally retrace my steps and note everything down. I've lost that habit, but it fed a fine discipline of noticing that I have tried to hold onto, even as I've gotten lax about the recording. I have the journals, all of them. I've scarcely opened one after coming home; maybe the initial writing was enough. Sill, I'm glad they're there.

Some details of the Peru trip--Dad's hypothermia on the Lake Titicaca, the giant spider in the bathroom, the unsugared oatmeal on the Inca trail--have become the stuff of family legend: often rehearsed, repeated--altered? No doubt. Memories can be stories we tell ourselves, and when we tell them to others, they slip further beyond our control and become their stories, too.

I listed destinations and remembered stonework. Misadventures and an extraordinary moonrise. Go to Ollantaytambo, I told my friend. And when she praised my memory for detail, I said, "I spent years trying to write a poem about it." Almost as an excuse. 

I did write that poem. It was published in The MacGuffin 9.1, 1992. The journal doesn't have an online archive that I can link to, so I'll share the poem here, with thanks for the editors' early hospitality, and hope they won't mind. In honor of National Poetry Month, and travel journaling and embroidering, and trying to remember it all and get it down in words. And, always, missing something big.

Dappled praise

I was going to write about mixed-language stage plays today, and I may get to that (if not, stay tuned--it's one of my ongoing preoccupations, sure to reappear), but dabbling around, sampling other people's blogs, I came across the Poetry Society of America's request that people share via Twitter the line of poetry that first made them fall in love with the art. 

The line that jumped to mind was "Praise God (sic) for dappled things." (When I went to look for the poem, it turns out--surprise, surprise!--I had misremembered that first line; should be "Glory to God.") Anyway, it's the dappled things I remember, the quilted landscape, the piper. When we read Gerard Manley Hopkins' Pied Beauty in English Lit. (or was it AP?) I was already in love with poetry and writing lots of poems. I was the preached-to choir. But I remember the relish

glee

joy 

delight

mischievous glint

true generosity

with which Mrs. Niblock presented the poem. She loved it. Loved the sound of the words and the strange combinations that are nonetheless just right and the message, too: the crumpled, pied, dappled, unexpected is beautiful, worthy of praise. When I was there, Helen Niblock was legendary at East Lansing High School. She stood at the front of the class in her pink and black houndstooth suit, matching salt-and-pepper hair piled in a disarranging bun, and pulled us into the poem. So this is my small shout-out in her memory. I have held Hopkins' lines, and her teaching of them, in the back of my mind ever since: "rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim"-- praise them!

(other poetry-related blogs I've enjoyed today: Giving up the Ghost and Cut out the Stars)