When the pretty girl was seven a new girl came to school. She was from France. Her mother was chic with one side of her hair cut short and the other long. The pretty girl adored the French girl and her French mother and fell in love with France. She promised herself she would go to France one day. When she was 14 she began to learn French. When she was 19 she went to Paris and stayed seven years, studying music, singing and other arts.
I met the pretty girl tonight at a French conversation group. She's probably about 30 now, and her French was very very good, unsurprisingly, and she was very sweet. I also met a young man who has been studying mushrooms for 18 months. He rents a garage on the North Side, which he heats, and where he grows mushrooms. And a man who teaches ESL in a school and is frustrated because the parents of one Mexican girl know that she can't hear very well but have never gotten her hearing testing. The school is pushing for her to get hearing aids.
I've written before here about the strangeness of speaking a foreign language with people you don't know. How odd that this person and that are able to understand your non-English. How much easier it is to disclose in your non-native language. What I want to talk about now is how we package ourselves and our life stories. You can read about this in journals of biographical theory. You can present Exhibit A (French girl) and B (her sophisticated mother) and Intangible Exhibit C (the desire to go to France) and it all makes sense. But of course the pretty girl's life is more complicated. We like reading stories because there's causality. We like reading biographies because we learn that X and Y inexorably led to Z. It's the inexorableness that we crave. As historian and biographical theorist Hayden White says: "...there has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found..." How I came to this country. Why I want this job. How I chose my major. Why I became a nurse. How Abraham Lincoln became Abraham Lincoln.
How I got cancer? A loose mess. Maybe environment (Which? Houston? Chicago? asthma medicine? plastic cups? hormones in milk?), maybe chance (This little cell got bored and decided to expand?), maybe lack of children, maybe maybe maybe...
The story of cure (of polio, smallpox) is so satisfying. Problem, solution involving heroics, the end. The story of prevention is not a story. It is lack of story. Prevention is invisible. It does not wear a pink ribbon. It does not go for four-day walks to develop its endurance. Prevention can be tracked, but it is always messy: what caused the lower rate of X and Y and Z? Peut-etre ca, peut-etre ca...
Showing posts with label French. Show all posts
Showing posts with label French. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Friday, September 28, 2007
Translation
It's always dangerous to make absolute statements (such as those that include "always"), but I will venture: Everyone loves secret code. That's what's so magical about speaking a foreign language.
I went to a French-language gathering last week. It was at La Creperie, and when I arrived there were about 20 people sitting outside at a long table. I went to sit down in an empty chair and a man gestured toward me and said he liked "l'ecran." My screen? What was he talking about? O, "le crane," my cranium, my scalp, meaning the message on my head: US out of Iraq. I'd thought it was too light to read. I told him I had the tattoo because I'd lost my hair. He didn't ask where it had gone. He was a very good and quick speaker of French, thanks to a French ex-wife. I realized I hadn't spoken French since December. I spoke rather rustily to him and to another guy who arrived, looking like a lawyer in a yellow tie and suit. And he was--a lawyer. I say I'm a writer and people say what do you write and I tell them I'm writing about cancer. What kind? asks the lawyer. Breast, sein, I say, and to make sure he's understanding me, he touches his chest. I am telling this stranger about my breast cancer and my recordings on WBEZ, and I'm feeling I wouldn't be telling him all this in English, so easily. Of course it's not easily tripping off my tongue. The gears are creaky. I read a William Maxwell story in which he talks about a man and his wife who want a child, and the wife is unhappy as a 1950s housewife without career or children, and they take a French class and say to one another what they can't say in English. Then their life goes on, after that brief opening up. I'm amazed at what one reveals in French, but at the same time on this very blog I've said many an intimate thing to--anyone--n'importe ou (anywhere)--who can find this square of zero-dimensional cyberspace. But it's different in person, isn't it? But in French in person it's not real; it's not English, doesn't matter what you say, and everything is interesting if it's said in French, because it's French, you have to struggle a little, to comprend. Pay that extra attention. French not real the way that travelers unfold the bills from their wallets and say, How much is this in real money?
The waitress came to collect money and the lawyer was asking her for change (in French) and she couldn't understand him. We were in a haze of French, speaking French, speaking in a familiar but foreign language to strangers. And we thought the world could understand us, because these people we'd never ever seen before could.
Makes you believe in the believers in Esperanto, who would craft a universal language and we would all be able to speak to one another, to speak the same language, as it were, and there would be no more strife.
But there were civil wars. Still are.
But the Jew who started Esperanto already had a universal language at hand: Yiddish.
Don't be afraid of Yiddish, Kafka told an audience once. You will understand it more than you thought you would, because it is like German. (Don't be afraid that you'll turn into your grandparents because of it.)
Old joke: What do you call someone who speaks two languages?
Bilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks three languages?
Trilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks one language?
American.
I went to a French-language gathering last week. It was at La Creperie, and when I arrived there were about 20 people sitting outside at a long table. I went to sit down in an empty chair and a man gestured toward me and said he liked "l'ecran." My screen? What was he talking about? O, "le crane," my cranium, my scalp, meaning the message on my head: US out of Iraq. I'd thought it was too light to read. I told him I had the tattoo because I'd lost my hair. He didn't ask where it had gone. He was a very good and quick speaker of French, thanks to a French ex-wife. I realized I hadn't spoken French since December. I spoke rather rustily to him and to another guy who arrived, looking like a lawyer in a yellow tie and suit. And he was--a lawyer. I say I'm a writer and people say what do you write and I tell them I'm writing about cancer. What kind? asks the lawyer. Breast, sein, I say, and to make sure he's understanding me, he touches his chest. I am telling this stranger about my breast cancer and my recordings on WBEZ, and I'm feeling I wouldn't be telling him all this in English, so easily. Of course it's not easily tripping off my tongue. The gears are creaky. I read a William Maxwell story in which he talks about a man and his wife who want a child, and the wife is unhappy as a 1950s housewife without career or children, and they take a French class and say to one another what they can't say in English. Then their life goes on, after that brief opening up. I'm amazed at what one reveals in French, but at the same time on this very blog I've said many an intimate thing to--anyone--n'importe ou (anywhere)--who can find this square of zero-dimensional cyberspace. But it's different in person, isn't it? But in French in person it's not real; it's not English, doesn't matter what you say, and everything is interesting if it's said in French, because it's French, you have to struggle a little, to comprend. Pay that extra attention. French not real the way that travelers unfold the bills from their wallets and say, How much is this in real money?
The waitress came to collect money and the lawyer was asking her for change (in French) and she couldn't understand him. We were in a haze of French, speaking French, speaking in a familiar but foreign language to strangers. And we thought the world could understand us, because these people we'd never ever seen before could.
Makes you believe in the believers in Esperanto, who would craft a universal language and we would all be able to speak to one another, to speak the same language, as it were, and there would be no more strife.
But there were civil wars. Still are.
But the Jew who started Esperanto already had a universal language at hand: Yiddish.
Don't be afraid of Yiddish, Kafka told an audience once. You will understand it more than you thought you would, because it is like German. (Don't be afraid that you'll turn into your grandparents because of it.)
Old joke: What do you call someone who speaks two languages?
Bilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks three languages?
Trilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks one language?
American.
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