In the Jackson Street metro station, a woman shoved coin
after coin into the machine. It spat them out as she muttered, furrowed in frustration. “Do you need help?” a man asked. She had put almost 30 dollars on
the card and still had a fistful of coins. “Tak,
tak, tak, tak,” she chattered at him, pressing buttons without
understanding—yes, yes.
“Вибачте, що ви хочете зробити?” I asked—what do you want to do? She turned and
smiled and launched into rapid-fire Ukrainian. I stammered. The words were
there—I felt them gathering on the other side of my mind, past English, past dark
not-words. Before I could drag them into form, a CTA worker strode over. “You
can’t use pennies,” she said and vended the card with authoritative movements.
The woman ran up the stairs before I could speak, calling back, “Sank you!”
On the El, underground lights reflected between windows in
dizzying streams. The woman shifted shape as I thought of her, became
Valentina—lost and breathless in Chicago, needing my help but left alone. The
women were like figures in dreams, when they take on faces of the dead, or look
on you in judgment.
…
When I dream in Ukrainian, I do not communicate so much as
yell at or express some antagonism toward others. Several months ago I drew back from a friend,
alarmed at his desire for greater closeness. In a dream, I addressed him with ви:
the formal, plural you for which we
have no equivalent. “Why do you say ви? Why not ти?” his dream-self demanded,
pained.
In the spaces between you
and ви and ти, translation refracts. Often instead of a straight line linking
one word with another, translation must navigate such thorns as cultural
connotations, history and, thorniest of all, emotions. In Anna Karenina, the lovers Anna and Vronsky revert to French, more
comfortable with vous than the
unbearable stiffness of Russian’s вы, or ты and its dangerous intimacy.
But with only so many words, imaginary ones may become
necessary. Constructed languages, or conlangs, are fascinating not only for
their bizarre inventiveness (think Klingon, Elvish, Esperanto, and so on), but
also for what they reveal about their creator’s desires. That is, what gaps the
creator seeks to repair.
Take Láadan, designed as a feminist language by Suzette
Hader Elgin. She intended to open more possibilities for emotion in language, which
is, she argued, too cramped by logic and “male” ways of thinking.
As Láadan evokes a now-defunct era in feminism, a quick scan
of its dictionary reveals such forehead-smackingly goofy
entries such as abathede, or
clitoris, a compound of “fragrant” and “jewel.” I also snorted at a verb
meaning “to menstruate joyfully,” until I remembered the particular joy of
getting one’s period soon after sex and thus being less pregnant.
But Láadan is interesting in that its speakers must define both
speech act and the feeling in which the act’s intended; for example, “In fear, I
ask”, “In teaching, I command” or “In love, I say as a promise.” Of course, this equation, logic/feeling = male/female, is a
centuries-old and regressive one. Let’s set aside the intended “feminization”
of such constructs and ask, what would it mean to define the feelings behind
our words as we utter them?
Then again, what if my fear is not your fear, my love not your
love? What if I don’t want to know
what I feel, or can’t know? Each word would fold into itself like a Möbius
strip, untranslatable, never linking with another. Or it would self-destruct.
…
In W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz,
the title character finds his words falling apart in his hands. This
alienation, he learns, is a result of his inability to deal with the past—with
his parents’ probable deaths in the Holocaust. “I could see no connections
anymore,” he says, “the sentences resolved themselves into a series of separate
words, the words into random sets of letters, the letters into disjointed
signs, and those signs into a blue-gray trail gleaming silver here and there,
excreted and left behind it by some crawling creature, and the sight of it
increasingly filled me with feelings of horror and shame.”
Later in the novel, he researches the ghetto Terezin, where
his mother had been interned. Long lists of elaborate, twisted compounds
describe its administration: Barackenbestandteillager,
Zusatzkostenberechnungsschein. The words both revealed and enacted the inhuman
treatment of some sixty thousand Jews in the ghetto.
In the years after the war, poet Paul Celan tried to rectify
or reckon with the German language’s misuses and perversions. According to
Celan, who lost his parents to the death camps, his poetry translated “German
into German.”
“Reachable,” he said, “near and unlost, there remained
in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language,
remained, unlost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its
own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand
darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words
for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through
and could come to light again, ‘enriched’ by all this.”
Poetry always totters on the brink of death. The words stare
into mute space, the whiteness closes in along the margins and blows its
snow between stanzas. I believe in the power of poems, not to “deal with”
death, whatever that might mean, but to cast lines into its depths. Maybe lines
with tin-can-telephones attached to them. I keep talking into my end, hoping
someone picks up the other.
…
In the months since my return, I have not been able to call
the people I know in Ukraine. Every time I think to log into Skype and check in
with Svitlana, Valentina, or one of my former pupils, something sticks in my
mind like an obstruction to the throat. In guilt, I say as a promise, I will
not forget them. In fear, I ask, how can I not forget? In love, I ask, how can
you love someone you never really knew?
In my dream, I am in a city, maybe Lviv or Dnipropetrovs’k,
chasing after someone who has left me far behind. I can only propel myself crouched
on a wooden board with wheels, such as the legless use while they beg. I come
finally to a large plaza encircled by grand white buildings in Classical style.
There is a carnival with many people shrieking laughter on a merry-go-round,
and I would ask them for directions but don’t remember how.
…
To say you to anyone is no small gesture. It establishes a relationship, as tenuously as English allows us to do so, between that you and the I who wields it. And to communicate anything means to bridge a gap. A gap between the thing and its expression, between the speaker and another. A gap as wide as oceans, wide as death.
Last weekend I visited my grandmother’s house in
Philadelphia. She had a photograph on the table I’d never seen before. Three
women and a young girl, the central woman seated with a stern, thin face. The
girl in her lap had very small buttons along her shoes, which inspired in me a
sudden tenderness. Standing behind them, two women, maybe my age or a little
younger.
The young woman to the right, my grandmother told me, was
her mother, Yetta Lischensky. The picture was taken, I assume, around 10 years
after the family’s migration from Kiev. Yetta has a solid face with a flicker
of good-humor. I like the face.
Even in English, I never truly feel like my grandmother and
I speak the same language, so I listened very closely as she talked about her
mother. “When the Cossacks came by the house, she would hide under the table,”
she said. She talked about the sister who was left behind,
wheelchair-bound from polio. She followed them to America, but at Ellis Island
was sent back to Ukraine, where she died of starvation. The mother, that
haggard-looking woman in the chair, only lived to her 40s.“She worked herself
to death,” my grandmother said.
I may not have earned the right to speak
to you, you who came so far and who suffered. I walked the streets of your
city; on long bus rides I passed villages you might have lived in, might have
died in had you stayed. I saw monuments to you-in-the-plural which mean to
stand for the horror into which you-in-the-plural were dragged and there
silenced. I say you, Yetta Lischensky, I say you unlost, and I say I am sorry, I am
sorry, I am sorry.
