ALONG FOR THE RIDE - 20 July 2011
20th July, 2011
One of the fascinating aspects of living in a place where you are an intermediate student of another language, is how the mind has to carve out different routes. Habitual ways of thinking are constantly interrupted, often derailed, because even when you're sitting alone somewhere, the second you begin to have a thought that strikes you as "important" you automatically begin translating it into the language at hand. In our case case, Italian.
This process - unless you are fluent, which we obviously are not - out of necessity begins to reduce each thought down to its simplest form, partly because of the lack of vocabulary and partly because of the urgency of one's need to communicate. This morning, finding myself in silence with Joel as he drove and I gazed out the window at the landscape I realized that the beauty of these hills is not only because of the quality of light that befalls them, but the texture of them, resulting from centuries of working the land, so that one feels, simultaneously, the combined beauty of nature and the hand of man.
I must have quite liked that thought because I found myself trying to translate it as I was thinking it. How mad. For whom was I translating? Joel still speaks English and as far I know there were no Italians in the back seat. I think there are a couple of reasons for this. One being that our friends here speak no English, so we are daily in the process of this attempt at instant translation. Our friends tell me I speak bad Italian very well. But then, I am a writer: I love language. I love the search for just the right word or phrase, love swapping one adjective for another, or deleting it altogether. In another language the hunt is intensified.
For sure there are times when the strain and frustration of speaking Italian is high, times when we return to our casa and flop on the bed, brain-dead. I swear you can smell the aroma of singed cells. And then there are those days when you simply don't have it: whatever Italian you've accumulated simply vanishes and you sit at table like a goldfish, the mouth opening and closing in watery silence. I've learned that these days often herald a new stage of learning. I did actually once experience, after one of these dumb days, a huge leap backward into the passato prossimo. How I wish that would happen with the future and conditional tenses! Then again, how freeing it is to live in the present tense, no domani, or prossimo anno. No should or would or could.
The structure of learning a language seems to me to emphasize the priorities in our lives. You learn the present tense first because it covers all needs: food, water, bathroom, shelter. Now. Then we learn the past tense because we think it's what describes and validates us most. We cling to our memories and accomplishments as proof of our identify. And who doesn't love a good story told round the dinner table? That's why I was translating my thoughts in the car: to share later, something that by then will be both present and past. Present in the sense that it will still be relevant to me, and past, because it happened this morning.
And how I love the hunt in another language: mounting the beginning of a sentence, grabbing the reins and going along for the ride. And every once in a while you have the exquisite experience of both being in the pocket and not having a clue how you'll find the words to describe what you so want to share with those you love.
In these moments I experience the magnificent ability the mind has for multi-tasking; going forward in a straight line while scanning for one of the few words you have available that will do the job for now. It's a rare experience of simultaneity: thinking and not thinking. The balance is everything or you fall off the horse. You must keep the coherency of thought going without thinking how best to express it. You must be willing to let go of perfection. You just go, and trust that the words will arrive from one of those recesses in the brain that's been holding them for just this very moment. And when the horse suddenly comes to a screeching halt, do try not to go headfirst into the ditch, but alight gracefully and try again, domani.
Maggie's photo