Breach of Close

Mandelstam, Cukovsky, Livshiz and Annenkov, 1914

The poets she chose to read that evening had all met violent deaths. One was killed in a duel, another committed suicide, and the third died, emaciated, cold and exhausted, in a transit camp on his way to imprisonment in Siberia. There was another writer, the old woman’s husband, who had translated the works of these poets from the Russian into his native Greek, and he also died an appalling death; that the aggressor was not a rival or a murderous state but nature itself (or, rather, nature gone awry) made it no less horrific. The Greek translations of the poems were read by a young man, himself a poet. He sat next to the woman on the stage of the small dark theater where the reading was held.

She had selected five or so poems from each poet, early and mature works alike, not necessarily the most well-known poems but suggestive of particular milestones in the poets’ creative and personal journeys. There were love poems and poems of resistance, but also poems that spoke of exile and disillusionment and the premonition of death:

And so I wait through the night for my guests to arrive
Rattling these door chains, these convict shackles

Seated at a table that had been laid with a black felt cloth, she would briefly describe these way-stations before beginning to read the poem. At times she would interweave these annotations with reminiscences of her husband and the life they had shared in the Soviet Union, where he had fled as a political refuge in the wake of the Greek Civil War and where he lived for decades in an exile no less painful than the ones in which the poets he translated had been subjected to.

These recollections seemed to come without plan or intent. Yet they felt entirely natural. It was if while reading she had been transported back to the small parlor of a modest Moscow apartment, where she would sit at the end of the day and listen to her husband read the draft of a translation he had worked on, commenting here and there on a particularly felicitous or unsuccessful rendition of an allusion or metaphor.

And then she would read us the poem. She read if she were reading a letter a solider on the front had written to his young wife at home or an entry from a lover’s diary, strange and familiar at the same time.

I had expected the Russian to sound different. Weightier, deeper, more resonant, heaving and slow and mighty, like a great river. But she spoke like a stream flowing past a bank of reeds, a soft, quick murmur of conversation. Perhaps it was physical. She was a large woman of advanced but indeterminable age. (Some woman grow frail as they age, others gain in stateliness, and she was one of the latter.) Or maybe it was just the burden of memory. Sometimes her voice would tremble as she told a story or read a line that moved her, but mostly she read as if she were in the kitchen talking to a sister or confidante neighbor in the very early morning and did not wish to wake her husband.

The Russian was a soundscape of texture and rhythm, imperfectly apprehended. Just as we need to have listened carefully to Bach many times before we truly hear the gigues and sarabandes in his suites, it is only when we have become competent in a language that we can truly hear its music. I know very little Russian. I could hear traces of seduction, rebellion and lamentation, and other voices, too, but they lay too deep within this unfamiliar but inviting carpet of sound for me to fully grasp.

The heavy-set dark-haired young poet with the neatly trimmed beard and somber black clothes who sat at her side had the earnest, inquisitive look of a young monk or philosopher excited by ideas but untested in life. After each poem was read in Russian, he would read the Greek translation. He had a hard, thick voice, all declamation. It was as if he couldn’t trust the poem to speak for itself. The antiphon of Russian and Greek was jarring not for the contrast in language but in tone, hers lute-like and intimate, his public and demonstrative, the stuff of marching bands. They seemed to be reading different poems.

There was still another poet present that evening. He, too, had died a horrible death, ravaged by a series of opportunistic infections (those were the early days of antiretroviral treatment, a time marked by much experimentation and little in the way of success). Cytomegalovirus caused him such intolerance to light that he didn’t want to leave his darkened apartment. An episode of delirium sent him on a spending spree that depleted his savings in a month’s time. He suffered necrotizing ulcerative periodontitis in which he lost most of his teeth and which in the end became so painful he could not eat. He told me he was no longer at home in his body. It had become an enemy internment camp, a place of senseless torture.

He was not present in the way the dead poets were, or the old woman’s husband, who had translated them, was. There was no voice to give shape to the words he had once written. But he appeared nonetheless. He came unsummoned, as an angel might, and stood alongside the other poets, he, too, “taking delight in the greatness of the plains/and in the cold, the snow, and the darkness.” He kept reappearing as the old woman read in Russian and the young poet translated in Greek.

I could not remember his poems. I must have lost them on one of the earliest of my many moves. He had copied them out by hand for me, the ones he had written to me or because of me, back then when we are together and ravenously in love. I think the poems may have wound up in a cardboard box which I left at my parents’ house but returned too late to reclaim. It was stupid on my part. But we have so little talent for conservation when we are young. We have not yet experienced the irrevocability of loss or realized the sad transience that inheres within our relationships and possessions. The sense of invulnerability that is part of our youth makes us less provident than we should be.

I kept his letters, though. The ones he wrote to me after I first moved here, years after we had stopped seeing each other (though we never stopped loving each other). Written in a sinewy austere hand on the yellow sheets of a legal pad, his words, too, traced the arc of a journey of cruel promise.

“Are you doing what you want to be doing?” he wrote. It was the kind of question he often asked himself. “I feel like I’m almost there… What I need is a huge nod in my direction—in the form, say, of an advance on a book deal—to let me know that the things that frustrate me (the job, the lack of $) are truly temporal…How I look forward to the happiness I think that’ll bring. Work, work, work! In the meantime there’s hope, hope, hope!”

The book deal eventually came through, for a biography of a well-known actor. Some of the reviews must have hurt—“The reader will feel the author’s failure as a biographer”, wrote one critic—but he was happy. He was doing what he wanted to be doing, earning a living as a writer. There was another book offer, again a biography of an actor.

I can see him now, writing in his tiny New York apartment—there was no proper bathroom, just a toilet, and the shower was in the kitchen—truly happy:

The excellent poorness, splendid destitution,
I live alone in it, somewhere—quiet, consoled—
the days and nights blessed.
The sweet voice of labor, guiltless.

Even when he became sick, he kept writing. Poetry, mostly, but also letters. It was the way he resisted the enemy to whom he’d been laid siege. Even in the last months of his life, his body in agony, he never succumbed to misery, never “asked alms from a shadow.”

“While I hope I go on beating the odds, holding out,” he wrote, “I know that I’m haunted by darker and devastating things. I think I’ve forgotten about them now, and I need to hear from you to keep it that way for as long as possible.”

I hope I didn’t fail him.

The quoted fragments of Mandelstam’s poems in this post are taken from a collection of new translations put out by Ugly Duckling Presse in its Eastern European Poets Series, available online. Highly recommended for anyone interested or engaged in the translation of poetry, as most of the poems appear in more than one translation (one poem, in fact, appears in five different translations).  

The poetry reading referred to in the post took place on April 25, 2012 at the “104” Center for Arts and Letters in Athens as part of the monthly series of readings me ta logia yinete [1x2]. 

Dimitris Harissiadis, Athens Coffeehouse during the 1956 Parliamentary Elections

On April 2^nd I was made 18 wishes. It wasn’t my birthday and I hadn’t gotten a promotion, though considering the situation here, one more week that goes by without an announcement of a cut in pay is grounds enough for celebration. It was a day like any other, except it was Monday, and that’s the start of the week, so a couple of people wished me a ‘good week’ (kali evdomada).  Eighteen wishes, and that’s not counting the good mornings I was wished by the barrista where I pick up my pre-workout espresso, the receptionist at work and a dozen colleagues I met on my way to my office.

English doesn’t have a large stock of wishes.  Good morning, good night and good luck. The happy and merry holidays. The happy birthdays and anniversaries. But that’s about it. We don’t even have our own words for seeing someone off on a trip or starting a meal together, but instead need to borrow from the French ! And some of the few we do have now sound hopelessly archaic (Good day!) or are confined to more formal and impersonal settings (When was the last time you said “Good evening” without saying in the same breath, “ladies and gentlemen)?  Perhaps our optative penury explains why our wishes often sound like instructions: Get well! Enjoy yourself! Have fun! Sleep tight!  It may also explain the growing popularity of the ultimate one-size-fits-all generic non-wish: “Have a good one!”

Greek, on the other hand, has wishes for a bewildering array of occasions: for the start of Lent and the break of day, for the fisherman’s catch and the windsurfer’s tack.

Perhaps this continuous stream of well-wishing began as a way to ward off the evil eye or mischievous wights or just bad luck, a kind of talisman in words. And an agrarian society would have had more than its share of unexpected misfortune: flash floods and marauding bandits, the visitations of blight, wilt and scorch.

Some of these wishes are imprinted with the signs of a culture that have since disappeared, semantic fossils that reveal another, simpler and pre-industrial way of life. Mesimeri, literally “the middle of the day”, refers to a span of time that stretches from 2:30 to 5:30 – the hours of common quiet, as the law calls them, when the shops used to close. But kalo mesimeri, spoken when taking leave and never used as a greeting, has very little to do with time per se. The wish for a good midday is more the wish for a good midday  meal, or rather, what was once the midday meal, the main repast of the day that one would eat, often at home with family, and that one would follow with a siesta before returning to work for the rest of the afternoon (in Greek, literally, ‘after the meal’).  A wish for a restful and restorative break in the day.

Though often among the first words a new learner of a language is exposed to, these greetings, which are in essence disguised wishes, are among the most problematic. The day is not demarcated into clear bands of time but is instead a continuum of modulation. Morning segues quietly into midday, afternoon seeps into evening.

Theoretically I could understand how it could be both afternoon and evening at the same time. Dusk is a problematic time in any language, and I soon realized that Greeks had an especially elastic view of time. And now that globalization has all but eradicated the midday break, evening can start at 3. But that the same person—our receptionist at work, for example—would use good afternoon and good evening more or less interchangeably at the same time (or so I thought) was perplexing. I mean, why couldn’t he make up his mind? Eventually it dawned on me (no pun intended) that he was saying good afternoon to colleagues who were leaving work and good evening to those arriving for an evening concert or poetry reading.  One was a farewell, the other a greeting.  One said, we spent time together, and that was good, and now that you’re leaving, I hope you enjoy the hours ahead. The other said, ‘welcome’.

I began to learn which wishes are said upon greeting, and which upon taking leave, and which, like the wish for ‘good descendants’ are said only in Church and then only to certain people.

I also began to realize that some wishes came in pairs, great parentheses that, like lexical hugs, embraced the span of a meal, a day, a journey, a season. There is the wish for a good day and a good night, of course, the words with which you begin and end your day. There’s a wish you say when a friend takes on a new project (kalo xekinima), and another when she’s battling deadlines for the end (kala xeberdemata, more or less the equivalent of I hope you manage to tie up all the loose ends and come out of this unscathed, or in short, good riddance).

And then there are pairs for which we in English have only half the dyad, and it’s only until you hear the other half do you realize, yes, we reallyshould have a phrase for this. You walk by a colleague’s office and see her opening her Tupperware container of leftover stir-fry, so you might want to say kali orexi (bon appétit). The next day you walk into her office as she’s polishing off the last remains of a take-away sandwich and you say… what?  Kali honepsi, of course (literally “good digestion”)! Some even come in triplets. My friends at the gym wish each other a ‘good workout’ before and ‘good relaxation’ after. But you would also wish a workout partner who continues the workout as you finish up yours a ‘good continuation’ (kali sinehia). This also comes in handy when taking leave of colleagues who are stuck at work for a few more hours while you’re off to meet friends for a coffee.

There’s a wish for the start of a trip (the good voyage we borrow from the French) but also for the end of one (kali epistrofi). One for the beginning of summer and one for the end; the latter, used when greeting someone who’s returned from August vacation is the one I found the hardest to get used to: how can you even think of winter, however good it might be, as you’re sweltering in the only slightly less oppressive summer heat of September?  But of course it’s not exactly a good winter that’s being wished, but the remaining year ahead. It is a way to mark a transition, one of those wishes that are signposts of change not only in the seasons and the work of the land—the wish for good harvests and good crops—but also in identity and social role. I learned what you say to the conscript who is about to finish his military service (‘good private citizen’), and to a pregnant friend about to deliver her baby (predictably enough, kali leftheria, or ‘good freedom’).

It costs nothing to utter these two-word dabs of well-wishing, except perhaps a slightly heightened sense of compassion (in the sense of imagining oneself in the other’s position), but how well they lubricate social relationships. Because it is relatively easy to detect a wish that is made begrudgingly or insincerely, they are a litmus test of feeling and intent. Maybe it’s the tone of voice or body language but you really can tell whether your interlocutor cares if the results of your blood test are good (yes, there’s a wish for ‘good results’). Wishing isn’t small talk, even if—or perhaps precisely because—it’s just a few words.And these few words, generously sprinkled through the day like so many hidden treats, are a testimony to a quintessentially Mediterranean genius of making even the smaller events of ordinary life an occasion for bonding—and celebration.

Michael Raedecker, Therapy (2005)

During our last Dutch lesson Mrs. Brouwer asked me if I was gay. Actually, it wasn’t really a question, more a request for confirmation. I seemed to remember she tagged on a toch or nietwaar, as if she was expecting an affirmative answer. She already knew.

She asked me it in the same matter-of-fact way she had asked where I lived and if I rode my bike to work. There seemed to be absolutely no element of gossip or prurient curiosity to her question. It was a straightforwardness that could only come from someone for whom another person’s sexual orientation was a matter of supreme indifference, a question of demographics and not morality. Oddly enough, I was a bit shocked by the question, because I am so rarely asked it, and then shocked that I was shocked. After all, shouldn’t we be striving to foster a society in which sexual orientation doesn’t matter?

Of course, I don’t know enough Dutch people to judge whether this is characteristic of Dutch tolerance, though it went far beyond mere tolerance, or of just Mrs. Brouwer, who lives in an old neighborhood in the city whose residents are mostly immigrants from eastern Africa and who seems to be very much at ease in the world in general. A zaftig woman in her 40s, she is so laid back she could be teaching in her house slippers and you’d never notice. Come to think of it, next lesson I’ll sneak a look down at her feet.

The question came up as we were talking then about family and in-laws. She was explaining to me that nicht and neef meant cousin,female and male, respectively, and their diminutives, niece and nephew, but only when they’re small. Once your niece grows up, she’s a nicht. And then she told me about the nichtencafe, Amsterdam slang for a gay café, and then she asked the tag question about me being gay.

“It’s something you might need to know when you’re in Amsterdam. And besides, learning a language means learning about the culture. If you don’t learn anything about the culture, why bother studying Dutch?”

I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d do with this new cultural and linguistic knowledge. I couldn’t see myself inviting someone, zullen we vanavond in een nichtencafe iets gaan drinken?  Although I didn’t know the emotional overtones of nicht in this context, somehow I sensed that calling a gay man a female cousin wasn’t all that kosher.

I doubted if I’d use it. Slang depends so much on context and character and intonation that it’s almost impossible for even a competent foreign speaker of the language to use it deftly, and when he does, he often calls attention to his foreignness. Not to mention the faux pas he commits when using it when the situation calls for something in an entirely different register.

I wondered what kind of person would say nichtencafe? Gossipy shopkeepers or housewives at the market? How disparaging was it actually? But then I ran across a marvellous alternative Dutch dictionary on the Internet, where I learned it was frequently used Amsterdam slang for queer. And queer is good.

Perusing the dictionary I also discovered such gems as geilneef, which means a man who’s always horny. Literally it means “horny cousin”. Apparently cousins are a very interesting family relation in Dutch. The other thing that made an impression on me was how often testicles figured in Dutch slang. Klootjesvolk (people with tiny balls) is apparently a term for middle-class persons and when something’s really bad, da’s kloten van de bok (that’s goat testicles). My favorite instance, though, is aardapels afgieten, which literally means shake the potatoes dry and is a way of saying ‘go for a pee’.

I suppose it wasn’t all that odd a question. I hadn’t described my personal life to my teacher, except to say I wasn’t and hadn’t ever been married, which leaves lots of room for at least some other kind of important relationship. But all the significant relationships in my life were in the past, and I didn’t know the past tense yet. Beginning students of the language exist in an odd state of timelessness. Everything is now. You are child, teenager and adult simultaneously. No one has died, and all your past lovers are now reunited in your bedroom as if it were the day after Judgment Day. I could have improvised a present perfect from what I know in German, but I suspected that a lot of the most common verbs—the workhorses of the language—were irregular, and I was sure some Germanicism would slip in to send my teacher through the roof.

I wondered how she discerned that I was gay. Did I inadvertently reveal more of myself than I usually do? I’m not closeted. I’ve been out at every job I’ve ever had. But I tend to be a private person. Maybe I’m less opaque during the lessons. Learning a language means shedding your usual adult-in-control self and becoming more like a child (actually a child doesn’t make the mistakes an adult learner of the language does).  To learn effectively, adult learners must become less self-conscious the more they expose themselves to the possibility of error. This is not easy. Though your language may be juvenile, your thoughts aren’t. You still have an adult’s sense of the world. But complex thought must be sacrificed, at least in the beginning. Films need to become “interesting” or “awful”. Your sharp-witted yet deeply compassionate friend is flattened into a nice guy. Otherwise you say nothing.

The beginners’ world is necessarily one of simple feelings, basic impressions and unambiguous likes and dislikes. Ask them about favorite fruits and the way to the supermarket—provided it’s not too far—and you’ll build their confidence in using the language.

Just as well. I managed to tell Mrs. Brouwer that my lover—I said mijn vriend but she knew what I meant—and I had been together for 14 years and then, kaput, but wij zijn nog vrienden.  I couldn’t say why we broke up, of course. But I’m not sure if I could do that in English, either.

Paul Delvaux, Large Skeletons, 1944

I had thought that knowing German and English would make learning Dutch easier. Now I’m not so sure.

Admittedly, knowing both, but especially German, helps an awful lot with grammar and certainly with recognizing the meaning of printed words. In Brussels I could read the train signs and good bits of the menu and even scraps of the captions to the paintings in a marvelous exhibition at the Museum of Yxelles on Paul Delvaux and his influences (Paul Delvaux, Starting Points, till January 16, 2011).

The Dutch was like a ciphertext that a beginning cryptographer had generated when hastily encrypting the Anglo-Germanic plaintext with the simplest and most transparent of alogirthms. Some of the substitutions were immediately apparent: beroemde/berühmte, wordt gedrukt/wird gedruckt, opgebouwd/aufgebaut, loopbaan/Laufbahn, aan de hand van/anhand von, stempel/Stempel.  Others took a moment or two to figure out, like invloeden, which sounds somewhat like ‘inflow’, which made me think of Einfluss, which is influence and just what you’d expect in the sentence: Zoals elke kunstenaar heeft ook Paul Delvaux zijn beeldende universum opgebouwd aan de hand van diverse invloeden die hij tijdens zijn loopbaan onderging. Like all artists, Paul Delvaux’s visual world was informed by the various influences he was subject to throughout his career.  This is not a sentence that someone with eight 1½-hour lessons of Dutch should be able to read. Of course, I don’t really know the words well enough to use them, I can just recognize them. The words are comprehensible but eviscerated from the deep tissue of understanding. It’s just the skeleton I see.

However much German helps in reading Dutch, it’s an impediment in speaking the  language. Dag slides into Tag, gemaakt to gemacht, wij into wir, without my even realizing it. German is like the memories of a past lover that keeps sneaking into the conversation with the new one. You get so used to talking to your lover in a certain way, of even seeing the world in a certain way, that even after it’s over and you’’re in a new relationship you find yourself unconsciously reacting to situations in the same but now inappropriate way. “I am not Jürgen, I’m Geert ,” he yells.

It drives my teacher mad. Mrs. Brouwer is very laid back in what seems to me a typically Dutch way (The people Dieter and I would meet in Amsterdam were so relaxed and friendly that he joked they must have ecstasy for breakfast), but she snaps at my Teutonicisms like a mantis shrimp its prey. That and my u’s. She’s corrected me so often for mispronouncing bus that I’ve stopped saying the word.

So, yes, knowing German and English makes learning Dutch easier. But also more dangerous. It’s like swimming with scuba fins: it gets you across the lake faster but does absolutely nothing to help you swim better.  I’m moving faster than I should. I should be consolidating very simple things like ordering a ham sandwich instead of reading captions on Delvaux’s paintings. I should be doing drills on my daily routine. ‘s Morgens om zeven uur ga ik naar het zwembad. ’s Nachts slaap ik.

Except my teacher, Mrs. Brouwer, isn’t a great fan of rote practice, though she should. Perhaps she thinks it’s too juvenile. But repetition, transformation and substitution drills are good for beginners; they give us a chance to try out the language in a very controlled way, without much room to make mistakes and thus with a greater likelihood we’ll feel a smidgeon of accomplishment. She doesn’t do much pair work either, even when it’s in the textbook (she tells me to do those exercises for homework. She does ask a lot of questions, which is authentic, I suppose, though sometimes they’re entirely inappropriate for my level of competency in spoken Dutch. She asked what my favourite museums in the city were. I told her. Then she asked me why. This is a not a question that can be answered without knowing relative pronouns.

The textbook we’re using is actually pretty good, informed by modern communicative teaching methodology, but Mrs, Brouwer doesn’t exploit the opportunities it offers for learning. She still doesn’t use the CD player but instead reads the dialog. Luckily she was a great talent for characterization. I listen later to the dialogues on my iPhone and must confess, Mrs. Brouwer’s readings are usually more enjoyable. Even when I understand most of the dialogue, I ask her to  do it again.She wanted me to read along while she read aloud the script for a listening activity, but I put a quick stop to that. Part of the idea of listening tasks is to accustom the ear to hearing the language, grasping and discerning sound clusters. And reading prevents that from happening. I sometimes think I shouldn’t have seen the printed word till after the first two months of lessons.

Mrs. Brouwer’s idea of warming up for the lesson and pre-teaching vocabulary is to recite the list of new words I’ll encounter and ask me if I know them. If I don’t she’ll tell me the word in German. I don’t think she’s ever used realia or paraphrase to explain a word. Except in the very first lesson.

It’s enormously frustrating being a better teacher than your teacher. I know how I’d do the lesson if I were her, and I know it’d be more effective. But I haven’t figured out a nice way to tell her how to do things. But why should I worry about saying it nicely? I suppose I should be be more assertive. I’m paying for the lessons, and they’re not cheap. I really should. I will tell her. This is amazing, I’m just deciding now, as I write this, to tell her the next time how I want her to work. Who’d have thought language learning would be so therapeutic?

Fernand Khnopff, La Ville Abandonee

I swore when I started Dutch that this time it’d be different. I swore I wouldn’t move onto the next lesson until I had mastered the vocabulary in the present one. Or more precisely, the gender of the nouns in the vocabulary. It’s the same resolution I had made when I started German, which I then didn’t keep.

I feel like an alcoholic when it comes to learning gender. Each week I resolve to dedicate time to learning whether a noun is neuter or masculine/feminine (mercifully there are just two genders in Dutch), and each week I fail to do so.

The words from the lesson take root in my mind without the article. It’s like arriving in a foreign city without your luggage. You can certainly do things without your bags but it requires a lot more improvisation and people will always notice that you aren’t appropriately dressed for most occasions. Mixing up gender makes you stand out even more as a foreigner.

Woord, success, land, werk, museum, station, stoplicht, swembad…of course I know what they mean, but will I know in a week that they’re all neuter?

Maybe growing up speaking a language that doesn’t make this distinction for 99% of its nouns has rendered me simply incapable of learning gender. There’s no infrastructure in my brain for it, I say, no analogue, no way of organizing and retrieving that kind of information. Intellectually I know that it’s just a marker with a small number of implications in using the language (e.g. in the case of relative pronouns). But I don’t have a feel for it. Or talent. Or capability, I fear. I think, this is what it must be to be color blind, though I recognize the analogy is flawed. People with most forms of color blindness actually do perceive colors, and the same object in the same light will always be the same color, even if it’s not the color other people see.  They don’t see it once yellow, yet again green. But for me I’m winging it: tijd or time is sometimes neuter (which is wrong), sometimes not.  When it comes to gender, I’m an achromat.

“You just have to learn the article with the noun,” my teacher says, just as my German teacher had before her, and my French teacher before her.

But how? I repeat to myself: het antwoord, het beroep, de bar, het idee, de honger, het college, de cola, het café. But it all starts to blur into two muddy streams of words that begin with het- and de-.  Indistinguishable. This time—ah, there’s the voice of the addict again—I’m doing things differently. I even thought of reviewing vocabulary in different places—on the trolley or the toilet for the neuter nouns, on my bed for the masculine/feminine ones. Or writing them on index cards of different colors. Anything that will help me get a better feel for this peculiar property.

I record the neuter nouns on the right-hand pages of my notebook, the masculine-feminine on the left. I embed the latter in mini-scenes with guys and girls, the former with empty space and still life. De kaas is a guy in overalls slicing into a round of Gouda, but het broodje is a roll on an otherwise empty plate.  There’s always a woman in a tight short skirt and knee-high red leather boots hanging out on de hoek, waiting for de klant. But there’s never a klant in het café or het restaurant, not even de ober, though de bar is always packed. In the parallel worlds of my vocabulary notebook, no one ever receives an answer for anything. Het antwoord is always a voice in the wilderness.

Frans Hals, The Lute Player

I had my first Dutch lesson today. I feel like a teenager who’s had his first flirt at a bar: I feel excited but awkward, my sense of utter inadequacy (“he’s just out of my league, why am I even bothering”) barely outweighed by the momentary pleasure I had of communicating in the language, if only at the crudest of levels: I actually managed to describe a picture of a man with a pen in his hand sitting behind a table: Een man zit achter de tafel. Er heeft een boek in zijn hand.  Most of the time I just felt awfully self-conscious, as I tried to repeat words whose sounds had no equivalent in my language. It was the verbal equivalent of the feeling you have in a dream when you want to run but can’t. The body no longer listens to your commands.

I remember my first language lessons as if they were first dates. I can’t seem to recall the second or third dates, but the first I remember as if yesterday. Even now, many years later, I remember the dialogue from my first French lesson in high school, which began with a child asking his mother, Maman, dinons-nous en ville ce soir? It made a huge impression on me, this dialogue. It made me think the French were terribly sophisticated and must really value food if a 12-year old could ask if they were going to have dinner in town. My family and I rarely went out to dinner, and then only on special occasions, like a grand-aunt’s birthday or my jockey cousin winning at the racetrack, and then I didn’t need to ask where we were going because we always went to the same restaurant.

This initial exposure to the foreign language, this first dialogue, seemingly so innocent, so lightweight, with the most basic of words and expressions, unfailingly imprint the most indelible of impressions on the student.   I used to teach English. The beginners’ textbook we used started with a dialogue of a rock climber who had lost his footing and slipped to the narrowest of footings. There was a picture of him perched on this sliver of a landing; his fingers wedged into the rockface as he held on to life and limb. The first word in English my students heard was “Help!” I still wonder what image of America this communicated to my students. (Curiously enough, the textbook we’re using for Dutch is called Kunt u mij helpen? )

My first Dutch lesson began differently but even more dramatically. Or rather, more theatrically. My teacher held up a pen and announced to me, Dit is een pen. She said it as if she were revealing a sacred object, the relic of a saint perhaps or an obscure surgical instrument used in esoteric rituals. Dit is de tafel, she said, pointing to the desk. Again, she made it sound as it were an altar. She made me forget for a moment it wasn’t even a table but her son’s desk. We were having the lesson in my tutor’s son’s bedroom, sitting at her son’s desk but in her priestess voice, it was a table. Ik wijs de tafel aan. Dit is de tafel. This was the table, no doubt about it.  The table where it’s all going to happen.

She laid the pen on the desk. Ik leg de pen aan de tafel. She fell silent for a moment and added, De pen ligt op de tafel. She made it sound as if it had gotten there by an act of teleportation. She reached for a small bag, not really a purse, more the kind of zip-up vinyl case you might keep pencils in. It may have been her son’s. She opened it and put the pen inside. Ik doe de pen in de tas. And then out. Ik pak de pen uit de tas. Like a magician at a childrens’ party, she repeated the process of situating and de-situating things with other objects, each time adding a few more motions. This was plot development!  Then it got personal. Ik zit op de stoel. Ik sta op. Ik loop naar de deur.  Ik doe de deur open. Her son’s room led out to the kitchen. I was trying to be polite and not look beyond the door into her family’s private space but I was thinking maybe I should because if she disappeared into the kitchen I would want to hear what came next. Yes, what came next! She managed with these simple sentences to create a sense of heightened expectation of what was to come next. I was enchanted.

Eventually she came back to her seat (after going to the window and opening and closing it a few times). She looked at me and said Nu pakt u de pen. I did as I was told. Pak het boek. I took the book from her hands. Leg het boek op de taafel, naast de pen. Doe het boek open. She raised her hands and extended her ten fingers and motioning to the book with her thumb said, Op bladzijde zes. Nu geef me het boek.

I yielded myself up to her firm but reassuring voice. She could have told me to take my shoes off and whirl myself around like a Sufi mystic and I would have done it, though of course I wouldn’t have understood anything so sophisticated. I would have done it happily because I was on some very basic level communicating. Well in the sense of following instructions, which is an authentic task, even if in real life nobody would probably ask you to put a pen in a bag or walk to the door.

Then she showed me some photocopies of paintings. Portraits by Frans Hals. A man. A woman in a white lace cap and fur-trimmed black gown with a starched white ruff (which I later discovered it was a portrait of Cornelia Vooghtová)  A man, also with a ruff. Group portraits of women and of men. Dit zijn vier vrouwen (the Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almshouse). Dit zijn vijf mannen (Regents of the St Elizabeth Hospital of Haarlem).  The photocopies really didn’t do justice to Hals’s paintings and lots of details were lost, but they would have been lost on me anyway if my tutor had described them to me in Dutch. As it was I had a hard time figuring out who was standing achter de tafel, who voor de tafel and who naast de tafel; they all seemed to me be aan de tafel, but that was just the nerd in me speaking.

I loved the exercise. Talking about paintings with my friends is something I do in real life, and again this seemed to be real communication. It was admittedly a bit of struggle to suppress my over-achieving self that wanted to talk about his fluid brush stroke and masterly play with light and shade. But learning a language means lowering one’s expectations and being content with a little. Though I do want to become competent in the language, to arrive at some point of proficiency, what’s more important is the process and pleasures of learning, the small discoveries one makes about oneself and the culture and the language one is studying.

My first impressions of the Dutch language are now inextricably linked with drama and painting but also with philanthropy and swimming. And that, I think that’s a grand way to start.

Anton Beeke, Naked Ladies' Alphabet

We did the alphabet and numbers today. After the theatrics and art lesson of the previous session this was a letdown. I also thought it was weird doing the alphabet before basics like how to greet people. Talk about skipping formalities. Hallo. Es-te-e-ve-e-en.  Hallo. Pe-e-te-e-er. Luckily I had already listened on my own to the first episode of the Laura Learns Dutch podcast so I could at least say goede avond to my teacher. And why the numbers so soon? Why was it so important that I learn how to count before I knew words of things I could count with. Ok, I knew boek and stoel and tafel but I didn’t know any plurals. And even if I did it would just mean I could say things like 24,546 stoelen at the end of the lesson. Which I suppose is authentic language if you’re working at IKEA.

I know I need numbers so that I can write down someone’s phone number and know how many layers of clothes to wear before going outside and pay the right amount of money when I go shopping. When I was in Berlin and before I became reasonably fluent in German, I would always pay for things in denominations of banknotes at least twice the value of what I thought the object cost. This way I’d never be embarrassed about not handing over enough money to the cashier. I had to keep going to the cash machine just to renew my stack of 50 Euro bills. I was determined not to make the same mistake with Dutch. But I didn’t figure it’d be this soon.

Saying my mobile phone number in Dutch was much harder than I thought; I’d get about halfway through the number and forget the rest. It was easier if I said it digit by digit instead of in groups of digits, which is the way ordinarily would say them, I was ok, but I buckled under the combination of having to remember my own number and the odd (for me) way of counting numbers from 21 to 99 in Dutch. It was a lot easier reading off numbers I could see. Perhaps they are really very distinct operations: reading numbers and saying numbers.  I’m walking around now with a list of meaningful numbers and practicing them on the trolley. My cell phone. My postcode. The first 15 prime numbers.  The first part of the Fibonacci series. (I know that’s weird but I’m desperate for practice).

And then we did the alphabet. I choked on ij. I thought I heard “eye” but I was obviously wrong. She said it again and I thought she said the vowel in “mate”. I kept seesawing between might and mate. Might. Mate. Might. Mate. I eventually realized it was somewhere between the two, but I couldn’t get it to rest there. It was like when you step onto a physician’s scale, you know the kind with the height rod, and try to adjust it to your weight. Even when you get it to around the actual, the pointer still keeps bobbing up and down. Might. Mate.  I could see the sound floating before me, suspended between the two other phonemes, but it was an image of an ij in my mind that my mouth and throat could not reproduce.  “Bet you can’t catch me,” it taunted.

But it’s not just the ij. I’m stumbling over simple words like zuid and zijn and the town of Houten (which I learned is a Utretch suburb that was named Netherlands Bicycle City 2008). It must be how people feel when they first learn to swim, where they  have to think about everything in advance. I decided to hear these sounds ina  more focused way. I found a good overview of Dutch pronunciation at Marco Schuffelen’s very rich learning Dutch website. with dozens and dozens of sound files illustrating the phonemes of the language, along with other pages and sounds to contrast long and short vowels. He also provides a wonderful matrix that provides recordings in which pairs of vowel sounds are compared. It’s a useful look-up table to train the ear to hear the differences between vowels that are not immediately audible to the non-native speaker (especially when one of the sounds doesn’t even exist in your language).  One half of the word has one vowel or diphthong, the second another. Like aandacht, lijfspreuk, huidbui and duekhoed. I have no idea what these mean, except aandacht, which is fairly close to the German.

My tutor had a few exercises for me to practice the alphabet. Nothing really challenging or interesting. If I’d been the teacher I would have done it differently. Maybe given my students mugshots of actors who had been arrested by the police (I made a collection for my teacher just in case she wants to quiz me). I’d have them imagine they were this actor, who was now in the precinct station after getting arrested. And they’d have to spell their name for the sergeant who was fingerprinting them. Ha-u-ge-ha Ge-er-a-en-te.  Er–o-be-er-te De-o-we-en-i-en… and, yes, ij. I wonder how you say Junior in Dutch?

Max Ernst, Portrait of an Ancestor

Living in a foreign country can sometimes feel like one protracted rite of passage that never really reaches the desired climax. Where you’re terminally stuck in that betwixt and between stage that follows the period of isolation and precedes the (re)incorporation into the family, community or body politic. This cultural coitus reservatus is re-enacted on countless occasions but perhaps nowhere more markedly than on those feast days in which the community celebrates itself in food, song, dance and ritual. Like Easter. I can learn the words to the song and the steps to the dance but it’s all in the head. The feeling is just not there. There’s too much mediation, too much self-consciousness, too little history.

This getting-stuck business is not, of course, the fault of my hosts or my ex-lover’s family or my friends. If anything, they’re eager to welcome me into the fold despite the amusement my faux pas and bungled Greek might occasion. I have never felt I was being made fun of. Perhaps I was teased a few times, mostly by being presented with delicacies like batter-fried calf’s brains (this was in the days before mad-cow scare). But I’m sure this was just good-natured fun. My father, who married into my mother’s very Neapolitan family, had similar stories to tell about his being accepted into the clan (one had to do with live eels in a bathtub).

I can manage a decent syrtaki and the brains weren’t half bad but trust me, you cannot feign a liking for a dish like the Greek Easter standard, kokoretsi: chunks of heart, liver, spleen and lungs which are wrapped in a coil of lamb’s intestines and then roasted on a spit. Kokoretsi is definitely a dish you have to grow up with. It’s the foreigner’s litmus test for Greek-ness.

I was telling my friend Georgia, who by the way doesn’t eat kokoretsi (but of course being Greek she doesn’t have to), about my father and the eels and how that reminded me of some of the “initiation scenes” in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. She screwed up her face as if she had just bitten into a morsel of lung. It turned out that she, like many of my other Greek friends, hated the movie. This struck me as worth pursuing. We usually agreed about movies. We even missed the same scenes in The Wrestler as we burrowed into each other’s chest during the more violent moments of the movie.

Georgia thought the Wedding a tasteless caricature of the importance that Greeks place on the family, the role of food in social and communal bonding, and the significance of the cultural legacy of ancient Greece in the identity of Greeks today. The film, she said, exaggerated national pride into stereotypes of chauvinism and parochialism. It was ridiculous, she said. Which struck me as an odd criticism for a comedy, the whole point of comedy being, as Aristotle said, the pursuit of the ridiculous.

She took affront at the father’s silly penchant for tracing the etymology of words like “miller” and “kimono” to their putative Greek roots. Though she had also told me with pride about a speech their former Prime Minister Xenophon Zolotas once delivered in English in which practically every word save prepositions and articles were of Greek origin. Actually there were two talks, but I’m being pedantic. I looked up the speeches. They didn’t really sound very English: “I emphasize my eulogy to the philoxenous autochtons of this cosmopolitan metropolis and my encomium to you, Kyrie, and the stenographers.” It was nice of Zolotas to remember the stenographers, though. I imagine they almost never get thanked publicly.

She also found far-fetched the father’s fondness for Windex as a cure-all for everything from psoriasis to poison ivy, as his daughter confides to her fiancé. She was right there. Despite the plethora of specialized gels, powders and solutions for all sorts of cleaning jobs from removing calk from faucets to scouring kitchen sinks, Greeks still swear by bleach, not Windex. I once witnessed a friend’s mother adding a couple of tablespoons of bleach to a sink filled with water to wash the romaine lettuce for a salad. Thank God I wasn’t around when she was cleaning the lamb’s intestines for the kokoretsi. Cleaning intestines is a Herculean task (you can guess which one), considering that my ex-lover’s mother, like every other self-respecting Greek housewife, would only use the fresh entrails of a Greek lamb in this dish; I don’t know how she was sure the lamb was Greek but she knew how to spot the difference between fresh intestines and the once-frozen thawed-out guts that unscrupulous butchers would pass off for fresh. Fresh intestines always contain remnants of the lamb’s last supper.

Georgia’s dismissal of My Big Fat Greek Wedding doesn’t mean she has no sense of humor. She does, of course. In his Essay on the Meaning of the Comic Henri Bergson makes the point that humor relies on a certain emotional distance to work. “It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled.” As soon as we start caring about what the comic character is saying or doing, we can no longer laugh. Georgia couldn’t be indifferent, I could. Perhaps my unruffled appreciation of the humor of Wedding was the flip side of my aversion to kokoretsi.

But there’s no going back. I thought Mambo Italiano, Émile Gaudreault’s delightful coming-out film about a young Italian-Canadian and his closeted (and also Italian-Canadian) policeman and of course their Italian-Canadian parents, was absolutely hilarious. It could’ve been subtitled, My Big Gay Italian Wedding. One could say it caricatured the importance that Italians place on the family, the role of food in social and communal bonding, and the significance of the cultural legacy of Italy…

My friend Jonas, who teaches Greek to foreigners at a cultural institute in Athens, is trying to get me to revive my idea of a series of podcasts on untranslatable Greek words. Words for which no good equivalent exists in English and reveal much about the way Greeks think and live and see the world, words like parea and meraki and filotimo, whose meaning can only be inferred through dialogues, anecdotes and stories.  Amerikanaki is another one of those words. If I ever get around to writing and recording the pocasts with Jonas, I’ll start with that one.

The story could begin sometime in the 50’s in Pireas, the port city of Athens, with the arrival of a US naval destroyer. It’s an early summer evening as the ship docks, and the city has already woken up for the second time in the day. Businesses and shops have re-opened. A carpenter has already swung open the heavy wooden double-doors to his workshop—as much to display the tables, chairs, and dressers that stand in various stages of completion in his shop as to catch a bit of the evening breeze—and is varnishing a closet, his brushstrokes slow, methodical, careful, as if he were caressing the wood with his brush. Old men shuffle down to the cafeneion, where the staccato knock of backgammon pieces punctuates the polyphony—Greeks having a rather elastic concept of turn-taking—of men talking politics.

The ship soon disgorges its sailors, and the young Americans raucously make their way through the streets of the city, in search of what sailors throughout time have always searched for when alighting in a port after weeks at sea. In Pireas at the time, this in itself was neither unusual nor particularly deserving of comment. But still, as these brawny, testosterone-pumped boys of Iowa swagger past the cafeneion, the patrons will mutter, amerikanakia. Intoned without bitterness, devoid of anger, the word doesn’t sound like an insult.  Amerikanaki.  The gullible, all-too-trusting  “little” American.

–aki is the workhorse of diminutives in Greek. There are lots more. The language, like Italian and Russian—and unlike English—is a language rich in diminutives, endings that denote something smaller in size or importance. In English we have to do with periphrasis. We say a small this, a little bit, smidgeon or tad of that. Oh, we have diminutives, but they’re almost always comical. Like  kitchenette. But in Greek, diminutives have a considerable force of their own. They make real words to denote real things. A piataki is a small piato, or plate, to wit, a saucer. Mihani is a motorcycle, mihanaki is a scooter. But it’s not just a matter of size. The diminutive signifies Greeks’ relation to the world around them. It can connote endearment, affection, intimacy, nowhere more evident than in names.  I knew I had cemented my relationship with M when he started calling me with a double diminutive—Stefanoulakis.

When a Greek orders a karafaki (small carafe) of ouzo, it not only means less volume but also reveals how Greeks drink: the ouzo is an occasion for the parea (group of friends) to talk, nibble on things like fried whitebait (maridaki) and fish-roe puree and tiny cumin-scented meatballs (keftedakia), and to enjoy each other’s company. To order a whole pitcher of ouzo would suggest that you’re really aiming to get drunk, which at least from my experience isn’t something Greeks do. I mean, the aiming part. They do get drunk.

When I first heard amerikanaki, I didn’t really understand what it meant.  A lot of my Greek friends and acquaintances see Americans as naïve if good-humored, apolitical, uncritical.  But this image of country-bumpkin gullibility didn’t jar (at first) with what my friend Nikos and many others would say about my country.

Nikos is the son of a carpenter much like the one in the story. He grew up in a working-class left-leaning family in a “distressed area”.  He’s now an architect for the City of Athens.  He votes Left but has more Gant and Nike and Timberland in his wardrobe than I ever had. He had an iPod before any of my other friends did. He likes American technology but he thinks of America as a country of immeasurable, almost sinister power that instigated coups, raised and deposed leaders, orchestrated wars, a country with no history and little culture and little dissent (Of course, I always thought he gave too much credit to the effectiveness of the CIA, given its record of bungled interventions). But he likes me, and he liked the Americans he met on his trip to the US, their openness, good-naturedness and enthusiasm.

I asked him about this apparent contradiction.  “It’s exactly because Americans are so trusting,” he answered “I mean, look at your faith in progress and the gods of technology, how you believe that everything can be fixed!—that’s why you have the political leadership you have. If you were more pessimistic, more critical, things would be different… and the world much better off”.  “You mean, more European,” I joked.

As time went on, I came to understand that amerikanaki has a trace of endearment to it. The  way you’d feel about a burly young cousin from the provinces unschoooled in the ways of the city.