Fallen Pines

Poems and photography

by

Deborah Joyce

Fallen Pines

I found you

nose in the dirt

bleached bare

a rack of ribs

lifting your true-arrow spine

aspiring to crawl

to a place separate

from that of your birth.

My own feet

will doubtless do no better

than such a pedestrian end.

So let me acknowledge

the messages etched in your core,

subtle changes of wind or rain,

your singular identity

in the uniform forest,

those moments that played with your essence.

Eclipses and swelter,

chinook and blizzard,

they are all written there,

wooden memories.

My inner forest has tales of shade and sun

carving my soul

beneath my bark

coarse cry and cover.

The children of my dreams

have spines of paper

begotten bare on sheets of white.

I stare down at them,

listening for a voice,

and hearing none, cruel mother,

I crush them in my hands.

They do not have your permanence

to share our secrets

with the stars.

Pasta

I assign them to their fate.

Silent, unbending, anonymous.

Thrust upright into the bubbling cauldron.

They stand a few minutes.

I watch their mute surrender

As they bow away under the steam.

Submerging the last unyielding bits,

I am the Kitchen Witch;

Doing nothing

And dreaming of power.

 

I am

a shell

where once

your heartbeat

echoed

I am

a forgotten lake

that rippled

with your passing

I am

earth

that melted

to form your footprints

You are

negated

only traces

and

I am

becoming

singular

  

Bad Habits

Some elements of nature

Do not know their place;

Like untidy blades of grass

Growing in the cracks of sidewalk

And water seeking its own level,

Eroding mountains in its path.

I wish I could make rainbows

Without first making storms.

Not all people grow in rows

Like vegetables in a garden.

We tend to reach for sunlight

Following nature’s course.

Chacunière

Quelques racines de mes espoirs

gisent encore sous la terre de ton jardin,

et tes pénates connaissent

par cœur mes prières.

Ton plafond se teint de la fumée de mes rêves,

où je crayonne mon nom

sur l’écho de ta voix.

Un verre sur la table

porte la trace de ma soif,

et tes livres réclament

la caresse de mes yeux.

Le feu du foyer

projette au mur

mon ombre qui danse et qui hante ta demeure.

Et là-haut, dans ta chambre,

ton lit manque ma chaleur.

Incorporelle,

Je suis la fée folle du logis.

Mon âme sans Toi est sans abri.

Maçonnerie

Tel un tireur d’élite,

ta conscience te guette du toit.

Tu marches félin,

frôlant les murs

voulant faire comme un canin

pour inviter des câlins.

Mais tu crains

te faire descendre

te réduire en cendres

par une foudre du Ciel,

des comptes à rendre.

Tes poumons à peine

remplis de liberté

sous ta veste où pèsent

les secrets

de tes sommeils manqués,

tes chemins ratés,

tu rases les murs de briques

où sont projetés

les ombres de tes doutes

et tu n’adoptes ta démarche de Juste

que sur les voies ensoleillées.

Je t’attends dans l’ombre frais

du passé.

Chandelle fine

qui illumine

les piliers de pierre,

un exil rassurant

du grand vent.

Je te connais…

Et ton cœur

que mon amour

avait fenêtré.

  

Randonnée

Encore aujourd’hui

je suis partie

vivre ma métaphore

dehors.

Méconnaissable

sous un gros anorak,

évitant le trottoir,

force de jambes

plutôt que de tête

visitée à tour de rôle

par les anges et les démons

par soleil et vent

marcheuse solitaire

creusant un chemin

que personne ne prend,

je souille de mes pieds

la neige vierge.

Je dessine mon parcours

en emportant avec chaque pas

un peu de cette vie

collée à mes bottes.

Sunset Walk on Snow

The land sips the sky

dry

of its opaque luminosity

so that Earth

may become a Star

seen from afar

and cold becomes

glow

across the void

to throw

its shining message.

I’m here,

if only a sound

and an impression

on the white reflection

of god.

                  

Innocence Paint

seamless

length and breadth

a healthy January snow

white whipped cream contours

to fill the harsh angles

the more eloquent

the apology

the more opaque

the layers

like a cerement

something smothers within

waiting for forgetfulness

to follow forgiveness

for only then

would this burden

seem less

Death Wish in Paris

The river’s caramel depth

seems unromantically incapable

of drowning unrequited love;

a shallow excuse for oblivion,

her every movement scrupulously observed

by countless would-be poets

and the traffic of infatuated couples

hiding on her bridges,

jeweled tiaras.

No place to lose a lifeless body.

Perhaps the tower’s dramatic demise –

a lovesick leap

off the ultimate phallic symbol.

Yet the wishful step to eternal forgetfulness

ends in public embarrassment

of being scraped off a crowded sidewalk.

I have found the surest anonymity

insured by French custom.

            Walk the street at their pace.

                        Smile at no one.

                                    Pretend you are one of them.

                                                You will cease to exist.

  

Michigan Avenue

Step gently

over the trembling bodies

of the fallen birds,

wings shattered

on cool smooth

panes of artificial sky.

Men in their vanity

lined this canyon

with mirrored towers

forty stories high.

Crawling dust and paper winds

slither after the staccato heels

that flee the blemishing drops

while the skinny exiled outline

of trees in their concrete beds

wave bare arms

in mercy prayers.

Perhaps the sky will deliver them.

Only the fountains

are strangely still.

Heaven holds its breath

before a sob, before

the storm is sent

to teach humility.

Orbits

Seven years I wandered

in a comet’s dream.

You flung me far

out where the echo of our past

energy resounds

and, rolling in its thunder,

the ellipse commands

the flame to its source.

I return to find you dancing

with some cold moon,

feeling hidden in the void.

I always knew my orbit

would come full circle in time

in which I can account

for all the moments

you thought I couldn’t

see you,

hear you,

watch you grow,

breathe

the common air of two birds turning

lost above the tundra.

So this is how ‘never’ feels:

like leaving the traffic

to drive alone through the woods

and ending up in a paved parking lot.

A full white moon in winter

or the secret of where birds go to die.

Cold candle wax

or a vow on the lips of a nun.

The foreign

unpronounceable

notes of your name

leave my head

 in tuneless silence

while I iron white linen

of a man’s shirt

whose proportions

are not yours.

Icon

I would have liked to reproduce you

pantograph and pencil you

mix navies and cerulean

eureka your eyes

I could have drawn you within

high relief

dimensions of you

impressions of you

seeped into my cells

split your atoms

rebirth you

in fresher tones

newborn nudes

refashion you

through artistry

of female chemical idolatry

I could have been your temple

sheltering your image

pagan portrait

of a god

who never left his heaven

The Conquest of Balance

What rules apply

to keep me high

and elegant

astride the stallion of my dreams?

A bit of steel

certainty and heels

dug deep in gravity

are all that attach me

to flight from pedestrian safety

and wed me

to my lofty desire.

Unsettling doubts

would unseat me

surely in a loss of mastery

of my precarious choice

to fly not fall,

if mind chose to matter

over heart –

that clumsy and unbalanced organ

binds me to my disobedience

of natural earthbound law,

neither centered nor centaur born,

aspiring only to marry

the furious muscled ever-forward

motion of my life.

Ellipse

Tu finis souvent tes phrases

en points de suspension,

signe de tes omissions,

style mitraillette

sursis d’exécution

de tes promesses incomplètes.

Tu ponctuais ma vie d’espoirs,

histoire

de me persuader

qu’il y avait suite à donner.

Sans point final,

tes idées planent

comme autant de doutes

pour repeindre tes serments

en mensonges,

les bornes de ma fausse route.

Je ne retiens plus le souffle

en goûtant à ton art

abrégé et ramassé,

ton chemin plus court

pour aller quelque part.

Je saisis maintenant tout le sens

de tes raccourcis,

de tes silences et de tes non-dits.

Lorsque tu parles d’amour sans fin…

je t’aime

point

point

point

Le Second Degré

Many years ago, working on a large in-house translation project, I supplied French translations to a group of programmers who were rebuilding the on-line Billings and Collections program for an American company.  The French I was asked to supply was a simple collection of fields on the screen, such as “Date”, “Time”, “Account number”.  As an indication of just how long ago I worked on this, the main consideration at the time was to convert the program from a text based interface to a GUI or “graphical user interface”, using all the little widgets that we now manipulate almost unconsciously on our computer monitors. They were “the latest thing” back then.

While the programmers had the task of modernizing access to information in two languages, my personal dilemma was coming up with French texts equivalent to the English, but with a crossword puzzle restriction:  only eighty characters per line.  This became a real challenge.

Although I had always had a sense of the quantitative differences between French and English, it was the programming SWAT team who was able to provide confirmation with real statistics.  These computer guys were an elite bunch from IBM, a generation before today’s post-Facebook software geniuses in their hoodies and jeans.  My team all wore suits and ties, removing their suit coats at their desks revealing white shirts, and were groomed like a squad of Marines: no beards or mustaches, and conservative haircuts.  Some of them had, in fact, begun their technical careers in the military.

What I learned from their statistical studies is that the average utterance in French is typically 30% longer than its English equivalent.  The team understood why I anguished over fitting my French translations into 80 characters per line.  Where one line on an English screen could allow for six or seven fields plus the blank spaces to be filled, the programmers kept coming back to me with the same old song:  “Any way to shorten this by a few letters?” 

The classic example is the American “DOB” for “date of birth”.  Three characters.  In French, I remember grappling with “Né le” and then wanting to be politically correct, going to “Né(e) le” in case the person filling out the form was a female.  But then the uncooperative software would leave out my accent mark and turned my rendition into nonsense.  Using “date de naissance” avoided the accent mark issue, but took up too many characters. 

Taking the statistical analysis of the two languages one step further, it also turns out that English has 30% more words than French.  I had always noticed that the English half of my bilingual dictionaries was consistently thicker than the French half.  The hard fact of more paper on one side was enough to prove that there simply are more words in English to be defined.  My Larousse book of French synonyms was visibly half the size of my English synonym finder, and bashfully included a subtitle, in smaller text: “with antonyms included” to beef up the volume and mask the fact that there just isn’t a slew of synonyms to be had in French. 

In practice, the smaller set of French word choices lends itself to the tricky area known as the Second degré.  In a language where one word, rich with underlying context, has several meanings, the Second degré is where the real art of speaking and understanding the French language, with endless plays on words, and subtle changes in tone of voice or a raised eyebrow, becomes the subtle secret handshake between two speakers.

When applied, the “Second degree” means one should not take a word or phrase literally, but look for the humorous aspect, delve into the underlying layers of meaning.  The image it evokes in my mind is a shadowy staircase into a half-lit cellar.  The French language has a second level where you must tread very carefully, or find yourself in that underground place, looking back up at the light outside and wondering how you had innocently stumbled into a completely different conversation.  Once one becomes a real player of the game, the geological exploration into hidden meanings beneath the surface can be the pathway to a few cultural treasures, the keys to really speaking French.

One evening, after a day spent interpreting in a factory for a group of machine operators from France, we were all sitting around having a drink before dinner.  I spent a month working with these men, and was happily accepted by them into their team.  They were already united by a certain camaraderie, cultivated while working together on the project at their home base.  But once they boarded a plane to the United States together, they became a synchronized, close knit soccer team, bound by the shared experience of a first exposure to America.  I was to become not only the technical assistant to accomplishing their work in the American plant, but their own interpretive barometer of cultural differences. 

As I sat with them sipping my sweet vermouth on the rocks, one of the guys complained that he had wanted to iron his shirt for dinner that night, but the ironing board in his room was … substandard. Temporarily dazed by the idea of a Frenchman’s dilemma with a wrinkled shirt, I watched him hunting around for the word in French to describe the problem, and then blurted out what I thought was the correct one.

« Branlante, la planche à repasser était branlante. »

A dead silence came over the room, and I saw all these pairs of eyes latch onto me simultaneously in surprise, as if I had just shouted “Boo!”

The Team Leader was the first to speak, with a flustered shake of his head.  “Exactly!  Yes, Déborah, that is the exact word to describe it!”  He looked around the room.  “She is correct, you know.”

The conversation took a quick turn to something else, and was forgotten as we left for dinner.

Of course, I had to find out what I had said wrong!  Hours later, back in my room, I ran to my dictionary to look up ‘branlant” which did, in fact, translate as “shaky, unsteady, tottering”.  Then I wandered into the basement of the Second degré and looked up the verb branler.   Oh, no!  To masturbate (used in the reflexive, naturally).  There were other phrases using the verb branler that merited two and three warning stars in my bilingual dictionary, none of them very polite expressions.

The next morning at work, after putting on my factory coverall and hairnet in the Ladies’ locker room, I hurried to meet the guys as they came strolling out of the Men’s Locker Room down the hall.

“So, gentlemen, I want to thank you for the vocabulary lesson last night.  I looked up branler in the dictionary.”  I was treated to roars of compassionate laughter.  Overnight, I had become “one of the guys.”  For the duration of the month that I worked with them, I was amazed at how many things in the factory were “shaky” and “unsteady”, how many of the hand tools in the tool boxes were referred to as the “shaky tool”.  I would learn every possible use of the verb in all of its most coquin of renditions. 

If I had to describe that ironing board now, I would cautiously say “elle n’est pas très stable…” 

Not very stable, like the sometimes shaky ground of French context.

Fringe benefits

My annual trip to the tax preparer has all the anxiety of a trip to the dentist,and the solemnity of the confessional.  I’m not worried about paying huge tax amounts.  Rather, I have to sit through a thorough examination of my performance for another year, from a purely financial point of view.

Working as a freelancer is a brave and bold endeavor.  As an independent, unless I provide it myself, I have  no health insurance, no retirement, no paid vacations.  One must be an IT expert, an accountant, a self-marketer, not to mention the self-discipline required. According to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, the average mean income of a translator in the U.S. is $45,000 per year.  My tax guy compliments me on my bookkeeping, and talks about his trip to France, giving up on trying to copy my pronunciation of French towns and castles.  Yet I always come away with the feeling that he thinks my ability to work in a foreign language should make me wealthy.

So now that the returns are filed, I am going to take an uplifting moment to review some of the priceless moments that don’t have a line on the tax form, that don’t add to my bottom line, and that make me happy that I do what I do.  Without becoming a millionaire.

This year, I took an oath of office for court interpreters in Illinois.  This is a milestone, mostly because we never had an Illinois oath of office before.  There are now some ground rules.  Their purpose is to make legal proceedings accessible to Limited English Proficient persons, but an equally great benefit is a set of guidelines that the attorneys and courts can follow to help the beleaguered interpreters in their performance.  Progress.

I was invited to speak in a webinar for the Illinois State Bar Association.  The moderator emailed that the presentation went “very well… Particularly Deborah’s portion.  She has a very personable style.”

I have a flowery Email from a project manager who used the words “thoroughness”, “great sound bites”, and “tremendous value to the research.”  This one is going into my portfolio.  I keep a leather-bound linguist’s scrapbook, as proof (to myself? to others?) of what I can do.

I have a lovely Thank You note from a client who writes “je suppose d’après votre nom que vous êtes Américaine… ”   I translated a legal document into French for him and he was surprised to learn that I’m an American!

I had my usual annual calls from my retired French citizens in Chicago.  One woman whom I assist left her native country in her youth to work in the mines in France and now relies on receiving her pension wired into her American bank account.  She cannot read or write the forms sent to her from France, so I go and help her and she and her husband serve me wine and pastries in their suburban kitchen.  Another elderly gentleman who has to show up living and breathing at the French Consulate to obtain his certificat de vie proving he is still eligible to receive his pension, brings me a bouquet of flowers and a box of chocolates for making a few phone calls for him.

I helped a woman with the paperwork she needed to regain her French citizenship, a West African woman who needed a translation of her school transcripts quickly to apply for a job, an asylum candidate who just needed to talk to someone while nervously waiting out the interminable weeks and months for his hearing. I translated the documents required to transport someone's loved one back to France for burial in his hometown.

Language is a very human activity.  We have electrified it, mechanized it, computerized it.  But those artificial processes do not really enhance the miracle transmission of words from one human heart and mind to another.  I can’t seriously look my tax preparer in the eye and give him the George Bailey line that I’m “the richest man in town.”  But I’m warmed by a call this afternoon from Simone who tells me that her pension finally made its way into her checking account.  She will use the money to see her new grandson in Texas for the first time.  Life is good
.

Liberté - Egalité - Etre Français

Over the last few days of the terrorist attacks on Paris, I had many exchanges with friends in France, from all different parts of the country.  My dearest lifelong friend Denise lives not far from Montrouge, the Parisian suburb where a terrorist shot and killed a policewoman in the street. 

In fact, the site of that attack isn’t far from the famous spot where a native-born Frenchman attempted to assassinate Charles de Gaulle.  I was too young to remember that moment, but just old enough later to be profoundly affected by the assassination of Kennedy.

I grew up in a time when bullets were used against important figures, targeted as symbols of something greater than their personal, private selves.  In the United States, decades have gone by without any acknowledgment of the significance of Kennedy as a target.  We are told over and over that it was the work of a single fanatic, nothing more.

In reaction to the shootings in Paris this week, one of my friends in the South of France wrote to me that “all of the West has to go to war against these fanatics.”

My reaction to this remark was immediate.  “We Americans went down that path to war after 9/11 and it did not provide us with a very satisfactory resolution.  In fact, it was ruinous.”

I remember one cold spring day before the war, before Shock and Awe, when I had gone to a friend’s house to go horseback riding in the woods.  There were four of us in the barn:  three women tacking up our horses and the farrier who was fixing a shoe or trimming a hoof.  He had a Semper Fi patch on his jean jacket.  The conversation, usually very collegial in a barn, had turned to the looming prospect of war with Iraq.

I spoke up and said “Invading Iraq will be our greatest mistake since Viet Nam.” 

I quickly learned that this was not the sort of thing one should say, smack in the middle of Republican DuPage County.  The response to my outburst was on the order of “Do you want our way of life threatened?  Do you want to see gas go up to $4.00 a gallon, threatening our economy?”

I felt very alone that day.  But I have never regretted voicing my opinion.

Fast forward to a more recent time.  I received a Facebook message from a woman with whom I had worked and remained friends for thirty years.  “Politically we are on opposite sides but that is okay because that is why we vote our personal choices but don't shove it down anyone's throat. It is almost like you are an activist.”

The message here was that I should NOT discuss religion or politics, particularly my left-leaning French ideas.  In order to keep everything “friendly”, those subjects are taboo, and Political Correctness is more than ever a requirement for social survival.  Me? An activist?  Posting something pro-Obama on Facebook is activism?  He is the President.

While we in the U.S. are conditioned not to rock the boat with our opinions, the French relish a good heated discussion.  It is a national sport, on a par with soccer, except that nearly everyone plays.  

One way of understanding the differences between French and American thinking is to look at how students in each country are evaluated.  In the U.S., the SAT and the ACT are multiple choice exams where only one answer is right!  Unthinkable in France.  The baccalaureate exam in French is in essay form.  The grading system in French schools is on a severe numeric scale, where no one ever achieves a perfect 20 out of 20 points.  Americans strive for that A+, but in France, there is always “room for improvement”, and nothing is ever perfect.  If you want to pay a Frenchman a compliment, “pas mal” or “not bad”, uttered with the appropriate uplifted tone of voice, would be more prized and more believable to him than an exuberant outburst of “wonderful job!”

In a country where the esprit critique is the cultural heritage of the Enlightenment , where nothing escapes doubt and examination, an attack on freedom of expression is particularly hostile.  And yet, the French terrorists this week, unlike those who hijacked the planes on 9/11, were not foreigners attacking a nation who had invaded their homeland.  They were French nationals attacking what they perceived to be an invasion of their beliefs, which were not to be questioned.  They attacked the satirical press precisely for being French, with the sometimes biting, saucy, challenging components of French humor. 

These guys were attacking the very culture in which they lived. 

Is France “at war” as my friend suggested?  What happens when a culture is attacked from within?  In all wars, boundaries are disputed and set.  The boundary in France’s conflict is not geographic.  It is a fragile line between Fraternité and Political Correctness, secularism and religious indoctrination, cultural assimilation and cultural resistance. 

Americans are usually much more obvious than the French with flag-waving patriotism, but this week, I have seen countless French flags on the news, and everyone singing La Marseillaise at the top of their lungs. So I have been flying my French tricolor flag on my front porch, against the attack on the culture that gave me the literature, the poetry, the music, the pleasures of the table, the style, and, most of all, the people that I love.  My heart is with them.

A review of Co-ïncidences, by Dr. Cynthia Hahn

Probably the best compliment one writer can pay another is to admit to the pangs of jealousy I experienced upon reading a line I wish I had written:

Daybreak Harvest

Poised to sing spring, this

in-between hour when

poems are time’s pockets.

Obviously, Cynthia Hahn is herself justifiably proud of her stunning metaphor of “time’s pockets”, since this verse is repeated under her photo on the back cover of her newest collection, entitled “Co-ïncidences” (Editions alfAbarre, 2014;  editons@alfabarre.com)

In this collection, Cynthia Hahn and artist-illustrator Monique Loubet brush onto paper the delicate landscapes of a woman’s soul.  Dr. Hahn is at her poetic best in the spare precise Haiku of her art, like the delicate brush strokes of Chinese characters that convey multiple meanings.  Ms. Loubet’s art is in perfect balance with the words on the page, full of subjective and sensory impressions that re-create objective reality.

My greatest enjoyment of this bilingual collection, however, was trying to decipher which poetic version came first:  the English or the French?  As someone who can call Cynthia Hahn a friend, and as poet and translator myself, it was a great game for me (and perhaps for her students) to read back and forth between the French and English to seek out the original poetic inspiration from the poetic translation.  In testimony to her craft, this was never very obvious and my guesses are certainly influenced by personal preferences for certain sounds and images.

Comparing the English verse:

Copper bell sounds a

lake of yellow lotus,

sun’s grounded glow.

to the French

Une cloche de cuivre sonne un

lac de lotus jauni,

chimères de soleil tombé en terre.

makes me think that this poem was born in English first, while the vocalic harmonies in the poem Elle en arbre

Les oiseaux me fortifient

de leurs nids

de leurs dons de trilles

lead me to believe that this French rendition, with its strident bird songs, was written before the English.

As for Night Undresses

Sun and Moon lie

in a crimson suitcase

filled with ragged clouds.

I’m convinced that the beautiful evocation of this image had to have been first seen with Cynthia’s English-speaking eyes.  My impression is that Cynthia Hahn is a bit more “liberated” in English and more rigorous in French, but if that is true, she would only be acting in faithfulness to the distinct natures of those two languages.

Her collection is a bird’s eye journey, from Ascent, to Flight, to Landing, in a final contemplation of mortality at a poet’s favorite place for that:  the sea. 

I came back to a new reading of these poems over the Christmas holidays, and was again pierced through with lines written for the finality of another year in the cold of winter:

Who will sing new year

leaves onto the trees?

Softly falling angels.

Congratulations, Dr. Hahn, on an elegant, moving work.  I say that with both jealousy and admiration.

365 Cheeses

“A country that produces 365 cheeses cannot lose the war!”

So said General DeGaulle.  Also:

“How can you govern a country where there are 258 varieties of cheese?”

These two quotations came to my mind a couple of months ago while on the road interpreting for a group of over thirty French visitors to the Midwest.  The exact number of cheese varieties in France, as well as in the quotation, was as jumbled in my memory as it was in DeGaulle’s, so I had to look it up.  I tried to find an exact figure of how many different types of cheese are produced in France, and those numbers were all in conflict with each other.  I think the reason for the ambiguity is that the French don’t want to discount the small producer out in the Aveyron with a hundred head of cattle on a hill and a really great homemade cheese sold in the local farmer’s market.

The huge variety of cheeses is the perfect expression of how French cling to their individuality, to their unique personal expression.  How horrible of me to make sweeping generalities about a culture!  This is the place where prejudice is born!  And yet, the more time a person spends straddling two cultures, the more those cultural definitions become enforced through observation.  I know for a solid fact that some jokes will make an American laugh, and will not even provoke a smile from a French listener.  Conversely, something a Frenchman finds screamingly funny can totally escape the American sense of humor.  Certain actions and reactions can be expected, dependent upon culture.

My group of French visitors to the U.S. approached me on the tour bus with a request.  Would I please speak to the driver in order to reserve her services and her vehicle for the evening? 

It would be simple enough to just go interpret the question to the bus driver, but my antennae went up, sensing a pending complication.  Interpretation always has the interpreter thinking ahead.

“Before I ask the driver, can you find out three things for me?  How many passengers will there be?  What is your destination?  And at what time do you want to leave?”

The groups’ transportation delegates left me, with a promise to come back in a few minutes with the answers.

I sat in the back of the bus and watched the conversation unfold in the aisle, starting with a simple question and escalating to a full blown debate, punctuated with both laughter and moments of forcefulness.

An hour later, their spokesperson came to me with the following itinerary:  “Six of us would like to go to the art museum.  Five want to go to the jazz club.  Three from the museum group want to join the others at the jazz club, and two from the jazz club don’t want to leave the hotel until later, but then the art museum would already be closed.”

I borrowed the piece of paper on which the person had scribbled the math and made my way down the aisle of the bus to the driver’s position, knowing full well what her response would be:  “Taxis.”

How did I foresee that there would not be an easy consensus?  Would an all-American group have come up with one destination and one departure time?  Perhaps not, but I dare to make the generalization that Americans are more “team players” than the French.

I often hear from French visitors that they are astounded by the number of American flags, flying from every building, from schools to gas stations.  You don’t see as many tricolor French flags in France.  In some way, the French don’t need a symbol to know they are French.  Their culture is so thick with traditions, with “dos and don’ts” that are subtle indicators in a person’s mannerisms and speech that immediately communicate to each other that “I am French.”  I can’t describe it, but when I go to the airport to meet a group of clients, I can spot a group of Frenchmen at a hundred yards in the crowd.  For that matter, it’s just as easy to pick out American tourists at Roissy.  Nobody is carrying a flag.  The American one is a confusing patchwork of stars and stripes, and serves as a symbol to unite the cultural mix that is an American.  The French flag takes the same three colors, bleu blanc rouge , but displays them in an understated couturier-acceptable array of equally measured vertical bands.  I think to the French mind, other than on July 14^th on the Champs Elysées, those colors merely indicate the location of a government office and the French have a love-hate relationship with government.  They rely heavily upon it and are always extremely unhappy with it.

Working in the French language and culture is personally exhilarating for me, like joining an exclusive club with an elaborate secret handshake.  The French with whom I work are usually very warm hearted towards me, with my mixed American background but my obvious efforts to be one of them.  I think professional linguists have somewhat of a split personality, with a foot in two cultures.  We get to be someone else, role playing and toggling between idioms and the manners that go with them.

Today is the Feast of St. Jerome, the patron saint of translators.  He was a Roman who traveled to Gaul and spent some time in the Middle Eastern desert with hermits.  He made the cultural transitions required to translate the Bible into Latin, an amazing piece of work. 

I wonder if he was easily recognizable as a foreigner when he was hanging out in Syria?  Or was he successfully able to blend in with the locals?

The real test would have been when he went to arrange for his “bus ride” back to Rome….

Putting words in their mouths

Language separates humans from animals, and yet there are so many experts out there that claim to “read” animal language.  I suppose that puts animal trainers and handlers in a certain class with translators and interpreters.  We decipher a “foreign” communication, and give a voice to those who cannot be understood.

I volunteered for many years in an equestrian center, drawn by the natural beauty of horses, and perhaps riding a horse was the fulfillment of a dream passed down from my Polish grandfather. His portrait in my home shows him brandishing a sabre as he sits astride a horse that I would guess to be an Arabian, with its small stature, dished face and dancing feet.  Someone once told me that it is particularly tiring to sit an Arabian horse, because they never stand still.  My grandfather’s horse looks as if it wants to fly off the wall.

Early on in my exposure to horses, I found it interesting that human handlers routinely “spoke” (in first person) for the horses in their care.  “Where’s my hay?”  “I don’t really want to go for a ride today.”   I suppose all humans put words in the mouths of their beloved four-legged companions.  My dog communicates fairly clearly to me:  licking his nose while standing next to the fridge where his bag of kibble sits means “hey, I’m hungry.”  Standing by the front door means “I need to go out.”  Putting his toy at my feet means “can we play fetch now?”

Horses, on the other hand, are infinitely more discreet than a dog, and almost entirely non vocal.  They don’t bark or wag their tail to let you know they are happy to see you.  Their communication is so subtle:  the direction their ears are pointing, the position of their head, the amount of white showing around their eyes.  Unlike the happy hind end message of a dog, a swish of the tail on a horse (if not to chase a fly) might be a warning signal that a hoof is going to come off the ground in your general direction pretty soon, especially if his ears are flattened against his head.

As an interpreter, I would listen in quiet amusement while humans in the barn would “interpret” for horses.  Horses do communicate, but their very nature makes the communication complex.  They are both powerful flight animals and submissive servants  and we humans have had to figure out which side of their nature is operational at any given moment, without too much of a sign from the horse.  Human history would have never progressed to where it has if there had not been generous equines to assist us.  What if all we had to work with were goats or kangaroos?  Horses, with all their muscle and size and speed, stand for us and let us climb aboard, allow us to attach all manner of leather and metal to their bodies and in their mouths.  I am always deeply touched by the generosity of this animal towards humans.  It is their very generosity that makes them inscrutable.  Saints are not complainers.

As an interpreter, I am limited to my experience and exposure to situations in my foreign language.  I have actually toured a nuclear power plant with French speakers.  While this allowed me to learn some specific technical vocabulary, that one encounter does not make me an expert in nuclear power.  Likewise, spending years and years with horses might give me some vocabulary, but would I actually “speak horse”?

There are horse “whisperers” and trainers who, through extensive exposure, interpret what the horse is thinking and feeling.  Unlike language interpreters, however, who are trained to remain neutral, and who are interpreting within their own species and maybe even under a common modern cultural “umbrella” of understanding, the horse whisperer or trainer is making a bigger leap of faith.  Seriously, no one really knows what a horse is thinking. 

I have watched the conflicts that have arisen between horse handlers, each interpreting equine messages differently and subsequently providing different responses and reactions.  There are those who will beat the horse and intimidate it (the caveman approach), shout, whisper, massage, clicker train and reward. 

The trainer I respected the most was the very first one I encountered in a barn.  He didn't speak so much to the horse as LISTEN.  And, as any interpreter knows, effective LISTENING is crucial.  Horse communication is full of tacit messages, and can go misinterpreted for a very long time until the horse has a “freak out” moment, or lies down in pain on the ground.   

There are as many different styles of training and managing horses as there are barns across the countryside, and horse handlers are often immovable in defense of their preferred method.  They fervently cling to their method like a religion.

That is why I so appreciated my first instructor, Matt Trynoski.  His reflective approach to any horse problem would begin with:  “Hmm, that all depends….”  tempered with years of experience and a lot of listening.

Through my contact with horses, I have found them to be wonderful teachers.  They have much to teach human beings on the subjects of fear and confidence, dominance and submission, persuasion and force, strength and gentleness, generosity and collaboration.

If we only know how to listen…