* * * *
A note on translation from Roeblish
Though I have, in the course of my career as a philologist and translator, encountered many words and concepts difficult to translate economically and gracefully into English, never have I faced difficulties as great as those I found in rendering “Eft,” believed to be a fragment of a great, lost, thirty-line epic poem from Roebland's eventful third century AD. Only one other line is extant from the Lay of Roebland, and for a translation and explication of that line, which I could never hope to better, I refer you to Dr. Alfoot's book, Meren Gon e Nesoom. The Roeblish hold these five lines to be a cherished part of their national heritage, and I know that in offering this translation I have laid myself open to their intense scrutiny. I lived among the Roeblish for fifteen years before making this attempt. It may take as many more years before I can fully understand whether I have achieved something worthy or failed utterly.
The great Jesuit linguist, Father Francisco Gargani, who first attempted a Roeblish/Italian dictionary, died exhausted after working on it for forty-five years. I am deeply grateful to him for revealing to the outside world the incredibly rich and strange language of the Roeblish. Tucked away on their northern isle, having little contact with other peoples, the Roeblish developed the language of emotion, gesture and expression to a degree unknown elsewhere. It is said the Inuit have seventeen (or two hundred, or twenty-five, or merely twelve) words for snow1 in all its manifestations, due to its importance in their culture. The Roeblish have, on the other hand, sixty-seven words for various kinds of smiles, twenty-six words for laughter, and so on, beyond my ability to enumerate. This allows them to express nuance with a precision that the writer who works only with the words available to him in English, for example, or French, Mandarin, even Japanese, can only envy.
From infancy, human beings around the world learn a universal language of facial expressions. When shown a photograph of a woman making a face of disgust, Okinawans and Ohioans alike could identify the emotion correctly. A Roeblish speaker, however, could tell if the woman was really disgusted or merely pretending, and probably could deduce whether the disgust (if real) was occasioned by a bad smell, an unpleasant taste, or something imaginary.
Infants who hear certain phonemes learn to vocalize them through imitation; those who do not hear the phonemes grow up without the ability to recognize or reproduce them. Such is the plasticity of the human brain during the narrow span of time in which the fundamentals of language are mapped in the mind. The Roeblish language has, in its subtlety, given its native speakers the perceptual tools to “read” and render in words the language of the face and body more accurately than other peoples. It has been noted by many travelers that the Roeblish are oddly inexpressive. Their facial expressions and gestures are minimal; their laughter is muted and often silent. They frequently cover their mouths when they smile. This is the face they show to strangers. The Roeblish fail to understand that they have no need to conceal themselves from us. We lack the very words to interpret their smiles or frowns; we cannot distinguish at a glance—as they can—between a liar and a truth teller.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Mary
Bruce McAllister
When the American boy lived in the little fishing village on the Ligurian Sea, he went to school with the other boys from the village. His father was an officer in the military and worked in La Spezia a few minutes north, but his mother, an educated woman who studied other cultures, did not want him to go to the base school in the Navy port of Livorno, eat hamburgers all day and be around just American kids. She wanted him, she told everyone, to learn about these people, to learn compassion; and so the boy went to the school in the little fishing village where he came to know the castle overlooking the cove, the witch with tuberculosis who lived in it, the fishermen who returned each afternoon with their colorful catch, and the dark, damp alleys full of cats and little apartments where the boy's schoolmates had been born and would, the boy suspected, always live. He came to know, too, out in the sunshine, the villas on the hillside (one of them his family's), the olive groves where the boys played after school, shooting the green wall lizards with their little blowguns, where meaner witches tried to poison the cats, and where, when his friends went home for dinner, the boy could sit and look down at the bay. There, the boy knew, Mary Shelley's husband, the poet Percy, had drowned one day l40 years ago in a storm, and, a few years before that, Mary herself had dreamed the terrible dream that became her book, one the boy knew, about a monster who wanted only to be loved.
Because the boy, too, wished to write stories, he found himself thinking of Mary Shelley when the other boys had no reason to.
The man who taught them French, Roman history, literature, geography and most of their other subjects—everything except math, which was taught by a balding woman with a bad temper, and religion, which a big priest who rode a Vespa taught them—was a tall, thin hunchback with a lisp named Montechiaro. The hunchback would stand before them in the cold room with its single light bulb and ancient furnace and, spittle gathering at the corner of his mouth, ask the boys politely to sit on their hands when he tested them orally. All of them except the American boy knew the sign language every child in the village somehow learned; and if their teacher did not make them sit on their hands, they would, when he wasn't looking, help each other with the answers. Professor Montechiaro, whose first name was Firenzio, was kind. The American boy would remember thinking this even then and wondering, though no one else seemed to, why he was a hunchback, why he had a lisp or why he was so kind. He had been born in the village of Pozzuoli, the next village over, and many of the boys in his class had known him their whole lives. They would not need to wonder.
Montechiaro knew by heart many long poems, both ones for study and ones for pleasure. Montechiaro knew The Iliad and The Odyssey, or most of them anyway. “Cantami o diva del pelide Achille/L'ira funesta che infiniti addusse. Sing to me, o goddess!” He knew the epic poem about King Theodoric that began with “Sul castello di Verona/Batte il sole a mezzogiorno,” and ended with the old, sad king taking a bath at the top of his castle. Montechiaro knew French and English poetry, too, and he knew the Italian poems in English and French as well, as if he had translated them himself; and there were some poems, because he never mentioned their authors’ names, that the boys felt sure were his, though they would certainly keep it a secret. Poems about the mind's beauty, the wind, and birds in song—those subjects poets always wrote about. But abstract ones, too, ones that were difficult to understand. One about a tempest, and a silly one, the kind they themselves would write, about a cat. “Non piu! Non meno! Just a cat.” Even when it wasn't literature they were studying on a given day, the hunchback would stop and, if it felt right (he would ask the boy's permission and they would of course give it), recite a poem, and the American boy would watch the man closely, trying to feel what their teacher was feeling, and happy when he could.
Professor Montechiaro would take them to church before final exams and let them pray to God for good grades. He would say, “This is not cheating, ragazzi. God does not mind.” When a boy had a hard time answering a question during the daily oral exams, Montechiaro would help the boy with hints and clues. He had no favorites. And when he'd catch a boy in class trying to help a friend with sign language, he would say, “You are a good friend, but now is not the time."
After school or on weekends or during the summer, their teacher would sit fishing with a little pole on the wall of the promenade area by the wharf, where the main road passed closest to the little cove, and wait for the boys from his class, one or two a day, to find him. He never caught a fish. The American boy was sure of this. He was there simply so that the boys could find him. He wasn't married. He liked a woman, people said, in Porto Venere, the next cove over—a woman named Emilia—but he never saw her. He had no children and his parents had passed away, so he had lots of time to sit on the wall with his pole and wait fo
r any boy who wanted to talk.
The American boy watched all of this and wanted to go to him, but could not. He was a visitor and this was not his village. The American boy would stand outside the bakery or the beach-goods store and, if the hunchback was there on the wall, there would be a different boy each time. Montechiaro would be holding his pole and the boy with him might be holding one too, or not. What did they talk about? What do you talk about with your teacher when the pig production of Calabria or the length of the Po River is no longer important and you're sitting with him looking out at a bay where a famous poet drowned a long time ago and his wife dreamed a dream that became a sad, terrible book?
* * * *
One day when the boy was writing a story in class—one about a child-vampire that no other children wanted to play with—when he should have been paying attention to their teacher, who was talking about Garibaldi's March to Volturno, the hunchback stopped the class and said, “What are you writing, Hudson?” Face suddenly hot, the boy held his breath, and, deciding to be honest, said: “I am writing un racconto, una fantasia, Professore.” The hunchback looked at him and a miracle happened. He smiled. He did not scream or shout the way the boy's mother would, nor did he have contempt in his eyes, the way she sometimes did. Instead, Montechiaro continued to smile until he finally spoke. “I wish you the best of luck with your stories, Hudson. As you know, the great novelist Mary Shelley lived here for a while. If you publish your stories some day, please send them to us.” There was no sarcasm. The man was sincere. But how did he know the boy was writing stories—and more than this one? Gian Felice, his best friend, was the only one who knew. Had he sat on the wall one day after school and told him?
"Yes, I will,” the boy said, but he did not write in class the rest of the week. When he started writing again the following week, it was a story about a man who loved beauty so much that he became weak and died. He didn't write very long in class that week, just long enough that the story could be moved forward, that the people in it could become more real, but he knew their teacher was watching him as he did.
In the winter of that year, he wrote a story about a man who killed demons but then fell in love with one; and when the hunchback didn't seem to notice that he was writing in class, the boy dropped his pen twice and rustled his notebook pages until the man looked over at him, smiled and nodded at him. The boy understood: Even if their teacher wasn't looking at him, he knew the boy was writing; and this made it easier for the boy to write.
In the spring, when the school had its religious essay competition, the boy wrote about Jesus and how being gentle, kind and reasonable was difficult in a world where people thought it was a weakness to be that way. The boy's tutor—which his parents paid for and had paid for since their first summer in the village—helped him translate it and the essay tied for first place. It was only fair, the American boy's mother pointed out to everyone, that one of the boys from the village win too—not just an American visitor. One of the judges for the competition was Montechiaro, who wrote a note on the essay for the other judges (and not just its author) to see: “This is a persuasive argument for love and reason, and the author writes with heart."
* * * *
Over the summer the American boy played with his friends in the olive groves, shooting at the wall lizards and teasing the witches in their hillside huts, but he also studied with them because he had a final exam to retake for a class he hadn't passed in the spring. He had only one exam to study for while most of the other boys had two or three, but he was glad he had flunked. It was good to be with his friends, first at Pagano's apartment to study, then Gian Felice's, then Tincani's, and then at his own little villa at the end of Via San Giuseppe, just above the Hotel Byron, where Mary Shelley's villa had once been. During that summer one of the olive-grove witches poisoned his family's cat—the white one—and the American boy had to watch it die, making little pig sounds, in the shower stall of his bathroom. In vengeance, he and his friends broke the windows of the witches’ huts, but it would have little effect, they knew. Streghe! The witches would still appear on the cobblestone path to the tiny village of Pozzuoli, its red hammer-and-sickle designs bright on the miniature doorways, and would scream and shout at anyone passing, and more cats would die.
When the boy's father was away in Spezia and his mother was spending the day with the Contessa Marmorotto in her villa up on the hill, which was most days, the boy would write. He was writing another story about the man who killed demons, but in this one the man killed angels instead—not because he wanted to, but because God told him to, and, though it made no sense, it was God's will and so he had to do it. Though he wasn't in class for the teacher to see it, the boy felt sure the man knew he was writing. Wouldn't Montechiaro assume it? Wouldn't he assume the boy was writing a story during the summer?
In the fall, the boy wrote in class again and was happier. His new story was about an angel that had sinned, though it did not know how; and because it had sinned it no longer had wings, only stubs of bone on its shoulders, and could no longer fly. He showed this story to his friends, translating the first page without his tutor's help, and the boys liked it, they said. They teased him in the right way, letting him know they were his friends; and he was sure at least one of them told Montechiaro about it, for a few days later the hunchback nodded at him in class, as if to let him know.
The next summer, the boy and his family went home. When, twenty years later, the boy was grown and married and had children of his own, he returned to the village to look for Montechiaro, to tell him that he had, just as the man had asked, continued to write and that indeed the stories had been published—maybe not the ones he'd written back then, but other stories—and that he had one of them with him, one published in English, French and Italian, to give him. But the hunchback was gone. When the boy, now grown, found his best friend—who was living with his own wife and children in one of the castle towns not far from Pisa—Gian Felice said, “I am sorry, Johnny, but Montechiaro jumped from the castle wall in despair ten years ago because Emilia, that woman in Porto Venere, married another.” As Gian Felice said this, Tincani, his other best friend, who was there for dinner too, shook his head and later, as they were leaving, whispered, “The witches poisoned him. He was a good person, so they poisoned him. That's what my uncle always said. He threw himself from the castle, yes, but because he was dying."
From others in the village the boy heard that the hunchback had drown years ago, boating in the bay in June, when it is always dangerous to boat or swim; and also that he had actually been killed only a year ago by students from Parma who, coming to the olive groves during the summer to shoot drugs into their arms, had found him walking on Via San Giuseppe one evening and attacked him for his money. Even the Contessa Marmorotto, who couldn't think well now, had a story: “He became a cat. It's a secret, but you may tell your mother—only her.” And then, as the American boy was about to leave, a man at the hotel said: “Montechiaro died of tuberculosis just a few years after your family left. I do not know why there are so many rumors. People like good stories. Hunchbacks do not live long. That has always been the case."
The boy did not know what to do. He had, he saw suddenly, been waiting all this time to bring the man a story. He had in fact, he saw now, been writing all these years for him, the man who had not gotten mad at him that day in class and who had, for reasons the boy would never understand, wanted him to write. As if writing made life worth living. As if it led to the truth, to the power of Love and Reason. What use was it, the writing, the publishing of it, now that the man who had helped him feel what needed to be felt was gone? The boy could do nothing but go home. And there, one day, as if in a miracle, as if it were a story being told or dreamed by another, he thought of Mary Shelley, her drowned husband and the son she'd had to raise alone, a castle and poisoned cats and a hunchback who, cursed with the living soul of a long-dead poet, loved a woman he could never have, and the boy felt this, and was able t
o write again.
[Back to Table of Contents]
At the Rue des Boulangers Bridge Café
John Trey
Because Margot thought of herself as a poet, the romance of having her last meal on an August afternoon in a Paris cafe appealed to her. That she could embarrass her harshest critic made it all the sweeter. Her motley horde of companions had yet to recognize it, but the largest threat to the plan could very well come from two tables away.
"What if they don't bring the wine?” asked Hannah, her legs swinging back and forth under the chair. The color of her pinafore perfectly matched both her blue-sequined shoes and her eyes. Loose hairs had escaped her pigtails.
"Bah.” Margot waved dismissively. “They brought everything else. They won't stop now.” Yes, the waiter and the maitre d’ were whispering furiously, but Margot was more interested in the shirtless young men working in the street. Slick muscles bounced as the spike driver bratted against the pavement. She struggled to come up with an evocative description that would capture the scene.
"You're never too old to appreciate a good cut of beef,” she guffawed, but then wrinkled her nose. “Nah, too trite."
"Pardon, Madame,” said someone behind her.
Margot looked in the wrong direction. The preening smoky egret blocked her view of the thief. He was a pretty thing, but too intense. She could only think of him as a thief. Likely a mundane as well. Margot didn't remember seeing him before.
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 15 Page 2
