Elenamary

I had read  the book Steppenwolf and Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, when I picked up his book Strange News From Another Star.  It was one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read.  The imagrey was so amazingly beautiful that I began to sob with the realization that if it was this beautiful in translation what was it like in the original?  How much was I missing.  So I put the book down and swore I would never read Hesse again until I learned how to read him in German.  Needless to say I haven’t read him since.

I was trying to explain to someone last night the difficulty in both translation (written word) and interpretation (spoken word).   The person I was speaking to was a native Spanish speaker and I gave him this example; a young woman had a miscarriage and explained that with the miscarriage it had looked as if  “se me habia salido todo mole”.  The man grimaced and I explained, see you knew immediately what that image looked like you can almost feel it can’t you?  How would you in a literature piece translate “mole”?  Unless you really know mole and its consistency, its texture, its vibrant color, unless mole is commonly familiar to you, you can’t translate that without losing something in the translation.

On Friday night, I was standing on my porch waiting for a friend to come up the front steps when instead a VERY intoxicated man did.  He was a young male in his mid-twenties, Caucasian, wearing a polo shirt  ball cap, and blue jeans.  He was on his phone trying to figure out how to get to the party.  He swayed with drunkenness up to my front porch, asked the person on the phone to hold while he got directions.  He then asked me how to get to campus.

I told him to head four blocks north and then hang a right and go two blocks east.  Really though, he needed to go four blocks south and two blocks west.  I knew I was giving him the wrong directions and I did so out of anger.  I was pissed that he was walking around my neighborhood drunk with alcohol and white privilege.   It wasn’t his fault.  It isn’t like I myself didn’t walk around my neighborhood, that very same night intoxicated.  I regret it.  So, if you are that dude, I am sorry.   If you are out there wandering around Clintonville, turn around and head south you’ll hit campus no problem.