The Ties that Bind

Now that I am reading books in another language, I think a lot more about translations.  To convey not only the facts but the emotional context around a story requires more than just a dictionary.  It's an art.

At the end of last year, I read P.S. From Paris by Marc Levy, translated from French by Sam Taylor.  The protagonist, Paul, is a writer and his relationship with his translator is complicated.  There's a love story (or two) which develops along the way and a plot twist which answers the question of why Paul's books are so popular in South Korea.  (I'll let you work your way through the resolution of that.)

So these threads of translation and Korea drifted into selections of two books I read earlier this month.

A River in Darkness by Masaji Ishikawa is the memoir that opened my eyes to the history between Japan and North Korea.  Mr. Ishikawa returned to his father's native North Korea at the age of 13 with the promise of a better life for their family but soon after arriving, the grim reality that would meet them was hard to read.  Lack of work and housing, the perception of being "lesser than" due to Japanese heritage, and starvation were threads throughout his memoir and the decision to leave was his choice between imminent death and a slim chance of survival.  It is not a happy story but it is one which is important for all of us to read.

Go: A Coming of Age Novel by Kazuki Kaneshiro follows a young boy through adolescence and on the first page tells us that "The story that follows is a love story.  My love story."  If A River in Darkness opened my eyes, Go pushed me in deeper and set me off in search of more details between the history of Japan and Korea.  In each of these stories, our characters feel in various points as "in between" countries and subject to the prejudices of both.   Go is a relatively short read and while it is about love, it's equally about loss.  This kid is a fighter and as a reader you will find yourself rooting for him and hurting alongside him.

vida, muerte, y español

In the course of five days, I would receive texts to let me know that two Aunts had died.

These are the moments when the ~35 degrees of latitude on each side of the equator distancing myself from my family feels like the roughly 6,000 miles it is.

These are also the occasions when language falters.

I could purchase lettuce but the first time I was asked "Which type?", I stumbled, not knowing if I wanted romana, francesa, or hola de roble.  Learning a lot of words broadly was the easy part.  It is the depth of a topic that is my "tell" in Spanish.

And so it was with death.

It would be the first time that I would need to share this type of news and answer questions:  Was it sudden?  Was she sick?  Was she the oldest?  The sister of your mother or father? How do you feel?

Some questions I was better equipped to answer than others, but "how are you feeling" was one that I could not quite escape.  My vocabulary limited me to the basics and so there was no flowery descriptions or vagueness that I could use to skirt the issue, forcing me to say the obvious:  I feel sad.

And there was no Spanish lesson that prepared me to receive condolences.

I had a friend on the Camino who liked speaking in English because it gave her more freedom to say things that she could not say in her native Japanese due to norms in culture.  I think about that sometimes as the tears leak from using another language to express the feelings of the heart in a very base way.

I am also grateful for laughter through tears moments when I try to answer these questions, invariably using at least one wrong word causing the questioner to both want to give condolences and a Spanish lesson.  I think both Aunts would have gotten a kick out of that.

Remembering Aunt C here.