Memoria de mis labores tristes

On the flight home from China Owl sat next to a man reading the newspaper in Spanish. Owl read over his shoulder for a few minutes (she has no shame) and then gave up because he was going way too fast. After the flight took off, the man popped open his laptop and pulled out a hefty dissertation in English. When his battery died, he whipped out a book in Italian. At this point Owl could no longer read over his shoulder and she fell asleep. When she woke up, he was reading poetry in French.

Owl nearly spontaneously combusted from jealousy.

The flight attendant spent a lot of time smiling at the man and slipping him extra peanuts. Owl was convinced it was because he was a polyglot and not because he was tall and distinguished looking.

Jet-lagged out of her mind, hurtling through thin air wrapped in metal and clouds, Owl decided she too would become a polyglot. Because polyglots are made, not born, verdad?

So the thing is, Owl spent nine years in school studying Spanish. All of it is a blur except for her last year. This was the class roster:

--girl who went to a Spanish immersion elementary school

--girl fluent in Italian

--girl fluent in French

--girl dating a Mexican student she met while teaching ESL classes

--linguistic genius #1 (aced all sorts of spelling bees)

--linguistic genius #2 (absorbed Spanish at her nanny's bosom and went on to become a beast at Chinese)

--resident school genius

and...

--Owl

Owl, um, kinda bribed her way into the class because she was flunking Economics and this was her only other option. It was the year of shame and stealth. By stealth, Owl means googling English translations of the assigned reading and praying to five gazillion deities before each exam.

To this day Owl associates studying foreign languages with  trauma and despair. 

Owl's dream of becoming a polyglot died a quick death the moment she got over her jet-lag.

But a few weeks later Owl picked up Rimbaud's poems at the library. Owl has been enchanted by Rimbaud ever since she read this review in the Economist.

Owl prepared to be dazzled.

…

…

…Yeah no.

Owl can not believe that Rimbaud, the gorgeous golden boy known for his filthy filthy mouth filled his poems with rhymes like stream with dream and fair with air. Maybe these rhymes aren't a linguistic crime in French. Maybe he was just having a bad day. Or maybe Owl got a really shitty translation.

Owl's going with that.

But she’s not sure if that’s true. Maybe golden boys with filthy mouths really like puerile rhymes. Maybe that's irony! Or something. Owl has no idea because the frustration of being unable to parse out the translation from the writing is messing with her thinking process. In school, on the rare occasion that Owl understood a piece in Spanish, she compared it to various English translation. And the gap between the two was always disturbing. 

Some translators focus on word-for-word translations, sacrificing elegance for accuracy. Others craft an elegant piece, and end up with well, an elegant piece, that's more like a second cousin than a twin of the original. Translators fight a good fight, but they always leave their mark.

Owl is not going to learn French. Not unless she gets run over by a train, and gets reincarnated as a polyglot. Or a French speaker. Owl loves Japanese writers and Chinese folktales and Hindi verses, and there is no way she's going to pick up all three of the languages for her reading pleasure.

But Owl's already devoted nine (mostly fruitless) years of her life to Spanish.

Accordingly Owl went back to the library. She poked around the Spanish section of the library, got frightened off by hefty nonfiction tomes, nixed translations of famous English novels (somehow seems counterproductive) and finally found a slim volume by Gabriel García Márquez.

Márquez! How can you go wrong with Márquez? And short Márquez too, because slogging through the verbal diarrhea that’s Love in the Time of Cholera in English gave Owl feverish hallucinatory dreams.

Owl flipped through the summary and picked up something about an old journalist, something about Márquez's first novel in ten years and she was happy.  Márquez reminiscing on his beginnings as a writer. Adorable.

Later that night Owl picked up her book and began reading. She started with the title. Because titles are good places to start:

Memoria de mis putas tristes

Memory of my sad whores.

How the hell did Owl miss that?

First line:

“El año de mis noventa años quise regalarme una noche de amor loco con una adolescente virgen.”

For a very happy moment, Owl thought "regalarme" meant to remember—an old man remembering his first night of 'amor loco' with an adolescent virgin. Then she checked. And found no, nope. "Regalarme" means "give myself." In other words:

"In the year of my ninetieth year, I wanted to give myself a night of crazy love with an adolescent virgin."

Owl has been reading steadily, book in one hand, laptop open to google translate in her lap. So far she has learned many words for brothel and many ways to request the services of a prostitute and this is not what Owl was expecting, this is not what Owl had in mind, and…

Owl wonders: will any of this get extra peanuts the next time she flies?

The Truth is Like Multiple Unicorns

Owl is in the habit of believing whatever she reads is the sovereign truth. Pandas are being gored to death by unicorns, fine, unicorns are just having ‘technical’ difficulties with their horns, fine, unicorns are actually working for Panda immortality with PETA, yeah okay. Sometimes it is hard to reconcile all of these truths but Owl does it anyway. There are multiple unicorns. However, sometimes even believing in multiple unicorns is not enough.

Last week, Owl found this Economist article on China’s response to the Egyptian riots. Namely China has clamped down on reporting so that it focuses on stranded Chinese and the instability rioting has on daily life. Commentary on how this is a fight for a new government is eliminated or downplayed. Search results redirect you to a government warning or articles that deal lightly with the topic. Owl was horrified. The evil government! The innocent people who don’t know what their government is up to!

Then Owl read the comments. In brief, The Economist has an agenda when it writes about China. Chinese search engines do indeed generate articles on the Egyptian riots. Chinese commenters pointed out they’d been involved in heated and deep online discussions about Egypt. In fact, they are able to access this article.  

Such is the strength of the printed word that now Owl is thoroughly confused. Her instinct is to believe the article. She does not think the commenters are lying, but perhaps they are part of an elite who can hack the censor. Does the average citizen have the same access to news? The Economist is a well respected magazine. It would not be full of lies and slander. 

No lies and slander here.

 

Owl sent an inquiry to her friend Kate who is living in China. This is her response:

Economist is a little bit full of crap - I tend to think that a lot of what they write on china is pretty hysterical and ooga-booga, like OHHH the CHINESE they are COMING FOR US!!!!! Which may in some ways be accurate but it just isn’t the full story, it's very one sided. Not that Economist is the only one guilty of it, NYTimes is no better, much less CNN etc. WRT Egypt, AFAIK it's just on Weibo that you can't search for Egypt, and even so last I heard you could still search "Egypt," just not "埃及“. Also, they only blocked search results, but not actual postings about Egypt. Also, AFAIK Baidu can still search Egypt riots…That said, official news media in China is focusing on the rioting, violence and anarchy more than anything else. Most people I've encountered in China are pretty conflicted about the government - on the one hand many of them recognize how much good the CCP has done for the country in such a short span of time, lifting millions out of poverty and developing huge cities in only 30 years. On the other hand, they are deeply cynical about the CCP and realize that they have no say and no voice, and are blocked from information via the "great firewall" and other kinds of censorship...and recognize the abuses of the government, and their powerlessness against it…

What frightens Owl is that if she’d read the print magazine which has no commentary, she’d never have thought to question the article. How can you question when you don’t even know what you don’t know?

And even when she read the commentary from Chinese people, living in China, Owl did not fully believe it. She had to ask someone whom she knew personally and trusted. What happens when people have no Kate?

Owl figures they must read. That’s what she does. Clearly it is working well for her. Owl wonders about business leaders who make deals with foreign companies, politicians who shape policy, and intelligence officers who provide these politicians with information. These people shape the world. These people get to declare war. Owl hopes they have far more comprehensive reading material, far less biases than she does, and the ability to question everything they read. It would be a tragedy if bad information led to a war and civilians and soldiers went up in flames because of some erroneous report.

Actually, Owl had a high school teacher who followed several major news networks to avoid the problem of bias. He would bring in clips from CNN, the BBC, the major French networks, and Al-Jeezera.

Owl admires him. He also reads the news until it explodes out of his ears. Owl has other interests like sleeping in or partaking in pie. She is not interested in giving these up to spend more time reading the news. Worse, Owl admits, even if she spends a lot of time reading the news or puzzling out all the layers of complexity that make up a full story, there is no proof that when push comes to shove she will remember the layers of complexity and act on them instead of the simple facts that are served up to her on a silver platter as the Sovereign Truth.

Recently Owl’s cousin from India asked her when America became independent. Owl floundered. Owl had vague memories of all of her history classes where her teachers promised her the only date she’d ever have to remember was July 4^th, 1776. She also remembered her teachers telling her to be canny because July 4^th wasn’t independence. Owl struggled. She knew July 4^th was important because people eat hot dogs and fireworks and Owl always eats too many hot dogs and gets sick, but why? Why so many hot dogs in July? Owl prayed no one would shred her passport. Owl decided July 4^th meant independence and she was hallucinating the part about being canny.

Owl consulted yahoo answers and saw that other people wanted to know when America gained its independence. Owl felt comforted. She wasn’t the only one! Then she thought about that again and stopped feeling comforted. She also noted that the answers to the question fell into three categories:

(1)   Shock and outrage. Tell me you aren’t an American. What are our kids learning these days? Idiot!

(2)   July 4^th, 1776, duh!

(3)   It’s up for debate. July 4^th, 1776 was when America decided it was independent and gave the memo to Britain, a.k.a. The Declaration of Independence. Sept 3, 1783 was when the Revolutionary War ended, the Treaty of Paris was signed and Britain accepted the memo. January 14^th, 1784 is when the Continental Congress ratified the treaty officially establishing the United States as an independent country.

Owl will let you guess which two answers were the most common. (Owl also finds it psychologically interesting America celebrates the day it decided it was independent, not the day of actual independence.)

Owl is left with an uncomfortable realization. Despite the amount of time she spent studying history in school, despite the immense effort her teachers took to impress upon Owl that the truth has multiple layers, what Owl remembers years later is the simple facts, the ones that have been repeated over and over until they are embedded in the canon as the de facto truth, so obvious they can not be questioned.

American Independence. July 4^th, 1776. Duh!

The World Explained by a Couple of Squished Oranges

Owl’s family is full of doctors, engineers and business people. Owl spends family reunions pretending she has grand plans for a financially solvent future. The only exception is Owl’s aunt who went off and got a master’s degree in Hindi literature.

The last time Owl saw her aunt, Owl had a grand epiphany. Compadre! Ally! Owl and her aunt would spend all future reunions blissfully discussing literature and cultivating their souls.

Owl’s aunt was probably relieved that Owl had grown out of the standard Aunt greeting—‘Did you bring me a present?’ ‘Is it good to eat?’—because she poured out some chai and settled in for some serious book chat. Only—

Owl had never heard of any of the writers her aunt mentioned.

In fact, Owl never thought about the literary landscape of India. She didn’t know it had one. She’d heard stories about how few opportunities there were outside of doctoring, engineering, and civil servanting. She imagined Indians who wanted to write shut that up in some closet of their soul and soldiered on through life as best they could.

Owl realized her conception of Indian literature is as follows:

[1000 A.D.] Gods and sages with mystical powers roam the earth. When they die their bodies turn into the texts of the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Upshinads, the Vedas, and um, other stuff?

[1913] Tagore wins the Nobel Prize for his poetry. Tagore is probably another god who was a bit late to the party. 

[1990s] A breed of English writing Indian authors such as Kiran Desai, Andruhati Roy, Vikram Seth and Rohinton Mistry hit the bestseller lists. Children of the gods? Possibly.

Owl was embarrassed. This is her understanding of the literary world.

America—The literary bread bowl.

Britain—The mother land.

Australia—mini Britain minus the classics plus some aborigine folktales

Canada—L.M. Montgomery, Alice Munro

Spain/Latin America—What Owl had to read in Spanish class

Greece—a country that hasn’t produced any writers since togas became passé

Italy—see Greece + Italo Calvino. Owl frequently mixes up Greece and Italy.

Russia—Eleven really depressed writers who all look up to Papa Pushkin

France—FREE LOVE, and um, Montaigne

Germany—Hesse & Mann, Nietzsche doesn’t count since he was crazy

Japan—Manga, Haruki Murakami, Tale of Genji, haiku, pillow books

China—Pearl Buck, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, assorted philosophers, books on why Mao sucks

India—see previous explanation

Middle East—Arabian Nights, cryptic poets

Scandinavia—sagas nobody reads, disturbing psychological thrillers everyone reads, cute books about moomin trolls

Korea—Bad manga

South Africa—J.M. Coetzee

Nigeria—Chinua Achebe

Everywhere else: NON-EXISTENT

The book world according to Owl

Originally Owl wanted to make a cartogram so that each country would be proportionally to the number of authors Owl had read or heard of, but when Owl plugged her data into the cartogram software, America and Britain turned into two massive blobs and all other countries disappeared. The map liked like two squished oranges.

The book world as explained by oranges

Owl would like to imagine this is solely because Owl speaks English and a smattering of Spanish. But when Owl was in high school a teacher told her 90% of the books published in the Democratic Republic of Congo are written by Western authors. Owl had a spastic attack. If someone grows up in DR Congo, either they’re reading books where DR Congo is never mentioned or it’s a place filled with heathens and barbarians.This must have an excellent impact on the psyche.

Owl remembers reading several British classics as a child. African and Eastern countries were never mentioned, or if they were, they were strange and backwards places full of idols. (Latin America never made it in unless an author wanted one of their characters to get rich quickly). Since many of Owl’s relatives pray to said idols, she found these descriptions upsetting and decided British authors were a very ill mannered breed. Owl's psyche had several tantrums.

What Owl found most troubling however, was that Asian and African countries never appeared in her history books at school. (Owl learned about Latin America because of Spanish class.) Owl knew the Asian ones had histories at least because her parents came from them and would occasionally tell her stories about emperors but somehow these emperors never made it into her textbooks. China was a couple chapters on communism. India’s Gupta empire was reduced to one page while the Dark Age of Europe was about half the book. It was even called the Dark Age, the period where Nothing Happened and Owl still had to learn about it for several semesters.

As for Africa, well, Owl has a very hazy notion that Africa was filled with tribes and then decimated by imperialism and slavery. If this was totally inaccurate she would not be surprised.

Owl asked her teachers about this omission. Her teachers gave her confused looks. Some of them said it was a tragedy. Others cited the Palmer (A History of the Modern World, the standard text for AP European History) argument, these countries had no influence on the shaping of the modern world and therefore they have been left out of the curriculum.

Owl understands that one can only pack so much information into a curriculum. It is not possible to teach or to read about every single culture that has walked across the face of the planet, but when it comes to the population cartogram, China and India are the two squished oranges on the face of the map. 

Legit Cartogram*

Given the number of times these countries are appearing in the news, their overwhelming numbers in terms of population and their exploding economies, Owl is a little frightened when she realizes that her education—the education most of her peers had—did not prepare her to deal with a non-Western-centric world. What Owl finds particularly disturbing is despite the fact India and China had civilizations that endured for thousands of years she, her classmates and her teachers, accepted that yes, these two countries were not relevant to the modern world.

90% of the books Democratic Republic of Congo publishes maybe from Western authors, but that does not mean Congolese writing does not exist, or that other countries do not have their own literary cultures. Owl went to a Korean bookstore the other day. On the bestseller table she found translations of The Kite Runner, Harry Potter, and a couple dozen other bestsellers that were originally written in English. But the rest of the bookstore was filled with Korean authors. Owl has never read a Korean author. Owl can’t name a single Korean author. 

One of the easiest ways to understand a culture is to delve into its literature. For example, the Bhagvad Gita (Owl recommends Stephan Mitchell’s translation) may have been written thousands of years ago, but for many Indians it still serves as a moral foundation that informs everything from personal to business ethics.

Owl is challenging herself to read books from as many different countries as possible. Owl would love your recommendations. Bonus points if the work is a translation.

Note: Owl is aware that she's mixed up all other countries in a most deplorable fashion, but she begs you to forgive her. She's read at least two or three times as many American books (she isn't even counting British ones here) than books from all other countries in the world combined.

*Legit cartogram source.