A Childhood in Translation

         We were sitting under a tree in Prospect Park, much past dusk, with a poorly hidden bottle of red wine: the two of us, my friend Spencer and I.  As the wine buzz grew stronger, the topics of conversation took the all-too-predictable turn for more “serious” – we returned to things we’d given up on speaking of in our previous, more sober states. Spencer, a youthful lad from Colorado, declared to me that I would become a truly mature person when I accepted Russia. Accepted it as a part of me, as a place to call home. He proceeded to speak of my life there as something that gives me almost an advantage, creatively and otherwise, something, as he put it, he can not and will not ever know or be able to fully grasp, even if he studied the place.  He was starting to sound almost jealous.

The other world I have, he claimed – one that comes out when my parents call me on the phone for the twelfth time in two hours and I finally answer – was a thing of beauty, and I was to embrace it and appreciate it. On the surface, this sounds exactly right. What Spencer was saying is valid and could be found in the Immigrant Handbook, if one existed (hey, it probably does) under “Accepting Your Past”. The truth is, having moved from Moscow to Tucson, Arizona at fourteen, I’ve had the past eleven years to try accepting the whole Russia business. I went from a devastating sadness and refusal to start over to stern denial of its existence and complete immersion in American pop culture. When a relative told me I’d have a strong accent for the rest of my life and would never be able to write poetry in English because well, fourteen is pretty late to move, I threw Russia away altogether, and took all the necessary steps to get an MFA in poetry (who said spite wasn’t good motivation?). I lied to my classmates for the first month, both about my age, and my place of origin (I pretended to be from Arizona (duh) and Seattle, where I’d spent one summer).  Then came the time to confront, start speaking about the place, remembering it, watching Russian films. I even took a translation class. Finally, in 2010, nine and a half years after moving, I went back. For a whole ten hours. Nothing important occurred in that time, no epiphanies or revelations struck me: it was, after all a layover on the way to Georgia: I was jetlagged as all hell and much more interested in getting pictures of myself and my travel buddy with a voodoo doll and baby rattle in front of St. Basil’s cathedral. 

But when Spencer brought up the “old country”, and mentioned these two worlds I supposedly inhabit, my first thought was that however well-versed I am in my current homeland’s history and culture, I will never know what it’s like to be born and raised in Colorado. I will never know what it’s like to go to Burger King in a car when you are six. I will never know what growing up in a house feels like, or watching Spongebob Squarepants as a kid, or going to a baseball game with my dad. And while these utterly clichéd Americanisms may not be a source of deep longing, they are experiences just as valid as mine, and ones I have never had. Spencer won’t know a childhood in Moscow, it’s true, and it seems compelling to him precisely for that reason. I will never know a childhood in Colorado, and you know what? Frequently enough, that sounds compelling to me too. It sounds nice to have an easy answer to the “where are you from?” question, without always feeling like I am lying. Neither of us will ever grow up in Brooklyn, where we both live now. We know the heterogeneous only by association, and will either fear it or idolize it. In truth, I find it nearly unbelievable, and somewhat funny that my entirely ordinary Russian-Jewish immigration tale is at all interesting to people, especially here in New York, where we’re a dime a dozen. Maybe it isn’t actually interesting at all and people are just being polite, but that’s beside the point. Spencer remarked that I have a much better idea of what his early years might’ve been like than he does of mine; I can picture them simply by living in this country and watching other people grow up. And that’s true enough, but we could easily be even if he were to hang out in Moscow for a decade.

But then there was something else: try as I might, I will never outlive the cultural and linguistic split I exist in. Any time I tell a story from my childhood, which as my friends and I get a little older, has been happening more and more frequently, I am inevitably translating it. Transposing it, substituting cultural terms with ones familiar to those around me. By this particular juncture, there are very few things I don’t already have an English version of. These versions get so good, in fact, that I start believing them over the originals, only to remind myself that they are even more fictitious than the actual memories themselves, which come primarily in image-form and can never be represented verbally. At the same time, whenever I speak to my family members, in Russian, and try telling them about my days, I end up having to go through almost the exact same process, but in reverse, and with slightly fewer alterations when it comes to cultural references (globalization is cool that way).

While the Russian-English translation is somewhat enjoyable-- I frequently choose the “funniest” words, point out certain incongruencies, create mystical worlds for my friends to momentarily inhabit – the English-Russian process often feels like an unnecessary drag. Either my family members are familiar with the current trends, or they haven’t a clue as to what I’m talking about because it is only the current stuff that they know – they have far too much catching up to do to understand that Seinfeld reference.  It is almost as if I fail at making my life seem interesting; or maybe I have been infected with my own exaggerated otherness, and that is why I do such a brilliant job at having no Russian friends: I am afraid, perhaps, that their translations of our pasts are too different from mine, and we would argue over them until perhaps, we would agree that in the end, it all amounts to legends, gospels from each family’s point of view. Both translation processes often feel like lying; I wonder if creating these unintentional falsehoods makes me a better writer or simply a more careful one –– after all, all I am trying to do is get closer to the original, make it possible for all these people to share a foreign experience… And I wonder if I have a somewhat difficult time trusting people because it’s hard to imagine someone carrying on without going through the same process.

And so I hate it, this circumstantial history I can take no credit for; I hate it often because it becomes the focus of conversation, because it seems to define the way I am perceived, because I cannot allow it to be the most interesting thing about me because I had so little control over it. Yet, the thought of another me, an Eastern one, living back in Moscow … is terrifying, as is the thought of having nothing to translate.

I think that perhaps we are all of us constantly caught in translation. The degrees vary, of course, but all stories we tell are nothing but transposed simulacra of an original that exists only in one mind’s eye. Sure, when Spencer tells me of his younger years, of which I am not a part, he doesn’t have to translate from a different language, but he has to adjust the hues and shades and shadows, equalize the regional terms with respect to ones I might know. Just like I draw an old photograph from memory, so does he. I am grateful to know another language, and the experience of moving has changed me forever. But the everyday things, I think, are much more similar for Spencer and I than one would imagine. The split I mentioned earlier, it exists for everyone because none of us go through the years unchanged. Not all are as lucky as I am, I suppose, to be able to point their finger at the exact moment of rupture. Maybe accepting Russia for me means accepting having to lie, and the only thing that comforts me in it is that we all have to lie about the places we’re from, inevitably.  Maybe Russia for me lives in a place of make-believe, existing within my current surroundings, and that is where it should stay.

I’ve moved too many times now to know what to say when asked where I am from. I feel that one must have a strong emotional connection to a place in order to grant it that status. I have decided that I am, forever, from whichever place I happen to inhabit at the moment of answering. Maybe that’s cowardly. But maybe that’s the only thing that somehow feels much less like lying. And so, dear Spencer, this is the best I can do for now. I can promise to spend some time in Moscow, perhaps next year. I’ve deemed it necessary. But I quite doubt it will feel anything like home.