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. 

warpeace everywhere

And of course, today is when I stumble upon this article.

To sum it up:
"Mr Lavryonov, the official behind the controversial new project, said he wanted to give Russians a place where they could come and remember 1812.
  "Finding the remains will really be complicated because two hundred years have gone by. <...> But I think if we want we can find them. <...> There is now no place where people can come and bow down and lay wreathes," he said."

You know, I just got this vision of all these Russians who've been all torn up inside because they haven't anywhere to put a wreath in commemoration of the War of 1812...

C'mon guys, just re-read your favorite passages from War and Peace while listening to Overture to 1812 and snacking on some Borodinsky bread (it's quite good, I promise).

      Jokes aside, I am all for remembering history. Really. I've spent many days and nights writing unsuccessful verses about the dangers of collective amnesia, neglect of history, and misunderstanding of memory and its powers.
     But scrounging up some remains, taking them from the place they've been, however messily, buried for 200 years and moving them in an attempt to ape the French... that's not remembering history, that's making things up. Not to mention that it is also a great expense, and most of the country lives far below the poverty line.

     Borodino, the place where the incredibly long and bloody battle happened and from where the remains are to be transported, is about 75 miles from Moscow.  That is where all those soldiers fell.  That is the place that everyone should know about. You can't just decide that it's inconveniently located, and move some bones over to Moscow, so everyone can come tip their hats. I mean, one can do all that. Maybe that's the whole point: it's a yet another bout of "look what I can do," except now nobody's really looking.

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location: Butler library, 8th floor

 

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decelebration

 "May 1945. Zwettle, Austria.
The war is over."

       May 9th is a grand ole holiday for people like my grandmother, who fought in World War II on the Soviet side. The Russians are, doubtlessly, attempting to outdo last year's parade. To me, the spectacle gets sadder year after year because first of all, the people who survived the atrocity are becoming considerably more scarce, and secondly, somehow, it feels that celebrating peace with a gun and tank show is perhaps a bit uncouth.
      Then again, the argument could be made that it is not peace we are celebrating, but military victory, and so the tanks and the guns and the marching soldiers are a demonstration of power and a way to tell the world that Russia's still got those World War II-style chops  But the diminishing handful of frail veterans that march along, or frequently, wheelchair along, should be a reminder of utter shame; these people are poorly taken care of, especially now, and especially if they don't live in Moscow. (And here I must add that I am fully aware that Russia is far from alone in putting on such parades. Everyone does it; this is just an example that came to mind because of the date, and it is equally as unpleasant to me when any other country puts on similar shows).

Tucson, AZ. 2005-ish

       For the fiftieth anniversary of the war's "end", my grandmother got, from the government, a set of spoons that are made of such crappy aluminum that they bend with the lightest of pressures (I've even made these spoons take on lovely spiral shapes) and have cheap, bright silver glaze on them, akin to the eccentric shade of paint that covered the mandatory statue of Lenin at my childhood railway station.
       So what is it that we're celebrating, exactly? A lack of collective memory beyond the obvious demonstration of brute force and the soon-to-be-holy relics? To my grandmother, this day means more than most days. But so long as we continue to celebrate ends of wars with tools of war, the happiness and relief this day brought to people like my grandparents sixty-six years ago, is, in my mind, dampened.

Where It Comes to "Who the Hell Are You?"

It has been a few years since I last went for a walk with my father.

At two I was learning to walk up a little hill outside of our house under my father’s instruction. To his great dismay, I wasn’t a great walker, though I excelled in all other toddler disciplines. To anyone who knows me now this would seem odd, for I have become a truly avid pedestrian, but as a child, I most certainly lacked an athletic streak. 

photographer unknown, family archives.

My father grew up near a forest and often headed there right after or, on occasion, instead of, school. With a slight blush he still tells the story of ditching school with his friends just to go to the forest and exchange the new curse words they had learned. Upon getting home, he says, he promptly demonstrated his improved cursing abilities to his parents. It seems that their reaction was rather uneventful.

My father got to run about and climb a variety of old agricultural machines, which lead to a few scars and naturally, stories that left my much more careful mother in horror. There wasn’t a forest anywhere near where I grew up, but the red brick apartment building constructed in the 60’s under Khrushev’s command was, thankfully, surrounded by various greenery. There were cherry trees near the dumpsters, and a few apple trees, which never really gave much fruit. Somebody had planted gooseberries and red and black currants under their window. As far as playmates went, girls were scarce, so the boys had no choice but to include me in the game of war. When it rained, we played with Styrofoam, though I cannot recall where we acquired it, and why it seemed to be of any interest – all it did was float aimlessly in the puddles.

photo credit: V. Popov

There were no climbable trees in our garden, so at least once a week, my father would take me to The Pond, which was about fifteen minutes away. On the way, my father would unfailingly present me with either historical facts or math problems about Peter and Basil who went to the store to buy various quantities of kerosene. The reason he used kerosene and not milk or sunflower oil was because it rhymed with the word for “store”, and therefore entertained me, as did the fact that kerosene was no longer in common use, and hence had an air of olden mystery to it: it was something my father had, in fact, bought in a store, something he had had need for, but I could imagine no circumstance, apart from perhaps camping, under which I would require it. In fact, no store, to my knowledge, sold any kerosene, though I never failed to look for it. In retrospect, I suppose, it is fair to say that I owe my knowledge of simple algebra to Peter, Basil, and kerosene. When we got to The Pond, which was exactly what it sounds like, a pond, surrounded by a park, which in winter provided decent skiing lanes, we would always go to the same tree. I would climb as high as I could reasonably go, and then go down to a certain branch that was about six feet above the ground. Every time, I would hesitate before jumping off the branch, but my father encouraged me and gave me instructions on how to best go about it. After I succeeded at jumping off the branch the first time, however, the fear hardly receded with each subsequent attempt. I was just as afraid the third, fifth, twentieth time – something my father found silly. Unsurprisingly, when years later I was diving into the Volga river from something like 10 or 15 feet, the same thing happened. Despite having done and enjoyed it, I was still afraid to repeat it. As it happens, this illogical fear persists still, only my father’s calm impatience no longer motivates me; it has been replaced with puzzled faces of my friends.