lost in translation

When I was twenty years old, I quit school. I was at a large state university, which was nice in many ways, but frustrating to me in others. Frustration won. One day, I was enraged (not an adjective that describes me often) when I flunked an accounting exam. I was hardly a whiz in the class, but had a B+ average up to that point, gained only through a lot of hard work. Somehow, finding out that my dad was going to die really took the energy out of studying. My professor refused to change the grade. I ended up with a B in the class, in spite of the lousy test score, but I swore that I would not stay in a school that only knew me by my student number.

So I went home. Misfit that I was in high school, I had had the job of compiling attendance reports after school for my junior and senior years. I could hardly complain about it: everyone was nice to me, I got to learn something about early 1980s computing, and I always had a job in summer, too, in the summer school. It was a fine job, but when the principal (the same principal that Jonathan Franzen writes about, same high school, and no, I never knew the writer; I am just name-dropping) offered me the chance to stay all year full-time, I told him thank you, but no. I was going to work in translation.

I did not actually have a translating job at that point, and about a month later, after going door to door to hand resumes to nearly every business in the St. Louis area that I could find with the word international in its name, I was beginning to question my decision to turn the principal down. One evening I came home, and there was a message for me.

It turned out that one of the translating companies I had visited (there really were only three) had just gotten a huge RUSH interpreting assignment and needed extra help editing and putting together brochures in four languages for a conference. Could I help temporarily?

Yes, of course I could.

My world was never quite the same after that. I went from my boring life in the suburbs to the cosmopolitan life I had always dreamed of, at least for that week. I know a lot of people identified with the movie Breaking Away because of the bicycle racing, but I had always found so much in common with the whole language and culture theme. My life may not have been Indiana. My dreams may not have been Italian. But I wanted a bigger life, too. I wanted to be French in high school. And now, I was working somewhere where I spoke it, better than I realized I could, on a nearly daily basis.

I also started learning some Spanish. The owner of the company was from Bolivia, and the other full-time translator was from Peru. That first day that I went in, I watched, my heart racing as freelance translators rendered texts into French, Italian, German. It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen, and there I was, in the middle of it, not in class, but the real thing.

No one in my family had ever even left the United States, but I was full of ‘satiable curtiosity, maybe from too much whimsical reading, or possibly from being that misfit. In high school, exchange students stayed to our house, for a week if not for a year, and my dad suffered nightly through three full hours of French television that I pretended to understand when cable made the world available in our living room. The exotic lives of my pen pals fascinated me, and writing to them must be how I managed to test out of most French in college.

When I started college, I never considered teaching. The thought of trying to force students like my high school classmates to have some interest in a foreign language was nearly as depressing to me as the idea that I might end up stuck in Missouri for the rest of my life. I wanted more, as in United Nations more, but honestly, anything more. Yeah, I guess I was a snob, or ambitious, depending how you look at it. I was, in fact, determined, and there I was, in a translation agency, doing what I had dreamed of doing, if only temporarily.

The conference I was hired for was a success, after hard work that I personally had never loved so much. A month later, I had a job, a real, full-time job. It was pure luck, I figured out soon after, as I went through the stacks of mail, new resumes every week. I didn’t even have a degree, but I had the job.

I learned a lot about the nature of translation, talked daily to people who were as passionate about language as I was, and found interest in topics (botany, sewing instructions, grocery store displays, camping gear, etc.), searching for the right word and the right person who knew what it was. The world grew around me in so many ways, not just in my eight hours, but after, in classes, in things I noticed, in people I met.

Yes, I loved my job. Sometimes I goofed. Once, a client was in a hurry for a sign he wanted to use for a conference in Belgium. Normally, we insisted on receiving the translation in writing, but in days before email, Roger called in the two-word translation for “Distributorships available.” Somewhere between his phone and mine, a c became an f, and I sent it to the typesetter. We received a call from Brussels. Our client was not amused when he realized why everyone was laughing. It turns out that “Confessions disponibles” has a vastly different meaning from “Concessions disponibles.” I was humbled, embarrassed; I learned a lot that day, most days, in fact. It was grand.

After a while, though, new doors opened, and I looked through them. Something in the Uruguayan poet I had met tempted me into a world I never realized I loved more: literature. I applied, was accepted, did well, ran out of money, went to France, finished school, looked for work, did not find it and went to grad school in Missouri.. I kept going back home. I taught. And there, even there in the Midwest, the world was there, and ever growing.

But unlike Dorothy, one day I let the tornado take me away, not afraid, but riding it for all it was worth, and I never returned, never tried to. The world still expands, albeit not without so much right here to do, too. Munchkins afoot, poppies distracting me from time to time… Oz, I think I am still looking.

“not suitable for everyday use…”

I have just been informed by the perfume police at ciao.com that the scent I have worn for twenty-four years is not meant for the daylight hours. After all this time, now they tell me.

I remember when I first wore it. I was in college, feeling smart, no doubt. My first boyfriend, normally a nice, laid-back California guy, dragged me along like a photojournalism groupie to burning houses and animal shelter fundraisers. I was away from home. I switched majors once or twice, liked economics, spoke French pretty well, but moved to the German department and its friendly Stammtisch at Shakespeare’s Pizza. My boyfriend’s brother did something or other with computers for the army in an office somewhere underground, beneath the White House. We drove to Washington, and he got us in to the Rose Garden to see Mitterand and Reagan. Not up close, but with a few school groups and other honored citizens. Maybe I could have been more political about the whole affair, but I was a starry-eyed not-yet-twenty-year-old girl from Missouri. They were speaking French, over a microphone, in public. It was exciting to me. I had visions of an international life, cities. My mom had sampled a new perfume in a magazine insert, and went to the only place in St. Louis that was selling it, downtown. She thought it would suit me. Maybe I was spoiled.

“COCO conjures up the baroque details of Mademoiselle Chanel’s rue Cambon apartment. Above her Paris showrooms, gilded mirrors, Venetian chandeliers and lacquered Chinese screens evoked a lush, fanciful atmosphere. COCO is Jacques Polge’s interpretation of the East, its roots firmly planted in Venice.” Wow. Sounds pretty exotic, even decadent. After reading the Chanel website’s description of its product, I really wonder if this is what my mom intended.

It was 1984, the year I started drinking coffee. My brother graduated from high school, and my dad was diagnosed with cancer. I wrestled with adulthood, finding ways to spend time that I had never before considered probable, or even possible. Dorm room philosophical discussions about Winnie-the-Pooh went on well into the night, with the English Beat in the background. The Julie who lived directly below me suggested taking the Poohs to the columns, a post-ancient ruin from the fire in 1892 that burned down something called Academic Hall. The wise Poohs contemplated serious matters from the columns, and we sat beside them, gazing at stars and drunken frat boys, maybe even a pre-Hollywood Brad Pitt, thinking of what life would bring us. Julie did have a varied life, as I heard from letters over the years: grad school, a Soviet husband, Soviet ex-husband, Hawaii, a child. So did I.

I quit school after the next year. Less than a month later, my dad died, and I finished my work in the high school. I had been the goody-two-shoes, the fat kid feeding attendance records into a computer after school, and typing course descriptions and helping in the summer school during my summers. The principal asked me if I wanted a full-time job. I told him no. I wanted to work in translation. So I did.

Sometimes I wonder if the Coco went to my head. The scent was sublime to me then. “Mandarin and Orange Blossom create a spicy atmosphere in which Bulgarian Rose and Indian Jasmine evolve over notes of Tonka Bean and Sandalwood, followed by a whisper of leather, wood and Vanilla.” Whatever the combination that enchanted me so, I always felt a little bit beyond myself wearing the perfume. And I wore it, not obviously so—at least, I hope—but nearly always. Once, forgetting that I was headed out not for coffee, but to clean up the yard, I avoided the regular attack of bloodthirsty insects. It evidently also worked as mosquito repellant. Why not wear it all the time? So I did.

Years went by, jobs, life. I always wore that perfume, still do. I was young and loved cloche hats and wanted a Vespa. It fit that well, even if the Vespa now looks more like a minivan. It made me feel less drab while I sat watching soap operas and nursing infants, something now long past, too. I wore it in Paris and Vienna and Oklahoma City. I wore it yesterday. I don’t know why it has been such a constant thing, didn’t even think of it until I found myself without ideas, clearly clueless about appropriate writing topics for the past several days. I pulled out a card from a motivational writing tool that I found half price at Barnes and Noble. It said, “Follow the scent.” Coco was the first thing I thought of. So there it is, my friends, my entry for today. I do still love it, that wonderful aroma that somehow suggests that I should run down the stairs and answer the door right now. So I shall.