Of Dogwood Trees and Dislocation

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time”

T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Nature is having a riot in Rock Hill these days. The blooming flowers and trees of South Carolina are unapologetically beautiful, positively Dionysian, challenging the intellectual Inquiry into The Nature of Beauty that I engage in with my students in art criticism and theory courses. When Spring arrives and the dogwood trees sing from outside the classroom window, I have to resist the urge to stop thinking and become a Zen nun.

‘Rock what?’ I asked when I first heard of this place about seven years ago. That was also the moment when I knew I would be moving to the States, soon. ‘Rock where?’ asked family and friends in relentless chorus. Rock Hill,South Carolina … I let the words roll in my head and listened to the sound they made when I said them. South Carolina had a romantic tone to it, like a memory of scenes in old films. I wasn’t so sure about Rock Hill. It took me a while to find it on the map.

Now I am about to move back to where I was then. In about 30 days I will be sitting in a glamor-less metal contraption called aircraft, flying over the waters, headed to the Western tip of Europe. My dog will be sleeping (hopefully) in the machine’s “belly,” in a pressurized area not far from my belongings. Destination: Porto, Portugal.

And so I come to what I think will be the main topics of this blog: adventures of dislocation, and search of meaning through translation.

Dislocation is my home. Yes, one can make a home in it, strange as it may sound, and a comfortable one too; it gets bigger at every turn and can change shape as different layouts are incorporated. And once the in-between is a home, no other fixed-wall home will ever feel right. This may be why, as my life zigzagged geographically from very early on (Portugal, US, Portugal, Germany, Portugal, England, Portugal, US and Portugal again … for now), I became comfortable in the varied ways of seeing things that languages offer and chose many points of view. Choice by choice, what seems like fate led me to the in-between even in my professional life, where I navigate between literature and art, art history and criticism.

The most fundamental challenge is, of course, that of translating a multidimensional being (in this case, myself) into an unfamiliar place and culture with minimal loss of meanings. New meanings are added, that is certain; hopefully, few are lost.

I have pondered this question ever since I can remember. As a child, I watched the world change almost magically as my family drove through country borders in a Europe that was very aware of its differences and completely ignorant of its future Union. Being allowed into another country meant long waits and much stamping of papers in an elaborate ritual of preparation. A mere two-hour drive would bring on a different language not made familiar by global TV or the Internet, different tastes and smells, a new currency, even a different sky, it seemed.

People changed too. One of the most vivid memories of my childhood is of my grandmother mutating from her genteel self to a red-faced stranger as she ordered breakfast in a hotel room in Spain. Louder and louder, she kept saying ‘pequeño,’ a clever adaptation of the Portuguese word for breakfast with a sexy Spanish sound to it that unfortunately means ‘little’ in actual Spanish. The hotel maid peered anxiously into my grandmother’s eyes trying to wring some sense out of what she was saying. After much fuss and bother we  were eventually allowed to have our tray of wonderful breakfast food.

The process of translation, linguistic and cultural – what works, what doesn’t –  interests me much. I have watched the ways in which I and others find our identity through the challenges of multiplicity. Picasso’s Cubist images speak to me instinctually because I sense their fundamental truth. It was Matisse that said, ‘Exactitude is not truth,’ and neither is the information in identity documents, be they a driver’s license or a passport.

Translation demands the ability to tune in and out appropriately, the finesse of nuanced tones. A reading in “black and white”, as well as the direct, literal transporting of meaning from here to there will not do; indeed, both pose a serious risk of rendering some of the most essential, less predictable dimensions of a person invisible, leaving only the ones that fit the “ways of seeing” of the new environment. Language is the most effective tool in resisting this process of reduction; those who don’t have this tool become like children whom nice people try to help, yet even those who speak the new language may be robbed of important, not readily “translatable” aspects of their experience. Translation, linguistic and cultural, is a form of art.

No wonder, then, that even after all these years I still ask, every time: Am I up to the task? I ask it even now, because the country I am going back to is not the Portugal I knew so well; it has changed, I have changed. We will have to engage in some translation dance.

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