Resisting Translation

 

            I’m a good immigrant. Seriously. I do my best to blend in. I have a deep respect for place, language, culture—when I lived in Budapest for a year, I tried to learn Hungarian; good luck trying to learn Hungarian in a year! But I diligently studied prepositions added at the end of the noun and nouns that changed their last syllable according to the preposition added and made choppy sentences with all that.

            Living in the US for ten years, you can guess, I give my bookishness free reins. I get a doctorate in American Studies (once someone remarked, “Well, this is the right place to do that!”). I read as much as I can on American history. I check English words in my etymological dictionary: hood and house come from the same root, according to the Chambers, a Germanic word that signifies “cover.” How important is that?

            Yet my Romanianness sneaks up on me at the most unexpected moments. I don’t know where I read about hybrid identities and how immigrant people manage their multiple identities etc. I don’t manage that well. It’s more like I’m controlled by foreign forces. They come and seize me when I’m not aware.

            Like for example when I answer the phone and say Alo! Instead of Hello!

            Like when I explain an assignment to a student and all of a sudden, in my speech, Romanian words mix with English ones. “You only missed one class and in the syllabus it says you can miss up to two without grade penalty, prin urmare you don’t need to worry about it.” I wonder how my student hears it. Are foreigners supposed to babble anyway?

            Like when I get angry and my accent becomes stronger and all of a sudden I can’t find English words, right when I need them the most.

            Like when I count in Romanian—sorry, can’t do two things at the same time, count and speak a foreign language, it’s either one or the other. To the bank teller it must seem like I’m whispering charms over twenty dollar bills.

            Like when I apologize too much, or say thank you when there’s nothing really to thank someone for, I just like that person and I say thanks to mask my happiness.

            And these are situations when I know it. How many other times do I act Romanian, speak Romanian, betray myself as being from somewhere else, perform my foreignness in perhaps disruptive ways?

            But what is my fantasy here? That indeed I can control my worlds, prevent them from seeping undetected into one another, crossing the mental border between “I am here” and “I was there”? Maybe I fear that, unbeknownst to me, I’m functioning according to rules that have changed since I last took a serious look at them, as if I’m playing a game of soccer and halftime has passed and the teams have switched halves but I still don’t know it yet, and I’m running triumphantly with the ball toward the net, about to score a goal, and it’s too late when I realize that it’s my own team’s net and I’ve just scored for the other team?

            This whole experience of living away from the country where I was born, under very different circumstances, makes me realize at a very deep level how much we’re a product of our worlds, how what we believe, expect from life, celebrate and eat all depend on how we spent the first twenty years of our lives. But then, what should I keep? What should I actively try to lose? Here's what's frightening: it doesn't completely depend on me.