January 28, 2004
There is no Vessel like a Book
Alembic is the blog of Maria Benet, a Romanian-American poet and writer. Most of her writing is about, well, writing, but she does have some interesting posts about her girlhood in Transylvania:
Growing up under communist rule, with our every move controlled and documented in booklets filled with the quilt of hieroglyphic stamps, we dreamt of travel the way Odysseus dreamt of going home. Though our borders were closed and we were shipwrecked, the world was still wide open to us in words.
The sirens -- dictionaries, primers, novels -- perched on the shelves of our small bookcase, sang and lilted of enchanted sunny islands in the subjunctive of French, echoed of the cobblestoned meandering paths of German compound nouns, and spoke in clipped tones of the bright, jagged cliffs of English verbs that stood like wardens holding off the invasion of maudlin latinates.
Our passage through these worlds of words was slow and required a great deal of effort, though we traveled light and weather was never an issue. But, back then, we had time and we had plenty of energy -- for we had few possessions to care for, and the exercise of effort seemed the only right to free speech left to us.
So we ventured, back and forth, between the languages, whispering words from one or the other to crack open the doors to a bit of fresh air and to another view, as the stuffy discourse -- the official language of some situation or another -- threatened to suffocate or blind us...
This might explain why I keep meeting so many middle-aged polyglots here.
(Link from Language Hat, the blog for language lovers. Scroll down to the comments section of that link for some discussion of matters Romanian.)
Posted by douglas at January 28, 2004 04:15 PM