When in French (10 page)

I was rarely able to appreciate my own mother's ebullience, though, without criticizing her unworldliness. I sometimes found her naïveté its own form of affectation. It struck me as stunted that she had never smoked a cigarette, eaten a bite of fish, gone to a restaurant by herself, mixed her own drink. The joke in our family went that she had invented sushi, having—one Valentine's Day in the 1970s—served up a cocktail dish of gelid gray shrimp, not realizing that they were supposed to be cooked. For his part, my father had neither a computer nor an e-mail address, cell phone nor ATM card, such was the fixity he required of the world. As much as I depended on my parents' constancy—their permanent address, their forty years of marriage, their perpetual availability, their diligence in
hanging on to immunization records and school diplomas—I faulted them for a lack of imagination. But at Olivier's family table, deprived of the tools of discernment, I didn't have the option to be cutting. I felt like a fool, but a sweet one—opened, in my wordlessness, to the possibility of an uncomplicated kind of love.

After dinner, Hugo ran off to the kitchen. A few minutes later he reappeared, carrying a cake. As everyone clapped, he deposited it in front of me. It was buttercream, with a marzipan scroll that read, in English: “Welcome to Lauren.”

 • • • 

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
we slept late. When we woke, Olivier and I put on the bathrobes that Violeta had left out for us. Violeta and Teddy, in matching silk kimonos, were up, buzzing around the kitchen. They'd set up a table under a tree in the garden: silverware, cloth napkins, cheery red-and-white polka-dotted cups and saucers.

I was embarrassed.

“We slept until lunchtime?” I said to Olivier in English, drawing my bathrobe tighter around my waist.

He looked at me like I was confused.

“This is breakfast.”

We all sat down, a phenomenon I was familiar with from cereal commercials. A plate of croissants went around, followed by jars of fig and strawberry preserves that Teddy had put up in the fall.

“Tea or coffee?” Teddy asked.

“Well, it's kind of weird,” I began, “but I don't drink either.”

I was waiting for Olivier to jump in and translate, but he remained silent.

“I don't know why—people always ask if I'm a Mormon, but nobody drank coffee in my family growing up, and I just never really got started,” I babbled. “Actually, I'm not really big on any of the hot beverages, so I usually just drink water in the morning.”

Olivier, finally coming to my aid, repeated my excuses—suspiciously, his rendition of the monologue took about half as long as the original version.

Violeta and Teddy looked at me with benign wonder, as though I'd said I didn't breathe air.

After breakfast, I went to take a shower. It was only after I'd stripped off all of my clothes that I realized that the toilet was in a separate room—an early lesson in the absolute demarcation between the scatological and the sensual,
les toilettes
and
la salle de bain
. There was one bathroom—of each type—for all of us. The latter was very much Violeta's domain. The ultimate sign of maturity, a friend of mine once claimed, is having a piece of furniture in your bathroom. This bathroom, with its framed nudes, frilled lampshades, and twin walnut bureaus, heaving with beads and eye shadows, spoke of a sort of deliberate, pleasure-taking womanhood that I wondered if I could ever claim.

A hand shower lurked in the corner, coiled around the faucet of an uncurtained bath. I stepped in, sat down, and slowly turned one of the taps to the left. A risky maneuver, I knew, freestyling with European plumbing, but I couldn't bring myself to call across the house for Olivier to help. Teddy was the kind of freakishly competent person who could rewire a lamp or explain how buttermilk was made. He washed rental cars. Violeta had grown up in a village in the Pyrenees. Even with four of us sharing a bathroom—later, it would be six, and
eight—it never seemed to be occupied, Les Fockers slipping in and out like wraiths. I was clumsy in inverse proportion to their gracefulness. I had never felt so American, so conspicuous, so inured by comfort to common sense. Even the old-fashioned handles on the doors strained my technical skills. I could never open one of them—for example, to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, which seemed like an opportune time—without it sounding like someone was popping balloons.

I loosened the tap a little further. It was the hot one, I soon found. The showerhead struck like a python, the hose writhing around the tub, firm as flesh, spraying searing water everywhere. Eventually I wrestled it into submission and turned off the tap.

Twisting my knees into lotus position, I quickly lathered my hair and turned the showerhead back on. Water trickled out, the python reduced to a caterpillar. Fearing that I was taking too long, I decided to forgo a rinse. I stepped out of the shower. Rolling my towel into a sponge, I got down on all fours and scrubbed the room dry, covered in suds and gooseflesh.

 • • • 

I
N DECEMBER OF 1977,
Jimmy Carter visited Poland, his first trip to a Communist country. He stepped off the plane, proceeded past an honor guard, and ascended a stage to deliver a speech that would be broadcast live on television. It was intended to be a human-rights landmark, a message of inspiration from the leader of the free world to the Polish people.

It was raining. For the occasion, the State Department, which did not have an interpreter on staff, had hired Steven Seymour, a respected translator of Russian, French, English,
and Polish literature. (“Interpreter” and “translator” are often used interchangeably, but technically, an interpreter deals with speech, while a translator works with writing.) He was to be paid $150 a day. It was his first time interpreting for a head of state.

Carter opened the address with a nod to his hosts: “We are delighted to be in your great country. When I left the United States this morning, I told the people of my nation that this journey reflects the diversity of a rapidly changing world.”

The State Department had not given Seymour, who was thirty-one, what is known in the trade as a Van Doren—a cram sheet named after Charles Van Doren, the contestant who was briefed in advance of his appearance on the quiz show
Twenty One
. Drenched and speaking in his fourth language, Seymour began to translate the president's words into Polish. Using the wrong conjugation of the verb “to leave,” he accidentally implied that President Carter had permanently defected from America.

Oblivious to the gaffe, Carter went on, praising the Polish Constitution of 1791. Seymour somehow rendered it “an object of ridicule.” Carter continued. “I have come not only to express our own views to the people of Poland but also to learn your opinions and to understand your desires for the future,” he said. Choosing the wrong form of
desires
, Seymour announced to the nation that Carter was carnally desiring the Polish people.

Seymour was quickly relieved of his duties. For Carter's next engagement, a state banquet, the State Department brought on a Pole named Jerzy Krycki. When Carter stood up to deliver a toast, pausing after his first sentence so that the translator could relay his tribute, Krycki said nothing. Carter continued and paused again. Crickets.
Å 
wierszcze
.

Krycki, it turned out, was experiencing the inverse of the
problem that plagued Seymour: he couldn't understand Carter's Georgia-inflected English. After the “carnal” fiasco, he had judged it wiser to simply remain silent. At last, one of the Polish officials' translators came to the rescue.

Interpreting emerged as a profession at the end of World War I, after President Woodrow Wilson and British prime minister Lloyd George insisted, in a break with precedent, that the Treaty of Versailles be negotiated and written in both French and English. (Since the Treaty of Rastatt, in 1714, French had enjoyed a monopoly as the language of high European diplomacy.) The Treaty of Versailles established the League of Nations. Its official languages were English, French, and Spanish, creating a permanent need for interpreters. At first, their techniques were limited to consecutive interpretation, in which the speaker stops periodically so that the interpreter can render his words into another language, and
chuchotage
, or “whispering translation,” in which the interpreter sits or stands next to the listener and delivers a running commentary.

Chuchotage
, clearly, was not going to work for the Nuremberg trials. And consecutive interpretation took so long that the proceedings would have gone on for years. The dilemma of convening the court in such a way that all of its participants—and, crucially, the world—could follow bedeviled its administrators. Robert H. Jackson, the chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg, wrote, “I think that there is no problem that has given me as much trouble and as much discouragement as this problem of trying to conduct a trial in four languages.”

Eventually Jackson and his cohorts decided to take a gamble on a new method, simultaneous interpretation. At Nuremberg, twelve interpreters sat in the “aquarium”—four desks separated by low glass barriers—listening through headphones to the testimony, which they immediately rendered into English,
French, Russian, and German, transmitting each, through a microphone, to a dedicated radio channel. IBM had installed the cutting-edge system free of charge, “that all men may understand.” Simultaneous interpretation requires almost superhuman neurological coordination. The task is so demanding that, at the United Nations, an interpreter typically works a shift of no more than twenty minutes.

The annals of diplomacy abound with incidents in which the garbled transmission of messages has had embarrassing, and even fatal, consequences. In July 1945, Allied leaders delivered the Potsdam Declaration to Japan, demanding an unconditional surrender. When reporters in Tokyo pressed Japanese premier Kantaro Suzuki for a response, he replied, using the word
mokusatsu
, that he was withholding comment.
Mokusatsu
—a portmanteau word, formed by combining the kanji characters for
killing
and
silence
—has several meanings: “to take no notice of; treat with silent contempt; ignore [by keeping silence]; remain in a wise and masterly inactivity.” The press, however, took note only of its more belligerent connotations, and the world came to understand that the premier had deemed the Potsdam ultimatum “not worthy of comment.” According to a report published years later in an NSA technical journal, “U.S. officials, angered by the tone of Suzuki's statement and obviously seeing it as another typical example of the fanatical Banzai and Kamikaze spirit, decided on stern measures.” Even if
mokusatsu
was only one of many factors in the decision to drop the bomb, as was likely the case, it has lived on as a cautionary tale—history's “most tragic translation.”

Eleven years later, at the height of enmity between the United States and the Soviet Union, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev delivered a speech in which he invoked the Russian
phrase “
Мы вас похороним.
” Idiomatically, the saying means something like “We'll be here even when you're gone,” but Khrushchev's translator, Viktor Sukhodrev, relayed it literally as “We will bury you”—causing Americans to fear imminent nuclear war. (Sukhodrev said later that Khrushchev, with his fondness for hyperbole and folksy humor, was one of the most difficult people for whom to interpret.) Hillary Clinton returned the favor with her “reset” button of 2009. Intended as an emblem of her desire to improve US-Russian relations, it was emblazoned with the word
peregruzka
, which actually means “overcharged.”

Mistranslation also wreaks havoc on individual fates. Particularly for immigrants attempting to navigate high-stakes institutions such as courts and hospitals, its consequences can be dire. Santiago Ventura Morales spent four years in prison for having murdered a fellow migrant worker on a strawberry farm in Oregon. Eventually his conviction was overturned—in part because he had gone through the entire trial with a Spanish interpreter, when in fact he spoke Mixtec.

In January 1980 Willie Ramirez, an eighteen-year-old Floridian, was taken by ambulance to the emergency room, having entered a coma after complaining of a headache that “felt like someone was sticking a needle through my head.” He had pinpoint pupils and was breathing heavily. He was accompanied by his mother, his thirteen-year-old sister, his fifteen-year-old girlfriend, and his girlfriend's mother, all of whom believed that he had fallen ill after eating bad hamburger at a brand-new Wendy's.

Ramirez's mother didn't speak English, so his girlfriend's mother, who didn't speak English well, dealt with the doctors. “He is
intoxicado
,” she said, using a Spanish term for any general kind of poisoning. The ER doctor later said, “Healthy,
strapping kids don't come into the ER comatose unless they've been in a car accident or had an overdose. I thought my conversation with the family confirmed the diagnosis—that he had taken an overdose of drugs.” It wasn't until nearly forty-eight hours later that someone, noticing that Ramirez had stopped moving his arms, called in a neurologist, who determined that Ramirez had actually suffered an intracerebellar hemorrhage. Due to the misdiagnosis, he became a quadriplegic. A jury awarded him damages of $71 million.

Translation implies a sense of movement—you translate something out of one language into another. The journey can be straightforward, a run to the dry cleaners, or it can be a grueling road trip across space and time. In mathematics, translation refers to “the movement of a body from one point of space to another such that every point of the body moves in the same direction and over the same distance without any rotation, reflection, and change in size.” But in practice, translation often works more like a chemical reaction, in which one or more substances are converted into something else. The Chevy Nova is famously said to have sold poorly in Spanish-speaking countries, where
no va
means “doesn't go.” The Nova actually did fine: the stresses in
Nova
and
no va
fall on different syllables, and Spanish speakers are as able to distinguish between them as English speakers are between
notable
and
not able
. But the history of marketing is full of linguistic flops. Sticking just with cars, Mitsubishi released a sports-utility vehicle called Pajero in Spain, where
pajero
means “masturbator.”