The Translator

It  could have been from a prequel to Star Trek, the earliest stages of the Universal Translator. It stood about four feet high, slightly askew on its post, and had buttons for selecting a dozen languages. It looked a little like the jukebox selectors in the booths of old diners. The bottom button was labeled “more languages.”

The Translator robot stood next to the reception desk at the local hospital where I went for some routine lab work a few days ago.

Photo from Big World Network

I always wanted to be a translator when I grew up. I came close a couple of times. At the English-language Athens News in Greece, we had to edit stories that were submitted in French or Greek. At that point, I could at least tell the difference (the Greek alphabet has different characters, duh.) At Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, a friend asked if I knew enough Greek to help him evaluate a stroke victim, to tell whether his speech was slurred. When I greeted the patient, he immediately said “Ta dontia mou. Pou einai ta dontia mou?” (By that time, my Greek was better.)

“He wants his teeth,” I told the medical student friend. “He asks where his teeth are.” “Is his speech slurred?” Harold asked. “Not at all,” I said, “but it will probably be better when he puts his teeth in.”

At the United Nations building, near the office where I worked, I sat in the galleries and watched the translators up in the glass-fronted booth instantly interpret whatever was being said on the floor in dozens of languages. In my hippie days, I chose the name “Talking Bridge,” again thinking about translating. And in a way, I think all my teaching and writing has been a matter of translating. Certainly I have discovered no new thing either in music or discourse, but sometimes just the way something is expressed can make the connection between the abstract and the useful.

I have made some pretty funny gaffes along the way. On a deadline in Salonica, I thought I was yelling “Hurry! Hurry!” when actually I was shouting “Rape! Rape!” I thought my maid’s name was Askimoula (Little Ugly One) when in fact it was Asimoula (Little Silver One.) I complimented her on her worms (skoulikia) when I meant to say something about her earrings (skoularikia.)

Anyone who has dealt with Google Translate or any of the other Internet translators knows the perils of word-by-word translations, which can be Byzantine at best and even dangerous at worst.

Here’s a recent example from Greek which was poetic but which made sense in the original: “Sometimes only lift his gaze and watched city people who swiftly sinking in darkness. Hasty and smelling nice, tired of crawling, others in small groups discussing. Had a weird atmosphere the city every dusk and asked her to hide and be quiet. Smelled glorious past and decadent nobility. A nostalgic permanently strolled through the narrow streets with the palm trees are swaying to sunburnt and parked outside the time and the wear and tear.”

California hospitals must provide a translator for patients who don’t speak English, and I was talked into translating for an elderly Greek stroke victim in the long-term care wing of the local hospital. My brief career as a translator is described in Caryatids, my book of short stories published by Amazon’s CreateSpace in January.

Obviously the local hospital wouldn’t be needing my services as a translator any more. But I thought about the first thing I had to translate for my little old lady.

“Ask her if she is in pain,” the nurse had instructed me.

“Ehete pono pouthena?” I asked. Do you have pain anywhere?

The little lady answered with the Greek “No”, a sharp tip of the head backward and a tongue click (think “tsk”.)

I really doubt that the new mechanical translator robot could handle that one. Why, it didn't even have a head.

Greek Key

Keys have power. Think about how some people display their keys. Think about what is involved when someone gives you (or will not give you) the key to their house. I remember how hard it was to turn over my keys when I retired from the college, even though there was no reason I would need to open the practice rooms or the piano lab again.

I think it was this feeling, the feeling of someone handing us the key to something important, that made Nicodemus and me so enjoy our first class in Fourth Century Greek. Most of the people I have mentioned this to have reacted as if we were studying Trilobites in Turkestan. Three friends actually understood our enthusiasm, and one of them was the daughter of a Classics teacher.

Every time a New Testament passage comes up, N and I grumble about the various translations, always preferring the King James. The original Greek, of course, is always the same, but it is considerably different from the modern Demotic which we try to practice at dinner time, when we read the Divry’s calendar, with its historic notes, its bad jokes, and its two dates—one Julian, one Gregorian.

The second session of this class happened to be held on a night when neither of us had a rehearsal to attend or a lesson to give, and on a lark, we drove up to San Francisco, found the place, and took our seats. There were about twenty interesting-looking people in the church library, one of them in priest’s black. The teacher was a comfortable-looking woman wearing a beret who proved, in the course of two hours, to have a mind like a fine-honed steel edge.

Nicodemus took notes. I sat with my mouth open most of the time after we did a jet-speed sweep from the Phoenicians to the possibility of a class party in Greece.

So now N is trying to learn his lower-case Greek letters and I am trying to absorb the fact that what looks like an apostrophe is really an “h”, as in hoi polloi, which is pronounced the way it looks in classical Greek, but which is “ee poh-lee” (the many) in Demotic.

Just think: the next time we go to the British Museum, we’ll be able to read the Rosetta Stone!

Greek Practice

Nicodemus and I practice our Greek every day by reading the calendar to each other. He recites the date (Paraskevi, 26 Fevruariou) and the year (Dio hiliades deka), then adds the previous day's date and the date and day which is to come.

My job is to read the information on the particular saint's Day (Photeini, the Woman at the Well) and the historic event (Feb. 26, 1936, Volkswagen named its first model Genesis) and to translate the daily joke:

The policeman said to the thief "Since you claim that this gold brooch is yours, you need to prove it to me." The thief turned the brooch over and said "It says right here, 'Yours forever.'"