The Catholic Writers Guild

 

 

Our daughter, Angelica, is an interpreter. Born and primarily raised in Brazil, she is fluent in Portuguese, English, and Spanish. She mostly translates for medical and physical therapy patients. She enters a room where a patient is struggling to communicate with a doctor. When Angelica addresses patients in their own language, she says their faces light up with joy. Few things, she says, could be more satisfying.

Angelica lives with Hunter, a big, fat, lazy tabby cat. “Why do you support that bum?” I ask her. “He’s very handsome,” she replies. “Time he got a job,” I say.  

Angelica takes an assessment for a translating firm. “It went well,” she says. “How about Hunter?” I ask. “Did he apply for a translating job?” 

“You know,” she says. “Cats are way ahead of us. Hunter can communicate with any cat in the world. He can understand a Chinese cat, or a French cat, or a Peruvian cat, just as well as he can understand the cat next door.”

Way ahead of us! Which got me thinking about the Tower of Babel.  

You remember the story from Genesis. Human beings were getting uppity, thinking that they knew more than God. (Sound like any generation you’re familiar with?) They decided to build a tower that would touch the sky. Until then, all humans spoke the same language, but God decided to throw a wrench in the works and confused us by having us speak all kinds of different languages. 

When I first read this story, I thought God’s action was a punishment. When I had to sit through endless dull Spanish classes in middle and high school, I knew it was a punishment. Then, when I was twenty-one, I entered the Peace Corps. I was sent to Brazil and had to learn Portuguese.  

Unlike some of my friends, I am not a natural language learner. As I remember my first six months in Brazil, I understood perhaps ten percent of what was going on and could communicate at the level of a three-year-old. For an articulate (in English) young hot shot, this was very humbling—which was a good thing and helped to save my soul.  

But gradually, as I grew in understanding (I lived in Brazil for nearly forty years), I began to appreciate this language. This new language said things differently, expressed nuances and points of view that were not like my English. It had a beauty, a depth, a humor, and a music, all of its own.  

The “punishment” of Babel turned out, like so many “punishments” (my diabetes, for instance), to be a gift. What God sends to confuse us also enlightens us. Words and phrases from French, Mandarin, Hindi, and Swahili, bring us new ideas—new ways of seeing things. Each language has its own charism (German, for instance, is a perfect language for philosophy). Writers from the world’s many languages—even when we can only read them in translation—bring us new visions of life.  

Yes – the monolingual cats are way ahead of us. I suspect their vocabulary is much smaller (though the cats I have known always made me feel that they were aware of all things, so wise they need not deign to speak; perhaps we should draw our analogy from lesser animals – dogs, for instance).  

So, compared to monolingual dogs, we have a confusion of words, yes, but also a wealth of words – a wealth of cultures, expressions, and modes of thought. We, as writers, particularly, have all this available to us. Ah, the Power of Babel! 

 

Copyright 2022, Arthur Powers