Fun with Cyrillic

I.

               Russian is the most difficult language I have ever studied.

               My bookcases are filled with languages from around the world. I have books in Croatian and Arabic, and textbooks promising to reveal the secrets of Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Tamil, Swahili, and Icelandic. A workbook on Muscogee has caught my eye on Amazon. Every day, I try my hand at French and Swedish on Duolingo. There are apps on my phone to help me learn the Japanese hiragana and katakana. I even have grammars of Nahuatl and Akkadian.

               But Russian stands supreme as the language that puts up a fight, that jabs me in the face when I get too close.

               It is also a beautiful language, bewitching my ears with its gruff exterior cocooning a soft, fluid underbelly. I like the way it first punches, then glides, slipping off the tongue with a penchant for producing fine novelists with names like Turgenev and Dostoevsky and Bulgakov. My own tongue fumbles its words, staggering through its declensions and enigmatic palatalization. This being said, I am not giving up until I can read The Master and Margarita in its original fabric.

II.

               This morning, I awoke, scooped up my book (David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas), made my tea, and reviewed yesterday’s writing that I did on the novel. This is the second time in my life – just the second – that I felt truly that I could bring this book to a close, that I could actually say that I finished my story. I have written twenty-eight chapters, all of which need to be restructured, but whose very existence buoys my flagging, thirsty hopes.              

               I eyed my Russian textbook with the mixture of fear and excitement that comes to my stomach, lodges in my throat, when I think about the complexities of the Cyrillic writing system. I have been personally victimized by Russian cursive; I think all of us who study it have. So with my hand-written chunks of the novel, I have scrawled my friends’ names in Cyrillic, as well as my cats’ names, because where would I be without knowing that the Russian word for “Fable” is baznya.

               The point of all of this is to say that I am floundering in the Russian seas, but I am working to set up a daily devotion to this mesmerizing language where all consonants seem apocryphal, like they are ghosts lurking around one another but not revealing their forms to the living. I want to incorporate it into my morning tea, perhaps learning one noun and its hefty declensions a day.

               This is what language is all about for me: Devotion to the machine of grammar, the willingness to put it before all other things, to act of worshipping words and savoring sentences. I often say that language is the great love of my life, so how could I not prepare a bouquet of special languages, no matter how unruly some of them prove to be? It is that sharpness that I love about Russian, as though to see the gorgeous flower, one must first offer one’s blood to the thorns.

III.

               As a child, running wild through bookcases and novels and nonfiction works with my hair streaming in the wind, I wanted to be a virologist (and world’s leading expert on Ebola), and, if not that, then a translator. With my minimal French, teenage me attempted to write a screenplay set in Paris – obviously, it got nowhere. But the idea of smoothly smearing myself from one language to another, like watercolors, stayed with me. I want to translate some of my own work. I want to speak to my abuela in Spanish.

               It seems that I dream in language. My very first roommate, the lovely Noriko from Kyoto, told me halfway through her study abroad that she was finally dreaming in English. At the time, I was throwing everything I had into Arabic and Persian. I stared at my Teach Yourself Persian. I could not wait to dream in another language. I still cannot.