Saturday
A special treasure awaited me in the mail today: My latest copy of Poets & Writers. I am something like a child about new editions of my favorite magazines. Next month, World Literature Today, which is my favorite magazine. I still hold the unrealistic dream of being a regularly contributor to that one.
I say all of this because, today, I made the commitment that I would honor one of my bucket list goals of translating my own work into Spanish or Arabic or Persian someday. Being a literary translator was always on the shortlist of life dreams, but for some reason, it has taken on a renewed sense of urgency and excitement. I dabbled in translation as a teenager, sifting some of my wayward sentences into passionate, red-as-blood Latin. Latin was the first language that I ever fell in love with, and since then I have collected tongue after tongue, dictionary after dictionary. These books pad out the shelves in my library.
That first Latin book was Latin for Dummies. I was in middle school. I carried it with me everywhere. There are few moments of euphoria that triumph over that feeling that I had when I read The Aeneid for the first time without needing to carefully parse each word. It just was. Latin is the language that ran with me throughout my childhood, the language that I wanted to write my journal in, the language that befriended me, a strange and obsessive child, and gave me a sort of linguistic shadow. Later, my mother gave me Wheelock’s Latin and a big orange dictionary.
I was very theatrical with my Latin pronunciation. I almost gave it a dramatic Italian flourish and would practically overflow each word and syllable with gusto. Indeed, it was a thrill when I got far enough into it to recognize the “Italian-sounding” parts coming through. Truthfully, I probably sounded like Latin as spoken by Super Mario, but it was a bolt of lightning at the time.
With this reflection on a lost love of Latin, I began my day.
11:00 AM
I sleep late again because I was up to the wee hours watching Legally Blonde and scrolling JSTOR for articles on Swahili literature. I had found some great pieces on the modern Swahili novel, as well as some women poets. I had far less luck finding good resources on Civil War-era Spanish literature, which I hoped to incorporate into my sources for Project Novacaine. You win some, you lose some.
So what did you do with your Friday nights when you were thirty? Well, I am glad you asked, because I cuddled with my cat while I mouthed the (memorized) words to Legally Blonde while I listened to my printer squawk with each new journal article waiting to find its way into my binder.
So. I choose to give the morning to literature rather than the GRE or Cognitive Grammar. I have my handy copy of Plain Text and my pen. I make another chai and stir the frothing drink absentmindedly as I look out the window into the backyard with is tiny pine tree. I like to play Wordle, but I especially like to check my word count for Canis Major. This morning, I am going into the day with 48 pages and 14,367 words finalized and ready, like bread out of an old oven, for the querying process.
12:00 PM
The spaghetti bubbles on the largest burner on the stove. I am keeping it simple today — no meatballs. It will be just the pasta and tomato sauce, even though I love the Impossible meatballs. I do not clean the kitchen when I am done. I probably won’t clean it until I go to bed.
1:00 PM
Try as I might, I can never quite negotiate myself onto the stationary bike first thing in the morning so that I can get exercise over and done with for the rest of the day. When I wake up at 5:00 in the morning on the weekdays, I consistently talk myself out of working out, be it the treadmill or the bike. I usually end up exercising around 3:00 or 4:00, but I was feeling restless, not accomplishing much, stagnating in my attempts to get through any of Canis Major. I put my headphones in and read If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English for an hour while listening to Prince, Aesop Rock, and Bruce Springsteen. Pedal, pedal, pedal.
4:00 PM
It is time to daydream.
In addition to Latin, I think about the almonds I eat, the scrapbook supplies that I will purchase tonight. I think about my essay that I wrote in my first year of college, one on post-Arab Spring Egypt (that essay represented me coming into my own as someone interested in Middle Eastern politics). My mind curves around thoughts of going back to Las Vegas, skirts and plods on ideas of which sentences to craft in my short story, “Head Games.”
I move a lot when I think. Yesterday, I ruminated on the first time I ever saw music, and how magical it was to later see Fantasia 2000 as a child because those images that the animators birthed were exactly as I had pictured the music, too. Colorful, almost vexing in its wildness and beckoning on.
Today, though, I think about what it means to be a storytelling animal. I love story so much that I want to pursue, at least in part, comparative literature at the doctoral level. I am passionate about understanding the history and sociological phenomenon that is the novel. I believe literature is what gives us our souls, what severed us from the frigid caves and into the sunlight. I think story is what we can do to truly impress the stars, vast as they are, and move the mass of the universe to play along.
Tonight, I will go back to JSTOR. I will peruse some articles on Tamil. I will look at the stars that poke out from their black curtain, and I will nod to them some secret language, maybe Latin, maybe story. Either way, I think I will be understood.
