Looking into Poems
Date 12/11/2003 12:00 AM | Topic: Opinion"I hope your news," concluded the fax from the Spanish hotel we were booking for my family's Christmas trip. My husband was baffled by the sentence, but my recent cramming in Spanish paid off. The verb "esperar" means "to expect" or "to wait for," but it also means "to hope." I figured the sentence-writer meant to say, "I'll be waiting to hear from you."
I have been listening to language CD's in hopes of polishing my modest Spanish. Two weeks at a Guatemalan language school seven years ago, spruced up by two week-long vacations in central Mexico, still leaves me talking only in the present tense: "I eat bread," I say in my toddler Spanish, placing my order with an imaginary waiter. I repeat the recorded Spanish phrases, but I despair of even minimal fluency.
Attempts to speak another language often bring unexpected humor. When we traveled in China, my group got some real hoots out of the Chinglish we encountered: "No upping of guests in the room," read the rules of our Hangzhou hotel. I walked past a group of Chinese students and intended to greet them with "Hello, how are you?" but what actually came out was a declarative "No thank you!" Once they had passed me, they burst into guffaws.
Last month's column focused on the difficulties of expression in our own language; this month's focuses on the comic potential of miscomprehending another. The poet Bob Hicok's poem "Love Song" (The Missouri Review 26: 2, 2003) is a good, kooky poem for finals week. The poem plays not with the speaker's own gaffes in speaking another language, but rather with his mistranslation of a Spanish pop song's lyrics:
I am misunderstanding a song
in Spanish. The song
in Spanish
not my confusion, though one day
I hope to be confused
in many tongues,
to botch my days
with polyglot savoir-faire.He is tongue-in-cheek as he talks of many "tongues," toying with a French phrase as he hopes for a future multilingual ("polyglot") know-how ("savoir-faire"). But it will not be an adept multilingualism: he will simply have more ways to botch up his days with confusion. As the speaker begins to detail what he understands the singer to be saying about his beloved, his list becomes increasingly absurd:
On my CD he's kissing her
under a peanut butter sky.
He's already asked the sea
for permission to marry
her pubic hair.
The sea said first
you must solve
simultaneously
two hundred
quadratic equations,
proving true lovers
paid attention during algebra.The speaker's failure to understand the nuances of Spanish allows him to let his imagination run, juxtaposing the explicitly sexual "pubic hair" with the more respectably institutional word "marry," and to assert that the sea, a traditional romantic image, demands of him a very particular (and impossible) mathematical feat to prove his worth as a lover. The speaker explains his predicament, implying that he has no intention of doing such a prosaic and unromantic thing as using a dictionary for linguistic accuracy. No one dances with a dictionary as with a lover, and he's ready to obey whatever the romantic melody commands (even if it calls him up for military duty), rather than what grammatical niceties might call for:
I have no idea
what these sounds mean
but I've never asked
a dictionary to dance.
If the guitars
invited me to join the army
I'd salute.Then we're back to the absurd imaginative fancy of the speaker as he listens to sounds he cannot decipher:
The singer says, from afar
I've admired the jumping jacks
of your navel, I promise
to make you salads
the rest of your days. Who hasn't
been brought to tears
by vegetables
or wouldn't be by the music
of these words,
which sound like you
calling me on the first
of too many
nights alone.]
The speaker manages, despite the ironic tone and bizarre list, to make this poem--about an incomprehensible love song--into his own love poem after all. His absurd vows are charming love-talk: who wouldn't fall in love with someone who admires the calisthenics of your navel, or better yet, who vows to make you great salads for life? The speaker ends by addressing his beloved, whom he pictures as alone and longing for comfort. In the end, the poem becomes a gentle reminder that playful repartee can be serious and that love-talk is often a subterranean, coded - and sometimes irrational - music. Haven't many men and women, including Shakespeare's Beatrice and Benedick, been won over by a jesting lover? (Have a merry Christmas!)
--
Carol Gilbertson
Jones Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities, 2002-04
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