Harmony of Language: a Recipe

Translation is not only a means to survive in a foreign country, but it also a story of addiction and frustration. These have nothing to do with drugs and alcohol, but they deal with "language exploration." Like addiction, a traslated word drags other words that wait to be translated, and so on until an entire phrase, sentence, or paragraph is poured into another language. It is funny, to some extent. It is compelling, but also frustrating because words and language are intangible. That is, people give words their meanings, and they change with time. Translators are always concerned with how to get close to the meaning they want to convey. Words and their significances depend on the context. While for a native speaker such context may be intrinsic, for a foreigner the many nuances a term bear are not so explicit. This difficulty is at the core of the experience of a writer who wants to translate even a simple written work.

To translate themselves into another language, writers must rape the foreign idiom. That is, they have to uproot the words from the text and observe them as if they were a Michelangelo’s statue. After that, writers must make peace with them and treat them with pure respect as if they became their own words, their own children. Only in this case, probably it will be more a harmony of languages than a mere transplant of nouns.

Why are American students obsessed with grammar?

For a writer and for everybody, grammar should be a “natural tool.” As Stephen King makes clear in his On Writing, one has either already grasped the sense of grammar since her earliest years of writing or she will never learn. According to King’s view, students in school can only learn the name of the grammatical rules. Other than that, if one arrived in college not knowing the mechanic and the style of her own language, she will never learn it. Grammar is to a writer as walking is to a baby. That is, a baby learns to her own how to walk. Then, when the time comes, she will walk!

Most American students seem obsessed with grammar. Why? Nobody, in middle or high school, taught them the rules? Perhaps, in their earliest years of school they did not find the right teachers. Grammar should be funny. It is nothing to be frightened. Students need only some goodwill and a strong backbone able to hold on negative feed backs that are not always “bad,” but they are constructive most of the time.

Language and grammar shouldn’t be an obsession, but an integrated sphere in everybody’s life.

On Illegal Immigration

Today, whatever users tune their ears they can listen on illegal immigration. Lou Dobbs – and God bless who may understand him when he talks! – fights illegal immigration almost, if not, every day. The CNN plays immigrant’s story, the headlines of the newspapers are filled with immigration issues. For years, they are talking about it, but almost nothing has been done. Ok, let them fight illegal immigration, let them send 25 million people back to their own country. Then what? The U.S. will go through an even greater economic crisis than it is experiencing today.

In Farmer Branch, Texas, illegal immigrants cannot rent or own homes. This is what the city’s council ruled.

Ok… dear Texan residents and citizens you send your illegal immigrants home. Then ask yourself who will milk your cows and prepare your meal when you go to your favorite restaurants? Who will harvest your fruits and vegetables? Who will clean your personal and public restrooms? Who will build your houses and clean your roads. Dear Texas: think about it!

On Immigration

Immigrants often don't know what immigration means until they become immigrants. Only when in a country something goes wrong, its citizens need and want to live their homeland. In a state of peace, people do not depart from their native country. Sometimes, the choice to leave everything – and often nothing – they own in their nation is not a happy choice. Often, it is a forced way out, but it also an unconscious act because immigrants have no idea of what they will go through after they will leave their familiar soil. They have no idea of the suffering they will encounter on their journey. If they knew it, probably they would have remained poor for the rest of their life and die in their motherland.

Immigrants double their working hours to show their new country that they can make it, and that they are entitled to be there. Immigrants take all the scraps, the hunger, the harshness of the native citizens: whatever unfortunate events happen in a country, it is considered the result of the immigrants’s sin.

That of the immigrants is a story of survival.