Travelling with a storyteller on a night train from revolution

If I remember, I had to run for the train. Miss it and I’d be travelling through the night, or waiting until the following day. This train would get me there after midnight, but at least well before breakfast time.

I was heading for Hull, in Yorkshire, from London. If I was late, it was probably because this was the time, forty years ago, when I was heavily involved in activism for the far left, and I’d been busy forwarding the revolution. A revolution which, in case you hadn’t noticed, didn’t happen despite my efforts. I was convinced it would, but in a top-down Cult, you can convince yourself of anything.

It was a time when I read quite a few books of Lenin’s. I remember almost nothing about them, just that they were stiflingly boring but had sonorous titles.

Far from difficult to put down
And eminently forgettable

One title I liked was The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. Few people today have any idea who Mr Kautsky was, and fewer would feel it worth spending thirty seconds on Wikipedia to find out. But Lenin wrote ponderously against him, itself a characteristic of the hard Left: it spends far more time denouncing its ‘renegades’ and ‘traitors’ than its enemies.

When it comes to wiping those backsliders out, I reckon a cruel but effective method would have been to start reading them Lenin’s works. They’d be begging for the firing squad in no time at all. Or at least for a pen to sign any confession put in front of them.

Another title that sticks in my memory is Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder. I remember not a word of the contents, but the title remains relevant today: there is something infantile about the far Left, to which I then belonged. But, like St Paul, when I became a man, I put away childish things. Then, however, I saw things as through a mirror darkly, and felt sure, as do so many today who should know far better, that wishing for change yourself was enough to make it happen.

I was on my way to Hull to see a fellow wishful-thinker of the Left. However, since she was also my girlfriend at the time, I don’t think the activity for which we were getting together was exclusively the advancing of socialism. Which was another reason, I suspect, why I was anxious to get there before tonight had become irretrievably tomorrow morning.

In my hurry, I’d taken no reading material with me. Not even Materialism and Empiriocriticism, which wouldn’t have been the best way of passing the time on the journey (what on earth does the title mean, anyway?), but might have been better than just looking out of the window. Fortunately, a fellow passenger in my compartment took pity on me.

“I’ve just bought two books. You can read this one, if you like.”

Practically impossible to put down
and far more memorable than Lenin

It was Nevil Shute’s The Chequerboard. I’d never read any Shute before. I’d probably never even heard of him. But within minutes, I’d fallen for the story and simply couldn’t put it down. In fact, handing the book to the generous passenger when he left the train, was a painful experience. It took me a while – well, I had a revolution to organise and more Lenin to read – but within a few months I found the time to pop into a bookshop and buy a copy of the book, to finish it.

The thing about Shute is that whatever you think of his writing, he was an extraordinary storyteller. And in The Chequerboard he gives that skill plenty of scope: as well as the protagonist’s own story, the framework for the novel, we get the stories of the three men he sets out to track down. They’re finely constructed, compelling tales, a pleasure to read at any time, especially in a train running through the featureless landscape of night-time England.

The kindness of the stranger in my compartment is a memory I treasure. So is my pleasure in reading Shute. I’ve consumed a great many of his novels since then, and re-read several of them many times, though none so much as The Chequerboard.

My daughter-in-law Sheena, knows how much I like the book. She also knows that I’m working to improve my Spanish. So, when she saw a copy of Tablero de Damas, the 1951 Spanish translation, she snapped it up for me.

Found for me by Sheena in Madrid
where she lives with my son and new granddaughter

As she says, there’s something to be said for reading a book you already know, in a language you’re trying to learn: you don’t have to struggle to understand the story and can concentrate on the words. Since they’ve been written by a native Spanish speaker, I’m sure they’re good enough to help me with the language.

Although what gives reading the book additional spice is seeing how awful the translation is: librero (bookseller), for instance, for ‘bookmaker’ (someone who takes bets, for instance on horse races), of ‘cutting corns’ (removing calluses of dead skin) rendered as selling agricultural products.

But that just makes re-reading the book all the more fun. As does the memory of the strange times, and the kind circumstances, in which I read it for the first time. Especially as it was so much more entertaining than my usual reading.

Thank you, Sheena. Thank you, Spanish translator. Thank you, stranger on a train.

And thank you, of course, Nevil Shute.

While we wait we hope, or a window into another culture

“While I breathe, I hope,” the Romans used to say. Sounds right, doesn’t it? Hope springs eternal in the human breast, to use the English expression that means more or less the same thing. Or while there’s life there’s hope.

Waiting. And hoping. At least to be seen

In Spanish, the word “esperar” means both “to wait” and “to hope”. As though you can only wait in hope. Which seems reasonable. After all, why would you bother to wait at all, if not in hope of its yielding something?

Come to think of it, I can see a marketing slogan in there somewhere. “We give you hope – while u wait”. For any reasonable level of royalty, I’m happy to provide that to one of those weird new churches that keep popping over across the US.

But “esperar” isn’t the only Spanish word that has enchanted me recently.

“Destino” is another, with its double meaning of destination and destiny. You’ve got to admit that its quite attractive to get to where you’re going and realise you didn’t just plan to go there, you were fated to.

We’ve been having work done on a bathroom recently, and inevitably required the help of what the Spanish call a “fountaineer”, a “fontanero”. In English, that’s just a plumber, but doesn’t that seem horribly prosaic compared to someone who specialises in fountains?

One of the standard tools used by a fountaineer and, come to that, by any other handy man or man less handy, like me, is a “destorniallador”. A “tornillo” is a screw, so a “destornillador” is the tool that allows you to remove a screw. The Spanish seem more concerned with removing the things than with putting them in. Which is curious, since you can’t unscrew anything you haven’t already screwed up. 

Although, to be fair, there are also screwups you can’t fix with a screwdriver.

In English, it’s the opposite: you use a screwdriver to drive a screw into position, with never a care as to how to get it out again afterwards.

The French are much more logical about the naming of this instrument. A “tournevis” is, as its name implies, a tool for turning a “vis” or screw. Which way you turn it depends on you and the circumstances.

Sometimes the Spanish can be hopelessly complicated. What we call simply a “postman”, and the French a “facteur”, they call a “distributor of mail” or “repartidor de correos”. What a mouthful for such a simple notion…

Another great recent discovery was a word which sounded, to me, like “fiery”. It was something we were asked for as work was finishing on some tiles. “Fiery?” we asked.

It seems they were after some detergent. “Liquido detergente” it’s called, which again is a mouthful. Hence the shortened term, pronounced “fiery’ but spelled “fairy”, as in Fairy Liquid, the renowned dishwashing product.

Ah, well. One of the delights of being an immigrant in a new country is learning a little about its language. All the more delightful because it isn’t just a matter of different words. It’s also a matter of seeing things in a different way.

Not just a new language then, but a new culture too.

Tense about language, easier about life

Ah, Valencia. Charming city. Full of surprises – the convent that has become a bar and restaurant where you can eat Asian street food and drink a glass of wine under the stars and the palm trees, for instance, or the park that’s kept so clean that it can be hard to find a stick to throw for the dogs.

Valencia gets Spring going

It’s not all magic, of course. There are downsides. One is that Spain works at a higher volume than Britain. People don’t simply meet and have a discreet chat in subdued tones. They seem to feel that they haven’t fully demonstrated their joy at being with friends unless they talk loudly enough to be heard three blocks away. That can be a little tedious in the street during the day, but at 2:00 in the morning in the flat next door to ours, it can be a real bane.

But the benefits vastly outweigh these minor inconveniences. If nothing else, it was sheer joy to be enjoying Spring there, a point driven home to me here in Boston (Massachusetts, not Lincolnshire), where I’m looking out on a cold winter’s day under grey, rain-laden skies.

Danielle and I both feel that, to fit into our new life, we need to master the language. As it happens, I already speak a little Spanish, so my new tutor’s first action was to assess my level (far from high). She came up with some curious conclusions.

One was that I sometimes drift into an Italian accent. Not altogether surprising, since I was born in Italy. But, to be honest, I have no idea what an Italian accent sounds like in Spanish. To my tin ear, both accents sound Mediterranean. Which is perhaps a measure of just how much I have to learn.

What’s more, it’s a little exasperating. To sound Italian when I speak Spanish might be more acceptable if I didn’t sound so English when I spoke Italian. Why can’t I have an Italian accent in Italian?

But my tutor’s major concern was over my mastery – or rather lack of mastery – of the past tenses. I keep using the wrong one, she tells me, in rather a random way. It’s not as though I always use the imperfect when the simple past would be more appropriate, say, which would be a far more comprehensible error, and far more easily corrected.

The truth is that I can never remember how the verbs work in the past, so I just use whichever form comes to mind first. I make an approximate stab at the tense, in the hope that the person I’m talking to will translate it to what I actually mean, understand me, and make allowances. 

For an Englishman who sometimes sounds Italian.

Since my command of the future tense in Spanish isn’t a great deal better, that leaves me comfortable only with the present.

This is ironic since a character flaw of mine is always trying to get ahead of events, planning what I’m going to do and what steps I have to take to make it happen. This sort of hankering for the future is what the French call fuite en avant and the Germans Flucht nach vorn, both of which mean a flight – in the sense of escape – forwards. It’s odd that there’s no real term for it in English, since Anglo-Saxon nations are no more immune to this sad disorder than anyone else.

Equally, I have a tendency to live too much in the past, for instance spending too much time concerned with a period, within my own lifetime, when the Brits were rather more open to others and generous in their tolerance than they’re proving right now. So forwards or backwards I go, to the serious detriment of the here and now.

The Rubáiyát of Ommar Khayyám
Lots of good advice, not always easy to follow

“Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday, why fret about them if today be sweet?” asks Edward Fitzgerald’s version of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Excellent advice, but I’m not good at following it.

Except, it seems, in Spanish. Apparently that’s a language in which I truly live for the moment. Poor mastery of the future, none at all of the past.

It’s almost enough to make me wonder whether I really should pursue my studies of the language. If my current limited skill allows me to tackle a deeprooted character flaw, is that perhaps a price worth paying? Maybe I should just learn to live with being a foreigner who sounds English and occasionally Italian, and can’t account coherently for what he was doing yesterday. And stop constantly planning for a future that may never happen, or regretting a past that’s gone for good anyway.

Curious what language learning can tell you about yourself.

Catalonia: an appeal for peace with simple words to say it

It was good to see Catalans, or at any rate a great many people both Catalan and non-Catalan, demonstrating on behalf of dialogue in Catalonia this weekend. That’s to get out of the crisis brought on by demands from the Catalan government for the independence of their region. The marchers wore white, the colour of no party but of peace, they carried no national flags, and they had only one demand: let’s talk. Hablamos in Spanish. Parlem in Catalan.

Marching for peace and dialogue in Barcelona

The absence of flags was a good move. Flags stand for nations and nations stand for far more than just the good. You can point with pride to a Dalí or a world-cup winning football team? Just remember that you also have to take on board the persecution of Jews and Muslims and nearly four decades of Fascism.

Instead they sought communication. “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war,” Winston Churchill said, and the words ring particularly true at a time when the Catalan leadership has pushed its case to the brink of conflict, and the Spanish government has stepped right over the line into violence which, if it wasn’t lethal in its police action against a referendum on independence deemed illegal, was nonetheless brutal.

So “let’s talk” sounds like an eminently sensible response. Watching people demanding it was heart-warming. It left me feeling hopeful for once, as few political developments do.

Though I have to admit it wasn’t just the sentiment that touched me. The words themselves struck me. They awoke memories from decades ago, memories of an amusing discovery during my student days.

It may seem odd that of the two great languages of antiquity in Europe, Greek and Latin, only the former is still spoken. There is apparently no “modern Latin” as there is a “modern Greek”. That is, however, only an appearance. The only reason there’s no modern Latin is that there are, in fact, multiple modern Latins.

Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, even French are all in fact the descendants of the language spoken across the Roman Empire at its height, altered by the successive waves of incomers that have affected some regions far more than others. French, for instance, has come a long way from the original language, heavily influenced by the Germanic speech of the invaders from across the Rhine – Burgundians, Goths, and of course the Franks, who gave the country its modern name.

The Latin from which those languages developed, however, wasn’t the elevated language spoken from the Senate. “Latin’s a dead language, as dead as dead can be,” goes the schoolboy doggerel, “it killed the ancient Romans and now it’s killing me.” Even those ancient Romans realised it was far too complex a language. Pliny the Elder admitted he spoke a different language in the market than in the Senate.

The language of the marketplace was, above all, far simpler. For instance, the word for ‘to talk’, loqui (think of ‘loquacious’ or ‘eloquent’), is particularly painful. Its form is called ‘deponent’ so it looks passive when it’s actually active (so a classical Latin scholar would say ‘I have been talked’ when what he meant was ‘I have talked’).

The more sensible kind of people who would sell you a water melon or repair a broken shoe don’t speak that way. So they looked around for different words to us.

Two are particularly simple. To tell a parable – ‘parabulare’ – and to tell a fable – ‘fabulare’ – are nice, easy, first conjugation verbs that are entirely regular and therefore behave predictably. The common people chose one or other of those two to mean “to speak’ in preference to loqui

The Italians, the French and the Catalans chose ‘parabulare’, shortened to ‘parlare’ (the word in Italian), giving the Catalan ‘parlem’.

The main branch of the language in the rest of Spain chose ‘fabulare’. The Spanish have a way of replacing the initial ‘f’ by an ‘h’ – smoke, for instance, which is ‘fumo’ in Italian is ‘humo’ in Spanish. The Spanish for ‘to speak’ morphed into ‘hablar’ and hence ‘hablamos’.

The marchers in white were therefore demanding that the two parties tell some fables or some parables to each other. What they meant was that they should speak. Any of those would be great.

Isn’t it great that they chose to say it with a particularly easy word – not a derivative of the ghastly Latin ‘loqui’?

In the end, chatting to each other instead of fighting isn’t all that difficult. It just takes a simple word. And a bit of goodwill.