Over the years I have noticed certain things about my brain, which, as a convenient shorthand and imitating the great doctor-types of the world, I like to call “effects.” One example of this is something I dubbed “the Norway Effect,” inspired by the geological fact that, after the ice sheets that covered it melted, the whole landmass of modern Scandinavia (the most important country of which, as we know, being Norway) rose hundreds of meters on its pillow of magma and is rising still. It is happening in the Arctic today, and is one of the reasons that part of the world isn’t suffering from coastal flooding, even as the ice melts. Brain-wise, the Norway Effect is the elated feeling one has after a big project is over (in my case, it was on finally finishing and defending my dissertation that I first identified it): kind of giddy and goofy: a sort of “feels so good when you stop” feeling, as in the old joke about hitting yourself on the head with a hammer.
The effect I’m experiencing today, our second full day back in Europe, is something I call “the Shakespeare Effect.” Why? Because every time I go to a live performance of Shakespeare – partly because I am not well-read in the bard and don’t have anything but about one speech of his memorized (wait, make that two) – it takes me about a page of text before I understand one single solitary phrase coming out of any of the players’ mouths. This is why I am so grateful to said bard for not saying anything particularly important on the first page: it’s usually a couple of old geezers of the backstairs staff discussing the sad goings-on in the throne-room. I really don’t know, since the whole page is a blank to me. Anyway, understanding kicks in pretty soon and then the whole thing is translating itself inside my head into meaningful parcels of information, poetry and whatnot. Does this happen to anyone else out there?
Speaking metaphorically, the Shakespeare Effect when travelling is when suddenly something makes sense that was really opaque the day or moment before. When I’m translating something from Italian (or Latin, but Latin is easier) into English, sometimes I just have to read it over aloud or silently a couple of times, and bingo! the light dawns (ouch – lights don’t go on when you say “bingo” except at really fancy Bingo parlors, do they?) and the meaning shows clear. I suspect this happens to you, too, and when you or I are in a foreign country, or staring at a poster in a language we sort of know, a couple of interesting things happen.
First of all, it takes a couple (lots) of tries to get down the whole daily routine/train times/places to shop/things to wear/fastest route home in a new place. Even with judicious use of maps, it isn’t until you’ve literally “walked the walk” and gone into a couple of shops, hurried for a train (and missed one that left moments before – the one everyone was running for, elbowing past you), tried that particular outfit and discovered that the hat drove you crazy, after all, forgot to wear wool socks instead of cotton and froze that you settle down to something like a seamless routine, and can give your attention more to the higher things in life. That’s something like the Shakespeare Effect.
A quite literal experience of this happened to me on the train this morning (yes, the later one, not the one everyone was hurrying for). I was facing, as yesterday, two advertising posters, nearly exactly the same as two I faced yesterday.
One was from a clever campaign that was also running last January when we were here, a play on words that doesn’t work in English for Telelangue, a language-teaching school specializing in English teaching. The catch-phrase is Arretez massacrer l’Anglais! (sorry, French experts if have remembered it incorrectly), literally “Stop massacring the English!” but meaning “Stop massacring the English language!” but showing an apparently battered man covered with bandages and clearly “English” (meaning British), either because he has a plaid draped over one shoulder (yesterday’s poster) or is in full bobby uniform (today), getting a big kiss on the cheek from a pretty nurse. Last year, incidentally, they just showed the bandaged and battered bobby, a look of terror on his face, holding up a crutch to fend off the reader of the poster with the (then no doubt new) phrase in much larger letters. The nurse is a nice improvement, but that is not the poster that really jumped out at me today.
The second poster, whose French I really will massacre if I try to reproduce it, is something to do with furniture storage. Yesterday, fresh from my on-the-plane French refresher course in the form of a good, hard look at my Rough Guide Phrasebook (during which I made the amazing realization that French is structured a lot like Italian – incredible!), I realized that the name of the company advertised was something like “the missing piece” or “the extra piece” or “the piece left over” and that it had something to do with moving. Today, I sat down, looked at the poster, and realized that it said, “breaking up house?” (or “moving away?” perhaps), then “have you considered what to do with your furniture?” The same sort of sense of recognition and “translation” can happen, yet more metaphorically, with life in a new place, especially in a new country, where the differences seem at first so great.
On the way back to the apartment yesterday, for example, as part of that whole “figure out which grocery is right for you” thing, I tried a different grocery store on rue Daguerre: Monoprix, instead of FranPrix (the names have something to do with price, I expect), and discovered quite a different clientele there from the first. Being on a busy corner, Monoprix seemed to attract more hapless, dizzy tourists (“oh, look, gallettes!! I just love gallettes!”), more crazy people and more very elderly ladies than FranPrix just down the block, though the checker at Monoprix was much sweeter than the chilly little blonde at FranPrix. In front of me in line was a tiny, elderly white lady in fur coat and pink felt beret, buying her box of kleenex, her dozen containers of plain yoghurt and her liter of CocaCola, who was fussed over wonderfully by the kind checker, a richly-darkly-beautiful woman of central African extraction. The checker greeted the pink-beret lady with a smile and a question of how her holidays had been, raising her voice good-humoredly when the little lady didn’t hear her at first. The lady answered that she had spent them, as she said, tout seule (“all alone”), at which the checker expressed appropriate shock and sorrow, raising her voice and speaking very clearly into the lady’s ear, as she did when telling her the cost of her purchases. I, in my turn, being in the “hapless tourist” category, she was quick to help out with a little English.
Until I become brave enough to go into the specialty shops for bread and milk and meat, I believe I will keep shopping at Monoprix, and maybe even after that. Kindness needs no translation, and no Shakespeare Effect to grasp.
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