Kitchen, clutching, handkerchief

As you may have noticed, what I write here is not exactly English. It’s something more in the vicinities of what Umberto Eco famously called the official language of the European Union: Translation. Writing these newsletters — my modest contribution to an European, global conversation on arts, politics and more —, I’ve been experiencing the difference between looking at reality from this or that language. Whenever I change some sentence from Portuguese into English, I immediately sense that a whole new accuracy, a different, take-no-prisoners precision, is asked of me.

On the other hand, if, for some reason, an idea comes to me in English and I try to put it in Portuguese, I tend to feel that there’s something missing: a bit of music. Some way of making those ideas move, dance — so that they may reveal themselves on the page, instead of just standing there making speeches. Maybe “music” here means something like “leaving space for other meanings”. (It was Thomas Mann, or one of his characters, who said that “music is the most ambiguous of all arts.”)

And, yet, I learned English listening to music. My parents had a four-LPs Beatles anthology that came with a book of lyrics. We learned the songs, my brother Rafael and me, listening and singing, trying to match what the Fab Four’s voices were saying with what was written on those pages. The hardest thing was to get right that verse of “She’s Leaving Home”: “She goes downstairs to the kitchen,/ Clutching her handkerchief.” There was the funny tch alliteration, of course, but the big prize was that strange, German-sounding word, “handkerchief”.

But, as I was saying — translation. There’s this paradox: the extremely interconnected world we live in, a world moving in a sort of continuous translation, suffers an increasingly evident language crisis. The concept may seem grand and scholarish, but it’s a very concrete phenomenon that shouldn’t be left to specialists. Because this language crisis — which is related, of course, to the excessive time we spend looking at screens, but it’s not confined to any specific behavior, it’s really, as the expression goes, all over the place — this language crisis, I was saying, is not just a symptom of a certain social malaise. It is also a cause of conflict, misinformation and indifference in our societies.

As Nanni Moretti tells us in “Palombella Rossa”, “someone who speaks badly, thinks badly and lives badly”. Or, as Joseph Brodsky writes in “To Please a Shadow”: “Society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant.”

She was no ugly, wicked tyrant, just a round-faced, solemn-looking policewoman, but, once, yes, I was saved by a bold linguistic gesture. It was the most microscopic, and nevertheless epic, confrontation between Man and the State. The year was 1996, and I was a bearded guy with long hair and the general look of a somewhat shy, out-of-place hippie. Coming back from a three-months film workshop in New York, I had to change planes at London Heathrow. At the baggage control, I was stopped, of course. This policewoman opened my backpack and began digging through my dirty laundry. It’s difficult to describe my level of embarrassment. Pardon my literal translation from a Portuguese expression: it was “more than a lot”.

I stood there, looking at her, but it was like I didn’t exist. If this lady was to investigate every unwashed piece of clothing from my New York adventure, it would be a painful, humiliating festival. To my surprise, she focused on one single object she had found at the bottom of those three months: a hyper-realistic heart, made of rubber, that I had used as a prop in a short-film. She looked at it, intrigued, turning the thing in her hand like an actress. Short pause. And, suddenly, I found myself saying — with the audacity of a non-native speaker —, “Please, don’t break my heart.”

The police-lady smiled, finally (in my memory, she even blushed a little), and, with a simple hand gesture, told me to get out of there.