Recreation through Translation

Recently, I wore a pair of new shoes to a meeting with a client.  What a mistake.  I had to take a taxi home, unable to make the 15 minute walk that normally seems so easy.

The taxi driver had an accent - that is, not any of the American or British accents one hears here in almost any course of affairs.  So I asked her where she was from.

"Slovakia", she said.  The word was followed by a bit of nervous laughter.  Perhaps, because Eastern European immigrants are taking a bit of heat here: seen as taking jobs in hard times.  Perhaps, because, as she'd later tell me, most Britons wouldn't know where Slovakia is if you hit them with the Iron Curtain.  I sympathized; when I studied in Kentucky, one mid-1980s survey found that only nine percent of its citizens could find it on a map.  I lived in Ohio, so I didn't count.  But, I never got lost on my way to University.

I followed tentatively with "Bratislava is its capital?"

With the pain in my Achilles Tendon, my brain had been slow to visualize a map of the country.  The map was also dim and flickering something like a computer monitor suffering power failure.  But, that and its implications are another story.  The name, Bratislava, was difficult to read from the mental map.  And, distractingly, it conjured up an image of a plump, white Brat roasting on an outside grill.  It was lunch-time, I thought, and excused the image on a savory bun as hunger.

At my recognition, she was overjoyed, turning her head from the ruthless Cambridge traffic, offering a broad-smiling, "Yes!"  She turned back just in time to see the woman riding down congested Mill Road in the middle of the street as though she either owned the lanes or had a death wish.  Taxis, cars and loris were dodging the woman like a piece of gum you don't want on the sole of your shoe.

By the end of the ride, our short conversation had travelled miles, sometimes as if meandering down country lanes, sometimes with the intent of Dr. Viktor Frankenstein searching out buried body parts and stitching them together.

I'd walked because parking a bike in Cambridge is a hundred times worse than parking a crutch on the walls of the Cathedral at Lourdes or St. Joseph's Oratory in Montreal.

When finally home, I Goggled "How to break in new shoes".  One of the more highly ranked sites was a Spanish blog.  "I can deal with Spanish," I thought.  "I've held tri-lingual conversations with colleagues in the Caribbean where no one speaks anyone else's language.  This should be easy."

The English language sites gave lots of now useless or seemingly absurd advice.  "Wear new shoes with thick socks," for example.  This advice was useless; I'd already thought to do just that when putting the shoes on in the morning.  "Soaking [the shoes] over night and wearing them the next day until dry," was an absurdity.  Certainly, I could agree with the logic that wet leather would be likely to dry formed to the contours of my feet.  Wet leather, though, tends to shrink when dry.  I had the O.J. Simpson trial ringing in my ears: "If it does not fit, you must acquit"  . . . as well as an old form of torture-to-death practiced in the late 18th century by certain Western American native populations.  In any case, this was a strategy best not attempted during the wintry cold snap that Cambridge was now experiencing.

The Spanish blog had none of that.  Instead, it seemed fixed on the legalities of the practice.  It was flush with all of those common journalistic questions: Who would want to [break into a pair of new shoes]?  How would you get in?  Maybe unlacing would do the trick.  Might the wearer be asleep?  Or, per-chance, fixated on a newspaper while, say, riding a train?  Surely, no one would want to break into a pair of vacant shoes, would they?  And, once in, what would you steal from a pair of new shoes?  Laces?  Perhaps, one might silence their tongues as well, to keep them from naming you as the thief. 

I assure you that nothing was lost in my translations.  I used BabelFish to ensure that I hadn't gone crazy.  (I'm winking and nodding, knowingly.)

With books on this and that for dummies, I'm wondering if I might launch a new career here with a line of books: "Idioms for Idiots".  I'm sure that the description frequently includes myself.  I should be well qualified to author at least one.  There's no end of British idioms that have already gotten me wrong.  But, more on that later.