I put the world in neutral

Over the last few months, I have drifted far, far away from my daily Bengali study.

I don't know exactly why, especially at a time when I should have been eager to learn - our Let's Learn Bengali open group has crossed 800 members and the intermediate group has progressed so much. I still speak with my in-laws regularly. I have many Indian and Bangladeshi friends who want to talk to me in their own mother tongue, yet it is me who resists, even as I don't want to resist. I want to hear them talk about their day, the joys and frustrations, the deeper things of life, to be fully and truly themselves. I want to be able to capture that in myself, the inflections, pauses, the allusions. I have so much opportunity right now to really plunge in and become bilingual, culturally competent in more than one sphere. 

But I'm not there, and maybe it's that I'm judging myself for the halting sentences, the superficial conversations, the accent I will never lose, the translating from English, the trying to remember what page in the textbook that grammatical construct was on. I'm spending too much time in my head that I can't converse, I can't understand, I can't love. So I go back to default, put my world in neutral instead of moving forever forward. I can compose the most beautiful lines in my own mother tongue, weave words into a tapestry that captures a feeling, decorates a moment. Yet when I read Raihan's Bengali poetry, I'm lost on the third word and I can't even understand the denotative meaning, much less appreciate the beauty and deeper meanings. A cry of delight leaves me analyzing - can I say those words too? When? Will they laugh at me if I do? Does sundor apply to more than just things you see? What about things you hear? taste? Why am I wondering these things when I should be enjoying the time with friends, the good food, the music? I hate that I am thinking so much and living so little, so little that I don't even remember the moments afterward. I'm not even learning very much this way. But is it necessary? I know that I have to be uncomfortable while learning and using a new language, but is it even doing me any good? I know there's still lots to learn and work to do. But the work is getting in the way and I seem to be spinning my wheels, not improving.

I don't have to learn Bengali, you know. My husband speaks perfectly good English. There are plenty of non-Indian women married to Indians who never learn much more than a few phrases. I speak well enough to have simple conversations with my in-laws. But I just want more than that. I want to be able to connect with them about more than just the weather and cooking. I want to be able to comfort my friends in difficult times, on their terms. I want to be able to discuss books and movies, and exactly what I liked and did not like about them. I want to know when the compliment I think I'm getting is an icy barb in disguise. But no textbook has chapters on these things. I am not interested in textbooks anymore; they don't teach the things I really want to know. How to live, how to love, how to connect to people in the language their heart speaks. That's the reason I want to learn and always has been. It still feels like there's a gulf between, and I'm not sure if I can get to the other side. 

But from yesterday on, I'll make my tiny futile attempts to do just that. 

Translation: Sunset by Nitin Sawhney

I first heard this song on a compilation CD one of my students gave me nearly a decade ago. This was the first song, and the music and voice gripped me from the first second. I didn't know who was singing, what he was singing, but that didn't matter. The English vocals were no less enticing; I must have listened to this song hundreds of times, if not thousands, over the last ten years.

Over that time, I learned that the singer in English was Eska. That the beginning lyrics were in Bengali. That the singer's name was Pandit Jayanta Bose. That I would eventually meet people who had learned to sing from him. And I would learn how to read and write those lyrics that at first listen were nothing but beautiful music, and today I am able to translate these four lines for you.

Bengali: 
হঠাৎ যদি আমি থেমে যেতাম
শেষ বিকেলের মতো অস্ত যেতাম
অসীম রাতের শেষে শয়নে
সূর্যের সাথে আমি ঘুমিয়ে যেতাম

Transliteration:
Hothat jodi ami theme jetam
Shesh bikeler moto osto jetam
Ashim raater sheshe shoyone
Surjer saathe ami ghumiye jetam

Translation:
If I were suddenly to pause; to set beyond the horizon as dusk arrives,
At last, in the bed of boundless night, I would fall asleep with the sun.

(Special thanks go to Abhik Ray for discussing compound verbs with me at length, and Shumon Sengupta for his translations of Tagore that inspired me to do this.)

Why did you learn Bengali?

I saw this question float through my Facebook timeline today. And was surprised to see so many responders who had learned Bengali or Hindi! Most for religious reasons. Some lived in India and picked it up that way. I didn't really respond except to post links to Let's Learn Bengali, the Facebook group I admin. But that is my way, isn't it? When confronted with a question, I take the intellectual route. If I can examine something, analyze it, then I don't have to provide a narrative. I can easily tell what I know, give you the right answer, get an A+, but I don't give away my stories, my motivations so easily.

So to correct that lapse, I shall answer that question here.

I have always loved languages. I started learning Spanish and French from childhood, majored in French in college, started learning Hindi while finishing my French degree, and had a brief foray into Norwegian before I realized I had no one to speak it with. I have been told I have a natural talent for language, and found that the one thing that my extremely right-brained orientation was good at was translation. My only real problem was that I was casting my net too wide, trying to learn too many languages, when it makes more sense to dive deep into one. If I had known then what I knew now, I would have chosen Bengali from the start. Its rich literary and film traditions would have been enough. But they do not teach Bengali in school, and so I went with French instead. Je ne regrette rien, but it would have been nice not to have to wait so long.

I suppose if I had paid better attention, I would have started learning years before I actually did. Here are some snippets of conversations I had throughout the years:

2004:
A: You should learn Bengali.
Me: LOL, no, Hindi's hard enough.

2005:
P: You should learn Bengali.
Me: What for?

2006:
F: You should learn Bengali.
Me: Maybe later. Let's practice singing.

2007:
S: You should learn Bengali
Me: I don't understand why people keep telling me this.

Or maybe I could have started learning in 2006, when I went to Mumbai amidst the glowing reviews of all of my closest friends and found it left me cold. In the airport, I began reading a book about Kolkata and said, "Well, if I ever come back to India, maybe I'll like that place." I could have prepared myself, but I didn't.

Or I could have started learning once Hindi started making more sense, and I began listening (on 2006's recommendation) to Bangladeshi rock music, just to listen to music whose lyrics I didn't understand once more. But that would have defeated the purpose.

But I did go back to India, and upon invitation from a friend, I did go to Kolkata, in a rare monsoon weekend where the clouds gathered angrily, then dispersed to reveal the most brilliant blue sky without a drop of rain falling. At the risk of sounding like a second-rate travel novel, everything seemed to fall into place. Yes, the roads were full of people, full of monsoon mud, animals roaming the roads - everything you would expect from having read all those other India travel novels. But there is a palpable difference between Kolkata and Mumbai, Kolkata and Delhi. Those two metros, they move quickly. Business gets done. The trees do not have time to really be green.

Kolkata was different. It was slower; it seemed more concerned with the things that matter to me. It revels in nostalgia. Art and music were important, not just resume-fillers and networking opportunities. As in other cities in India, I did attract attention as a foreigner and people approached me, but simply for a minute's chat at a store counter or crossing a street, then they said goodbye and we went on our separate ways. I felt safe there; I felt home. Of course I wasn't; it was my first time in a city I have, as of today, spent less than a total of thirty days in. But it felt the same way it did the first time I went to Dallas as a child, enthralled by the streetlights; my heart settled there and the Life I Had Always Wanted found an ideal setting.

In some ways, I suppose you could say I fell in love. With the humidity, the tree in my courtyard, the house behind mine. With turning the pages of Tagore and reading the words of Gitanjali for the first time. With Music World, where I deciphered characters round, angular, and elegant and vowed to learn this alphabet. And so I bought a book.

But love did come later, and with it even more reasons. In-laws, naturally, but there is also another reason. We communicate in my native language. English has so many twists and turns of phrase, hundreds of synonyms, dozens of ways to say the same thing, each variation carrying its own shade of meaning. I speak various dialects, including Texan and LOLcat, switching effortlessly between them. I write songs and poems, drawing upon the richness of the language. But Bengali is just as rich, with words carrying so much meaning, connotation, and power in a way that is not like English at all. Learning Bengali teaches me another way of thinking, and that way conveniently happens to be my husband's native way of thinking. How can I know the context that shapes him, how can I comprehend his hopes, dreams, and fears without knowing his language? Even if we don't speak it together, I find that the more I learn of it, the more I understand of him.

The more Bengali I learn, the less I know. I realize with every new thing that there are a thousand more things I wasn't even aware of, and it is quite unlikely that I will ever speak like a native or near-native. But I really don't care too much about that; as long as I keep learning, I'll know more than I did the day before, and those small moments of learning, those light bulbs of comprehension, the songs you listen to and feel without the need to translate, the times when you realize that you've just had an hourlong conversation in your fifth language and people understood you and you understood them, those moments are why I learn.

Translation: Hawa from the film Damadol

Every December, or perhaps October, a song comes along that just captivates me. This year I was lucky to have encountered such songs in both October and December; this is the December one. (October was St. Lucia's "Elevate" which needs no English translation!)

Any corrections to lyrics or comments on how I can improve the translation would be welcomed. I am really just a beginner at this.

Thanks to Supriyo S. Daisy P. Sangeeta D. Rajlakshmi R. Anabil P., Anirban M., Rakesh S., and all other wonderful people who have given their input and entertained my obsessive discussions :)


হাওয়া - ডামাডোল
Hawa - Damadol
Wind (from the film Damadol - "Chaos")

chup chap kichu kotha
ure beray
emni kichu kotha
ghure beray
silently some thoughts fly away
and like that, other thoughts wander about

bolte gelei bhul ekrash uro chul
pathore photena holud buno phool
misunderstood words fly around 
like your hair in the wind
yellow wildflowers don't bloom on stone

sudhu hawa... eshe songe niye jay
kichu kotha hariye jay
only the wind comes to take them away;
these details get lost

purono chithi, notun ekta kham
paltaina kichui tobu rakhi daknam
an old letter in a new envelope
nothing has changed, but still i give it a new name

thonter kone hashi, bhetore jokhon
aajkal shob kichui khub onnorokom
i'm laughing on the outside,
but inside i feel very different these days

tai hawa... eshe songe niye jay
kichu kotha hariye jay
so the wind comes to take them away,
these details get lost

teen char te mon kharap
ekta bhanga din
baloonwalar beshe dukhi aladin
restless at three or four in the morning; a ruined day
sad Aladin in balloon-seller guise*
*(balloon-seller is someone who gives happiness to others)

bondhur pocket-e ochena ticket
mitthe ashwashe kobita likhi
in my friend's pocket hides an unknown ticket...
but it is in false hope that i write this song

aaj hawa... eshe songe niye jay
kichu kotha hariye jay
today the wind comes to take me away
these details get lost

Speech is near the heart

I know this blog is not even about my personal life and I try hard to sound academic when I write. I am not intending to do that today. It's not appropriate to my topic.

Where do I start? Fourth grade, where Richard told me on the playground that despite being born and raised in these United States, I "talked like an Englishman" and so I got angry at him and told him he farted too much?

Or when I moved later that year and Niki and the other mean girls would tease me by telling me to say "New York" and surrounded me with cruel laughter since I couldn't pronounce the letter R when it followed a vowel?

Or the one day I went to the school speech therapist, then folded the practice paper up as tiny as I could and hid it so my parents wouldn't find it and realized I'd had to go to special ed? I had taught myself to read when I was two. People considered me smart. Mom and Dad would get angry at me for not being smart anymore, or so my eleven-year-old mind thought. I was ashamed of myself, of my nonexistent R.

On that paper was the trick I'd searched dictionaries to learn but never found. You touch the tip of your tongue to your hard palate. Once I realized it, the problem disappeared. It's easy to fix this stuff when you're motivated. And eleven.

It's a lot harder later on, even if you're motivated.

My job in India was creating training materials for accent neutralization. I went back to the source, to these simple mechanical tricks that I had myself used to sound "more American" as a child. Tongue goes here. Lips do this. Smile a bit more. No, not that much. When testing these new techniques, I could see the same frustration in the eyes of my trainees that was in my own back in the day. Some nailed it. Others struggled. I realized that now we needed a lot more than mechanics. My training had to be coupled with massive amounts of encouragement and positive reinforcement, as it's hard to be told "you need to speak like this to be understood better." It's hard to hear. Because the way we speak is who we are.

I grew up in an environment where certain patterns of speech were considered "uneducated" and it was not okay to talk like that, and despite Texas, grew up sounding more like NPR than country music. I had a Canadian neighbor I idolized as a child and hearing my voice today, I know some Vancouver crept its way into my voice. Upon returning from India, I was asked on multiple occasions "where I came from" because of my "beautiful accent." I have even been accused of "code-switching" into an Indian accent around second-generation Indians even when I was using what was my regular everyday I'm-not-thinking-about-how-I'm-talking voice. Who knows -- maybe because I am so isolated here and the main person I talk to is my husband, I'm beginning to pick up his speech patterns? I think I pick things up fairly quickly and unconsciously --unless I am told not to-- but my accent has never been Canadian, or Indian, or even pure GenAm. I don't know what it is, but I've made peace with it in the years between self-conscious preteen and now.

Well, at least I think I have, but I am certain that it is one of the things that is holding me back from expressing myself fluently in Bengali. I remember the giggles of my classmates, my own horror at hearing older girls in my French classes in college speak French with American accents, and of course the hesitation and terror of a former "gifted kid" - I can't mess this up. I can't get this wrong or else it proves I'm really not that smart. So my mind stops; I freeze, and I say nothing.

I know a lot about Bengali. I can read and write with little problem. I'm still expanding my vocabulary and trying to solidify grammar, but I'd say I'm at an advanced beginner or beginning-intermediate level. I can wax poetic about the order of the alphabet and how it all makes sense and conjugate verbs and put together simple, grammatically correct sentences if I have the time to write them out. But when it comes to practical usage, I slip back down into the novice level. I tell people I talk like a toddler but I know toddlers who speak better than me.

It feels like math class; I know the equations. I can plug numbers in and get the right answers. But I'm not entirely sure of how those equations are derived, if that matters at all, and you certainly don't want to get in a rocket that I built using those equations.

So I am trying to break through this impasse. I am doing this by trying to speak daily, then recording myself and actually listening to what I recorded. I'm not up to extemporaneous speaking yet, but at least reading from a book and getting the sounds in my ears and mouth seems to be helping. And since I either have no more shame or just a lot of bravado (not sure which), I will share a couple of recordings with you.

This is the last recording from the first book of Sahaj Path, Lesson 1, after a week of recording and listening back.

This is the first recording from Lesson 2. 

You can tell the difference a week of practice makes. (I got frustrated and deleted the first recording of Lesson 1, which is why I didn't post it.) In Lesson 2, I read the story ahead of time so I could understand its meaning, but I didn't with the poem. This recording is the first time I have encountered the poem, and I'm reading the Bengali script.

This is my life, my study, my fears. You should do one thing every day that scares you, they say. So I speak. Maybe one day that won't be scary and I'll have to do something else.

Translation: Eka by Lakkhichhara

I have written about this song before (in yet-to-be-published-if-ever vignettes), but now I am translating it to share with you. The guitar tells you everything you need to know though; the translation is simply a bonus.

Thanks to Rakesh S. Tova E., and Supriyo S. for insights :)

Lyrics and Translation:

একা - লক্ষীছাড়া

Eka - Lakkhichhara

Alone

Eka eka hoyto gopone

Chupishare boroi anmone

Shunyo haate bhari ondhokar

Alone; perhaps in secret

Noiselessly; indeed unconsciously

With empty hands full of darkness

Charidhare jhapsa mukh koto

Chena kichu ochena hoyto

Eki kotha bole barongbar

So many blurred faces surrounding

Some recognizable, perhaps some unknown

Repeating only one thing, over and over

Bujhina je tar maane

Raat jaane, 'raat jaane'

Kothay, kobe, konkhane? 

I don't know what it means

The night knows

Where, at what time, in what place?

Keno mishe jachche bortoman 

Neme ase somoyer shopan

Shob kichu lagche bemanan

Why is Now becoming dark

As it descends the steps of time

Nothing seems as if it fits

Deke othe raat-jaaga pakhi

Kome ase jiboner goti

E du'haate mukh dheke rakhi.....

The nocturnal bird calls out

As life's pace winds down

I cover my face with these two hands

Amar e dike cheye

E akashe utheche chand

Bonnay aalor bhengechhe baand

In this sky the rising moon shines upon me

And the flood of light breaks through

Chole jae majh raati re

Shanto nodir tire

Hajaro bochor aager 

Sriti ase phire

Midnight retreats to the bank of the peaceful river

Memories of the distant past return

Translation: Obak Bhalobasha by Warfaze

I am going to start posting some of my translations of Bengali songs here. First, because if they were already online, I wouldn't be translating them, and second, so that if you are able, you can correct my translation and make it even better.

I'll post transliterated Bengali here in the way I understand it best, and my translation.

And of course, because the songs are so beautiful, I will post them here too.


 (Sorry Bangladeshi readers, I can't find this song/video anywhere but YouTube. :\)

Lyrics and Translation:

অবাক ভালবাসা - ওয়ারফেজ
Obak Bhalobasha - Warfaze
Astonishing Love

shob aalo nibhe jak andhare
May all the light fade to darkness

sudhu jege thak oi durer tarara
Where the only ones awake are those faraway stars

shob shobdo theme jak nistobdhotay
May all the words trail off into silence

sudhu jege thak ei shagor amar pashe
Where the only thing I hear is this ocean next to me

shob bedona muche jak sthirotay
May all the pain be erased into stillness

hridoy bhore jak ostitter anonde
May the heart be filled with the bliss of existence

hridoy gobhire obak drishtite, thomke danriyecche mohakaal ekhane
The deepest part of the heart is surprised by a sudden vision of eternity


shubhro balir shoikote
On the beach of white sand 

elomelo batashe, guitar haate
In a random breeze, guitar in hand

nistobdhota chouchir
The silence is shattered

unmaad jhonkaare kaandi obak shukher kanna
In the mad ringing of a sudden flood of tears of happiness

jeno chuni heera panna shagorer buke,
alpona enke diye jay
obak bhalobashay
Like a sacred design of precious jewels in the heart of the ocean
Created by an astonishing love 

shob aalo nibhe jak andhare
May all the light fade to darkness

sudhu jege thak oi durer tarara
Where the only ones awake are those faraway stars

shob shobdo theme jak nistobdhotay
May all the words trail off into utter silence

sudhu jege thak ei shagor amar pashe
Where the only thing I hear is this ocean next to me

shob koshto boye jak sukher jhor
May all trouble be carried off in a storm of bliss

hridoy bhore jak sahoj neel shopne
And the heart be filled with a simple azure dream

hridoy gobhire obak drishtite, thomke danriyecche mohakaal ekhane
The deepest part of the heart is surprised by a sudden vision of eternity


shubhro balir shoikote
On the beach of white sand 

elomelo batashe, guitar haate
In a random breeze, guitar in hand

nistobdhota chouchir
The silence is shattered

unmaad jhonkaare kaandi obak shukher kanna
In the mad ringing of a sudden flood of tears of happiness

jeno chuni heera panna shagorer buke,
alpona enke diye jay
obak bhalobashay
Like a sacred design of precious jewels in the heart of the ocean
Created by an astonishing love