Rima LIII

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

Bécquer was born in Sevilla Feb. 17, 1836. His father, of Flemish descent, was a painter. Gustavo Adolfo was left without a mother at age five, without a father at age 11.

Volverán.... Volverán.... Volverán.... How striking this beautiful reiteration is, channeling our understanding, sentiment and empathy at the beginning of these lines as though down flutes in polished marble. In English, these lines only very awkwardly could begin with "Will return...." Every language has a different structure, different characteristics, and certain poetic effects are possible in some that are not in others.

Take note of the assonance (asonancia), in which only the vowels rime, as in the golden old song: Irene/dreams (Goodnight, Irene, goodnight, Irene, I'll see you in my dreams.) Though occasionally employed in English, it is not nearly as common as in Spanish. In consonance (consonancia), both the vowels and the consonants rime, beginning with the final stressed vowel. This is so easy in Spanish it hardly seems worth the trouble. The rarer something is, the more it is apt to be valued. Note that the stressed vowels of colgar, llamarán, escalar, abrirán, etc. rime, though not the consonants. That will get you started. Check out the other verses on your own and prepare a one sentence report.

On the first day of Eduardo's first course with Dr. Sánchez y Escribano, don Federico wrote two sets of historical dates on the blackboard and told the students to spend the next four weeks of class in the library studying every Peninsular Spanish theatrical work pertaining to those dates and write up a report of their impressions and discoveries. Then he dismissed the class. "Come back in four weeks." Sheer panic.

"I always claimed to have been fairly fearless in combat in World War II," Eduardo said of this. "It only scared the 'spit' out of me," I usually say. But my classmates and I left that room shaky and white. Believe it!"

With respect to his translation of Verde que te quiero verde, Pérez would like to inject a curious fact regarding English. There are dual words for certain animals and for their meat. Instead of sheep meat, mutton. Not pig meat but pork. Not cow meat. Beef. The French-speaking Norman conquerors, exactly like the conquered, ate sheep (mouton), pig (porc) and cow (boeuf). O.K., not cow. Ox, bullock, steer, yes. Cow is vache.

Well, naturally, whatever the conquerors ate was upper class (anyone who has dined at even a **-star French restaurant might agree with that, assuming that at that point the Normans had adopted some authentic Gallic cuisine), so all the Anglo-Saxons wanted to eat porc (pork), not pig, however tough, stringy and inferior. And mouton (mutton) and boeuf (beef) too. The Normans lived in maisons (houses). The Anglo-Saxons aspired to do the same. This is how the wealthy among them came to have their mansions.

Think how uninspiring the scripture would be if instead of mansions it read, "In my father's house are many dwellings" (a word of Middle English origin). Germanic house goes way back (cf. contemporary German Haus, Dutch huis, and Danish, Norwegian, Swedish hus). The Spanish is En la casa de mi Padre muchas moradas hay. Morada rolls off the tongue with the softest, smoothest, most comforting, reassuring touch, taste, scent and sound imaginable. It translates as dwelling. "I just throw this out," Pérez habitually says when dishing out enrichment.

Oh, what a favorite of his don Federico became! He can still picture him hunting a reference for him out of one of the shoe boxes stacked high in his office. Inerrantly, the right shoe box, the right notation on the right sheet or scrap of paper of any size, shape or color. It always reminded him of a poster hanging at a disorderly angle in the office of one of his German professors: Eine gute Verwirrung ist besser als eine schlechte Ordnung (a good disorder is better than a lousy order). Obviously not an old-style Prussian. Could have been a Bavarian or Austrian. A fascinating fact: In Germanic lands, the easy-going ones are thought to be in the southern but higher, colder, Alpine country. In the U.S., in milder climes, "southreners" are also thought to be more soft-edged than hard-edged northern Yankees. Just throw that out, Eduardo!

We pick up one of Pérez's fine collagenous threads here to point out that Spanish quiero can imply I want, I like, I love. Remember Verde que te quiero verde? Poetic nuances are often impossible to capture in translation.

Well, I assume that you know by now who is writing this. Who else could live digression, not merely illustrate it? Pérez abhors books written in first person. I, I, I, I, I triggers in him !Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay! (Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch! Alas, alas, alas, alas, alas! Woe, woe, woe, woe, woe!) Whoa! None of that for him! Examples: !Ay, mi dedo! (Ouch, my finger!) !Ay de mí! (Woe is me!) !Ay, no puede ser! (Alas, it cannot be.) So for this book's author, I no puede ser! Ouch! Not I, therefore, but....

Very good! Who else? Eduardo Pérez here. You may call me don Eduardo. As you read along and get to know me better, you may think of me—of him—as Lalo. He would like that. Far better than I, I, I, I, I are Pérez, señor Pérez, Dr. Pérez, Professor Pérez, señor director, don Eduardo, Eduardo, Eduard, Eduart, Ed, Eddy, Lalo, he, him, himself, his, querido (dear), corazón mío (my heart), alma mía (my soul), mi tesoro (my treasure), mi cielo (my heaven), Liebchen (darling), Schätzchen (little treasure/darling), etc. More about the latter later.

O.K. No more of this first-person stuff. If Pérez accidentally lapses back into it, kindly overlook it. Look away. Avert your gaze.

"The ryne in Spyne styes mynely in the plyne." This well-known line from My Fair Lady, the fabulous musical based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, had come unbidden to don Eduardo's brain in the form of a phonetic transcription, no less—International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) version 19xx. A researcher could look up the exact year or we could ask Dr. Pérez, it is to be supposed. This time it is given in TO (Traditional Orthography), with the diphthong ai (or ay) pronounced like ai of aisle, i of isle, and y of by (exactly the w'y Eliza pronounced May of Mayfair before Henry Higgins teaches her the high-toned speech of that fashionable London district. Now do you get the play on words: Mayfair to My Fair?

Fantastic how 'enry 'iggins converts the lowly, begrimed flower girl into a very high-class lady. Her speech, her manners and mannerisms, her walk, her smile, her wardrobe, makeup, hairdos, and.... You surely can smell them as you follow her enchanting, engrossing transformation.... exquisite perfumes. Some of those gowns! Out of the corner of your eye as you watch the video can't you catch every Miss and Mz and Mrs almost reaching out to touch them? Might one wonder if any of them feel a light synesthetic pressure on their skin at the waist or other sites?

Shaw's Pygmalion ought to be presented regularly at secondary and higher-level institutions and there should be every expectation that it would be a financial success staged commercially too. An ep.... A movie has been made of it—quite an old one, in black and white, by the same name. (The temptation to write eponymous was successfully resisted, please note.) It used to be shown on college campuses in the U.S. when Dr. Pérez was a student. It was extremely popular, loved by all campus "comers" as they were known then, who surreptitiously looked up the Greek myth so they could talk learnedly about it. It wasn't uncool to know stuff back then. It wasn't the custom to flaunt ignorance and bad breeding. It was cool to have a knowledge of high culture (art, music, literature, theatre, architecture) without being scorned as a snob—by other comers, anyway.

When Eduardo found as a callow youth in Buenos Aires that jovencitas and jovencitos at liceos (secondary schools) could chatter happily, knowledgeably and excitedly about everything from Camus to Van Gogh, Mistral, Dalí, Austen, Frank Lloyd Wright, Borges, Yeats, Walter Gropius, Pirandello, Antoni Gaudí, Schönberg, García Lorca, etc., he felt like an uncouth oaf. (Very few schools were coed, is why the itas and itos are separated above.) A challenge for you, callow youths of today: Can you match the above names with their artistic pursuits? Which was an artist, which a writer, etc.?

O.K., O.K. I'm not chagrined. It's a delight to be proved wrong. The above names were selected totally, mmmm, at random.....

About the Greek Pygmalion myth, with an attempt at an analogy that may keep those of you already familiar with it interested:

Pygmalion I, king of Cyprus sculpts a statue so beautiful that he falls in love with it. Moved by the intensity of Pygmalion's desire and his piteous supplication to her, the goddess Aphrodite brings the marble statue to life.

That's it. The bare bones. Shaw really fleshed them out. (Aren't you glad this word wasn't totally supplanted by meat?) Too bad Shaw didn't write a sequel showing how Eliza resculpted Henry Higgins after they were married. Some people may think that people are more malleable than marble. Pshaw! What an idea!

The old saw that the boy is father to the man has only a kernel of truth in it. "Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia," (I am I and my circumstance) wrote the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gassett. Brotherrrr! Think of all the things that have chiseled and keep on chiseling away at us till we die! The language and silent language we grow up with....

It occurs to Pérez that you may now be told that Lalo is the nickname for Eduardo. He makes the following observation: Most nicknames appear to be derived from baby talk. The developing organs of speech can't articulate Roberto, for example, and it comes out Beto. Elisa is reduced to Lisa. Robert is Bob, Elisabeth is Liz.

....the parents and other ancestors who lived under the same roof with us, perhaps, and gave us our genes and so much more; the older brothers who told us "Stop tagging after us, you little brats!"; other relatives and friends; the highbrow, lowbrow or nobrow culture we grew up in; our parents' religion; the occupations around us; wild animals and pets, insects, microbes; the status of our health; our physical makeup and appearance; our economic situation; the geography and topography of the area; our teachers (the high school Chemistry teacher who read The University of Hard Knocks to every class he taught to effectively prepare them for life); the female Algebra teacher who insisted that a certain somebody would get the gold L for Lewis Jr. High awarded to the top graduating student and Boy, did she ever mean it!; the climate; the toys; the low or high technology; crime; war; peace....

This could go on and on, with hard knocks and milder scratches, bumps, shoves and nudges working away at us incessantly, together with the scrubbing and polishing we get from those attractive, alluring ones who know what is best for us.

The word language above should have been given as dialect. Dialects are what we speak. Even the normative or standard language we may use is just one dialect among several that a given language may have. Some idiots even have idiolects. (Just a witticism! Falls short of being a pleasantry.) Originally, idio referred to one's own. Some individuals are so much their own selves that they are idio_s. Some manners of speaking are so much an individual's own that they are idiosyncratic idiolects.

It's true, too, that every word or expression can have its own flavor or connotation to a person, the result of each individual's unique lingual history—often lost in the dim mists of our childhood growing up but there nonetheless. Lechero is connected in Pérez's mind with the chants of Argentine vendors and deliverymen, from the milkman to the mailman to the knife sharpener who traversed the streets with their unmistakable cries, whistles or bangings on a piece of metal.

When Pérez heard the cry ¡Lechero!, he grabbed the pan reserved for the purpose, ran out into the cobblestone street and handed it to the milkman—his cow trailing behind him—who milked a litro of milk into Eduardo's pan and other waiting pans before resuming his parade down the street. Pérez took care to boil the milk first. Lechero still has that association in his mind, as does leche—quite different in taste to the pasteurized milk consumed today. When Eduardo and Anneliese returned from Chile, a number of things tasted very different to them. Especially the lechuga, always washed in a solution of iodine and water (as recommended by the Embassy) to kill bacteria. Back home in the States, the lettuce continued to taste odd for years. One word can evoke lots of memories, though they may seldom come back to us consciously.

Individuals, families and clans can have their recognizable idiolects. Pérez knew of an extended family of Maughans that, if you had already heard one of them speak and on hearing another one you asked, "Are you one of the Maughans from Cache Valley?" you might very well get Bingo!

Among his notes somewhere, Pérez has an item about five brothers. Any one of them could be identified as a Hall by his speech. One of them, according to reliable reports, was a little farther out on the idio side. He had a windy way of expressing himself. The word from some sources is that his childhood nickname was Windy.

According to the Whorfian Hypothesis, even the language we speak chips away at us—or molds us, perhaps, if we are soft, huggable types. That's right, each language can direct the way we think in certain directions and cause us to perceive things in a special way. That's the hypothesis. Hard to prove, it is said. Most people are impressed by Benjamin Lee Whorf''s comments on snow. Eskimos have so many different words for types of it, that if Whorf is right, it's as if this fact has made veritable virtual snowmen out of them, molding them according to the perceptions and customs thereby imparted. (Oh, oh! Begging your pardon. Snowpersons.) Still, many linguists and other thinkers snort, "Nonsense!" But wait a second. Think a little.

The socalled function words of a language—in English, the, and, to, a, in, that, for, he, for example—tend to remain very stable for centuries. They may change glacially over time as in the case of Latin ego (I) becoming Italian io, Spanish yo, French je, Portuguese eu, etc. It might take something approaching a shifting of continental plates to bring about more rapid change. Conquest, for instance. Scandinavian invasions of Britain brought new third-person plural pronouns (they, them, their) to replace the old. For some time in Britain, thanks to these invasions, the words for she and he, both beginning with h, ended up so similar that they could get confused.

So what else is new about the hes and shes? They're getting more similar in some ways every day. A lot of ladies wear the pants literally as well as figuratively, something heretofore quite unknown and totally scandalous and unacceptable to other women. Back on track again: To overcome the third-person singular confusion, a curvy, unambivalent sexy S replaced the crude masculine H, giving our language she. Phonemically, //.

But other usages remained change-resistantly, chauvinistically masculine. "All men are created equal." "When a linguist studies this, he...." Right now we are at a period in time when continental plates are shifting and awkward solutions are erupting. s/he. She/he. The department chair. The deliveryperson. Over the internet, usually no title is given at all, by-passing Mr., Mrs., Miss, Mz. Good thing, because the gender of many names has become blurred (Toby? I mean the Toby with the.... uh.... the blouse), so we have "To: Eduardo Pérez", for example.

Not good. Dr. Pérez does not like that. He worked very hard for his Ph.D. and has often thrown this enrichment out: "Doctor originally meant teacher (cf. doctrine), so we professors have a much greater right to the title than those medical people."

"So....," a reader asks? "May I call you Lalo? What's the prob? No title at all is just as egalitarian as Dr. In English, Dr. refers in these progressive, enlightened times to either men or women. Quite astonishing! There are female Drs. of both the M.D. and Ph.D. persuasion. Yes, yes, Lalo, I know. In Spanish it would be clearly Dr. or Dra. (Doctor, Doctora)."

"So who's so all-fired egalitarian?" Dr. Pérez wants to know. "A Ph.D. degree, whether earned by a woman or a man, deserves recognition."

In his spare time Professor Pérez is working on this morphological gender problem that English has and definitive solutions will be forthcoming.

So, have you thought a little? Can you see that Whorf was right? Definitely, in the case of morphological gender in English, which reflects and reinforces the bemused male attitude toward female achievements and females' status, linguistically establishing male dominance and subtly fostering in females a sense of inferiority, low self-esteem and, in extreme cases, worthlessness. There is some truth in this. In these politically correct times, ask any man who has a wife and five daughters.

Women have always known how to fight back, though. During the time he spent in Chile, Eduardo read a very humorous play. Unfortunately he never had the opportunity to see it on the stage: Frutos de LlaiLlai. LlaiLlai is a nice little town in Chile's central valley, one of the richest agricultural areas on earth, especially productive of such delicious fruits as oranges, lemons, limes, grapes, figs, kiwis, paltas (avocados), papayas, lúcumas (apricot-like and fantastic in ice cream), chirimoyas, persimmons, locuats, apples, peaches, pears, quinces, etc., plus all kinds of melons and other beautiful produce. The male characters in the play think they are masterfully embodying their God-given traditional macho roles, but in fact the females are making fools of them at every turn, totally in charge as far as anything that really counts is concerned, though they play along with and encourage the masculine fantasy.

Pérez has always cautioned those within range of his voice or sight of his writings to be extremely cautious and careful when chipping away at someone. We must always keep in mind that that is what we are doing. Helping to smooth and perfect them or getting them all out of shape with themselves and the world. Y'know, in My Fair Lady, Eliza was already a splendid person as a poor flower girl. This could even be said of her wacky old, wickedly lovable old Da. Nevertheless, one of the greatest things in life is that we can experience it in a multitude of ways through the myriad roles, rites of passage, transformations, occupations, and so on that may come our way or that can be ours. So change definitely is desirable, when not pernicious.

One of Lalo's best friends was in a junior high school music class with him. A good kid but slow to wise up. He reverenced authority way too much. (Pérez knows, revered, but what that connotes would not be right here.) A subservient boy. The music teacher often made a point of demonstrating how the lips should be rounded for certain vowels and he would demonstrate this in a very exaggerated way, it seemed to most of the class. You know—just to get his point across. Little Subserviency put his whole little heart into doing what the alpha male desired.

One day the district music supervisor paid a surprise Gotcha! visit to the class. The teacher, very popular, was confident of scoring high, knowing that the young students would perform their very best for him. Their performance commenced with a relatively simple selection so that they could get off to a good start and shine. Barely under way, their singing was shocked to a sudden halt when the supervisor pointed his finger directly at Master Servility and shouted, "What do you think you are doing? This isn't a circus, you disgusting, dimwitted little clown!" In his deep desire to please, little Mister Starting To Wise Up To The Realities Of The World Around Him had rounded his lips a displeasing trifle too much .

The upshot was this: The evolving Mr. Independent Thinker never took a music class again. Over the years that followed, he did learn much more about music and much more music—informally, on his own. Only then did he begin to sense in all its severity the great sensual deprivation inflicted on him—sorrowfully, self-inflicted to an inescapable extent. Just as the poor young fellow was starting to come to his senses. Or they were beginning to fully come to him.