Lost in Translation

Often, between translations, thoughts are lost. They wander around the darkness, looking in vain, for a way to complete their journey, bouncing from one dark shadow to another. They know they can’t go back home. That door is shut.

I wonder what happens when we speak, you and I, in languages that are bright as sunlight to the speaker, but are foggy and confusing to the listener. What happens to the numerous thoughts that trickle away, misting the surface of the dark canopy of the secret world of our conversations?  Thoughts rising up to the canopy, touching its cold innards, cooling to tear drops, crying in despair and falling as homesick rain that looks to fall in the same pond it evaporated from. The pond is filled with the ripples of our conversations. Drops fall on the glass bangles of the ripples, breaking them with the weight of their loneliness.

And when the pond freezes over, with no more new conversations to keep it warm, the thoughts lost in translation linger on, gliding on the ice, like hockey pucks, moving around here and there, between your frosted lips and my reddened ears. Thoughts getting licked by your tongue and pushed away by my ear, Thoughts persisting like hunger, rumbling like echoes of thunder on a rainless night.

Thoughts lost in translation, that knock the drumming doors of the ear, always trying to reach inand declare their lives complete. Thoughts that want to enter my ear, so you can declare that you have made a goal with the talking hockey stick of your tongue, and cheer in ecstasy.

But no, the defense of my ignorance stands guard, preventing the puck from entering the ear and so the thought remains lost. You can't take it back, having uttered it in your language. So you try to play around, move it every now and then, with your tongue, uttering it in several, but always incomprehensible words, trying determinedly, hoping that the thickness of my ignorance would melt, making way for the vagabond thought to one day reach its destination.

Maybe one day it will. Maybe.

Maslenitsa - Dasvidaniya, Winter

“Wake up, waaaake up!” her hands dug into the chestnut brown coat of the bear. His snore ruptured and ended up becoming a staccato. She bent over, moving closer to his folded ears as though she could speak him into wakefulness. Her auburn hair falling all over her face, it was difficult to say where her face met his. She spoke softly into his ears, almost in a song; she wanted him just awake, not awake and terrified. 

“Waaaaake up!” 

Problem was she didn’t know how sweet her voice was. She only pushed him deeper into his slumber. It was tiring. She had walked all the way to his cave to wake him up. It was time, wasn’t it? The trees had been barren too long now; the forest had gone silent without the tickling partridges and the laughing flowers. 

She didn’t like any of it. She was Spring. She wanted to run around, her long frock combing the lush grass, and the bright colors of the land wanting to adorn her hair. The evening sky would blush at her curious glances and the streams spoke rumors of their secret love. In the shallow bottoms of the grassland, rabbits gathered to gossip about their romance. 

But, that was all in the past. Winter had played spoilsport. Why, even now, she was sitting there on the fallen branch of a once majestic tree, smugly watching Spring try to wake up the bear. She knew. Her time was not up yet. There were several days left. The bear will not wake up. 

“Waaake up” Spring said again. His pudgy forehand stretched to take hers into his. With her warmth comforting him, he snuggled in some more. Her honeyed pleas were not enough to wake him up. She did not know what to do. Spurned and sad, she lay on his furry back and closed her teary eyes.

Winter sat on the fallen branch, the hem of her bluish white dress draping its rotting bark. Her smile was smug. Spring had gone back to sleep. “Maybe this time”, she told herself, “I’ll stay back longer”. She snapped her fingers in glee. Snow powdered from the sky. She briefly suspended a snow flake and smirked at the sight of Spring’s teary face resting on the back of the sleeping bear. 

It was a minute. It was a day. It was a week. We may never know. The suspended snowflake was liberated by gravity and fell to the ground. Winter looked anxious. Her ears had picked up something. She turned her head around in the direction of the sound.

It was faint, but was growing louder fast. 

The lack of rhythm in the drums made it obvious that they were being beaten by untrained hands. As they got closer, Winter realized that they weren’t drums, but the footsteps of the people. There was a tall figure, clothed in bluish white. Winter strained her eyes to look at the figure. She couldn’t believe her eyes. It was a figure of herself. “But, why? It’s not time yet. Why are they coming so soon?”

By now, they were close enough for her to make out the words. Уходи, зима, ко дну, присылай весну!*

They were chasing her away. But, she wasn’t perturbed. It was still snowing. She was still in control. She stretched her long arms and relaxed. People can shout all they want. She wasn’t going anywhere.

As her eyelids came close to each other, the sudden movement pierced them apart. She watched in horror, as the bear moved his arm around his body to scratch his back. It fell on Spring. She woke up, and wiped the dried tears from her cheeks. That wasn’t necessary. The happiness bubbling from her would have washed them away anyway. 

“You’re up! You’re up!” She went up and down jumping in joy. And as she jumped, Winter noticed horrorstruck, that a tuft of grass reared its head from under Spring’s feet. 

“No! It can’t be!” Winter snapped her fingers. This time, the sound walked alone, without the accompaniment of snow. 

The shouts were really close now. The piled up snow sweated as it ran away from their path. It looked longingly at Winter let out a last cry of help. One of the shouters slipped, but was quickly back on his feet. Winter felt helpless. 

“How could this be? How could I be chased away before my time? It’s all because of her. She brought them here. She woke the bear up. Let me…” 

Winter did not complete saying what she wanted to be allowed to do. As she moved towards Spring, she buried herself headfirst into the soft fur of the bear. He stood on his hindlegs, seven foot tall. Winter looked up at his eyes. He didn’t look angry that she wanted to attack Spring. He just pointed behind her. She turned around. The crowd had arrived. A man and a woman, dressed in the brightest colors, their dresses complementing each other, were going in opposite directions drawing a big circle with the sticks they held. 

Two more had lifted the branch Winter had been sitting on and stood it upright. They had also tied the effigy of Winter to it. One of them, a lady, slender as a fruit-laden twig, stately as an oak, walked in with a large jar in her hands.

“Honey!” Spring ran out from behind the bar and took the jar from her. She ran back to the bear who picked her in his left hand and brought her to his chest. She dipped her soft hands into the jar, coated them with honey and took it to the bear for him to lick it clean. This was his breakfast, as he broke his long period of fasting and sleep. 

It was over. Even Winter knew it. She looked at the bear to confirm. He was unperturbed; his eyes closed as he relished the honey that Spring fed him. She looked back at the crowd. They continued to chant, “Уходи, зима, ко дну, присылай весну!” *

Winter moved away from the bear, from the crowd, from Spring and walked forlorn into the forest. It was time. She was powerless now. The sun would be out soon, scorching her out. She would have to wait till he was done, for her to get back. He was already peeking from between the clouds. The heat from the fire the crowd had lit was also reaching her. Winter took refuge under the shade of the leafless trees until she walked so deep into the forest, nobody could see her.

The crowd set the effigy on fire. They sang and danced and lit their stoves to bake blinny**. It was the time of celebration. Winter was gone. Spring was here. What was there to worry about? As they shaped the snow into balls and castles, Spring went amongst them, laughing as they laughed, dancing with those who stood without a partner, playing with the kids in their sweaters and caps and bringing warmth into the lives of all who stood there.

She later took the bear’s hand and walked with him across the forest, stirring the trees and waking up the grass. They will bloom now. Winter was gone. Spring was here. It was time for Maslenitsa.

*- Уходи, зима, ко дну, присылай весну – Leave, Winter and send Spring

** - Blinny – Pancake

I'll Revert

Disclaimer: All characters and events mentioned in this post, even those based on real people, are entirely fictional. Any similarity to people, living, dead, or somewhere in between, is purely fictional and shall be considered to be the product of the fertile imagination of the reader. 

“I’ll revert at the earliest.”

Lately, this statement has been bumping into me more and more. Every time I read this, I struggle to suppress the GIF forming inside my head, of a human suddenly sprouting hair from all over his body, his spine bending, tailbone growing out long, in short, turning into a primate, the last common ancestor we shared with the Chimpanzee.

I’m sure the statement was not made with that GIF in mind. What the speaker perhaps intended to convey was that he would reply at the earliest. His earnestness is beyond doubt, of course. But let’s see what “revert” actually means.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “revert” means, “Return to (a previous state, practice, topic, etc.)”. So when a human being decides to revert, and that too at the earliest, well, you can understand the GIF in my head.

And then there’s the “I’ll revert back”. Now go back to the GIF. Only this time, the man is transforming into a primate, stops the transformation midway and then loses all the hair, straightens his spine and becomes human again. Or think about your school days, when your PT Master would issue two subsequent orders of “About Turn” bringing you back to looking at his angry face again. That’s what “revert back” does to me. It’s a Nolan-esque abomination that puts you on a recursive loop, see what I did there? Recursion itself implies that it’s an endless loop, so a recursive loop is a meta term for describing recursion or loops. 

So, “revert back” places you on a recursive roller coaster ride,  where your co-passenger is the other abomination, “repeat again”. “Repeat” means to say/do something again. How would you “repeat again”? By getting into an infinite loop, where every time you finish doing the task, you decide to repeat it and then repeat it “again”? 

But we digress. We need to revert to “revert”. There. That’s one way to use “revert”.  One of the correct ways. 

All these are passé. The greatest of all, the greatest and perhaps most noble reverting that I have seen anyone want to achieve was the “I’ll revert to you”. If you go with the conventional meaning of “revert”, this statement presumes that I was an earlier version of the other person, (a humble Windows XP to the advanced Windows 10, if you may) and that this person is willing to go back to being me. But that’s not all of it. In legal context, “revert” is used to imply that the rights or ownership of a commodity will return to the previous owner. Now, let’s go back to “I’ll revert to you”. Is the person claiming that he will go back to being my property? Am I a slave-lord? Is this even legal? And if it isn’t, will that person be guilty of abetting the crime of slavery? I get all these questions when I read the apparently harmless, but obviously ominous “I’ll revert to you”.

Sometimes, all this makes me wonder when this may have started. I mean, when did we, as a civilization decide that it was ok to appropriate the word “revert” and force it to take the place of the perfectly useful “reply”? What’s wrong with “reply”? It’s easy, not a lot of characters to confuse the spelling, and everyone knows what it means. Hey, it even starts with an “r”, just like “revert”, so why not use it? 

I think there must have been some cataclysmic event, like the one that drove the dinosaurs to extinction, but in this case, pushed “revert” into our vocabulary in place of the simpler “reply”. I have been trying to trace this event, so that we can collectively err… revert to the day and time when we were no longer using “revert” when we wanted to say “reply”. Until then, I guess, people will continue to do this.