The Best American Essays 2016 Part 4

In the backseat, Kilo held my hand. I hadn't told him that my mother had pulled a knife on me, or that just hours before, I'd swallowed her pills and gone to bed, that I woke up vomiting, surprised to still be alive. All I'd said on the phone was that I was sick and needed a ride to my father's.

I leaned my head on his shoulder, and he put his arm around me. In the front, Papo and Kilo's dad were talking about the Miami Dolphins, Joe Robbie Stadium, what they planned to do this winter. When I called Kilo for a ride, I'd already known that I'd be leaving Normandy Isle for good, that there was no way in h.e.l.l I'd ever go back with my mother, not if I could help it. I knew that my leaving would mean I wouldn't see Kilo, Boogie, and Papo every day, and maybe I wouldn't be able to stay out all night or hang in the streets whenever I wanted, that we could easily drift apart. But I was so tired.

Kilo leaned over, kissed me on the cheek, then whispered something in my ear that I couldn't make out. I told myself that he said, "I love you," even though I knew it wasn't true, but for now I needed it to be.

I spent most of the ride to South Beach thinking of our time as if it were already in the past. How Kilo and I danced at the Nautilus Middle School Halloween dance, all sweaty and breathless and crazy. How once Papo introduced me to his neighbor as his sister-in-law, and afterward he always called me Sis. How we walked all over the place-the four of us shooting the s.h.i.+t from Seventy-First and Collins to Normandy Isle to Bay Harbor, even at three, four in the morning. How Boogie and I sat on a bench by the courts in Normandy Park, knocking back a quart, pretending we were grown and watching the pickup game. How Kilo and Papo acted like they were super-fly streetballers when really they were just okay. How in Kilo's room the walls were all tagged up with spray paint and Sharpie, covered in bad graffiti, his homeboys' names, their neighborhoods, and on the bedroom door, the largest piece: RIP MIKEY. How once I got so p.i.s.sed that my name wasn't written anywhere, I took his Sharpie and wrote JAQUI N BOOGIE on the wall next to his bed, then drew a heart around it. How he came when I called. How maybe he saved my life and didn't even know it.

By January we would barely see each other. By Valentine's Day, Kilo would already be with the girl who'd become the mother of his baby.

When I got out of the car in front of my father's apartment complex, the air was too warm for winter. Even for December in Miami Beach. I strapped on my backpack, watched the station wagon as it drove off, headed north. They would drive past North Beach, past Seventy-First and Collins, then make a left toward Crespi Park. I would go into the lobby of the south tower, take the elevator up to my father's apartment on the eighth floor, where my abuela would greet me with a hot meal and cafe con leche, always ready to forgive me for stealing her cigarettes, for running away, for getting arrested so many times.

A few days after going back home, I would have a dream. I'd be on the roof of the north tower, standing close to the edge, my arms extended like wings. I would be looking down at Biscayne Bay and across at the Venetian Islands, and then I would jump, and before I hit the ground, I would be flying, flying. The dream would come back every couple of months, and always I would fly before hitting concrete.

A couple of years after the French woman jumped, another woman-Papi's friend-would fling herself off one of the balconies. The south tower this time. She would hit the side of the building, then the roof of the pool maintenance storage shed, then the ground. She would fall fifteen stories. And she would live.

IRINA DUMITRESCU.

My Father and The Wine.

FROM The Yale Review.

The making of wine binds me to my ancestors who were tough-sinewed peasants and whose feet were rooted in the earth.

-Angelo Pellegrini, The Unprejudiced Palate Now and then I click a link to find out what the hipsters are up to. The hipsters are raising chickens and slaughtering them at home, I read; the hipsters are distilling hooch. This is trendy and far out and probably how we should all live, despite being smelly and arduous. No doubt they have it right, the hipsters, and if they are fermenting cheese and spritzing meat into sausage casings in Brooklyn, then surely we will soon follow them in the lesser metropolises. But the romance of do-it-yourself is tainted for me. I cannot muster up the enthusiasm to kill my own rabbit and pickle it. There is a droning voice in my head that says, You do this because you never had to. You do it because you do not know the humiliation and occasional physical danger of an immigrant father who held on to his past using food. You do this because the ethics of the undertaking are clear to you, and you don't-yet-understand the exquisite liberation of food that comes from a supermarket.

First, and last, and every time, above all things, was The Wine. It was never just wine, it was always The Wine, that year's ma.s.sive household production, the gravitational pull of which none of us could escape. This is not because my father came from the country. He was a city boy par excellence, but he could remember days when Bucharest had dirtier hands, or at least cleaner dirt on its hands. He used to tell me with a grin how when he was a child, chickens were always bought alive. The housewives would go out to the street with a knife and flag down a pa.s.sing man to kill the bird they wanted to cook for dinner. Businessmen who wanted to display their machismo refused the knife and wrung the chicken's neck barehanded. This was the old Bucharest, when my father's father still had his sausage factory, when salami still hung in their attic to cure and my father was responsible for tending to it. It was when my grandfather still made his own wine.

After we had moved through two new countries and multiple apartments in each, after we had finally settled in a house in the blandest cookie-cutter suburbs we could find, my father started to talk about making wine. Enough moving around and you'll want to reach for a bit of what was good back home. Enough moving around and you'll want to drink, I suppose. The decision to start making wine was helped along by the fact that alcohol sales are controlled by a government monopoly in Ontario, the LCBO, leading to small selection and high prices for a liquid as essential to Romanians as milk is to white-bread North American families. My father saw this as the oppressive fruit of Canadian puritanism, and he set about staging his own private revolution. In this, he had the help of "the Italians," purveyors of everything needed by the suburban vintner with Old World sensibilities: ma.s.sive bottles, special corks to let the gas out, industrial quant.i.ties of grapes, and the facilities for turning them into must. I was in my early teens at this point, still excited by the enterprise and even a little proud. As my father studied the chemistry of winemaking with the a.s.siduousness of the university professor he had once been, I designed wine labels on the computer with the t.i.tle CASA DUMITRESCU, and struggled to align a sheet of sticky labels in our dot-matrix printer so that the graphic would come out right. It was not very good wine, though back then I couldn't tell, but it was ours and it was cheap. My father calculated the cost per liter to two dollars, a magnificent savings to our family over retail wine, and clearly a wise financial move.

A fifty-gallon barrel cut in two will provide two excellent stomping vats. The heftier children and maiden aunts with heavy bottoms will be delighted to do the treading to the accompaniment of a tarantella or lively Irish jig.

Soon enough, our own Casa Dumitrescu became more crowded, as my surviving three grandparents came over from Romania and moved in with us. My grandfather was aged and absent by then, but I still remember him making sausage once, his trembling hands struggling to work the st.u.r.dy old meat grinder. My father became more ambitious in his winemaking, deciding that the Italians were good for grapes but that he did not trust their pulping machines not to adulterate his must with traces of other varietals. He went to Price Club, the daddy of Costco and perennial favorite of immigrant families in search of a deal, and bought a giant gray plastic garbage bin. This he carefully washed out, set up in our garage, and filled with muscat grapes. And then, for days on end, my two grandmothers and I stood around this bin and squeezed grapes. With our bare hands. I do not know if you have any experience of making must in this way, but muscats are tough, tight little berries, and you have to strain to crush every last one, and each bunch of grapes made our hands ache even more. My grandmothers and I tried to work out how we might get one of us into the garbage bin to apply feet to our common problem, but it was narrow and had two wheels at the bottom, and hopping in seemed an unsafe, if tempting, proposition. So we squeezed on into the night, tired but not thinking to question my father's imperative. This was, after all, The Wine.

At some point it occurred to my father that the price-gouging, racketeering deviousness of the Ontario government was not limited to wine; a greater injustice was also being perpetrated. A typical Romanian meal begins with plum brandy, uic in Romanian, or slivovitz as it is more widely known in Eastern Europe. Now, while fine wines could be had at extortionate prices, uic was hard to come by at all in the LCBO stores, and even when available, it was inevitably industrially produced and tasteless. The situation has improved over the years, but if you wanted a decent uic in the nineties, you had to smuggle it back from Romania, nonchalantly lying to the customs officer at Pearson Airport and hoping she did not discover the four quarts of hard liquor in plastic bottles and various ma.s.sive country salamis and cheeses nestled among, and stinking up, your clothing.

But my father, an engineer who had designed a bridge to go over the Danube and paper-light satellites that went into s.p.a.ce, and who, even more breathtakingly, had failed two terminally stupid students with parents high up in the Communist Party-failed them not once, not twice, but three times, until the dean took the exams out of his hands to protect him from his own probity-my father was not going to be frustrated in his basic, Romanian male desire for plum brandy at dinner. My father could design a joint for the Canadarm and a wind tunnel for testing airplanes. My father could a.s.semble Ikea furniture efficiently and without error. My father sure as h.e.l.l could put together his own still.

Now here was more treacherous territory, for while Ontarians were allowed to make wine and beer to their hearts' content, hooch was another matter. You couldn't just have a bunch of grandmas and a teenage girl making it in open daylight. This was closed-garage-door business. The garbage bins multiplied. Now there were some for fermenting plums, some that held a mix of fruit from our own backyard, and just to make any foray into the garage as confusing as possible, a few with enough pickled cabbage and cauliflower to keep a Transylvanian village free of scurvy for a winter. A metal boiler appeared from somewhere, as did a large plastic bucket and some copper tubing. And a spout. My father explained to me the physics of the thing (he was always so good at teaching what he wanted to teach): how the alcohol would be first to vaporize in the boiler due to its lower boiling point, how it would travel up through the copper tubing he had painstakingly coiled and, upon reaching the bucket filled with cold water, would condense and drip out of the spout into a waiting bottle.

The experiment was a success. After his first year of lonely distillation, my father's friends began fermenting plums in their homes too. Groups of them gathered in our garage in the evening, in the hazy yellow light of the one bulb hanging from the ceiling, and took turns boiling their own uic in his still. They smoked and talked for hours, watching single drops emerge from the spout. It took ages to fill a bottle, and they probably consumed the liquor much faster than they made it. But even then I suspected the true draw was the solitude of the process, the absence of nagging wives, children, and elderly parents, the heavy fumes of hot alcohol, the trancelike peace of drip, drip, drip.

In many regions, blackbirds, sparrows, catbirds, robins, and larks are purely destructive and a menace to crops. People now and then complain that their cherries, raspberries, strawberries, or blueberries are entirely eaten by the birds.

Making liquor happened also to be an ecologically responsible hobby, as my father insisted on using the spa.r.s.e fruit that grew in our yard for experimental blends: a few cherries produced by our insect-decimated trees, some bruised strawberries I had painstakingly planted and tended, the riotous bounty of a raspberry bush that grew beyond our expectations. And then there was the grapevine. Our dining room opened out onto a tiled patio covered by a wooden trellis. My father planted grapevines at the base of the posts that held up the sides of this trellis, and after a while, with a bit of care and nudging and wires to guide them in the right direction, the vines worked their way up the posts and over the wood slats. Their leaves grew large and gave cool shade in the summer. They even grew fruit. But the berries never really ripened; the grapes disappeared or fell to the ground still hard, a source of unending frustration to my father. We found out that the culprit was a racc.o.o.n that liked to clamber all over our trellis, disturbing the delicate grapes. Thus began the feud between one, or perhaps more, Upper Canadian racc.o.o.n and an East European professor of engineering, and if you have ever had any dealings with racc.o.o.ns you probably already know who won.

My father began by hanging bells from the trellis, hoping to scare the beast away with noise. Racc.o.o.ns are not frightened by the tinkling of bells. Then he bought a foul-tasting substance that he painted around the bottoms of the posts, so as to prevent the racc.o.o.n from climbing up them. But the trellis was attached to the roof, so the racc.o.o.n could reach the vine that way. Clearly it was time for more extreme measures. My father went to Price Club and bought two weapons, a plastic pellet rifle and a pellet pistol. These he placed on the dining room table, so that if he happened to hear or see a racc.o.o.n he could quickly grab a firearm on his way out. When we protested, he insisted he did not want to kill the racc.o.o.n, simply to scare it away from the grapes, which had, after all, been destined for greater things. After a few weeks of having two plastic guns lying ready on our table as if we were the Hatfields expecting a visit from the McCoys, my mother put her foot down and made him take them back to the store.

Things were at a standstill when I came back from school one day to find my father covered in blood. Covered in blood, and angry. The story went like this. He had been in the kitchen chopping onions with a large chef's knife when he heard a rustling on the patio. He rushed out of the house, knife still in hand, and there it was: the racc.o.o.n. He looked at the animal. It stared right back at him, unfazed. Exactly what happened next is unclear, but there seems to have been a skirmish. My father lunged at the racc.o.o.n with his knife, and at the last moment the animal moved out of the way. The knife tip stuck in the wooden post, the blade broke off from the handle, but my father's hand kept going in its trajectory along the blade. The racc.o.o.n escaped unharmed. My father never tried to salvage any of the grapes again.

This was the way things worked in the logic of do-it-yourself. What began as an eminently practical proposition would soon get out of hand. Always, behind the inanities of our everyday existence there were two una.s.sailable arguments: it was cheaper to do things this way, and it was authentically Romanian, part of our ident.i.ty. I found it easy to argue against the first. Few normal families buy at retail the amount of wine we produced in a year, so it was hard to be convinced of the great savings involved. We would have simply drunk less, and had fewer authentically Romanian family fights in the middle of dinner, if our wine had cost ten dollars a liter instead of two. But the nod to tradition was harder to counteract because it spoke to something I felt too. True, I longed to eat out in restaurants and use ready-made salad dressings, as native Canadian families did. Still, even then I could tell there were dishes in our cuisine that were better than anything Canada had to offer, and that they were worth extra effort, a bit of sweat, a few burns and cuts. There was an element of community in it too, because you made ma.s.sive amounts of food and drink partly so you could serve it to other Romanians at parties. Even in a huge city like Toronto, with its thousands of immigrants, there were few Romanian restaurants, and no good ones. If we wanted the food of home we had to make it or have friends who made it. Ideally, everybody prepared his or her own version, and the evenings after a gathering could be spent in fruitful discussion about whose recipe for cabbage rolls was best, whose cooking had too much Hungarian influence, which live-in grandmother was the most gifted baker, whose wine was never going to be as good as my father's.

I think this feeling of diasporic togetherness is part of why my father got involved with the lambs. He had a younger coworker who ran a farm north of Toronto, an Italian, and therefore automatically a kindred soul. More important, he raised sheep. The succulent memory of a party where a bunch of Romanians set up a spit in their yard and roasted a lamb on it must have gotten to my father because he set about coordinating a ma.s.s purchase of lambs for the coming Easter. Fourteen families were in: each would buy half a lamb, and my father would organize it all with his Italian engineer-c.u.m-farmer friend. The deal got messy, for predictable reasons. There were seven lambs ordered for fourteen families, but every family wanted the front part. It was not unusual at that time to hear my father furiously slamming the telephone down and yelling, "I told them at the start, they have to decide who gets the a.s.s and who gets the head!"

I was able to maintain a bemused distance from it all until one afternoon when the doorbell rang persistently. I opened the door to see my impatient father, who thrust a large black garbage bag in my arms and said, "Clear some s.p.a.ce in the fridge and put this in there." It took me a moment to realize what was happening, but as my arms felt the round contours of a small body through the plastic bag I understood this was one of the lambs, our lamb. Fighting back tears, and as quickly as possible, I shoved bottles and Tupperware aside in the largest part of our fridge, folded in the animal as best I could, and leaned against the door to press it shut. To this day, I can't remember if we got the a.s.s or the head.

Still, after all the drama of his various projects, n.o.body could have guessed it would be yogurt that would nearly do us all in. Yogurt is a tricky issue: I have inherited some of my father's madness on this point. Since leaving our house in the Toronto suburbs I have moved through five cities in the United States and Germany. In each new home I must spend an enormous amount of energy finding an acceptable yogurt, not too sweet, not bland, not adulterated by bananas or vanilla or cappuccino goji berries, or whatever other abomination is currently being used to sell yogurt to people who do not actually like yogurt. Then I try to find the largest possible container sold of that yogurt, so as never to be without. When I lived in Dallas and was addicted to a Bulgarian-style yogurt made by, appropriately, an aeros.p.a.ce engineer in Austin, I had to fight the urge to buy the gallon-sized jars despite living alone. So I understand my father, understand that once he had found the "Balkan style" yogurt that was closest in taste to what we knew from back home, he didn't want to have to buy a fresh container every day.

The normal thing to do in this circ.u.mstance would be to purchase a yogurt maker, but making yogurt in miniature cups would not do it for us; it was not really the point of the exercise. Romanians do not serve food in miniature cups. Modest, individual portions are basically inimical to our culture as a whole. Again, my father carefully explained the process to me: how a cup of starter yogurt would provide enough culture for a gallon of milk, that it was important to keep it warm, but not too hot, over many hours. Instead of a little electric machine, my father used a large pot which he wrapped in towels to keep it cozy overnight after it had been heated on the stove. The resulting yogurt was watery and lacked the firm tartness I loved about our chosen brand, but my father was convinced we would save an enormous amount of money by never having to buy yogurt again. And really, it was the least objectionable of his undertakings: it didn't involve guns or illegal distilling or the transport of dead lambs. Until, that is, I woke up one night to the smell of something burning. The entire house was dark with smoke, and our fire alarm had not sounded. It turned out that my father had forgotten to turn the stove off, and despite the electric element giving off such a small amount of heat, eventually the contents of the pot began to burn, badly. After that, yogurt was something we got at the store, though years later my father did give me a yogurt machine with six little cups that he had found on sale somewhere. I haven't had the courage to use it yet.

When, a year or so later, he managed to burn up the kitchen properly, the ample bounty of Casa Dumitrescu came in handy. It was a simple grease fire that began when he left some onions he was frying to answer the phone, but it destroyed a good deal of our cabinetry before he managed to put it out. My mother was at home to receive the a.s.sessor from the insurance company a few weeks later, and since it was lunchtime and his presence in our house made him a kind of guest, she offered him a bowl of soup. He accepted, and, I imagine, warmed and comforted by both soup and the empathetic smiles of my understanding mother, told her his story. He was Polish and was going through a heartbreaking divorce. My mother quite naturally poured him a gla.s.s of the house wine, and they continued talking. Afternoon turned into evening, and my father came home from work. Knowing well the therapeutic properties of uic and a.s.suming that the poor insurance man hadn't had anything so good since leaving his native Poland, my father pulled out a bottle and started filling little gla.s.ses. I think the a.s.sessment lasted until about 10:00 p.m. My parents soon had an entirely new kitchen.

Every fall I make wine for the family dinner table and for the good friends who cross my threshold. These have learned to enjoy it as any European. They praise its quality and drain their gla.s.ses like true sons of Bacchus. If they do not make it themselves, it is because I dispense it so freely, frequently bringing it to their table when I dine with them.

The kitchen remodel was a high point, but as the years pa.s.sed The Wine became more and more of a burden on our family. Even when money was tight there was never a question of sitting out a year of wine production. The economic rationale for it was, after all, unbeatable, or, rather, none of us had the emotional energy to challenge my father on something so clearly central to his life. I grew embarra.s.sed at the gallon-sized jug that was always at the foot of our table, envied my friends whose parents bought wine in decent, normal-sized bottles. My father probably knew more about the different varieties of wine than any of them, but we, his family, didn't. For us there was no Bordeaux or Ctes du Rhne or Merlot, there was only the special blend of Casa Dumitrescu, always changing in composition, always tasting the same. Part of my father's goal in making wine was to revive our Romanian heritage in Canada, a place that never really felt like home to him. Unfortunately, what he kept alive for us was the familiar feeling of life under communism, where you could only ever have one brand of any product and daren't complain about it lest the big man who ran things get sour.

This is not to say that there were not still occasional moments of pride, even as my father and I went from being tight accomplices in my early teens to arguing almost constantly as I approached twenty. My small residential college at the University of Toronto lived off stuffy Anglophile pretension and a measure of worldly sophistication, and I discovered to my surprise that I could impress the provost or an influential alumnus with an exotic bottle of homemade uic. As more time pa.s.sed, I also cared less what other people thought. Somewhere at the core of my father's obsession was a set of values that still feel true to me: that wine is just a beverage that goes with food, neither demon nor fetish; that local stores should not determine the limits of your culinary pleasure; that there is a warm joy in giving people food you made yourself, even if it is simple. Especially if it is simple. That gardening and cooking and fermenting and decanting can give you, if not a home, then at least a feeling that you belong to yourself even if you're not sure who exactly you are anymore.

As trendy as immigrant foodways and home canning and novels by ethnic women with "spice" in the t.i.tle are nowadays, the dream of authenticity in food is old romance. When I discovered Angelo Pellegrini's The Unprejudiced Palate, originally published in 1948, it seemed I had found my father's script and bible. No wonder my father loved the Italians so! Pellegrini, who left hunger-ravaged Italy and settled in the bountiful Northwest, waxes poetic on the spiritual value of tending a small vegetable garden, the joys of serving guests out of your own cellar, and the sheer deliciousness of fresh ingredients, put together simply but with a measure of peasant cunning. His book is a paean to immigrant wisdom, pungent and coa.r.s.e though it might seem from the outside. Even in the 1940s, he notes, I read with some guilt, how the second generation grumbles about the unappealing, unhygienic food practices of their Old World parents. And yet Pellegrini is also uncannily like me, a child immigrant who grew into the language of his new home, becoming a professor of English literature. Although his mother did a great deal of the cooking, his father is Pellegrini's model and authority, the one who taught him how to think about food and, naturally, how to make wine. Like Pellegrini, I could write a chapter on "The Things My Fathers Used to Do," but while the emigre Italian paid attention and followed in their footsteps, I strayed.

I left for graduate school in the wake of one of our family's uglier moments. That summer my father's get-rich scheme was to buy fixer-upper houses, renovate them, and resell them at a profit, none of these activities fitting into what one might call his skill set. My mother was unwilling to risk their life savings on this business venture, and he presented her with an ultimatum: compliance or divorce. In the middle of this, he and I had our worst fight, so furious that when the power went out all over the eastern seaboard I was sure that my anger had blown out the lights. We had patched things up into cold civility by the time my parents drove with me down to New England. At that point he had also dropped the idea of buying property and with it, quietly, the threat of divorce. But my mother had not forgotten, and she had her own thoughts about a marriage that could be traded in for a run-down house. She made her mind up when, having said their good-byes to me and set out on the highway, the first thing my father asked was, "So when are we going to start making The Wine?"

Years later, a family friend confessed to my mother how much he had dreaded coming over for dinner. You see, when someone makes their own wine, you can't simply drink it when it's served to you. You have to comment on it. You have to discuss its qualities, how well it turned out this year, how successful this particular blend of grapes was. Basically, you have to act like you're at a wine tasting and it's the pinnacle of sophistication to detect the fine nuances distinguis.h.i.+ng Casa Dumitrescu 1998 from Casa Dumitrescu 1997. A failure of hospitality of this magnitude is the stuff Greek tragedies are made of, but its core is innocent, a natural imbalance of interest and pa.s.sion. Here is what no one admits in their gleeful reports on the year of planting their own vegetables, baking their own bread, and brewing coca-cola with self-harvested cane sugar and homegrown cocaine: some undertakings require absolute, unyielding dedication, and not every member of the family or community can match it. Oh, it's one thing to go berry picking with the kids on a farm and make a pot of jam at the end of the day. But if you are pickling tomatoes because you miss a taste from your childhood, you have to try to get it right, which means you have to do a lot of pickling. It also means the people around you will have to eat a lot of sour tomatoes while you work out the recipe.

Wine is even more demanding, requiring copious equipment, knowledge, and most of all time. It has to be tended, observed, cared for. You have to judge the fermentation, know when to rack it to another bottle, siphoning it away from its sediment. It is intimate too, in the various demands it makes on the body of its maker: my father labored to lift bottles and bruise grapes, and he always racked wine the old-fas.h.i.+oned, unsanitary way, by sucking on one end of a hose and placing it in the fresh bottle, allowing the pressure to drive the wine into its new receptacle. The liquid that a proud vintner puts on the table is the fruit of months of planning, mixing, crus.h.i.+ng, was.h.i.+ng, testing, tasting, pouring, and smelling, but all the guest knows is that he is drinking mediocre wine. The wine was my father's second child, one whose faults he couldn't see.

The deep irony of the years that followed the divorce was that my father's liquors improved. His wine was now more than palatable, and his uic was the real thing, a pleasure to start a meal with. We had all put in time, but he stuck it through. It took a long while for us to be able to talk to each other after our fight and my parents' subsequent split, and even then our encounters were awkward, veins of hurt pulsing under the surface. But it helped that all we ever did, on those tense holiday visits, was eat and drink together. On the worst days, food and alcohol were social lubricants, keeping mouths from talking too much, giving the illusion of celebration and togetherness around a table. On the better days, it was easy to enjoy a good plum brandy, to appreciate it honestly, to see him enjoy the compliment. He would send me off with several bottles to take home with me, some pure uic, some experiments he had colored with tea, flavored with fruit, or aged in a bourbon wood barrel. I didn't know what to do with that much hard liquor, but inevitably something would come up-an exam pa.s.sed, a dissertation submitted, another move to yet another new city-and the uic I found in my stores provided the punctuation.

We do not speak anymore, my father and I. The decision was his. When I went to pack my things for my most recent move, now so far from Toronto that I'm almost back where I started, I found one more plastic bottle of uic. It was full, and it would clearly be the last I would ever have from his hands. I decided not to put it in the container with all my other belongings, wrapping it instead in a plastic bag and hiding it in my luggage; it was perfectly legal, but it felt illicit. This is also an authentic Romanian gesture, one I performed instinctively. One of my parents' friends escaped from Romania in the 1980s by hiding on a train, leaving his family behind but tightly grasping, under his jacket, two bottles of exquisite wine from the vineyard where he had worked. He opened one bottle with great pomp on his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and told his guests he was saving the second for his elder daughter's wedding, which he did not live to see. I did not wait so long. The bottle of uic was a little crushed by the time it reached my new home, looking as if it might crack the moment I tried to unscrew the cap. But it held, and to celebrate the start of our new life, I poured a generous amount into espresso cups for me and my husband. I expected the fresh, clean punch-in-the-face of all-natural, homemade plum brandy, but that is not what I tasted in the cup. This bottle, it turned out, was one of my father's experiments, an infusion with orange peels that had taken on a powerful bitter note over the years. It was undrinkable.

They will want to suck at the siphon hose and taste whatever you taste. They will laugh and smack their lips and a.s.sure you that the wine is very good. When you leave the cellar they will insist on carrying the bottle to the dinner table . . . And as they cling tightly to the bottle, with all the elaborate care of which little ones are capable on such occasions, you may possibly glimpse a comforting symbol-the child drawing closer to the father.

ELA HARRISON.

My Heart Lies Between "The Fleet" and "All the s.h.i.+ps".

FROM The Georgia Review.

For the past several years, my friends have known it as "my translating job that I love." When asked for specifics, I start by saying I'm employed as a translator for a Dutch publis.h.i.+ng house, preparing an English version of an Ancient GreekItalian dictionary. At this point, the person's eyes may glaze over ("She said Ancient Greek!"). Or I see the wheels start to spin-Dutch . . . English . . . Ancient Greek . . . Italian . . . translating-a dictionary? Or Dictionaries usually involve one, or at most two, languages. Not three. Or Ancient Greek is a dead language-why does it need a new dictionary?

How can I explain the allure of rapid pa.s.sage from one word to the next-one world to the next-as I work word by word through an ama.s.sed list so long I can perceive no horizon? Sometimes, whole dictionary pages, 7-by-10-inch, two columns per side, fine print, are filled with compounds based on a single concept or word: recently wealthy (nouveau riche); fresh from war; of recent appearance; freshly killed (twice, from two different words for "kill"); recently grown; freshly poured. Then I encounter, perhaps, a couple words having to do with even numbers, whose base is a sound-alike of the word for "recent"-and next maybe on into the "bread" words, another sound-alike: To give bread, giver of bread, bread seller, bread basket, piece of bread, bakery, to be a baker, pertaining to a baker, baker . . .

Conversely, sometimes each successive entry is a leap of worlds. A word for a poisonous plant will be followed by a verb that, in its different manifestations, can mean to raise or to rise, and can also refer to the sun, a sail, or growth into adulthood. Every time I save one such entry and move along to the next, I enter a new sphere of thought and sound.

To gather and explicate all the words of a dead language is to build on the work of others. I can't go to the newspapers or listen to how things are said on the radio, can't a.s.say a sample of Internet verbiage or pull words out of current bestsellers. A comprehensive alpha-through-omega requires a grand scavenger hunt through the best literary sources-Homer, Plato, the New Testament, the historians and dramatists and orators of centuries past-as well as the ma.s.s of texts engraved on stone or written on papyrus, to say nothing of official and private doc.u.ments, letters, graffiti, tombstones.

Greek words carved on rocks, penned on papyrus carbonized by volcanic eruption, or wrapped around a mummy are still unearthed every year. Once the words are gathered-and literally cleaned up by archaeologists and others-they must be presented in snippets of sentences showing off their most flattering profiles if they are to make useful dictionary entries. The size of the lexicon is immense, what with all the objects and concepts that need words and descriptors, along with the great propensity of Greek to bud adjectives off nouns and verbs, to derive nouns and verbs out of adjectives, to form adverbs out of past tenses of verbs, to borrow words from other languages, and to make up new ones completely. Alpha alone-the letter with the greatest number of entries by far-comprises 406 pages in three columns of tiny print, with up to fifty entries per page depending on the length of the individual entries.

Here is another dimension of my wonder: as I move from one entry to the next, I am not only s.h.i.+fting sound and thought gears, I'm skipping across centuries and social strata. For example, I may encounter a series of words with essentially the same meaning, but that were each spoken in a different epoch, when one or another suffix was mostly used. One comes from the most highbrow style of cla.s.sical Athens; another is a colloquial form found only in texts from Egypt; another is not attested later than the Iliad, and yet another not earlier than Saint Luke.

Four-hundred-plus pages of alpha sounds like a fat wad of print, and it is . . . and there are twenty-two other letters to traverse. But I'm not working on a paper page. These myriads of words are filed in a database I access over the Internet, sitting thousands of miles away from where the language was spoken at a time when the fastest computer was the human brain with an abacus. Five other translators are also at work (over the duration of the project there were a total of ten), none of whom I've met, and all of whom are located in different states or countries. We are totally dependent on electronic hardware and optic fibers, web browsers, online databases, and specialized software. The voluminous physical book with its light-gauge pages is our anchor, the bridge between the high-tech practicalities of our work and this language that so far precedes high technology-although, in an ironic twist I enjoy, it was to supply so much of the high-tech lexicon.

Paper page . . . web page . . . The Greek words I'm dealing with were written on scrolls of goatskin that were rolled up rather than turned, or they were scrawled on sc.r.a.ps of pottery, or carved on a wall or pillar, or brushed onto papyrus with a reed pen. Of course, many other words of Ancient Greek were never written down; instead, they were spoken in some remote area where writing was unknown, and they disappeared when no one used them anymore. As I do my small part to preserve these survivors, this "dead language," in a novel nonphysical context, I wonder about those disembodied words echoing in some word-Neverland. That I am working with Italian as well as English pushes the echoiness of words closer to the front of my mind. What I'm doing, essentially, is overwriting the Italian translations of Professor Franco Montanari's dictionary. The Italian gives me a template and a structure for a given lemma (dictionary entry), but I'm expected to rely on my expertise in Greek at least as much, especially when it comes to translating the snippets of example pa.s.sages. I'm more apt to notice metaphorical resonances in languages other than my native one-even in other dialects of English-whereas in my native idiom I take such connections for granted, unreflectingly. For instance, the jump from paper page to web page is easy, but what about screen? I never think about computer screens as having a metaphorical relations.h.i.+p to anything else, but when I go into Italian I'm acutely conscious that schermo is also a curtain, a veil, even a s.h.i.+eld. The Modern Greek word for (computer) screen is-with allowance for change in p.r.o.nunciation-exactly the word for the veil that in the language of Homeric epic would shroud a modest young woman-and suddenly, working with these three languages, I am aware of the delicate balance of hiding and self-revelation I'm granted by the (screen of) computer and Internet-of the connection, even, between revelation and veil in my own language.

The most comprehensive Ancient GreekEnglish dictionary was last updated in 1996 and reflects the state of knowledge of Ancient Greek in 1940. Montanari's Ancient GreekItalian dictionary was first published in 1995, and expanded and updated in 2004. The third edition came out in 2013, while we were in the later stages of our translation based on the second edition. In other words, this Ancient GreekItalian dictionary is far more up-to-date than the most complete existing Ancient GreekEnglish dictionary, and with electronic technology, it's easier to keep current (revise an entry, or add a new one to the database)-which slows its obsolescence, or even perhaps renders the obsolescence obsolete. The end result of this project will be a unidirectional dictionary translating all known words of Ancient Greek into English, but the whispers of Italian are in the very bones of our creation.

The beneficiaries of the project are few. Such a comprehensive dictionary would overwhelm a beginner, and whatever the number of beginning students of Ancient Greek-a small crowd no doubt-only a small percentage will become the sorts of experts who would use such an exhaustive volume. But for those few pract.i.tioners it will crucially include even obscure and elusive words, thereby validating such words' existence, and it will give comprehensive histories of the usages of more common words. This new dictionary will verify an unexpected meaning for a supposedly familiar word, and it will show how the meaning of a word has changed over the 1,500-year period of Greek the dictionary covers.

Covering this span of the language's life would be like creating a dictionary for English spanning back to before the Normans arrived in the British Isles and began creating the zesty amalgam of Germanic and Romance that makes the vocabulary of English so expressive and easily added to. There are old, pre-Greek words in Ancient Greek too, marked by their peculiar forms, like erebinthos, a chickpea, which shares the -inthos ending with place-names like Corinth, showing the great age of that settlement, showing how ancient is the cultivation of chickpeas-of which, in reality, no variety exists in the wild.

I'm aware of how oddly my excitement about words of arcane provenance and about the metaphorical nether parts of our own words might come across in casual conversation with a friend in the grocery line, but-for me at least, and I can't be that rare-these are valuable areas of research. To canva.s.s and explicate the full instrument of a language is to make it alive despite its no longer being spoken, is to capture the vigor of the words and the kind of people who used them: beautiful words; words for objects we have never seen; names for tools we dig up and try to identify; names of aphrodisiac plants gone extinct; words for concepts and metaphors we have never thought of, and some that we also use, coincidentally, in unconscious imitation. For example, the Greeks too used grains of sand on the beach as proverbial for innumerable mult.i.tudes, but we probably created the same metaphor independently of them. I can easily say why I am doing this work.

At the big-picture level, I marvel at the juxtapositions the project presents to me: I work thousands of miles from where the language was spoken between 3,000 and 1,500 years ago; in order to have the required comprehensive list of words, I'm going via Italian into English; alphabetical order is essential and yet arbitrary. At the nearer level, I'm excited-my appet.i.te is stimulated-by the choice snippets of cla.s.sical literature presenting the context of a given word. I remember a cited play or poem, and in a little room in the back of my head I relive some of its story. I strive to provide the most elegant translation of a disembodied snippet, approving or censuring the Italian translation as I match efforts with it and aim to surpa.s.s its example. At the microscopic level, every word of Ancient Greek-how it sounds (or how it might have sounded, since of course we don't know for sure), and how its set of meanings overlaps or fails to overlap with English and Italian-creates for me an understanding of other ways to approach the world, and thus re-creates my own worldview over and over. As unreal as the physical symbols of words behind the veil of my computer screen may seem, as unreal as may seem words we don't know how to p.r.o.nounce and that refer to unknown objects, I feel these words and symbols connecting me to a fierce, distant reality of which I would otherwise have no conception.

In truth, I'm addicted to the work. Every time I promise myself I'll take a break when I've finished ten more entries, or turn my attention to one of my other jobs, or go stretch my body, I take on ten more. I mark my time against a constantly unrolling arc of words, and the arc is coruscated with tangents and arbitrary transitions, just like my own experience of time and behavior. But the arc is solidified and anch.o.r.ed in the rote movements of my fingers and eyes. Stepping back from my own compulsion, I watch in fascination as I become a grand funnel into which Greek and Italian are poured, and out of which comes English. I like to say I'm a trivium-a three-way crossroads. Instead of two roads intersecting, touching one another and then diverging again like the letter X, the two roads of Greek and Italian intersect, touch one another, and become a single, new road-English out of Italian and Ancient Greek-like the letter Y. This letter exemplifies the process of creating the product, the English version, which exists in real time. I trace it over and over, enact it for each word-different product, same process-with every entry I translate.

The scale of this dictionary is so grand that when I'm in there working lemma by lemma (literally, leaving, from the Greek; the technical term for "dictionary entry"), it's like being on the ground of the "flat" earth. I can't see the curving arc. But my snail-like, step-by-step momentum charts the route of my own life. When I enter the private room of each entry in the database, for a moment I have the word and its lemma to myself. Eventually I will leave the room by hitting SAVE. Or else it's a much briefer visit-the entry merely redirects the reader to another entry, and the abbreviation "v." is automatically translated to "see"-and I exit via the BACK b.u.t.ton. These series of finger-clicks that get me in or out, this rhythm, the way whole sequences of words are sometimes so similar-all could contribute to monotony or rote behavior, to one word blurring into the next. But what happens in the middle is what matters. There are moments of anarchy when I type a nonsensical joke-definition containing a bad pun or doggerelesque alliteration, or when my fingers are misaligned by one key and for comes out as got or order as iesewe or one as ibe. Scary moments in the privacy of the lemma's room. I correct the mischief quickly and move on. No one will ever know-but haven't we all, at one time or another, wanted to be in charge of what words get to mean or say?

During this series of middles, of visits, life continues outside. I might be about to leave for an appointment, or the library whose Wi-Fi I'm using might be about to close. My bladder's demands might finally be unignorable; I'm drumming my knees. Someone might call on the phone, or come up and start talking to me. I might continue to translate while giving them some of my attention. Sometimes I catch myself making strange monsters like desiderable when overwriting Italian with English.

At home, I can't see the output of my oil heater unless the sun is. .h.i.tting a shadowless spot on the hardwood floor, yet the heat spreads to my body nonetheless; just so, something in the essence of each lemma, and in the process of looking at it and changing it, kindles my body. Just as I seek and revel in heat, I crave and go after this connection with words. I have marked hours of sleepless nights in mania, grappling with my teeming self from one word to the next. I have stretched out hours of fasting, one word to the next, avoiding food for yet more drip-drip moments of sustenance I find in language, even though these are uneven.

Sometimes the satisfaction is just a matter of transcribing someone's name and noting that it is a name. Sometimes a name is an ambivalent descriptor, hinting at word-stories: strongman Ajax, constantly referred to as "son of Telamon"-why was his father called Telamon, i.e., baldric, strong belt? Common nouns smuggle in stories as well. The Ancient Greek word halcyon means "kingfisher"-in English too that's what halcyon still means, underneath it all-but in Italian alcione means "seagull." Look more closely, and the Greek hal- is "salt (sea)" and kyon is "the one who incubates." Kingfishers were thought to hatch their young at sea; perhaps the Italians thought seagulls did so too.

Sometimes a highly complex word, or a preposition with multiple meanings, takes up a whole three-column dictionary page, or even more; its "private room" on my screen requires scrolling and scrolling no matter how big my monitor and is rich with ill.u.s.trative quotations from hundreds of years' worth of evolution of the word that showcase its action. I'm a thrill-seeker for these voyages of definition but feel warmed even by the less interesting or less expansive tasks such as one-to-one explications of word and object: "pole," "an unknown plant," "a type of meter," "to sell," "wra.s.se" (a type of fish). Yes, these short entries teach me about the world too.

The editor in chief for the project metes out access to the database a few hundred entries at a time. I don't always realize I've run out until it is the middle of the night in the Netherlands, or, worse, Friday night. When I need to wait for him to send more, the rest of my day is blankly empty-although there's always plenty else I should be doing. I can't imagine what my life will be like without this series of words and their demands-their juxtapositions with one another like jostling elbows, reinforcing, undermining-their stories, their vistas, continually unfolding before me. The pa.s.sage from one word to another has served as a lifeline at times when my experience outside of the dictionary was a battle: the next word always draws me on. Diving in is what I do when I receive more entries, but perhaps even more accurately, a new cache causes language and story to dive into me.

A good dictionary entry will disambiguate a word with examples in context, and it will indicate the ways the word's set of meanings does and does not correspond to the meanings of similar words in the target language. Pen means something very different in a school than it does on a farm. Diverting a stream is an activity different from diverting someone's attention, although their similarity might give you the insight that attention is like a stream. And what is a sake, a dint, or rather? Except in the very simplest word-object or word-action correspondences, a good dictionary doesn't simply line up two columns of words, one for each language shaking hands across a table, representing a common intent, because that's not how language works. Not every language will use the same word for diverting both streams and attention. English-speakers keep prana, chi, karma-or amok, kamikaze, and the like-because English lacks native words for those concepts, requiring a phrase instead, and so we borrow the Eastern words as a shortcut.

As I make crosses of Ancient Greek and English, ostensibly I'm overwriting and translating from the Italian, which disappears in this process. But like all the translators on this project, I'm a cla.s.sical scholar, not an Italianist, and I think this is as it should be. When I read poetry translated by a poet who relies on the translations of others and is unacquainted with the original language, I always miss a certain depth and rootedness, no matter how good this new version is as poetry (and as much as I love, for instance, Coleman Barks's renditions of Rumi). The same intimacy with the original should go for dictionary entries, where the task must be to choose the best word of English to correspond with the Greek, no matter what Italian word has been supplied-that is, to translate the phrases quoted to ill.u.s.trate the use of the word in full representation of the Greek. An Italianist might not be able to look at the abbreviated author's name attached to a quoted phrase and immediately know whether the snippet came from comedy or tragedy or history, philosophy or epic, Stoic or Christian texts, and thereby adjust the tone of the translation accordingly. She or he probably wouldn't know that s.h.i.+elds at the time of the Homeric poems were made of layers of beaten leather, or that the dative case can sometimes express agency, would have no basis for visualizing the complex mechanisms of Greek door bolts or grasping the many nuances of the infinitive and how it can be put into English. To create a translation that brings words vividly to life for the dictionary user, I have to know both how the words exist within the Greek (partic.i.p.ating in its grammar) and what sort of world the words describe (how they interact with its objects).

Yet the Italian is also essential. For each lemma, the stage directions are in Italian-pa.s.sive voice; in a positive sense; and; or; philosophical; never found in prose; frequently metaphorical-the kinds of information that clarify the many different uses and sorts of words. And of course there are many words of Ancient Greek that I do not know, that I must learn from the Italian lexicographer. As large as my working vocabulary of English itself may be-and I do need a huge vocabulary in English for my intent to translate the Greek in a manner simultaneously faithful to its letter and spirit and producing idiomatic and beautiful English-I probably do not know half the words in the Oxford English Dictionary and, proportionately, even fewer Greek words. I rely on the original, Italian work for identification of plants, unusual animals, pieces of equipment, obscure characters, and a plethora beyond my imagination of concepts, epithets, and ways to do things to people.

I'd never heard nor thought of a whip for torture made with flails of small knucklebones, or the sorts of human interactions that would make use of such. A special sc.r.a.ping tool called a strigil was used to cleanse the oiled body, in lieu of bathing, and I imagine how hard it would have been to take showers with so much less available water, how to organize a city of coexisting bodies with no plumbing. An adjective that means "lacking in extension," i.e., tiny, can also mean "immeasurable" or "infinite." An adjective that can really refer only to days and other measures of time means "favorable to conception of boys." Words for plants are often also words for birds: I think of the gaudy orange-and-blue bird of paradise flowers, and of b.u.t.terflies and bees, and recognize my own multiple a.s.sociations of flying creatures and flowers. The bird of paradise struggles to raise its orange wing-petals in a damp London yard; carrion b.u.t.terflies bloom on rotting fruit in Thailand; a s.h.i.+mmering blue bird settles on a cl.u.s.ter of yellow umbelliferous flowers on a parched hillside in Athens one cicada-s.h.i.+mmering afternoon.

The stylized, larger-than-life sculpture of the ancient Greeks and their scantly surviving portraiture give us no kind of photographic impression of anyone's face in which to descry a likeness to one of our grandparents or colleagues. Doc.u.mentaries and movies based on cla.s.sical literature or myth deal in stereotypes-bearded men with long hair, women in flowing robes, keening music in the background-mysterious a cappella women's voices, a lute plucked in minor modes. These representations-the ancient Greeks' own and our culture's-enforce a sense of remoteness between us-now and them-then. They convey beauty and loss, beyond our ken both; they convey the notion that the characters in the myths, even the histories, are themselves conscious of their ancientry and the transience of their own world and culture.

The language too is so distant-even from Modern Greek. We don't know for sure how the sounds were p.r.o.nounced, but we do know, based on study of Greek metrics, on comparison with related languages, and on the testimony of scholars such as Dionysius of Halicarna.s.sus, that until 200 BCE or even later, the accentual system was based on pitch, not stress-more like Thai or Vietnamese than the familiar European languages, or than Greek itself from that time on. (By the time the Alexandrians introduced written diacritics to indicate pitch changes, in the second century BCE, the requisite distinctions of vowel length were collapsing and the stress accent taking over.) But that flowerlike bird, those birdlike flowers-these connect me to people who interacted with the world in the same ways that I do. The delicious word isthmus refers to a neck of land, and the Greeks knew the same somatic metaphor; an isthmus could be a human neck too. These were people who inhabited a world I recognize. I begin to see and hear myself in the bits and pieces of their lives that surface through the words they used. Their storied Echo and Narcissus offer two different kinds of reflection-sound reflecting sound as it hits a solid object, image reflecting image. Narcissus became a flower; Echo haunts rocky places like an unseen bird.

As a writer, I find my energy frequently turns outward from the poem or essay I'm composing to imagining how what I'm saying may transfer to readers-whether it conveys something of import, whether it will move spirits. This impulse is certainly present too as I take care of the translation of each dictionary entry, sometimes adjusting two or three times before submitting it. I consider carefully whether the context in which a word had been uttered (if said context is available) would better merit a translation of "laudable" or of "worth praising." I hope I will have enabled a reader of Ancient Greek to puzzle out the sentence she or he is stuck on because I translated a word "divert" and not "deviate," as it also could have been. Is it better to say "the cavalry" or "all the hors.e.m.e.n" in a given context? Or in another, "one who has absolute power" or "plenipotentiary"?

Words are the world; my here and now is words. I am unable to cry when someone dies until I'm hit by the memory of how he p.r.o.nounced used, or how she said criminy when she spilled her tea. When my mother reads a recipe aloud sotto voce, it doesn't conjure the finished food item-I'm only struck again by her p.r.o.nunciation of crush as crash and of batter as b.u.t.ter, her still not distinguis.h.i.+ng a and u after all these years speaking English-and her being bemused by the oddness of the word treacle.

Life is words. It is Herac.l.i.tus's pun on bios as life versus the bios that, differently accented, means the death-dealing blow. It is that life is an anagram of file, which can be a spice mix, an abrasive tool, a row of people or objects, or a place where words can be collocated on a computer or in a paper folder. Car is a yellow Matchbox toy with flappy doors, but automobile brings to mind insurance companies and roadside a.s.sistance, backup. I feel emotion stir when I'm choosing whether to say word list or lexicon, catalogue or litany. My heart is in the choice between the fleet and all the s.h.i.+ps.

When I say that last, I'm thinking of Sappho's sixteenth fragment. The poem opens "Some say an army of horse and some say infantry/and some a fleet of s.h.i.+ps is the most beautiful thing/on the black earth, but I say it is/whatever each one loves." An army of s.h.i.+ps, a collectivity of s.h.i.+ps, a fleet. In Sappho, the "army of s.h.i.+ps" is one of three different kinds of army, neatly collocated with cavalry and infantry. If I say "fleet," I tend to think of something military, with that punny flavor of swiftness special to English. If I say "all the s.h.i.+ps," I see sails in different shapes, s.h.i.+ps with high-polished wood and boats with flaking paint; I review in my mind all the names for floating vessels in Greek and English, and I savor their sounds and images. These lip-smacks of words, their savors, the s.n.a.t.c.hes of poetry they evoke-they feed my heart as well as my brain.

As I work, embodied, in time, I am never conscious of the dictionary as a whole, as a book, as an ent.i.ty out in the world. I work on it in fragments, I translate cutouts and pieces. I might translate hundreds of words in a day and barely cover a half-dozen pages of the tome. No one will read this dictionary. People will consult it, looking up separate entries in separate places, based on the logic of the sentence they are trying to puzzle out. That logic is every bit as logical (or illogical) as the alphabetic sequence that is the filing system of all these words. The arc of alpha through omega vanishes in the use of the thing. The initial letter of the word that enrolls in its proper place on the grand arc is arbitrary, and so is its meaning, without good explication. People will read what they can find about a word fragmented from the other words that give it life, or brought to life in a fragment of poetry out of its own context. Who was demanding a ransom, and did they receive it? Why is a clepsydra, the ancient hourgla.s.s, etymologically a "thief of water"?

In a good afternoon I do the equivalent of four print-dictionary pages and come out as exhausted as the priestess of Delphi after her prophetic trance. I worked on alpha for months. I should point out, though, that before getting into alpha I had already translated pi (which is almost as long), and theta, zeta, and iota, and after I finished alpha I mopped up mu. My translating these letters out of alphabetical order didn't matter a whit-an eloquent demonstration of the arbitrariness of the arc to which I'm anch.o.r.ed.

Some words change meaning significantly over time; some words mean different things in different places. (In British English, an eraser is called a "rubber," and British visitors to the U.S. learn to their embarra.s.sment that's not what the word means here. Or, if you're an American-English-speaker, try saying "f.a.n.n.y pack" over in the U.K., and expect embarra.s.sed sn.i.g.g.e.rs or derisive snorts of laughter.) Many Greek words have multiple meanings, so that across the contexts of s.p.a.ce, time, and speakers a word can have a spectrum of senses that includes opposites. I always pause with these opposites-they seem to want to teach me something: that blessings and curses share the same bed, can come from the same mouth with the same word; that the boundaries of learn and teach are fuzzy, as are those of borrow and lend.

An array of different font styles and background colors differentiates the aforementioned stage directions, just as you'd expect in a reference dictionary. On the computer, these different colors and formats are built on xml code, a fact I can repeat but, not being a tech-head, can tell very little more about. On the other hand, I can now fix code using xml tags. In the little editing panel that is my theater of activities, it's easy to ride roughshod over underlying code and squish it. Hitting UNDO usually leaves you worse off than before you made the mistake. Furthermore, English and Italian do not order words in the same way, and sometimes a piece of the Italian I'm overwriting is superfluous, or (more often) I need to add something to the English version. I want to make the most elegant possible English translation of the Greek word with no vestige of Italian idiom; if I don't want to contort my English, I must manipulate code.

When I was a graduate student at Stanford, soph.o.m.ores referred to my ilk as "fuzzies"-I'm a computer user in the same way that I'm a car user. I can lift up the hood but know little more than how to check and replace fluids. But now that I've learned to "vie