Translating Time and Space

An American academic gave a lecture recently in Tbilisi.  I was not impressed with it, but I was impressed with certain things he said.  He’s been studying Georgian since 1977, and when he started, he was told that he was the 29^th American to study Georgian.  Obviously that number has increased since then, but the fact that at that time they knew all the Americans who had studied the language shows how remote Georgia was.  Now all it takes is a valid passport and two plane rides.

However, the longer I live here, the more I realize separates America from Georgia.  I am loving my language lessons but the language is a huge challenge.  Since the study of Georgian by foreigners, especially Americans, is fairly limited, the materials available are also somewhat limited.  Having studied a handful of languages, the difference in approach and material is noticeable.  About halfway through my first book, one of the vocabulary words is ‘hungover’.  I’m pretty sure they never teach that in American high school language classrooms, and I don’t even think I ever had it in a Russian class even in college.  However, when you’re talking about a language spoken by people who have been making wine for centuries, if not millennia, hangovers are a part of life, especially for the male population.  A few chapters later, an entire chapter was dedicated to words regarding the Georgian supra.  ‘Supra’ actually means tablecloth, but the meaning is extended to mean a certain type of feast/party where there will be lots of great Georgian food, lots of alcohol, and lots of toasts.  It is the way Georgians celebrate almost everything.  Sitting in an American classroom, I’m sure I would think learning the word for ‘toast’ was too long and difficult to remember, especially because in America it isn’t very useful.  However, learning the lesson in Georgia means that no matter the fact that the word is long and difficult, it’s also very necessary, so I must learn it.  I also must learn a few basic toasts to go along with it.  A few chapters later, I’m learning about corruption and punishment.  I’m pretty sure I don’t even know how to say ‘to punish’ in Russian, but in Georgia, with its recent history, this seemed important enough to teach to beginners.

There are a few other sentences that have stuck out in my mind.  In my exercise book, a few of them are:

At my place, my mother is always cleaning dishes.

You should learn the road signs, but if you don’t, you can still drive.

These two sentences are pretty indicative of Georgian life.  Women are either cooking or cleaning up dishes about 75% of the time, or so it seems.  Georgians are terrible drivers, as evidenced by the statement above, which typifies Georgian sentiment about driving.  They’re sentences that only make sense and don’t seem terribly incorrect when you understand Georgian culture. 

In a story I’m reading, the street cleaners are grumbling about the weather.  However, the word for street cleaner really is yard cleaner, but the idea doesn’t translate.  An American yard is green grass and a few flower beds attached to a private single-family house. In Georgia, in the country, it’s a fenced-in area around a house where you spend a lot of time, where you might have a sink, undoubtedly have trees that will help feed you in summer and spring, and probably has no grass at all.  You might even have chickens or bees or some other animal in your yard.  In the city, the yard is a public space.  There might be a playground, there will be cars, and there might be not much more than cracked sidewalk/road.  The distinction between road and sidewalk is often blurred to the point of irrelevancy.  In summer, you might play in the yard, especially if you’re a child, in which case you mingle with neighbor children.  Young men sit and drink beer in the yard.  Your neighbors watch what goes on in the yard from their balconies.

My host family's yard in the village, with my little host bro for authenticity.  The thing that kind of resembles grass is because they haven't had as much time to care for the yard since the host dad died.  All these trees bear wonderful fruit.

 Even in American cities where high-rise buildings shoulder one another, the community aspect of apartment buildings in Georgia does not exist.  Perhaps it is because in Georgia you need at least one, if not two balconies in your apartment.  You need these for the breeze on summer nights, for a place to hang your drying laundry, for storing jars of preserves and other goodies for winter.  However, since everyone has one, and few people have air conditioners, in the summer, people are on the balcony and have their windows open.  Your neighbor’s smoke wafts into your apartment.  You can see into the half-finished apartment across the yard.  The young people blasting music until 3am keeps you up.  The ubiquitous see-through curtains don’t allow for much privacy.

A bad shot of part of the apartment 'yard' during the day

However, I’m not sure people would complain about the lack of privacy.  I think communism forced community upon people, but I think it’s been part of Georgian culture even longer.  Part of it is the village mentality.  Your family members are incredibly important and your neighbors become like family.  You know each other’s business.  Even in the city, this is not completely lost.

The other night, my host sister and I were sitting watching a Turkish soap opera my host mother got us hooked on, when the yelling from the yard grew to an unusually loud volume.  We, of course, went onto the balcony to see what all the yelling was about.  Two older women were in the middle of a yelling match, with several young people and others gathered around.  My host sister translated the gist of the conversation to me.  Apparently some of the young men had been smoking pot in the yard and one of them had reacted poorly to it.  One of the yelling women had been forced to help the young man since no one was calling the police or taking him to a hospital.  Cops showed up soon after, which is when several younger members of the crowd conveniently left.

Another bad shot, since the yard was empty for once when I actually had my camera ready.

This struck me as interesting because of how involved people were in each other’s business.  We, and several other neighbors, watched the fray from our balconies.  The women yelling may not even have known the young men involved.  Yet, they are all part of a community that feels responsible and somewhat entitled to be in each other’s lives.  They have no problem airing their dirty laundry and grievances in front of anyone else who is around.  The very environment encouraged this, with the way the buildings are constructed.  Between the balconies and public yards, people live in each other’s way.  I’m sure the lack of air conditioning has a lot to do with it, and perhaps America used to be more like this.  But, the America I grew up in was fairly private, and spacious air-conditioned homes certainly encourage that far more than apartments that give far less private space.

In undergrad, I took a class on architecture and learned about Jane Jacobs, who tried to promote the regrowth of cities and neighborhoods.  One of her mottos was about having ‘eyes on the street’.  She wanted apartments and stores to mix, so that day and night, someone was around to keep watch.  While Georgians generally have their apartments in large, separate Soviet monoliths, I still think they would make this woman proud.  Little shops are everywhere, although I’m not sure how that is sustainable.  Even at midnight, people are sitting at vegetable stands, keeping watch on the street.  Neighbors are watching anything unusual that goes on in their yard.  There is safety in this.  There might not be much privacy, but there is safety.

I’m pretty sure this way of life could never translate to modern America.  Even explaining it without living it is difficult.  Even pictures can tell only half the story.  That is what I’m learning and what I love discovering-culture isn’t easily translated.  Sometimes phrases have word-for-word translations.  Those are little surprises.  Instead, it’s interesting to find how different cultures use different words to explain similar concepts.  It’s even more interesting to learn the words for concepts you don’t have.  Like the street cleaner.  In America, street cleaners are probably men in a machine that go around after bad weather.  In Georgia, they are old men and women with small brooms and ancient dust pails sweeping up trash and dust from public spaces, rarely the street.  In the story I’m reading, I get a glimpse into Soviet life.  My teacher laughed when I asked for clarification whether the ‘taloni’ for butter was for free butter or just permission to buy it.  It was essentially a ration card, as butter was always rationed in the Soviet Union.  I should have remembered this, but the laughter that my question engendered was totally worth it.  In the story, the shopkeeper also counts on an abacus.  I had to rack my brain to remember the English word.  I don’t know when we stopped using them in America, but I’m pretty sure it was before my parents and maybe even my grandparents’ time.  I’ve seen a Georgian shopkeeper use one before.  The same story has a girl about ten doing the grocery shopping, an alien concept to modern America, where ten-year olds are probably not allowed on the street even to play, for fear of being kidnapped.

It’s things like this that remind me why I love traveling and learning new languages.  In this way, I get to unlock new cultures, I get to understand things that must be seen and tasted and experienced to understand them, concepts that cannot be packaged and explained sufficiently in a textbook or an English-language video clip.  The Turkish soap opera that has sucked my family in sucks us in because it is weaving a saga where East meets West, a theme that resonates with the Georgians and that I have begun to appreciate only after living here.  The Caucasus are the geographical dividing line between Europe and Asia, but that divide is so much more interesting as I watch in played out in the culture- the striking difference between old and new, the mixture of Asian and European values, and the influences of Islam, Orthodoxy, and Western thought on life here.