Et, O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

I’ve had that line stuck in my head all day, something about the voices of children singing in a dome. Had to look it up, because I don’t know French— just the dregs of Spanish (Texican, really) that stayed in the sieve of my mind after that AP test. The one meek protest I can still trot out thanks to all those readings, Neruda and Marquez— “Ya no hablo español despues del examen de AP”. If I’d had to guess, I would’ve figured “couple” for coupole, “dance” for dans, forgetting that extra “e” that goes with macabre, russe. False friends, Blind Idiot Translation. For Matthew 26:41: the vodka is good but the meat is rotten.

Today I helped my mom find a Russian-to-Chinese translator, to riddle out some Cyrillic sig left on her coworker’s email. She went to high school in Jiamusi, just a pinkie’s span from the Russian border on this map I just googled; she fell into Russian classes the way this Texan fell into Spanish. But she’s forgotten by now the words for “goodnight”, forgot even the phonemes link to the script, couldn’t sound it out.

Spanish at least uses the Latin alphabet. But if math is a language like any other (its poetry I never learned to parse, O boorish bathos of a silly “humanist”, trying to romanticize things she’ll never understand!) then I’ve lost it the way my mom lost Russian. Even the signs grown foreign, can hardly sound them out. Never mind what all those symbols mean.

I keep Chinese I think because it’s a matter of blood, a matter of pride. (Self-styled rational obsessed with honor, because it comes in a double dose, I’m Southern and Chinese. And neither a belle nor a junzi will bow for the wrong reasons— I like this story, pretty if untrue.) If I close my eyes to it for just a little while, a week a year or three, it’s scary how quickly I start to forget.

Just think of this as a prose poem, a license for pretentiousness. Pretension? Whatever. And I forgot the most important part: two days till departure.