Wednesday, October 7, 2020

A unique and powerful memoir

Childhood is a foreign country in which we've all lived but few of us can evoke the landscape and the events we lived through the way Jennifer Croft does in Homesick.

Homesick is an exquisite little book, filled with color photographs, mostly snapshots, that Croft and her mother have taken over the years. A headnote at the book's beginning quotes Henri Cartier-Bresson: "We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth that can make them come back again." 

Which, when I think about it—an attempt to retain things continually vanishing—is what a memoir does.

Homesick is identified as "a memoir," but is written in the third person about Amy and her younger sister Zoe. The (unnumbered) first chapter is headed: "Their mom gets them ready for all the possible disasters that might ever occur." 

The text begins: "So she reads aloud the headlines from the Tulsa World at breakfast while Amy and Zoe eat their Cheerios. The girls stay quiet while their mother talks, but they don't really listen. All they know is that there is always a disaster happening somewhere."

I picked up the book because Croft won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Olga Tokarczuk's Flights and the little bit the flap copy told me about Croft I found fascinating. 

She grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she entered the University of Tulsa at age 15. After completing her BA at the University of Tulsa in 2001, she learned Polish at the University of Iowa, where she did her MFA in literary translation. She lived in Poland for two years on a Fulbright scholarship. She said in an interview, "Polish has always been more of an academic and professional connection for me, but I try to go back to Kraków or Warsaw at least once a year to maintain that connection." She learned Spanish in Buenos Aires. She also translates from Ukrainian, which, on the basis of Homesick, she learned from a tutor who homeschooled Croft and her sister (i.e., Amy and Zoe) in Tulsa.

I assume that Homesick, although told in the third person from Amy's point of view, is a memoir. As far as I can tell, the events occurred in Jennifer's life: Amy, like Jennifer, entered UofT at age 15; Amy, like Jennifer, won "the world's largest translation prize in London" on June 1, 2018. Which makes me believe that Jennifer as a child also went to Camp Waluhili (a real camp for Camp Fire Girls), that her sister did have a brain tumor, and that Jennifer flirted with alcohol dependency once she could drink.

Another notable factoid: Homesick's flap copy says that it was originally written in Spanish, putting the story at one more remove from Croft, who, somewhere, says she translated it herself.

All the above, of course, says very little about the book, which in short chapters—some only a paragraph or so—evokes the sisters' childhood in Oklahoma; their Russian tutor with whom both girls fall in love and who, inexplicably, kills himself (although, at some level, suicide is always inexplicable); Zoe's brain tumor from which she never recovers entirely; their mother's fear of disaster; Amy's love of language and much more.

Translation allows her to connect to the world. “Each time a Russian word meets an English word it generates a spark,” she writes. “And translation offers Amy a new kind of math, an alternative to the math of sacrifice that has ruled her life on her own until today. She can’t cancel out another person’s suffering or death with hers. What she can do is connect.”

And think about language. She told Words Without Borders, "On a basic linguistic level, Spanish is closer to English than Polish is, which makes the challenge of translation different, but not easier. For grammatical and lexical reasons, it’s obvious to me as I translate a Polish sentence that the whole must be broken down and rebuilt from scratch—but sometimes a sentence in Spanish that seemingly invites a closer parallel in English in fact requires a full dismantling, as well, and often apparent cognates do denote or at least connote something slightly other than what they might first suggest." Words to live by.

Check out this remarkable memoir by an extraordinary woman and writer.

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