the cassandra pages

Montreal, and Why I Love It

(Be patient and watch to the end!)

This video was taken last night as I was walking to the bus on my way to a concert by the OSM (Montreal Symphony Orchestra). All the seats were pretty much full; most Montrealers just deal with the weather and do what they were planning to do anyway. At the end there was a standing ovation, and the conductor, Kent Nagano, who is relatively new to the city and already beloved, addressed the audience. "This is a special day for me," he said, "because I have never seen so much snow in my life!" He went on to say that it made him feel like Christmas, and offered a beautiful encore -- Beethoven's Egmont Overture - to the audience as a gift.

I'll probably go to a couple other concerts during the season; my ticket, in the balcony, cost $22.50 which is enough that I/we don't go often but feel we can if there's something we really want to see. Access to cultural events is, obviously, one of the things I most love about being here. Last night's concert included a pre-performance discussion; Arnold Schoenberg's Symphonie de chambre no. 1; Mozart's third violin concerto played by guest soloist Hilary Hahn (the main reason I went); and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Nagano is programming all of Beethoven's symphonies during his first two years here, and even though it's so well known and I've heard recordings so many times, this was a really excellent, exciting performance; I don't think I've ever heard it performed live before.

When I arrived, I found my seat next to a man who was alone, and reading L'Art du Bonheur, by the Dalai Lama. I didn't interrupt him but took out my own book and read until the concert began. After the Schoenberg it was clear that there would be a wait until the rest of the orchestra took their places, so I decided to try striking up a conversation and maybe get some French practice. "Que pensez-vous?" I asked. He smiled, and we began talking about modern music, how much concentration it took to listen to it, and about our own musical backgrounds. After Hilary Hahn had played and the intermission began, we continued talking about the Dalai Lama, Montreal as a city, and eventually about where I had come from. All this in French; I was pleased and a little curious because he didn't switch into English; I was getting a good workout in both speaking and listening.

"Oh," he said, finally, still in French, "you speak French well, did you learn back in Vermont?" I rolled my eyes, since I know that's not even close to true, and that I had been blundering along all evening, making plenty of mistakes. I told him I had studied the language in school but that had been a very long time ago; I was trying to improve and slowly it was getting better. "Vraiment," he said, "vous parlez très bien; je le sais, je suis professeur du francais à McGill!" At which point I wanted to fall down through the balcon, mezzanine, corbeil, and parterre into the underground! Instead I laughed, and from then on we spoke in both French and English, finally saying goodbye as I went off to the metro to go home, and he took off on foot. "Vous êtes au pied?" I asked. "Oui, je suis à pied," he answered, without emphasis on my mistake. I nodded and repeated, "à pied!"

My evening ended up à pied as well; instead of taking the bus I walked back home through Parc Lafontaine; the snow had stopped, and it was magical.

Voice

He wants to know when we're coming down, because he has a doctor's appointment on Wednesday - could we have lunch, instead, on Friday? Yes, I assure him, that would be fine. I ask how he is; he responds with the usual litany and its antiphon: "declining very rapidly."

"Your voice sounds good," I tell him. "And you always have something to say."

"I began with that and have kept it!" he responds, laughing. "You know the story about my birth, don't you? The woman who came to deliver me was in mourning - her husband had died the day before - so she wasn't speaking. When I was born, she didn't give the usual "ululululu!"cry that means, "it's a boy!"; she just whacked me on my bottom and said, "Shut up!" My mother knew from that that I was a boy, and she rejoiced."

"And you've never stopped talking since."

"No!" He laughed again. "How is your poetry book coming?"

This caught me off-guard; I had mentioned it once in passing and was very surprised he remembered. "It isn't my book, it's something that a number of us are doing together."

"So you are all poets?" - this in a decidedly skeptical tone.

"Yes, some more than others. Anyway, it will be out soon; I'll get you a copy and you can see what you think."

"In Arabic we say, 'The best poetry is the one that tells the most lies.'"

It's a typical non-compliment, but I laugh anyway; I've never heard the proverb before and it explains a good deal. "Flattery will get you somewhere," I counter.

"The Arab one is better."

"It's good, you're right. Well, it's nice to hear your voice. You sound OK, even if you don't feel it."

"I'm declining very rapidly. Really. Every day is worse than the one before - I can see it."

"So everything is going to give out, and finally you'll be left with nothing but your voice."

"In that case maybe we should discuss what my last words should be! If you continue on the way you are, I'll say your name at the last!"

"That sounds very much like an illustration of your proverb."

"Hah!"

“Totally Lost”

"The Young Man Meets the Old Hermit," by an unknown artist, Moraqqa’ 1638, Golestan Palace, from an exhibition of masterpieces of Persian painting at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, spring 2005

After lunch we went back to his room. It hadn’t been a good day so far; his legs ached; he’d pushed the two halves of the ham-and-cheese croissant around on his plate, dismissed the French onion soup as “no good,” and finally eaten a bowl of cottage cheese with picked beets and onions on top. Back in his own chair in his own room, he sighed with relief. I fished around for a subject that would engage him. “Did you ever read Persian poetry when you were a student in Syria?” I asked.

He said no, that they had only read Arabic poetry. “I’ve tried to read Persian, and I can make out a few words but it’s quite different from Arabic,” he said. “They’ve borrowed a lot of Arabic words, and we have some of their words too. All these languages borrowed from each other; it was inevitable because of the trade and travel.”

I told him about an article I’d read recently, someone in Qatar was complaining that the students now all spoke in dialect and none of them were learning classical Arabic because it was never spoken in the home; the journalist asked where the homes were where classical Arabic had been spoken for decades – this was nothing new, he said. My father-in-law brightened. “That’s my next project!” he said. “Of course, after we raise a million dollars for my scholarship fund. I want to endow a department at AUB" (American University at Beirut - he is a graduate and used to teach there) "that will be devoted to the study of classical Arabic language and literature. Imagine! All the focus now is on studying the west. They’re turning out little Americans. Arabs should be studying their own culture and this long wonderful tradition. But maybe no one is interested. And we have a long way to go on the million dollars.”

“How are you coming on your poem?” I asked. For the past year or so, he's been writing a poem in Arabic that he says encapsulates everything he's learned about the heart of religion. I don't think he's written anything down for months, and what he recited to us before wasn't long - but it is epic in his mind and in concept.

“I have most of it written down in Arabic, but not in English,” he said. “I need two weeks of uninterrupted time, but I never get it. People come and bother me. I’ve told you about my project that it came out of, haven’t I? About the twelve people I studied, people who have had ‘epiphanies?’ I wanted to know what they had in common, what they had discovered in common.”

“Tell me again who the twelve were.”

“Let’s see…” He shut his eyes. “Abraham. Moses. Isaiah – the second one, the one who wrote ‘beat your swords..”

“… into ploughshares.”

“Yes. That Isaiah. Let’s see…Mohammad. Al-Hallaj – you know him, he’s the Muslim philosopher who was executed because he ran out into the street crying “I am God!” – they didn’t like that!’ I love him, I've spent a lot of time with Al-Hallaj…St. Francis of Assisi. How many is that?”

“Six. If we're going chronologically I think you forgot Jesus…?”

“Of course. Jesus. Paul. And I think I put the Buddha in there too, for some reason.”

“We’re still missing three.”

“Hmm. Who isn’t there?” he repeated the list, counting them off on his fingers and looking puzzled. “Oh!” he said, brightening up suddenly. “Of course – how stupid! I forgot the Greeks: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.” He looked relieved.

“Great,” I said. “That’s your twelve.”

“So these were what I call ‘the originators of religion’ and most of them went to the desert or some such place to meditate on the core of existence and that’s where they got their epiphanies. In Arabic we call it al-din al-hanif: literally, ‘the religion of the faucet, of the tap.’ My father would say, ‘go fetch a glass of water from the hanif’ – the faucet in the courtyard. The hanifa are a sect of Islam – it means “straight from the stream.” That’s what these men were looking for: the pure thing, straight from the source."*

“So what did you discover they had in common?”

“It all has to do with wrapping yourself in love. And from that, seeking self-esteem, justice, truth, goodness, beauty and excellence. This is all there is. Then, of course, the priests come and make it into a system! I call it ‘churchianity!’ Because I am always looking for mischievous things, I find them!”

He sat back and laughed, shaking his big head at priests and the people who follow them.

"You see,"he continued, "the most important verse in the Bible is 'God is Love.' There are so many words in Arabic to express ‘love.’ Do you know there are over a thousand words for camel? A lot of words for ‘sword.’ But I have no time anymore to pursue these things…

In Arabic we say, “When I love, I am no more.” It means to be lost in love, in the sense of ‘being’-- for one’s self to be annihilated. The verb is waliha – to be non-existent. ‘Ana walhad’ – ‘I’m totally lost.’ That’s what we say when someone is in love. That’s what love is. That’s what they were all getting at."

* My research tells me that hanif, in Arabic scholarship, was used to refer to the "original religion" - the original monotheists, of whom Abraham is the archetype. This pure monotheistic religion is considered by Muslims to have been corrupted in Judaism and Christianity; the Qu'ran states that Islam follows "..the religion of Ibrahim, the hanif, the Muslim.." As a capitalized word, it is a proper name that means "true believer."

--

We left a little while after that. In the evening, after we’d gone to bed, the phone rang. My sister-in-law said that she was with her father at the hospital; he’d been taken there at 10:00 pm after suffering chest pain that his “little white pills” wouldn’t relieve. His blood pressure had also been very high. They were in the emergency department and she expected him to be admitted. Fortunately, we were in Vermont, so we got dressed and went over. We stayed with him until 1:30 am, when he had been moved upstairs to intermediate cardiac care, and was settled in a room. That was Wednesday night. They've had him on a nitrogycerin drip and are changing some of his medications. He seems to be stable now, and has been in excellent spirits throughout. At his insistence, we’ve returned to Montreal; we expect him to be released tomorrow, and I’ll tell you more about the hospital stay in the next post.

In French, please

The Office de la langue francaise (OLF) is launching a "sensitization campaign" to remind business owners in Montreal's downtown of the language laws requiring French to be the language first used in greeting customers, and to appear first, and twice as large as English, in any signage. The program is coming out of a recent survey designed to study how language is being used in the city's downtown core; the goal of the OLF (and the Quebec government) is to preserve the French character of the city. The survey revealed that French was the language of greeting 83% of the time, and the language in which customers were served about 90 per cent of the time (I'm surprised by that; it seems like less to me.) Apparently the survey was carried out because of a lot of complaints in the French media that too much English was being used in the city's business district. The OLF used 40 "francization counsellors" to conduct the survey; it employs seven other inspectors to enforce the language law.

Aramaic Translation Needed

I've been approached by someone who is urgently seeking a professional for a film translation project from Maalula-Aramaic into English. Do any of the readers of this blog know such a person?

Aidez-moi?

I need to provide a French translation of a 700-word press release describing my book and Bishop Gene Robinson's visit to Montreal next week. He's coming to give one of the keynote addresses at the Montreal Outgames/International Conference on LGBT Human Rights. He's also going to be preaching at a special  "OutMass" at Christ Church Cathedral, and there will be a couple of book signings - all of which need to be publicized among both the English and French-speaking communities. Is there a reader out there who could do an accurate translation on very short notice, and how much would you charge? (email me, if you prefer)

Bonjour, madame!

Les Chiennes de Garde (the guard dogs - a French feminist group) are trying to eliminate the use of "mademoiselle" ("miss") in favor of one salutation for all women, regardless of marital status or age: madame. Although I enjoy the singsong "bonjour madame!" with which I am routinely greeted in Québec shops and offices, the assumptions inherent in the word do irk me - imagine if everyone in the U.S. said, "Hello Ma'am" rather than just the usual "hello". As we found out a few posts back in the discussion about "priest" and "priestess", since French has trouble expressing "female priest", the gender wars are written into the very core of the language, much more strongly than in English, since every single word must have a gender. While Les Chiennes de Garde are growling about implications of sexual availability, what I've heard from French women is actually the opposite: they hate being called "madame" because it makes them feel old and unattractive. I don't suppose people are about to drop "madame", though, and start calling all women "mademoiselle," and the feminists say they don't want an equivalent third title like the English "Ms." (And, let's note, they are still Les Chiennes, not Les Chiens.) Quite a sticky problem. I'd suggest a simple "bonjour".

Between Words

I’ve become aware, from browsing in francophone bookstores here, that considerably more Arabic literature seems to be available in French translation than in English. French, not English, was and is a more common second language in many parts of the Arab world, especially in Lebanon, Syria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria -- and the historical, academic, literary, and political connections continue. The first language for translation of major works often seems to be French. Many prominent Arab writers (especially from the Christian communities in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon) who have left the Middle East (or who maintain two households) have emigrated to Paris rather than to London or New York.

An article by Hala Halim in Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo) discusses the translation of Arabic literature into western languages, based on an interview with Roger Allen, a British-born professor and translator of Arabic who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. Several issues are brought up here, but the most interesting is that as a by-product of the trend for translators to know and work with the authors (as opposed to the former practice where translation usually occurred without any contact at all), translators have encountered pressure from book publishers and sellers to make editorial changes in the original text. The result can be books which have undergone substantial changes from their original Arabic form. Another issue concerns the status of Arabic literature studies in American universities. After the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1988, interest in Arabic literature courses increased, and after 9/11 there was another jump in interest, both in language courses and in Arabic studies in general. However, the author says:

after Mahfouz's Nobel "the availability of a much larger repertoire of translated Arabic texts -- and in most literary genres -- means that it is now possible to offer a variety of courses under the general heading of 'Arabic literature in translation'." But when the conversation turns to the future of Middle Eastern Studies in the US and the pressures brought to bear on it post-9/11 by, for example, the neoconservative Campus Watch web site which monitors and seeks to stifle dissenting voices in the field, Allen is far from optimistic. He mentions, nonchalantly, that he was recently quoted on Campus Watch: "my 'sin' is to say that I think that the American government and the American academy have different views about the way to embrace Arabic studies, and that people making decisions on that level are not qualified to make them...

Entre deux saisons

It's April. I will write more about that later, but it has been amusing both to watch myself plowing through my closet for appropriate clothes for iffy conditions, and to see the people on the street in everything from parkas to summer sundresses with flipflops. What is certain is that everyone is out, and enjoying it hugely.

The last post, on language, generated a long string of comments and a very good (still ongoing) discussion, which I'd like to commend to any readers who haven't already taken a look. Thank you to everyone who has contributed - please jump in if you haven't yet!

By some strange coincidence, we found ourselves today at the apartment of a new friend, a very fine photojournalist. In the course of conversation, he mentioned a book by a Canadian writer, another friend of his, by the name of Mark Abley - and ended up lending it to me. It's called Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages. I look forward to starting it soon and reporting back here.

And you thought Québec was prickly

Jacques Chirac left an EU meeting in a huff because a colleague addressed the other national leaders in English. Chirac described himself as "deeply shocked."

The expanded EU comprises 460 million people who are trying to speak with one voice without sacrificing their political cultures and identities. In order not to offend any one country, the EU uses each of the 20 languages spoken in member states, at a cost of up to $1.6 billion in translation and interpretation expenses each year.

The article notes that lingistic protectionism has been a longstanding preoccupation of Chirac's. He apparently insisted on speaking only French during a state dinner with George Bush, and at a recent UN meeting, he "pretended not to understand questions in English" and tried to get Tony Blair - who speaks French - to interpret. (Guess he didn't try that with Bush.)

Also from today's International Herald Tribune, an article on the closing of the last synagogue in Tajikistan. My father-in-law often speaks about how Jews, Christians, and Muslims coexisted peacefully, for the most part, in the Damascus of his youth, and how this was true in nearly all the cities of the Middle and Near East. Both the Christian and Jewish populations have been declining in recent decades, to the point of virtual non-existence in many areas.