Foreign Tongues

I'm going to share a secret about my job, because you've all earned my trust. One of the fringe benefits of designing catalogs is the ability to purchase the items from those catalogs at a reduced rate. In my early days at the company, I frequented our bookstore once a week, often for CDs. Sometimes the jewel cases were cracked, but it didn't matter because the prices were so good. Eventually I filled an entire drawer at my desk with music, but by then the selection had diminished and I found my workload left me less time to spend idly flipping through CDs arranged in no particular order to find something I might like. On occasions where I do venture down every few months now, I rarely find anything of interest. My best find in the last few years was a boxed set of Firefly DVDs, whose existence Curt alerted me to while he was still with our company. In the grand scheme of things, I've bought a lot of items I never would have considered purchasing, simply because I was there, they were there, and the price was right. Normally such a whimsical practice leads to regret in hindsight, but today wasn't one of those days. Today I bought Sehnsucht by Rammstein.

I first heard their song Du Hast several years ago, and while I had no idea what they were singing, it sounded incredibly raw and cool. Thunderous, primal drum beats raced in time to heavy electric guitars, with vocal interludes in German. For all I know they could have been singing something horrible, but to quote The Simpsons, ”No one who speaks German could be an evil man.” I suppose if it really concerned me, I could have played it for my German uncle to translate. I had since heard snippets of the rest of the album played by an illustrator friend of mine, and it sounded like all the tracks were consistent with the one that had gotten airplay in the U.S. I popped the CD into my computer when I got back to my desk this afternoon, and suddenly and magically I had accomplished everything I needed to today, and more, by five o'clock. That never happens. I had to kill time just so the gym wouldn't be too crowded when I went down.

One of the things I envy about Europe is their multilingualism. In America, separated by oceans and with the majority of our population far from our borders, we can be isolated. I have four years of high school French under my belt that I thought for sure would make me a hit with the ladies when I grew up. As a teenager, I took the phrase “romance language” literally, and had Italian been a choice at my high school I would have taken that instead. My parents only used it when I was a kid to discuss things in secret like what I was getting for my birthday, and once I started picking up words they stopped. As it is, they could never reconcile the differences between my mom's Sicilian dialect and my dad's Neapolitan. My choices were French, Spanish, German, or Latin, and perhaps I should have chosen Spanish. Even then, one must use a language to be proficient at it, and start at a young age, well before high schoool. In Europe, traveling from one country to another is like driving from New York to New Jersey, and while the denizens of those regions might perceive one another as speaking foreign tongues, we're more alike than two European nations. I had a friend in high school go on to study Japanese and business in college, and spend a semester in Osaka, Japan. By the time he came back he was fluent, and did all the talking to the girls at the karaoke establishment he frequented. A language in a textbook is never like the language on the streets. Even in America we can see the differences between colloquial English and grammatically correct textbook English. My ex-girlfriend's father was a college professor, and she told me one of his pet peeves was the phrase “workaholic”, because there was no such substance as “workahol”.

Limiting oneself to one language limits us to so much, culturally. Lately I've been appreciating things in other languages. First, there was my purchase of Final Fantasy: Advent Children. My computer automatically played it in Japanese, and I had to manually turn on the subtitles. It wasn't until a few days later on a message board that I read a discussion about the American voice actors, including Rachel Leigh Cook. I still haven't watched it with the English dubbing; most of the time the original tone of the movie is lost completely and as a rule, I almost always watch foreign films with subtitles. How great would it be to understand what the characters were saying without reading? Sometimes the emotion and context convey the meaning, as I found the other day watching Les Quatre cents coups, one of the 102 essential movies I'm slowly working into my rotation. As for today's Rammstein purchase, I looked up the meaning of “Du Hast” , and the vocalist is basically answering marriage vows with a firm negative, which is somewhat horrible after all. Music is universal though and the songs sound amazing, whatever their meaning, and helped my productivity. It would be nice if we all understood each other on this planet, but we derive what we will from different cultures and all things have some meaning to us, if not the one intended by their creators.