|
O Americano, Outra Vez!
One time I picked up a hitchhiker who told me how interesting South America was, and that I ought to go there. I complained that the language
is different, but he said just go ahead and learn it--it's no big problem. So I thought, that's a good idea: I'll go to South America.
Cornell had some foreign language classes which followed a method used during the war, in which small groups of about ten students and one
native speaker speak only the foreign language-nothing else. Since I was a rather young-looking professor there at Cornell, I decided to take the class
as if I were a regular student. And since I didn't know yet where I was going to end up in South America, I decided to take Spanish, because the great
majority of the countries there speak Spanish.
So when it was time to register for the class, we were standing outside, ready to go into the classroom, when this pneumatic blonde came along.
You know how once in a while you get this feeling, WOW? She looked terrific. I said to myself, "Maybe she's going to be in the Spanish class--that'll
be
great!
" But no, she walked into the Portuguese class. So I figured, What the hell--I might as well learn Portuguese.
I started walking right after her when this Anglo -Saxon attitude that I have said, "No, that's not a good reason to decide which language to
speak." So I went back and signed up for the Spanish class, to my utter regret.
Some time later I was at a Physics Society meeting in New York, and I found myself sitting next to Jaime Tiomno, from Brazil, and he asked,
"What are you going to do next summer?"
"I'm thinking of visiting South America."
"Oh! Why don't you come to Brazil? I'll get a position for you at the Center for Physical Research."
So now I had to convert all that Spanish into Portuguese! I found a Portuguese graduate student at Cornell, and twice a week he gave me lessons,
so I was able to alter what I had learned. On the plane to Brazil I started out sitting next to a guy from Colombia who spoke only Spanish: so I
wouldn't talk to him because I didn't want to get confused again. But sitting in front of me were two guys who were talking Portuguese. I had never
heard
real
Portuguese; I had only had this teacher who had talked very slowly and clearly. So here are these two guys talking a blue streak,
brrrrrrr-
a-ta brrrrrrr-a-ta
, and I can't even hear the word for "I," or the word for "the," or anything.
Finally, when we made a refueling stop in Trinidad, I went up to the two fellas and said very slowly in Portuguese, or what I thought was
Portuguese, "Excuse me . . . can you understand . . . what I am saying to you now?"
"
Pues não, porque não
?"--" Sure, why not?" they replied.
So I explained as best I could that I had been learning Portuguese for some months now, but I had never heard it spoken in conversation, and I
was listening to them on the airplane, but couldn't understand a word they were saying.
"Oh," they said with a laugh, "
Nao e Portugues! E Ladäo! Judeo!
" What they were speaking was to Portuguese as Yiddish is to German, so you
can imagine a guy who's been studying German sitting behind two guys talking Yiddish, trying to figure out what's the matter. It's obviously German,
but it doesn't work. He must not have learned German very well.
When we got back on the plane, they pointed out another man who did speak Portuguese, so I sat next to him. He had been studying
neurosurgery in Maryland, so it was very easy to talk with him--as long as it was about
cirugia neural, o cerebreu
, and other such "complicated"
things. The long words are actually quite easy to translate into Portuguese because the only difference is their endings: "-tion" in English is "-çao" in
Portuguese; "-ly" is "-mente," and so on. But when he looked out the window and said something simple, I was lost: I couldn't decipher "the sky is
blue."
I got off the plane in Recife (the Brazilian government was going to pay the part from Recife to Rio) and was met by the father-in-law of Cesar
Lattes, who was the director of the Center for Physical Research in Rio, his wife, and another man. As the men were off getting my luggage, the lady
started talking to me in Portuguese: "You speak Portuguese? How nice! How was it that you learned Portuguese?"
I replied slowly, with great effort. "First, I started to learn Spanish. . . then I discovered I was going to Brazil.
Now I wanted to say, "So, I learned Portuguese," but I couldn't think of the word for "so." I knew how to make BIG words, though, so I finished
the sentence like this: "
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
