Category Archives: foreign language study

my French teacher

 

Eileen McCauley began her career as a French teacher at Canton High School in Canton, MA.

I had her for two years of French in my freshman and sophomore years. I loved her class.

She had a great influence on me, like most good teachers, in awakening and fostering in me a love for learning languages, for the languages themselves. It got me started on a lifelong course of language study which has been pure joy.

There were no audiovisual materials for language study online or at home back then. I would monologue and recite the French passages in my French textbook over and over again while doing my homework. I would assiduously apply myself to memorizing the vocabulary list at the end of each chapter.

I once said to my older brother, who also took French, that when I recited le train out loud,  it seemed different to me than the English train. I asked him, is this the case with you too? He said, no, it didn’t.

 

— Roger W. Smith

   June 2020

забаллотирована

 

Если же власть категорически примет ультиматум ‒ то и этот выход не устраняет, а только отсрочивает ее падение. Достаточно будет водвориться начаткам правового строя, появиться одной вольной газете, ослабеть террору… и на другой день власть будет забаллотирована или устранена небольшой группой заговорщиков, опирающихся на общее сочувствие народных масс. Такова трагическая дилемма, перед которой очутилась власть, дилемма, в обоих случаях сулящая ее падение. С той лишь разницей, что в первом случае мы пойдем к ее ликвидации путем, способным при достаточной гибкости власти растянуться на 4-6 лет, во втором ‒ «революционно-анархическим» путем. Только война или какая-нибудь мировая катавасия могут спасти ее…

If the government categorically accepts the ultimatum, then this withdrawal does not eliminate it, but only delays its fall. It will be enough to establish the rudiments of a legal system, to appear in one free newspaper, to weaken the terror… and the next day, the government will be voted out or eliminated by a small group of conspirators, relying on the general approval of the masses. Such is the tragic dilemma that the government faces, a dilemma that in both cases promises its downfall. The only difference is that in the first case, we will proceed to its elimination by a route that can, with sufficient flexibility on the part of the government, be prolonged for 4-6 years, in the second it will be “revolutionary-anarchic.” Only war or some kind of world disaster can save it …

— П. А. Сорокин, Современное состояние России (P. A. Sorokin, The Contemporary Condition of Russia), 1922

 

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I was working on this passage today as a co-translator of the above-named work; and I got to thinking what a rich language Russian is. It has continued since my college days to fascinate and challenge me.

 

… только отсрочивает ее падение

only delays its fall

отсрочивает (otsrochivayet) … delays

 

и на другой день власть будет забаллотирована ….

and the next day, the government will be voted out …,

забаллотирована (zaballotirovana) means “voted out” (as in voted out of office) … Russian makes such intricate, complex, often long, words German-style, with prefixes and endings adding complexity and specifying grammatical function and meaning.

 

… при достаточной гибкости власти растянуться на 4-6 лет

… with sufficient flexibility on the part of the government, be prolonged for 4-6 years

растянуться (rastyanut’sya) … be prolonged (passive/reflexive with perfective prefix)

 

And …

Россия ненавидит ее сейчас сильнее, чем старый режим в самые бесславные времена последнего. Да и за что любить ее какому бы то ни было классу! Исполнила ли она хотя бы одно из своих заманчивых обещаний?

Russia hates it [the government] now more than it did the old regime in the most inglorious times of the latter. And why should any class love it? Has it fulfilled at least one of its alluring promises?

заманчивых (zamanchivykh), alluring

 

Она дала вексель на постройку нового идеального общества. Вместо этого в крови и пожаре построила душную казарму, нищую, разбойничью, деспотическую, в которой население задыхалось и вы ушную мирало.

It gave a promissory note for the construction of a new ideal society. Instead, in blood and fire, it built a suffocating barracks, impoverished, thievish, despotic, in which the population suffocated and died out.

разбойничью (razboynich’yu), thievish

задыхалось (zadykhalos’), suffocated (literally, gasped); perfective passive verb

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   May 2021

It pays to study another language.

 

“Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen.” (He who is ignorant of foreign languages, knows not his own.)

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen (1833)

I did my German homework in the wee small hours of the early morning today. Actually, I gave up around 2 or 3 a.m. halfway though, and told myself, I’ll finish in the morning. German grammar is more complicated than I anticipated. Doing drills in any foreign language is tedious, I always tend to put off the homework until the last minute. Foreign language exercises are like physical exercise: beneficial but monotonous and therefore wearisome.

 

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Which is not to say that I do not enjoy the class. It’s just the opposite. We are down to three students. The language institute will keep a course open as long as there is a minimum of three students.

The chemistry among us students and with our instructor, Peter, is great. I get to the class somewhat jaded in the morning, and then am fully engaged and energized in class. But, language study takes mental effort, and after an hour and half, I am restless and mentally tired.

 

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I learned so much today in just one class. Here are examples, in sequential (chronological) order, as they came up during the hour and a half long class.

Our instructor, Peter, began with the conjugation of the verbs geben (to give) and lessen (to read). I love morphology. It fascinates me to see how words change depending on their function and the grammatical structure. I recall, for example, when studying Russian, that I was intrigued by learning the subjunctive in Stillman and Harkins’s Introductory Russian Grammar:

If he knew the truth, he would have been angry.

Если бы он знал правду, он был бы зол.

Yesli by on znal pravdu, on byl by zol.

Yesli (if) by (a particle signifying subjunctive) on znal (he knew) pravdu (the truth), on (he) byl by (would have been; the past tense of the verb to be with the particle by; how odd it sounded to me) zol (angry).

 

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Our German instructor (today) conjugated lessen and wrote the past perfect and past participle forms on the board.

las (simple past) … NOTE: no helping verb, as in French j’ai lu but same as Spanish yo leí, where there is also no helping verb.

gelernt (read, past participle; as in, have you read?)

I love to study the particulars of languages such as in these examples. For me, it’s equivalent to the pleasure some boys used to take (as I recall) tinkering under the hood of a car, or that one so inclined might take in examining the inside of a watch.

 

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Our instructor, Peter, told us that es gibt in German means there is. Then, he gave us an example: In New York gibt es Freiheitsstatue. I was very pleased to learn the word for Statue of Liberty in German. Peter explained the derivation: Freiheit (freedom or liberty) and statue.

 

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The phrase halten das Leben einfach (to keep life simple) was used as an example.

This resulted in a discussion not concerned with German per se. Is einfach an adverb or an adjective? The class seemed to think, at first, that the answer was adjective. Peter seemed to agree. I raised my hand and said I thought it was hard to say. Peter agreed. I thought about it some more and raised my hand again. I said that I was pretty sure that it was an adverb. Peter said it depends about how one thinks about the word einfach in this case, how is it being used? I agreed with him, but said, morphologically speaking, that it was functioning as an adverb. One could say It’s best to lead a simple life in which case simple is an adjective, but if one says keep life simple, the word simple is functioning as an adverb; it answers the question, how? Peter said that was right.

All of this arising from an introductory German lesson.

 

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Peter said another verb such as führen could be used in the above example:
ein gutes Leben führen (to lead a good life).

This led to a discussion of the noun Führer (leader); Hitler was der Führer. Guess what! I knew from context what der Führer meant, but did I know the literal meaning? No. Shows the value of studying what would seem to be very basic subjects.

 

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To illustrate some point of vocabulary or usage, Peter mentioned the title of a German novel: Im Westen nichts Neues. He had a vague acquaintance of the novel, has never read it. I got excited and said that it was All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. (Peter did not know the book’s English title.)

(I wrote a paper on All Quiet on the Western Front in high school. My English teacher, Mr. Tighe. liked it. I said that what made the novel’s “anti-war message” so compelling was the unobtrusiveness of the main character: Paul Bäumer.)

 

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In the class, we are working on direct (accusative case) and indirect (dative) objects.
For purposes of demonstration, Peter wrote the following sentence on the board:

Ich töte Kuh für dich. (I am killing the cow for you.)

Cow in German is feminine.

If you are using the pronoun, you would say, Ich töte sie — I kill her, not it.

In German, the word for bull, Stier,  is masculine, but there is a word, Rind, which is neuter (das Rind), for beef or cattle.

The whole class got involved in a discussion, which provoked much laughter, of how German nouns got their gender. I had never thought about this. Tür (door) is feminine. Peter said he thought it might have had something to do with the idea of receptivity if one thinks of a door as an entranceway. One of the class members, a woman, said she thought it might be that a door is something the woman of the house might, in olden days, open, since she was likely to be home.

Peter pointed out that in some languages (Spanish el sol), sun is masculine, but Sonne (sun) in German is feminine. He thought the reason is that the word in German might have been associated with fecundity or generativity (giving warmth), whereas the Spanish, for example, thought of the sun as being regal, a sort of king of the sky.

What will the language police do about all these “gendered“ nouns?

Somehow, at this point in the class, a compound German word that was introduced by Peter came up: Kurzzeitgedächtnis (short-term memory). A cool word, indeed.

 

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The sentence Ich habe ein Buch für sie gekauft (I bought a book for her) was introduced as an example of a direct with indirect object construction. Peter said that Buch (book) was the direct object and that für sie (for her) was the indirect object. I said that I thought that was not quite correct and that, in this example, für sie is a prepositional phrase (I think adjectival). Whereas, I said, if the sentence was I bought Mary a book (as opposed to a book for Mary), there is a clear indirect object (Mary) and direct object (book).

 

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Peter wrote the German word for case (as in grammatical case) on the board: Fall. (The German word Fall can have multiple meanings besides case, such as a fall or decline.) And then the word der Sünderfall (sinners’ fall): the Biblical fall of Adam and Eve.

 

– Roger W. Smith

   February 1, 2020

 

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Addendum

February 8, 2020

 

I had another German class this morning, and have some things to add (including random things not course-related).

As noted above, making discoveries in foreign languages is exciting for me. I recently learned that mac in Irish means son. So, MacDonald means Donald’s son.

In German class this morning, Peter used the sentence Ich trinke Kaffee die ganze Zeit (I drink coffee all the time) as an example. There was a discussion (Peter posed the question) about the phrase  die ganze Zeit. Peter put his schema TMP on the board — for time-manner-place. Peter thought it answered the question, when? (meaning T, time). I said no, it answers the question how (M)? Another student, Alina, agreed with me.

Peter used the sentence Der Kuchen schmeckt gut (The pie tastes good) as an example. If one wants to say it tastes good, the German becomes Er schmeckt gut. — with a masculine pronoun (er), not neuter; whereas in English pie is neuter and it is used. I thought to myself, gender is biologically intrinsic and embedded in many languages. Why can’t the language police accept that?

Peter said we should go over the die Hausaufgabe (homework, feminine). I love the ingenuity of German compound words. I just came across something in my reading about how Iroquois languages are known for beautiful compounds.

Peter wrote the following sentence on the board: Die Demokraten haben nich gegen Trump. (The Democrats have nothing against Trump.) He was covering the use of the accusative in German with certain prepositions.Peter said that the meaning of the sentence (devoid of knowing the context) was ambiguous. It could mean either: (1) the Democrats have nothing against Trump (no grievances — they are fine with him); or, alternatively (2) they have (found) nothing evidence-wise — have come up with nothing — that they can use against him.

learning a new language

 

I have begun studying German.

I knew a smattering of German already.

I was motivated to take the course from my love of studying foreign languages. And to learn a language which is so important in Western culture and scholarship, and in music. I have recently heard performances of outstanding vocal works with a libretto or lyrics in German by composers such as Haydn, Brahms, Hindemith, and Franz Schreker.

I am in my fifth or sixth week of an introductory German course at a language school in Manhattan. A very small class, which is great. A great teacher …. Peter, German; he lives in Manhattan now.

 

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As I and my fellow students were laboring over reading sentences out loud yesterday, trying to pronounce the German words, it called to mind for me what it was like learning to read in the first grade. Reading out loud (in the first grade) in small groups (“reading circles”) and laboring to sound out the words on the page, in our reader, Dick and Jane. Plus phonics instruction, so tedious, as I recall it being then.

I remember when I learned to read; from one moment to the next I moved on from slowly spelling out the words to reading fluently and my life changed forever! — comment by Elisabeth van der Meer, on my post about reading, October 21, 2019

I had a similar experience struggling to learn and sound out the Russian alphabet and to read from the printed page (in Russian) in an introductory Russian class in my sophomore year at Brandeis University.

 

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In a language course, especially an introductory one, the teacher is everything. I have had some outstanding language teachers, such as Miss McCauley for French (in high school) and Luciana de Ames, a Spanish instructor at Columbia University.

And Walter Stock, in a Gaelic course at the Gaelic Society of New York.

In the late 1960’s, I saw an advertisement in the Village Voice for Irish (Gaelic) courses at the Gaelic Society in Manhattan. To the question, why study such a language, one that I would never need to use, I would have answered (and would still), why not? A language is a window into a culture. And, the grammatical or linguistic aspects of different languages have always fascinated me. To study a Celtic language! The Celtic languages are related distantly to a broader hypothesized family of languages including our own.

Mr. Stock would begin by going around the class, saying, “Dia duit” (hello) to each of us. He had us involved and enthused. He was a born language teacher.

After a few weeks, Mr. Stock, to my profound disappointment, had to leave because of professional commitments. The class was taken over by an Irish woman who lacked pedagogical skills. I quit after one class with her. She began the class by telling us to open our books. Then, sitting at a desk at the front of the room, she read from exercises in the book with the class presumably following. There was no interaction or class participation. Mr. Stock, her opposite as a teacher, not only got us speaking Irish from the outset, he was knowledgeable about languages and linguistics and was always pointing out interesting linguistic features and similarities between Irish and other languages. Peter, our current German teacher, does the same thing.

I still have my two Gaelic textbooks.

 

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It is so hands on (foreign language instruction). It reminds me of a subject like math. You have to make sure that the class does not get lost. Everything is progressive. Step by step, incremental. Interaction in the class is important. So that students in a language course can practice and so that everyone is keeping up. Or, in a math class, say. to make sure the material was understood and pupils can do the problems.

It’s not like a history or sociology or class, say, where one can skip a lecture or two.

The teaching style of my high school mathematics teacher, Mr. Badoian, seemed at times too “authoritarian” or top down. As if he were a football coach making us run endless drills. But I see now (and Mr. Badoain was a great teacher) that there was no other way. It was a lot different than my English class.

By the way, my father was a piano teacher. It was a lifetime occupation. I wonder how all of this applies to him. Teaching a musical instrument must involve similar challenges and demands.

 

— Roger W. Smith

   November 3, 2019

 

Progress in Irish.jpg

 

buntus cainte.jpg

Buntús Cainte means something (literally) like Beginning Speech (or a language primer).

 

 

 

 

Подушка какая Мягкая.

 

Подушка какая Мягкая.

Podushka kakaya Myagkaya.

What a soft pillow.

Russian is such a beautiful language euphonically, as Professor John E. Malmstad pointed out in an introductory Russian course I took at Columbia University. (Professor Malmstad was co-translator of the symbolist novel Petersburg by Andrei Bely.)

I took both French and Spanish as a high school and college student. I studied both intensively.

It was fun to compare the two Romance languages, both similar in their origins and vocabulary while at the same time (as is always the case with languages) both unique; distinct. Like persons, you like and admire, each one, for the things that make them unique.

It seems to me that Spanish is closer to the original Latin than French. I took two years of Latin in high school. I found Spanish grammar easy to learn.

A notable feature of studying Spanish to me was that spelling is very regular and simple. There are hardly any exceptions. A consonant, for example is either doubled or it is not – doesn’t change for different words.

Which brings us (to quote James Joyce) by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Russian. Russian is very similar to Spanish with respect to pronunciation. Spelling is entirely regular.

And, a notable, major feature of both languages — connected or related to regularity of spelling — is that a given word and spelling dictate the pronunciation. There are no exceptions. Words in both Spanish and Russian are pronounced exactly as they are spelled.

Every language has its own sound, sonority, a unique cadence and rhythm which, once you begin to learn the language, is music to the ear. Now you can “hear” the language, which the untutored can’t.

The musicality of spoken Russian, including the simplest phrases, is undeniable.

 

— Roger W. Smith

   November 2018

Mozart, Alexander L. Lipson, and Russian 1 with Professor Gribble

 

On Thursday, November 16, 2017, I heard a performance at Carnegie Hall of Mozart’s String Quartet No. 16 in E-flat major, K. 428 by the Tetzlaff Quartet. Mozart’s K. 428 is one of his Haydn Quartets, a set of six string quartets that he dedicated to Joseph Haydn.

It is a flawless work. It exemplifies Mozart’s genius. It also brought to mind a sentence in my first-year Russian textbook — written by a famed Slavicist and foreign language teacher, Alexander L. Lipson — which was as follows: “Как и Моцарт, Пушкин написал только шедевры” (Kak i Motsart, Pushkin napisal tol’ko shedevry. Like Mozart, Pushkin wrote only masterpieces.)

The Russian word for masterpieces, shedevry, is the same as and is derived from the French. (Makes me think of the French used by the aristocracy in War and Peace.)

The Mozart piece brought to mind the comparison between Mozart and Pushkin made in the textbook from my college Russian course, and he course itself.

 

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I was eager and thrilled to be able to take introductory Russian in my sophomore year at Brandeis University. The course was taught by Charles E. Gribble. Professor Gribble, who held a doctorate from Harvard, began his teaching career at Brandeis. When I took the course with him, he was in his late twenties. At that time, Professor Gribble was in the preliminary phase of founding an important publishing house for Slavicists: Slavica Publishers. He was the firm’s editor for thirty years.

I was motivated to study Russian for several reasons:

I had discovered the works of the Russian émigré scholar Pitirim A. Sorokin in my senior year in high school. I was totally engrossed in books of his such as Leaves from a Russian Diary. This led to a fascination on my part with Russian culture.

At the time, the Soviet Union was regarded with outright hostility, fear, and suspicion. Being by nature a contrarian, I tended to think differently. Politics aside, I saw, as did Sorokin (to quote from one of his works), “an essential similarity or congeniality in a number of important psychological, cultural, and social values” between the USA and the USSR: vast territories with all that implies (such as various climates, topography, and regional characteristics); rich natural and human resources; major cultural and urban centers; the fact that both countries were world powers; and so on. I was a sort of Slavophil without knowing it.

Russia as I imagined it was a country with vast expanses like us and a multiplicity of nationalities and ethnic groups and with a rich, continually growing culture, including Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (whom at this stage of my educational development I had not yet read) and composers such as Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich (whose works I had already become acquainted with and admired — in fact, Shostakovich’s fifth symphony almost in and of its itself made me a Slavophil). Just like America, Russia was huge, diverse, all encompassing, culturally fertile; and with a vibrant economy. And, I felt intuitively, a rich language.

 

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My previous language study had consisted of a year or two of French in junior high school (a complete waste); four years of high school French, on the basis of which I was placed into third year French at Brandeis University; and two years of high school Latin. Romance languages.

It was a thrill for me to be studying a Slavic language and one with a different alphabet.

Learning the Cyrillic alphabet, in both cursive and print form, was a stumbling block for me, a hurdle to be overcome. It often felt like I was back in the first grade learning my letters and being taught to sound out words phonetically.

Our professor, Charles Gribble, knew the author of the textbook we used, Alexander Lipson, personally. Lipson was teaching at MIT. (He later taught Russian at Brandeis.)

Lipson’s first year Russian textbook, A Russian Course, was in developmental form; it hadn’t yet been published. It consisted of pages that had been copied and bound, but not in book form. Without covers.

It was a clever and entertaining text, besides being well conceived from a pedagogical standpoint.

I was fascinated to find that Russian had cases — six of them — like Latin. (I love studying grammar and cannot understand why modern day self-appointed language “experts,” as they style themselves, want to emend or simplify, essentially emasculate — in the name of political correctness or conforming to their misguided, benighted theories of how language and English composition should be taught — language instruction. See Addendum below.)

 

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The genitive case (possessive) in Russian was introduced early, as follows. There would be an entertaining reading with a lot of words ending in –ого (-ogo), indicating the Russian form for a noun such as doctor’s used in a phrase such as “the doctor’s office.” Even Russian proper nouns have a possessive form, so that “Tolstoy’s house” becomes “Дом Толстого” (dom Tolstogo).

In the next or a subsequent chapter of Lipson’s textbook, the genitive case and its usage and endings would be formally introduced and explained. Since one already had a rudimentary familiarity with it in the previously encountered reading, one assimilated the grammar point with ease. This is sound pedagogy. It’s how we learn the grammar of our native language.

 

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Despite being motivated, I had difficulty with the course.

Some of the students had already taken Russian in high school, which, in the case of a language like Russian with a steep learning curve, put me at a competitive disadvantage, so to speak.

Nevertheless, I persisted. I tried very hard. I spent hours in the language lab, but — despite my best efforts — I always seemed to be a couple of lessons behind the rest of the class.

Professor Gribble said he would take into account class attendance and effort in grading. He kept his word. I got D on practically every quiz and exam. My final grade for the 6 credit course was C.

I have always had a very high aptitude for foreign languages. In French and Latin classes in high school, I was usually (but not always) the best student in the class. The same was the case when I took Spanish as a postgraduate student at Columbia University.

So how does one account for my struggles with introductory Russian? My former therapist, Dr. Ralph Colp, Jr., had an explanation. He regarded it as a case of what one might call “learning inhibition.” When a student feels uncomfortable with the classroom setting and the instructor. This was true of my experience with Professor Gribble. Strangely enough, he was actually a good guy. I went to a web site containing his obituary at

https://slavic.osu.edu/news/memoriam-charles-edward-gribble-1936-2016

and it was clear that this was the case. (The obituary mentions his concern for and rapport with students.) In the following year (I did not enroll for second year Russian), I would occasionally run into Professor Gribble in the snack bar. He was always pleasant and seemed interested in how I was doing.

 

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Alexander Lipson died in 1980 at the age of fifty-one. He was the author of the three part textbook, A Russian Course, which in its prototype/preliminary form we had used as our text in Professor Gribble’s course.

In a review published in The Slavic and East European Journal of the book Alexander Lipson in Memoriam (1994), Catherine V. Chvany refers to Lipson as follows:

… language pedagogue extraordinaire, maverick entrepreneur, linguist’s linguist, travel tour designer, and enfant terrible. Though Lipson never completed his own Ph.D., members of his now gray-haired cohort have claimed in my hearing they learned more from Alex Lipson — about language, about Slavic, and about teaching — than from any of their professors.

She also notes “Lipson’s broad interests [which reflected] Lipson’s profound if irreverent knowledge of Russian literature and culture.” One could sense this in the text of his we used, which was much more fun and informative than most language textbooks. And, often, downright funny.

For instance, I will never forget how Chapter One began:

Хулиганы сидят в парке весь день и курят. (Khuligany sidyat v parke ves’ den’ i kuryat; Hooligans sit in the park all day and smoke.)

This was a mockery of Soviet attitudes towards deadbeats.

Another chapter had a reading devoted to the topic of навозные мухи (navoznyye mukhi): manure flies. This was a satire on life on the Soviet колхоз (kolkhoz; collective farm). After this chapter, the Russian word for fly, муха (muka), was permanently implanted in my mind.

Then, there was the aforementioned chapter with a reading on Pushkin. It included a short poem by Pushkin, “Ты и Вы” (“Thou and “You,” 1828) that was accessible to first year students and from which I got a feeling for the enchanting musicality and the sensuality and power of Pushkin’s verse.

Пустое вы сердечным ты
Она, обмолвясь, заменила
И все счастливые мечты
В душе влюбленной возбудила.
Пред ней задумчиво стою,
Свести очей с нее нет силы;
И говорю ей: как вы милы!
И мыслю: как тебя люблю!

Pustoye “Vy” serdechnym “Ty”
Ona, obmolvyas’, zamenila
I vse schastlivyye mechty
V dushe vlyublennoy vozbudila.
Pred ney zadumchivo stoyu,
Svesti ochey s neye net sily;
I govoryu yey: kak vy mily!
I myslyu: kak tebya lyublyu!

She substituted,
by a chance,
For empty “you” — the gentle “thou”;
And all my happy dreams, at once,
In loving heart again resound.
In bliss and silence do I stay,
Unable to maintain my role:
“Oh, how sweet you are!” I say —
“How I love thee!” says my soul.

Russian — as with the French tu and vous or Spanish tu and usted — has two forms (formal and familiar) of the second person pronoun.

 

— Roger W. Smith

  November 18, 2017

 

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Addendum :

The 1960’s, a learned friend of mine once opined, was the Golden Era of American education. I would not dispute this. I experienced it in English and history courses, in foreign language courses, and in mathematics instruction. To get an idea of how low conceptions of foreign language pedagogy have sunk since Alexander Lipson’s time, one might take a look at the following article:

“Toppling the Grammar Patriarchy,” by Carmel McCoubrey, op-ed, The New York Times, November 16, 2017

my paper on “Platero y yo”; Luciana de Ames’s Spanish class

 

paper on ‘Platero y yo’ (in Spanish)

 

The short paper on the prose poem Platero y yo (Platero and I) by the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez — it amounts to an appréciation — that I have posted here (downloadable file above) was written by me in an introductory Spanish course at Columbia University in the 1970’s.

I have been a great admirer of Jiménez since my teenage years, when I found out about him from my older brother. He was reading Jiménez’s classic in an English translation and greatly admired it.

Platero y yo is a simple, semi-autobiographical account, written in the first person, about a poet and his donkey. It evokes the region of Andalusia and the town of Moguer, the author’s birthplace (which I have visited).

Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881–1958) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956.

 

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My instructor for first year Spanish was Luciana de Ames. I believe she was Italian.

She was gorgeous. It was an all male class. It seemed like the whole class was in love with her. I certainly was.

She was a great foreign language teacher.

I got an A in her course in the spring of 1974 and an A plus from her in the second semester of the course.

I attended a lecture in Spanish that she gave to the Spanish Department. I did not understand most of it. It was on the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo (1892–1938), who was the focus of her scholarly interest.

Her literary enthusiasms also included Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) by Gabriel García Márquez, which had recently been published. Mrs. de Ames raved about the book.

Mrs. de Ames was married with a son about five years old. I ran into her walking with her son one day in Riverside Park. She was eating from a bag of potato chips. She was very friendly and didn’t seem at all fazed by meeting me in a different setting.

She was a natural. Open and unaffected. Extremely energetic and enthusiastic as a teacher and scholar, a lover of language and literature — it was so much fun being in her class.

 

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Because of the energy crisis, daylight savings rules had been instituted year round. Our class was at 8 a.m. We would be gathered in front of the Casa Hispanica on West 116th Street waiting for Mrs. de Ames to arrive. She would always seem to be running down the street breathlessly, just in time, and would unlock the front door of the building, fumbling with the keys. It was always dark because of daylight savings, not usual for that hour in the morning.

Mrs. de Ames also liked the Nicaraguan writer Rubén Darío (1867-1916). She introduced us to Darío’s poem “Walt Whitman,” which begins:

En su país de hierro vive el gran viejo,
bello como un patriarca, sereno y santo.
Tiene en la arruga olímpica de su entrecejo
algo que impera y vence con noble encanto.

(In his country of iron lives the grand old man / beautiful as a patriarch, serene and holy. / He has in the Olympian wrinkle of his brow / something that prevails and conquers with noble charm.)

In one class, Mrs. de Ames asked, spontaneously — without there being any connection to the lesson — “Quien escribiò Hojas de yierba?” (who wrote Leaves of Grass?). I answered quickly, “Walt Whitman.”

The rest of the class had no clue as to the question. I didn’t either — at first. But it was the kind of question upon which my brain operates fast. I thought, “escribiò”: the word must have something to do with writing — escribir is a Spanish verb meaning to write and has the same root as the English word scribe.

“Hojas de yierba” stumped me for a nanosecond. Then, I thought: “yierba,” sounds like “herbs”; must mean something like grass. So the question must refer to someone who wrote about grass. (I didn’t know what “hojas,” leaves, meant.) It could only be Whitman. Who else wrote about GRASS?

Mrs. de Ames was impressed. So was the rest of the class. There was a bright, friendly law school student in the class. He was rubbing his forehead and asked me with incredulity, “how did you ever get that one?”

 

— Roger Smith

   May 2016

 

Postscript: I have wondered what became of Mrs. de Ames: what her academic career was like and where she might be now. I have been unable to locate her.