Languages were not my strong suit in school. After three excruciating years of high school French, I switched to Spanish in college. My professor was a kind, chatty Peruvian who frequently spoke about her beautiful country and its rich culture. I lasted a year—the required minimum—and was glad when it was done.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to know Spanish. It was just that I hated making mistakes and loathed that awkward, inarticulate feeling of knowing what I wanted to say but not being able to say it.

Years later, I found myself (¡otra vez!) back in a college classroom, auditing a Spanish class in preparation for—of all things—a year in Lima, Peru, with my family. The auditing status made it tolerable; I was relieved not worry about a grade or fulfilling a requirement. More importantly, though, I knew that if I didn’t pay attention, I’d have a much harder time surviving the year ahead.

That class didn’t make me fluent in Spanish, but I learned enough to get by and enjoy the year. On occasions when I needed to be certain I communicated clearly, I called on my friend Celia. Celia was a native Limeña with impeccable English. She would translate my English into mellifluous Spanish, then interpret my conversation partner’s Spanish back into English for me, later explaining particular idioms and turns of phrases.

I mention this because Peter Meilaender’s essay, “Crossed Lines: The Importance of Translation in an Era of Growing Political Difference” (page 4), reminded me of Celia and her translation superpower. “Not all of us need to be such translators,” Meilaender writes, “but all of us should honor them, and we should want our public life to be enriched by their work as intermediaries, go-betweens, ambassadors.” I couldn’t agree more—and a decade later I remain indebted to Celia for her expertise and her willingness to share it so graciously.

While Celia’s work was superb, I was glad for the effort I made in the class I audited. Sure, my language skills weren’t great by the end of the class, but at least I had something. In those early days and weeks in Peru, Celia and others kept repeating one phrase to me: “Poco a poco.” Little by little. I still take delight (perhaps a disproportionate level of delight!) in remembering the first conversation in which I was able to follow along in Spanish rather than trying to translate each word into English, as I had previously done. It had taken months, but finally I felt as if I were floating along a river rather than paddling furiously just to keep from sinking. Friends and acquaintances encouraged me to have patience and keep trying, so I did. It made a difference.

The topic of David K. Weber’s column, “Buen Camino” (page 47)—a pilgrimage on the Way of St. James in Spain—reminds me also of the importance of taking things poco a poco. “With each painful step,” Weber writes, “the pilgrim freely chooses slow progress toward the fulfillment of the truly desired end,” And: “A pilgrim knows that the harder the walk, the happier the rest; the lengthier the fast, the more gratifying the feast.”

All of this somehow reminds me of Simone Weil’s 1940s essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in which she writes that not only is it acceptable for students to have no interest or aptitude for a particular subject, but that it can actually be advantageous as they pursue their studies. A student who doesn’t like or isn’t good at, oh, say, languages, needs to work really hard to try to understand the subject, and that work does indeed pay off, even if it’s not in the classroom (although that would be ideal). “Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul,” Weil writes. “Every effort adds a little gold to a treasure no power on earth can take away.”  

—HGG

Work Cited

Weil, Simone. “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in Waiting for God, translated by Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, (1951) 2009.