Memory of Translation

I still have my first book in English, A Picture Dictionary for Children by Garnette Watters and S. A. Courtis, given to me by Mrs. Woodward, a Block Parent volunteer who lived several blocks from our home on Norfolk Street. Though I wasn’t part of the program, Mrs. Woodward had approached me at school and offered to help with my English. It’s only recently, decades later, that I noticed the publication date of the book she had given me: 1939, the year of my mother’s birth. Which is somehow fitting, as if the book had taken my hand just as I was learning to let go of hers.

Mrs. Woodward was a slender woman with graying curls that framed her head like a woven basket. There was something ethereal about her—the quietness of her voice, her patience. And not only was her voice gentle, but the whole space around her, warm and still, exuded a sense of care. Her living room glowed with lamplight, the soft sheen of a chintz sofa with matching lamps at each end. The light gathered in this room, where it felt as if I had entered a cocoon.

We had just arrived from Croatia, my family and I, still strangers to the language and country around us. Once a week Mrs. Woodward welcomed me into her living room, where we read aloud together from the dictionary, a book that seemed endless to me as a child, floods of words rushing across the soft, pale pages. Today, these pages have thinned, their corners worn by years of turning, but this book remains the rope I had once used to pull myself from one language into another, from one life into the next.

At eleven, I had no idea what I was holding in my hands. When I closed the dictionary, the world outside the book was as foreign to me as the world inside the book, the letters my eyes couldn’t grasp instead sounds my ears couldn’t catch. Once a week, my mother gripped my hand as we walked the long stretch to Mrs. Woodward’s home with my three younger brothers in tow. The sidewalk shimmered with heat, the asphalt hard and unyielding beneath our feet, unlike the dirt paths of our village, where the earth gave way slightly, as if cradling us in its palm. Mrs. Woodward’s house, with its neat shrubs and lace curtains, waited at the end of the block. The houses we passed on the way looked like barracks, their shingle roofs so flimsy a wolf could blow them away. Cars rushed by, their engines sounding like alien roars. Barely anyone besides us walked the streets, and there were no voices or laughter spilling forth from the houses. What surrounded us was not the murmur of life but a heavy silence, as if we were moving inside an invisible bubble, sealed off from a world we had only just entered.

In this silence of the new world, the dictionary was a secret codex, where words and their descriptions were not random but alphabetical, each one tethered to the next, a world sorted letter by letter into a structure I could lean on when nothing else made sense.

But by the seventh grade, this joy turned to humiliation. Classmates jeered at me. “Look at her, reading a dictionary,” they laughed. I felt foolish and exposed, as if it was my efforts to fit in that had been met with laughter. I wanted to shut the book forever. A dictionary was supposed to be a tool, not a companion. But it had marked me as foreign, the girl still grasping for words that were not hers.

Still, I couldn’t let go. Shame couldn’t undo what the words had begun to do inside me. I carried the dictionary everywhere in my woolen bag, a zovnica, that my aunt gave me before we left our village in the Dalmatian hinterland. My father had been working as a Gastarbeiter, a guest worker, in West Germany and left from there for America; we followed him several years later, during the unrest of the early 1970s in Yugoslavia, when joining the Communist Party was the only path to steady work and the air was tight with fear. My aunt had woven the zovnica herself, and it was the kind of bag that girls made for their dowries, though the custom had faded by the time I was of age. Perhaps that’s why my aunt made the bag and pressed it into my hands before we left, so I could carry forward a piece of a tradition that was ending. Its coarse wool, still smelling faintly of lanolin and dye, held the breath of our home across the ocean to our new home, its stitched pattern of triangles and squares symbols of mountains and steadiness. Instead of linens, however, the bag held my dictionary, notebooks, and sometimes a thin sandwich wrapped in wax paper. I clutched the zovnica as though it were a lifeline, the way my grandmother clutched her rosary on the way to St. Luke’s Church. The wool scratched my wrist as I walked, a reminder that belonging was something you bore, not something that came softly.

From this children’s dictionary I graduated to a bilingual dictionary, where English words bloomed into clusters of Croatian meanings, each translation a small act of crossing over. Next came a slim book of synonyms and antonyms, my first glimpse at the ways words mirror or oppose each other like light and shadow. It was orderly and precise, a primer in likeness and difference. Later, as a biology major, I recognized our same impulse for order in the way we classified the natural world—the same branching logic I’d first seen in language—where roots and structures mirrored the categories and connections between things. And later still, I discovered etymology—a dictionary that traced words back to their origins, revealing the fossils of history buried in language. Finally, I discovered the thesaurus, which felt like walking through doors hidden behind doors that led me deeper into an enchanted forest of meanings.

Over time, English no longer felt foreign. It grafted itself onto me, or perhaps I into it, until we were bound together in a single voice. Only later did I realize that the children’s dictionary from Mrs. Woodward was the foundation. Time folds in the way of words when you learn to translate yourself; there are moments now when I forget which language I dream in, or which one I think in first.

Years later, crossing the wide green lawn at UC Berkeley, I saw a woman walking toward me with a woolen, handwoven bag slung over her shoulder, its pattern of triangles and stripes so strikingly familiar I stopped mid-stride. The colors were faded, the weave slightly frayed, but I knew instantly that this was the kind of zovnica my grandmother would pack with bread and water for a hard day of work in the fields, the kind that village girls wove for their dowries, the kind that had carried my first English dictionary across Norfolk Street and everywhere with me.

I hurried closer to the woman and asked her where she got the bag.

She smiled. “My mother received it as a gift from a young student from Croatia.”

“That was me,” I said. “You must be Gail.” I recognized her, Mrs. Woodward’s younger daughter, by her hair—she had the same tight curls as her mother. My voice squeaked as I tried to take in the distance those threads had traveled—from one continent to another, from one woman’s hands to the next.

The bag had found its way back, carrying not words this time, but recognition.