Event alert!
I'll be reading from my translation, This Darkness Will Never End, on Monday at the Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts, home to Smith College. Here are the details:
Mon., Dec. 8, 6 p.m.
Forbes Library, 20 West Street, Northampton, MA.
I plan to excerpt a part of a speech I gave about Edith Bruck at Otterbein College in October. The title is, "The Age I Was When I Lost Everyone and Everything."
For more information, visit the library's event page.
See you there!
I'm reposting a version of an essay I wrote for The Boston Globe several years ago that contains some advice I still like to offer folks, especially at this time of year. It's an essay about the power of recording our loved ones' words, and the power specifically of recording my son's words and also those of my mother, in what was one of the last good recordings I made with her.
Be fair warned, though: "Sound gets inside of you -- it inhabits you. It can break your heart."
Here's the essay:
During a
weekend visit to New York last winter, I recorded my son’s impressions of the
city. I began by asking where we were. I thought he would simply say
“Manhattan” or “at the hotel,” but Leo, then 9, said, “We’re in a hotel in New
York City, in North America, on a planet known as Earth, in a galaxy known as
the Milky Way, in a universe known as the Universe.”
When I
became a mother in my late 30s, I wanted to do more than take photos or videos
of my son. I wanted to remember his speech development by preserving his
sounds. So I recorded him.
Jay
Allison, the founder of “The Moth Radio Hour,” once told me that humans relate
to sound in a way that’s distinct from other media.
“Sound
literally gets inside of you — it inhabits you,” Allison said. “It can break
your heart. That’s different from photos, which remain on the outside.”
I recorded Leo’s snores, his gurgles, his first words. Some recordings are filled with his guffawing as he watches TV. His belly laughs are a tonic.
Recording
has been a tradition in my family. My late father recorded conversations with
my sisters and me on a handheld tape deck. Piling into his den, we crowded
around his desk as he pressed the two large play and record buttons. Later, we
would listen back to the tape with glee.
Far too
late, I grasped the importance of recording my mother and father. If pure joy
compelled me to record Leo, pure dread inspired me to begin recording my
parents a few years ago. What would happen to their stories when they died?
Before
it was too late, I needed to piece together one bit of crucial family history
that had never been fully explained: What had happened when my mother’s younger
brother died in a car accident at age 18?
She
rarely mentioned him during my childhood, except to say that my grandparents
never recovered from the loss of their oldest son, whom everyone called Spike.
I only gleaned a few snippets about him during the adults’ cocktail hour at my
grandparents’ house: He had an outgoing personality and was a football star.
My
mother was 19 when he died. Now, in part because of my recordings, I see his
death, in 1957, as an event that has hovered over her entire adult life.
Recording
my mother’s words made sense for another reason: Video is for action, and her
action days are behind her. At the time of my last good recording, she was 83.
She sat down in her chair at the foot of the stairs, and, bathed in the glow of
a floor lamp, she lit a cigarette. She was game to talk about anything but the
present or recent past, which dementia had begun to scramble in her brain. More
or less housebound, she spent most days chain-smoking and dozing off, unsure of
the month or sometimes even the season.
Her
mental fog would soon force us to move her to a nursing home, but when I asked
about the circumstances of Spike’s accident, barely a second elapsed before she
began reciting a chronology of events. It was as if she was supplying answers
she’d had at the ready for decades.
The
accident had occurred during the summer. Spike was driving a convertible. A top
student, he’d been given the car as a graduation gift from my grandparents,
following his acceptance at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. He’d
been killed instantly when his car collided with an embankment and flipped
over.
The
funeral was held at his Catholic high school. “Oh God, thousands of people
came,” my mother told me. “Thousands.” It doesn’t matter that she’s likely
wrong about the number — it matters only that in her mind’s eye, legions of
people came to pay their respects to the luminous brother she’d lost.
It
wasn’t until months later, when I listened again to the recording, that I
discovered a moment I had overlooked. After the funeral, my mother told me,
they drove out to the cemetery, which was some distance away. At one point
during the muggy hour-long drive, the road curved, and my mother turned to look
behind her. And that’s when she glimpsed through the back windshield the
headlights of the dozens and dozens of cars following the hearse to her
brother’s final resting place.
More
than anything else, that image crystallized for me the tragic loss she’d borne
for 65 years.
Recording
affords us the ability to save not just our parents’ voices but their stories.
“People
would tell us, ‘I have a recording of my father’s voice, and it’s all I have
left,’” Allison told me. “It was an actual part of the person — it contained
his breath.”
In the
years to come, these recordings that contain my mother’s breath will remain
precious to me. And the little that I learned about Spike furnishes me with an
outline of the uncle I never knew and his role in my mother’s life.
This
holiday season, consider pressing “record” on your smartphone when you’re
around the table. The sounds of gathering — the voices, the stories, the
ambient clatter — will fill an audio time capsule you’ll cherish on some future
day when you’re longing in vain to hear a loved one’s voice.
You can also read the essay (with the full image of the wonderful photo they chose) on the Globe site:
As long as I'm alive, so are they -- in my books, in my heart.
It's a sentiment that resonates deeply with me, even though my life's story is completely different from Edith Bruck's.
I, too, will do anything to keep the memory of my parents alive. And I'm so grateful that they conveyed the importance of literature, and also that they signaled to me early in my life the critical, painful and cataclysmic moment in modern history represented by the Holocaust.
In her case, she's kept alive the memory of two souls who were cruelly persecuted and then executed by the Nazis in 1944. For more than 80 years, she's borne witness to their tragic ends.
And the least I can do, as a translator of her work, is spread the word about her work, and share in the toil in one tiny way by translating her short stories.
Publishing This Darkness Will Never End, my translation of Edith's first short story collection, has been the highlight of my year, and it's given me membership in a club I deem quite special: the group of translators of Edith's work. They are translators of work by an Italian woman author. And last but not least, they are translators of works by Holocaust survivors.
The colorful stories in this collection unearth a lost way of life: the rituals, preoccupations and joys of devout Jews living in rural Hungary in the years leading up to World War II. There are stories about the fearsome shochet who deems meat kosher -- or maybe not! -- and stories about the desperate but occasionally hilarious ways a poor man may attempt to feed his family.
The Holocaust looms like a specter in many of the stories -- sometimes only in the background, sometimes as the engine that drives the story to its harrowing climax -- but these tales are also testaments to the power of love and the primacy of familial bonds.
Her personal story is mesmerizing. Deported as a teen by the Germans, she survived Auschwitz and eventually made her way to Italy where she quickly mastered the Italian language, which became the instrument of her deliverance. She's published fiction, nonfiction and poetry. So treasured is she in Italy, Pope Francis insisted on meeting her and the two struck up a wonderful friendship.
At 94, she continues to write, dream, remember, share.
To those of you who have read the book, my thanks always. As you contemplate gifts for Hanukkah and Christmas, will you consider giving someone you love This Darkness Will Never End?
Thank you!
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What I’m reading:
John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs
It’s been a while since I have devoured a book the way I am
reading this book. I’ve been staying up until 11 p.m. reading it – not looking
at Facebook, not fooling around with the laptop. Just reading as much of the
book as I can manage – running to it whenever I have a moment free.
HOW TO CAPITALIZE ON THIS?
Am I reading the wrong books?
Should I be reading more biographies?
I think childhood -- and childhood obsessions -- could be the key to understanding my readerly swooning here. When I read about the Beatles, it's as though I am reading about someone I knew – as if someone wrote a biography of St. Anthony’s High School or Eclectic House at Wesleyan.
Growing up, I listened to Beatles albums a lot. Thanks to my uncles Joe and Pat, we learned about the Beatles as children and had the records. I loved the anthologies to start and then later Abbey Road, The White Album and Let It Be.
As a tween and young teen, I would obsessively listen to Beatles-only radio programs (for example, Scott Muni's "Ticket To Ride"). I studied the album covers for clues just as I was told to do so on these programs. And the drama of their breakup was something I felt keenly -- more than a decade after the actual breakup!
The book is also just plain fascinating.
As I wrote on the Goodreads site, I don't think I could love this book more! I am returning to my girlhood obsession with the Beatles and exploring in minute detail the inner workings of the Lennon-McCarthy songwriting partnership, thanks to this wonderful dual biography of the two Beatles. For anyone who's ever had any kind of Beatle worship, this book is essential. And what an interesting concept! Exploring this relationship as a one-of-a-kind partnership that eschews easy definition.
It's about friendship, it's about collegiality, it's about boyhood but it also confirms the partnership. I literally cannot put it done! Excellent work, Ian Leslie.
For more information about the book, visit the author's website where he details the genesis of this project:
https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/64-reasons-to-celebrate-paul-mccartney
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An academic in Italy read the essay I wrote for The Millions about learning to speak Italian and reposted it to LinkedIn with the most amazing comments!
She actually called it "un bellissimo articolo" -- a beautiful article!
I believe this is one of the few times I've read something in Italian that's commenting on my writing (outside of graduate school!):
Chi ama parlare, ma soprattutto vivere, una lingua riconoscerà subito questa sensazione: non è (solo) comunicare, ma anche acquisire una nuova identità e scoprire un altro modo di stare al mondo.
Translation: "Anyone who loves speaking but especially living another language will immediately recognize this sensation: it's not only communicating but also acquiring a new identity and discovering another way of being in the world."
How truly wonderful this is! Thank you, Gaia. Molto gentile!
Here's Gaia's post:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7358807293552971776/
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I took this photo one morning over the summer as I walked the streets of "my city." Firenze. Florence. The City of Dante. Also: The city of Jeanne. I'd finally made it across the river to revisit my old neighborhood and check on Piazza Santo Spirito, my old stomping grounds.
The morning that I took this photo, I stopped at Caffe Ricchi by Santo Spirito for a cappuccino and as I wrote in an earlier post about the trip, when I asked the barman there about a sign listing soy milk cappuccino, he said it tastes like cardboard. Old-school Italy remaining old-school Italy -- yay. The piazza was largely empty, I guess because it was all of 7:30 a.m. but how delightful.
On the way home to our apartment, I passed a throwback record store and peering into the window, I saw a Beatles album whose cover read in Italian, "Aiuto." Aiuto = Help. That's the famous “Help” album – translated for
the Italian edition. LOVE IT!
Anyway, this might be my favorite photo of Florence from this trip. It remains such a beautiful city -- especially if you're able to step away from the areas that are heavily populated with tourists.
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I was thinking recently about my Edith Bruck translation and all of the public readings I’d completed when suddenly I realized I'd only once said aloud something I'm constantly thinking, albeit in such a subtle, subliminal kind of way that it almost transforms thinking into unthinking:
I wish Liz were alive to hear about the translation
and the readings.
It’s obvious and with people we know well, we never have to say
the obvious. Everyone I know is aware she died two years ago on Sept. 6, 2023, at the age of 54, after a lifetime of illness.
But as wonderful as all of the readings have been and as
meaningful as it’s been to meet friends and family throughout this mini
book-tour, there’s still no denying that my librarian sister who lived for words and loved books even more than I do would have enjoyed the
publication of my first book-length translation and the attendant promotional activities. And I would have enjoyed any pleasure she might have felt over the book (Where ‘enjoyed’ sounds so trite compared
to how truly kaleidoscopically awesome it would have been for me to share this moment with her).
She would have asked me 1,000 questions by phone and text and in person -- the deadlines, the reviews, the details about the readings I'd scheduled, the questions posed by the audience.
She would have fangirled it up when I told her Elena Ferrante’s translator (Ann Goldstein) attended the reading in New York.
She would have read the translation closely -- far closer than it would seem humanly possible (a reflection of HER dedication to literature, her intense curiosity about the written word -- not the merit of the translation). I like to think she would have appreciated, somewhat grimly, the title that I chose for the translation, which deviates from the original Italian: This Darkness Will Never End.
But wait, there’s more!
And I don’t just mean the profound sadness I feel over her death.
I don’t even mean the gaping hole she left – my partner-in-crime for all things
literary (and also wicked thoughts you shouldn't say aloud and anything that reflects the ongoing conversation siblings, if they're lucky, share over the course of their lives).
What I mean when I say there's more: if I, who write often and blog regularly and admit that I more or less still openly grieve the loss of my personal Holy Trinity (Mommy, Daddy, Liz) – if I do not say how much I miss my sister in this instance, how many other people are going around this world with a similar ache that's rarely revealed?
It’s like I'm taking a walk or having a conversation with a bee buzzing about my face.
This bee’s persistent buzzing could be
translated as, ‘I wish Liz were here,’ or, ‘I wish I could talk to Liz.'
OR, ‘I wish Liz could have heard the question the man at
Newtonville Books asked.’
Surely everyone is like this!
If love (or actually hope) is the thing with feathers, grief is the one with talons.
And it's no one's fault. We stay silent often because it's more convenient -- for us. There was a lot to say when I gave the readings in the Spring -- why say more?
Yet it’s like a song that gets lodged in your head after you
hear it on the radio one day.
Visually it would be quite obvious: in a movie, they would
show the character’s face, maybe close up, then there would be a closeup of the
thought visualized. Maybe in my case, an image of Liz as she was attached to
all the beeping buzzing bleating monitors in the hospital on Long Island before she died. Then
my face again, outwardly impassive. Then another shot of Liz, pale, jaundiced, with a temperature of 93, days before the end. Then a shot, maybe, of my sisters and me surrounding Liz on her deathbed after
the doctor said, “There’s no hope.” (This was after he’d let us hope in vain, but I digress).
As I write this, I am perfectly calm.
So’s everyone you know who carries around an ache of this kind (or another kind).
The guy I call a jerk during a traffic jam. The annoying
father on the sidelines at a soccer game. The local official who makes a decision I disagree with (I don’t mean anyone specifically).
The inner landscape of each of these people could be exactly
like my own.
Now I stand at the podium of the conference room at my
public library.
Now I begin to say how wonderful it is to read at a library.
Now I say my sister was a librarian.
Now I say how much she would have enjoyed this talk with a smile on my face.
Now I continue with my remarks about the translation and appear perfectly happy to read from it because I am, despite being stuck on a channel of grief (because really and truly, how is it possible this translation was published only after its biggest supporter had died?)
Now I walk out of the library and talk with friends.
Now I go home and eat dinner.
And unless I am an aberration, everyone we know older than,
say, 30 years of age, is the same way.
(The percentage of those older than 50 who might feel this way? 500 percent.)
The United States of Grief. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization of the Bereaved. The United Nations of Sorrow.
Or simply what I never say.
And maybe also what YOU never say. All of our dead, all of our regrets, all that's gone. Weighing on us like a millstone and all you can hear is silence.
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Eulogy for Liz. Sept. 9, 2023.
I’d like to first of all thank you for coming – by coming, you tell me that you cared about Liz, and I’d like to thank you for that, too.
I am speaking today on behalf of my
mother, who is unfortunately not well enough to be here, and my sisters, Trish and Denise, and their families. I also speak, in a
way, on behalf of my father who left us just shy of two years ago and who never
lost hope for Liz.
We are heartbroken by this loss but
soothed at least a bit knowing she is no longer suffering – after so many
trying years.
I am the youngest in my family so
growing up, Liz was very much my big sister. But at some point, any authority
she lorded over me morphed into a friendship that was one of the deepest bonds
I’ve had the privilege of knowing.
It was a bond marked by shared
interests, including a love of books. Now we’re a family of big readers – beginning with my parents to my sister, Trish, and down to the rest of us, but I think she loved books the
most. Good thing she was a librarian! A job she loved, and a job she excelled
at. And even after she could no longer work at the library, she continued to
practice library science with me and I suspect anyone she knew, recommending
books and fiendishly listening to books on tape.
And I will also let you in on a
secret I’ve been harboring. While she often said she found writing quite
difficult and simply couldn’t do it, I think she would have been the better
writer and it’s one of many facets of what could have been, had the hand dealt
to Liz been a little different – or if the society she was born into had been a
little different. One that wasn’t so punitive toward those with mental
struggles.
As she put it to me one day, “I really wish I could write; then my eccentricities
would be more acceptable.”
But about those books and other
shared interests – like public radio and music and the New Yorker magazine – we
corresponded about all of these things continuously for the past 25 years via
emails, letters, phone calls and eventually text messages.
And after a while, I began
squirreling away the best of these missives with a plan to write an essay about
Liz. So on this day dedicated to her memory, I will draw on the correspondence
to reflect a bit on Liz’s life and on her character, which was truly
unparalleled, in all senses.
One of the most memorable of these
communications – and perhaps my first inkling that the text message distilled
her particular character to its essence – came on the morning of Nov. 9, 2016.
Do you remember that morning? I’ll
give you a hint. It didn’t dawn sunny for Hillary Clinton.
Liz, who perhaps like many of
us was still new to texting, sent me a two-word text in ALL CAPS:
“NOT GOOD”
Capital N, capital O, capital T,
capital G, capital O, capital O, capital D
What more needed to be said?
My apologies if I am offending some in the room but anyone
who knew her would know she didn’t support Trump.
It reminded me of some of the quirky things she did as a
child. Like hiding her flute in the bushes because she didn’t want to practice
it.
She often sent texts that I learned to recognize as quotes
from the authors she loved.
Like the Somali poet Warsan Shire who wrote a poem excerpted
in The New Yorker with a line Liz especially liked, and which she sent via
text: “Daughter, be
stronger than the loneliness this world is going to present to you.”
Through the writers and books she favored, one can trace the
existential conflicts she’s always battled.
She loved the essays of David Sedaris, a humorist who
nonetheless has often written about family tragedy including the suicide of his
sister. Of an article about his father’s decline, Liz said:
“At first his honesty is jarring but on second thought brave and admirable in a way. It made me reflect on the darkness within my own soul. Maybe that is what good or honest writing can do: shine a light on the parts of ourselves that we keep hidden from the world and sometimes ourselves.”
She also loved music. Her bedroom in high school was
plastered with posters of Prince and the Revolution. Her favorite Prince song
was “Controversy,” which contains the line, “I wish there was no black and
white, I wish there were no rules.” Not because Liz was rebellious – or not
only -- but because the world often didn’t make ENOUGH space for someone like
her.
One day a few years ago, she wrote in a text, “Just heard on
the radio ‘Bring on the Night,’ so I think I have a reason to live.”
What else did Liz love?
*“The Brian Lehrer Show” on WNYC; it was often blaring in
the background when I would call her. Terry Gross, too, because she unwittingly
channeled Liz’s profound curiosity about other people through her questions.
*John Lennon – she always observed Dec. 8, the day he was gunned
down in 1980, as if it were a national holiday….
*The British comedian Ricky Gervais, whose bold,
unsentimental observations tickled her.
She also loved Steve Levinson, who was her boyfriend for
many years before he succumbed to cancer.
And she was devoted to our mother, who is now in a nursing
home in New Jersey. Whenever I visit her, I listen to her voicemails and there
are invariably many, many voicemails from Liz, achingly intent on reaching my
mother, on maintaining their connection.
She was devoted to Buddhism as well, which will be apparent
today at this service honoring Liz.
I am of course mainly focusing on the positive even though I
know very well her life was marked by so many negative moments, so many
negative diagnoses, so many people who couldn’t help her adequately…
Which is of course tragic for many reasons but to offer one:
We in the family casually considered her the smartest of the
four girls.
Unfortunately, the chemicals in her brain were forever
unbalanced.
Liz spent a lot of her high school years in the hospital for
treatment for anorexia nervosa and was forced to leave college to go to a
psychiatric facility in New Jersey. They were unfortunately life-changing
experiences that left an enduring mark.
As she wrote in an email, five years ago, “The food can only
cover up a wound that refuses to heal.”
But food wasn’t her only medication – words were. And
connections to people.
She never took words for granted. She wrote to me about a
French novel she was reading in which, she wrote, “The narrator says that literature, of all
the art forms, can most reveal a person's soul.” And she asked, “So is the
writer bearing their soul because of some innate need to do it or are they
operating on more altruistic motivation to touch another's soul and try to
relieve their suffering through the power of connection?”
I probably don’t need to tell you that she herself was
READING the work of writers in the hopes someone would touch her soul through
words and relieve her suffering…
I’m not going to lie: there is no consolation in this death.
We sisters never lost currency with Liz, and she bombarded
us with questions.
In addition, she was eternally interested in all of her
nieces and nephews and always sought a closer bond with them. She was also
curious to the point of noseyness arguably about her brothers-in-law, who, coming from other families with different traditions, struck her as particularly
interesting and she longed to know them better.
The hole she leaves is immense. We worried about her health
for 40 years but I, for one, did not actually prepare for this moment because
it is truly unthinkable.
But I’d like to offer a palliative
to our collective grief.
I have learned in recent years of a
saying some people of the Jewish faith use when someone dies. It is an expression
that almost magically converts
grief into the pure joy of beloved memories:
“May her memory be a blessing.”
I will be leaning on this
word-formed lifesaver in the days and weeks and months to come and I say to
you:
May the memory of Liz be a blessing
to all of you.
Remember her and be filled with the
joy of having known her.
THANK YOU.
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During our trip to Italy, I was lucky to see many friends I'd known in Florence, but perhaps the most important meeting took place near the Spanish Steps in Rome.
It's the area where Edith Bruck lives -- "my author."
Indeed, Mike even arranged for us to stay near Piazza del Popolo during our visit to Rome so I would be able to to walk to Edith's apartment.
It was our third meeting; the first took place in 2018, shortly after I began translating, "Silvia," one of the signature stories in This Darkness Will Never End.
I spent three glorious hours with Edith this trip. Imagine if your 94-year-old grandmother was a famous writer. Over lunch, she reminisced, she complained, she repeated herself, she
smoked! (those thin cigarettes -- the whole time). But she also told me about a story (novel?) she wants to write – but
can’t because she’s lost most of her eyesight – and I wish she could write it.
It’s called “La Caccia,” and it’s about two journalists who go looking for the
last sopravvissuta.
Is that how she feels – like l’ultima sopravvissuta? The last survivor of the Holocaust?
(With only 220,000 survivors left worldwide, according to the Claims Conference, she may well feel that way).
She proudly told me she has a new book coming out this Fall! "L'Amica Tedesca."
She made some very interesting comments, including, “Quando scrivo in Italiano,
una parola partorisce un’altra.” That means: When I write in Italian, one word gives birth to another. She said it to explain that she can’t write now because she can’t see. And since she can’t see, she can’t put down one word and
then see where it leads. She said she’s always done her writing by using yellow legal pads
propped up on her tummy.
She and Olga (longtime assistant) were very kind and they both told stories about
Papa Francesco in great detail. Truly one-of-a-kind to have a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust with such close knowledge of a Catholic Pope! Beautiful friendship. They showed me a special
photo book from their visit to Casa Marta, where Pope Francis had lived, that the Vatican created for her (Editor's note: Pope Francis asked to meet Edith Bruck in 2021 to thank her for bearing witness to the Holocaust and to apologize for all the pain she'd suffered).
She told me she thinks about her parents every day -- 80 years after their brutal deaths in Auschwitz (mother) and Dachau (father). She even sang a lullaby in Hungarian that her father used to sing to her!
"Finché vivo, vivono loro ... nei miei libri, nel mio cuore."
As long as I'm alive, she told me, so are they -- in my books, in my heart.
And we spoke of the survivors who rarely if ever break their silence -- like her brother, who witnessed her father's death while they were in the concentration camp and told her what happened but tearfully begged her never to ask again. So she didn't. And she wonders, she told me, what were her father's last words? Was he asking about her? She'll never know.
If your grandmother was a famous writer ... I was spellbound! What a privilege it is to translate another person's words. I sat there combining all of my own identities -- journalist, translator, writer -- and grateful to have entered into a one-of-a-kind relationship with a writer like Edith.
Some of what I blogged about is so frivolous. My memento shrines! Whether the Crazy Drycleaner is still in business (in my old Florentine neighborhood). The barista who said 'Ri-buongiorno.' But this feels momentous.
Yes, there were happy moments, and sad moments during our visit. But mainly proud moments because we were celebrating the publication of "our" new book -- the translation of her first short story collection, This Darkness Will Never End, which has been a milestone for me, and a continuation of the flow of her works into English (three of which have now been published by Paul Dry Books in Philadelphia).
May it continue! I have translated most of her second short story collection, Two Empty Rooms, and even managed to publish an excerpt with Jewish Currents magazine.
My thanks to everyone who has supported this translation! (Including the National Endowment for the Arts). I've been touched by your gestures and interest -- a British colleague of mine at CNN Travel learned about the translation while we were chatting one day over Slack and ordered it from Amazon that day!
I'll continue to talk about the book in the Fall, including a visit to Otterbein College in Ohio where I'll be the guest speaker at a class on Holocaust literature. There will be some other stops, too, which I will detail on the blog and via social media.
The written word, the spoken word, the translated word -- a passport to a world of discovery, understanding and friendship.
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