What’s in a word—the hazards of language
The countdown has begun. In a few
precious weeks, Jonathan will depart his Mediterranean home-away-from home,
only to spend the next eleven months planning his and his family's return in 2016. With lots of hard
work, penny-pinching, and planning, the family will join him and “meet” their
new home.
Last night Jonathan said goodbye,
along with the rest of the village, to Anuh, the Bangledeshi man who has made
Greece his home for the past eight years. He has worked as an olive harvest
foreman with a team of his countrymen. The Bangladeshis have become Greece's Mexicans--the silent ones who make agriculture possible. The olive harvest begins in October and
continues from March, an enormous effort requiring hardworking gatherers. By
all accounts, the Bangladeshis fill that bill.
His Greek language skills are
more than credible and the two converse in Greek, as English and Bangladeshi
are foreign languages to one and the other. As in Hellenistic times, demotic
Greek is the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean. Anuh teared up as he
said goodbye to Kyria (Mrs.) Voula, and he referred to her as manna (mommy). “Mommy, I will think of
you every day when I’m in Germany.”
----
This is the first day of the new
month and the standard greeting is καλο μηνα (kalo mena, “I wish you a good month”).
The Greek language is rich with such pleasantries, which are expressed to
friends and strangers alike.
Last night Jonathan, whose Greek
is more than passable yet far from flawless, sat with a group of village
friends—farmers, fishermen, shopkeepers. One of them asked, in Greek, “What
will your daughter study at university?” The closest word to “athletic training”
is gymnastria (literally “gym
teacher,” from the cognate gymnos,
which means naked—which, in the ancient world, was the modus operandi of sport:
runners, wrestlers, and the like competed naked). Had he chosen this word,
everyone at the table would have shaken their head knowingly. Alas, Jonathan
used a similar word—gymnestria—and the
word elicited howls of laughter. Jonathan blurted out: “o.k., what, exactly, did I say?”
Gymnestria is a nudist--obviously a waste of good tuition dollars. Thus a new
word has entered his lexicon.
----
The spirit of Zapata
The old house, in its original
and marginal form, was built by a sketchy German man named Zapata, who became a
notorious local resident. Everyone over the age of 40 knew the man and his place,
so Jonathan has ceased describing the house location in tortured terms (that is: “it is located in the vineyard (αμπέλια—ambelia) outside of the village center.” More simply and directly: “I
live in the house of Zapata.”
The very name still raises
eyebrows and a wide range of reactions—from vitriolic disgust to cautious
admiration. For some he was a thief, a drunk, a lowlife, a renegade from both
Greek and German law; for others he was emblematic of the free spirit, whose
anarchic existence curried favor with a certain type of Greek thinking. Zapata,
by all accounts, engaged in small-scale thievery (stealing a foreigner's horse, for example, or helping himself to neighbors’ gardens, lazing about with galonis of cheap wine. If he were alive today he would be in his
eighties. No one really knows his fate.
Zapata disappeared several
decades ago, said to have been fleeing the law--both German and Greek. His illegally built house (on
someone else’s property) has since been legalized and utterly transformed by
your correspondent, with the help of local masters, friends, and his own two hands.
Jonathan mentioned to a group of
friends the other night that he has “chased out the spirit of Zapata”—meaning
the thievery, the drunkenness, the other dark characteristics. A woman
responded to that comment: “The spirit of Zapata was one of ultimate freedom,
because he rejected ‘civil society’ and government and institutions in favor of
the good life. Yianni you must embrace a part of that spirit.”
And so he does.
No comments:
Post a Comment