Translating His Mother with My Own

The English word “translation,” derived from the Latin, traslatio, signifies the transfer of knowledge, culture, or power. It can also refer to the relocation of a saint’s relics, or the passage of a soul to the afterlife. I find this last definition most compelling—the translator as spiritual guide. In this role, my mother and I have ushered four plays, two novels, and several short stories from their lives in Italian to their afterlives in English. But last year, as my mother’s dementia began to take hold, the concept of traslatio revealed a deeper, more enigmatic power—a power I now hope to summon as Mom bustles around her small apartment in the Assisted Living section of the retirement complex where we recently moved her. She occasionally forgets having made this move, or that she is no longer allowed to drive, no longer pays bills, and will never again cook a meal.

“What shall we eat for lunch?” she asks.

“We had lunch.” I open my computer. “Time to work, Mom.” We have a contract for a translation of La Madre, a novel by Grazia Deledda, recipient of the 1926 Nobel Prize for literature. Not an easy writer. Not an easy novel.

At her desk, my mother is searching—her hearing aids? A pen? One of the many notes she scrawls to herself on those endless concatenations of post-its? She looks out the window, studies the garden below.

She asks again about lunch.

The bits and bobs of hours that have brought us from morning to afternoon now collect as an aggravation inherited, in fact, from my mother. “Life is slip-sliding away,” she used to say after one of her nights spent worrying about her research, her writing, a conference, a talk, the threadbare academic job market.

Mom began her career in the 60s, a time impossibly tough for a woman with three children and a degree in Comparative Literature. When she got pregnant with her first child, my brother, while completing her PhD thesis at Harvard, her adviser suggested she quit her studies. Later, when teaching at Wellesley while eight months pregnant with my sister, a colleague observing her class criticized her for sitting too much. When my father was hired at Duke, our family left for North Carolina. Mom, armed with one academic book publication and a strong teaching record, applied for a position with Duke’s Foreign Languages department and was told, “Many faculty wives take up pottery.” After more searching, she found a year-long, grant-funded position at North Carolina Central University. When that ended, my mother spent the bulk of her days in her study in the basement of our home. The Humanities: Cultural Roots and Continuities, a textbook still used in college classrooms today, was born from her sheer drive, anxiety, fear, and intellect.

As head author of that textbook, Mom contracted Dad and experts in three other disciplines to write chapters. I was ten years old the day the box of glossy copies arrived, their covers shining a collective beacon in our living room. Days earlier, I’d heard a news story about a car accident and a mother who had coolly lifted the side of the flipped-over vehicle so her daughter could squirm to safety. Mom’s book struck me as the intellectual equivalent of what I later learned is called “hysterical strength.” Soon after that publication, she was hired at NC State, where she taught for the remainder of her career.

The knit of her thoughts has frayed quickly during these last months since her Alzheimer’s diagnosis. The expanse of time she once yearned for is now too often spent pouring over junk mail, scrawling notes, staring at her computer screen.

“Yes, time to work.” She walks from the desk to her tiny kitchen where she looks around, perhaps for the stove, before opening the microwave to heat two cups of water for tea. Once settled across from me, she sips at her tea. “Here we are.” Her voice has become soft, unsure, not the voice of the mother I have known most of my life. The knit of her thoughts has frayed quickly during these last months since her Alzheimer’s diagnosis. The expanse of time she once yearned for is now too often spent pouring over junk mail, scrawling notes, staring at her computer screen.

Mom finds the marked paragraph in Deledda’s text and reads the Italian aloud, her voice reinhabiting its old firmness. My belly relaxes, my breath deepens. After I read the corresponding draft of our translation in English, she shakes her head. “No, ‘light’ is the wrong word.” It matters whether we translate lampada as “light” or “lamp”; ear pressed to the linguistic ground, Mom hears reverberations of meaning, connotations, the thump of sounds often inaudible to me. “The syntax is off, too.” We try out various phrasings. Here we are. Translation has slipped us through its secret portal, back to a world where she is, once again, my mom.

La Madre, a title we translated as His Mother after deciding against the more literal The Mother, or simply Mother, explores the relationship between a young priest, Paulo, and his mother, Maria Magdalena. This mother, who has sacrificed everything for her son and God, who has spent a life in drudgery, her days absorbed by menial domestic tasks and routines, now faces the deepest, most profound questions involving the nature of earthly and divine love. Forced to contend for the first time with her intellect, Maria Magdalena will reject the church’s teachings and redefine love on her own terms.

Maria Magdalena’s trajectory, an inversion of my mother’s, now resonates most profoundly with me.

I hold the mantle of the text—the broader context for scenes and paragraphs—while my mother stitches in the words and phrases. Returned to her linguistic origins, and deeply attuned to possibilities beneath the language, Mom captures nuance. I revise our draft and read our new version aloud. “Yes. Much better.”

The work is demanding, and once we’ve been at it over an hour, we must stop. Our places marked, she shuts Deledda’s text; I shut my computer. She sits back, closes her eyes.

After a few minutes, she asks me what’s for dinner.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you think,” she asks, that soft voice returned, “will be served for dinner?”