The Route of My Escape

Crossing the Talamanca Range for the first time, heading to Puerto Limón on a rickety train while devouring a mango, I watch vertical peaks melt into the Caribbean. Farther on, banana plantations settle the sultry valley once owned by United Fruit, like a page out of One Hundred Years of Solitude. “Oh, this is why I came.” 

Translation—the moving of text from one language to another. Too literal a translation loses meaning. Too transparent, the idiom goes native, and the original is at risk of being lost forever.

What feels right: bodies, words, places, posture, art, love.

December, 1980, weeks before I depart for a semester abroad, I read about four nuns killed in El Salvador. “There are no death squads in Costa Rica,” I tell my mother. Walking uptown to collect my visa, I must rest my 20-year-old body on a stool at a coffee shop. Trembling, I ask the counterman for milk, and then a straw when I can’t raise the glass to my lips without spilling.

My boyfriend asked me to remain on campus. “How will I fulfill my degree in Spanish?” I replied. In truth, I failed to hear the spirit of his words, just as he tried to ignore my loyalty to a dream, yearning to stand on my own, inside of a new country, a new language. A new self, this he got right.

Each act influences the next. Our bodies interpreted each other perfectly for a time. Then the narrative fell apart. It was a bed I never meant to lose.

A girl sells perfectly ripe mangoes in the square in front of the university entrance. She smiles when I speak the same phrase as everyone else: Ay, qué rico.

Traduce (like the Castilian word for translation: traducción) means to expose to shame by telling lies. A confidence trick, a betrayal. Un-truth. When Gabriel García Márquez was asked about the veracity of the epic scene in his famous novel, in which three thousand banana workers are gunned down, he swore of all the stories that make up Cien años de soledad, the United Fruit massacre was unembellished history. A story known to Spanish speakers, unheard of in English.

A 17th century Frenchman took the liberty, comparing translation to women: Translation can be faithful or beautiful, not both. Bastard. They are not the same if you have a literal mind. Was I not both faithful and beautiful?

Upon my return to the States the following winter, I give a talk en español for the Spanish Department, on Yolanda Oreamuno, a Costa Rican author from the 1930’s and 40’s whose stream-of-consciousness novel, La Ruta de su Evasión (Her Escape Route), was never translated into English.

When my ex moves in across the street to live with another woman, she befriends me. I accept her invitation in order to preserve my dignity, my cool, my face. Like Yolanda, I feel ill much of senior year and spend every Friday in bed, surrounded by books and the ever-faithful Larousse Diccionario en español. I preserve the context of myself, but cannot hold the center.

The word courage (coraje) comes from coeur and corazón, French and Spanish for heart. Take my heart. My innermost urge was to flee, to feel fear and then carry it across like a baby or a basket of mangoes to sell alongside a track. There was no station, no way to get down once the train had started moving, another mountain or coastal village beckoning a path to follow.

Jenny Apostol is a writer, an Emmy Award-winning nonfiction television producer, and a Spanish-to-English literary translator. Her essays and poetry have been published in Brevity, River Teeth Journal’s “Beautiful Things,” and in Haibun Today. Jenny is an MFA candidate at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. She is a graduate of Amherst College, and attended the Kenyon Writers Workshop, and lives outside of Washington DC with her husband and their dog, cat, hens, and occasionally, their two children.