One of the most devastating outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic was the damage it inflicted on the education of children worldwide. As schools shut their doors and valued programs reluctantly halted, both kids and their educators were cut off from their communities and, for some, their places of refuge. In the following essay, assistant blog editor Edwin Alanís-García shares his experience working with one of these programs and spaces in New York City, a literary haven fittingly called Still Waters in a Storm.
The Traveling Serialized Adventures of Kid Quixote is a modern-day musical reimagining of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, of which the translators and performers are a community of young writers and thinkers ranging in age from seven to sixteen. To call this project “ambitious” would be an understatement—Traveling Adventures is a thorough reinterpretation of a four-hundred-year-old masterpiece of Hispanophone literature, being adapted into songs, theater performances, and even metafictional meditations on social justice, immigration, and the process of translation itself. It is a translation project years in the making, and the children were finally ready to present the first installments to the world.
Their visit to my alma mater was a confluence of the two literary worlds I’d known in New York City: the MFA program at New York University, and the sanctuary of Still Waters in a Storm, an after-school program in the working-class neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn. I volunteered at Still Waters during my last year of study, and was lucky to have witnessed the genesis of Traveling Adventures.
On a Friday morning in February, 2018, I took a train from Cambridge, MA to Boston’s South Station. The five-hour bus ride from Boston to New York stopped just a few blocks shy of the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers’ House in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, a literary landmark in a city of literature, and a space that has welcomed many of the world’s greatest poets and writers. It was a fitting venue for the Kid Quixotes. Though the performance space was smaller than some of the college classrooms and theater stages they’d been using on the tour, that intimacy provided a near theater-in-the-round experience. As one young performer described it, it felt more like doing a show in someone’s living room.
Friends and teachers spilled into the parlor. We sat close to the “stage,” a blocked-in area designated by the performers. At this distance, we weren’t just spectators, we were participants in a tale that began in seventeenth-century Spain and continued into twenty-first-century New York. The frame story begins with our protagonist (played by eight-year-old actor and author Sarah Sierra) being called to bed by her mother. Young Sarah wants to stay awake and read Don Quixote—she wants to become Don Quixote. In doing so, she adopts the persona of Kid Quixote, protector of the abused and oppressed. The dialogue is in Spanish, but quickly becomes bilingual when the scenes from the novel come to life. As she walks to school, Kid Quixote jumps into a scene from Chapter IV; a farmer is whipping a boy, and she cannot abide this injustice. What would be a horrifying scene of violence is reimagined by the children into an act of resistance, and the cruel farmer is made to look like a fool. Kid Quixote’s mission to help the downtrodden is set to “The Rescuing Song,” a plea and a promise to help those in need of protection. It is a song about belonging, and ultimately about “home.”
*
Still Waters in a Storm began in 2008 as the brainchild of Stephen Haff, a former high school teacher turned activist, author, and community educator. After growing exhausted and disillusioned with the authoritarian methods of teaching in public schools (especially in educating students of color—Bushwick is home to one of the largest Latinx communities in Brooklyn), Haff resigned from his post at Bushwick High, and began to hold Saturday meetings with former students, meetings which revolved around the practice of reciprocal listening. “Mr. Haff” became “Stephen,” and this egalitarian naming would carry on through Still Water’s pedagogical model of equal respect. Their initial meeting space was Stephen’s apartment; as the number of students grew, Still Waters moved briefly to a local pizza parlor, and eventually to the storefront classroom they would call home.
I was introduced to Still Waters by a fellow writer in my MFA, and my first correspondence with Stephen was a subtle preview of what the classroom experience would be like. Even through his emails, Stephen exuded a welcoming enthusiasm, and I eventually found my way to the one-room schoolhouse a few Saturdays later.
The schoolhouse was hard to miss; aside from the children running about the sidewalk, the exterior view of the building clearly marked a literary haven: the window display is a sample of some of the literary stars who have visited and volunteered (and continue to volunteer) at Still Waters, a who’s who of Pulitzers, Booker Prizes, National Book Awards, and New York Times Best Sellers. The classroom was set up as a cross between a conference room (no individual desks—the children and volunteers work together at shared tables) and a living room, complete with a couch and upright piano. Thousands of books lined the walls. The verb “love” was conjugated in Latin on the southwest wall (Still Waters offers weekly Latin language instruction to the kids). A mural/map of the neighborhood stretched across the northeast wall. I had to appreciate the symbolism: the history of language convenes in Bushwick between those walls.
Stephen graciously showed me around the schoolhouse, explaining some of the projects the kids had been working on, his patient demeanor complimenting the youthful energy bursting about the room. Stephen’s voice is gentle, nearly meditative—a welcome trait when working with children who often equate volume and aggression with figures of authority. (Even the word “authority” isn’t appropriate for the dynamic at Still Waters, where Stephen’s pedagogy eschews rote learning and authoritarian lecturing in favor of close, contemplative reading, and open discussion.) After the tour and introductions, the class gathered and Stephen offered a writing prompt. Little yellow notepads were distributed to everyone. We broke into groups—writing time is part of Saturdays at Still Waters. But the most important part is listening.
The Still Waters model of learning is based on a simple yet powerful philosophy: everyone listens to everyone. With the help of volunteers and their classmates (the older kids help out the younger kids), each writer shares their work with the class. The writer stands to deliver, and everyone gives that reader their undivided attention—no criticism or judgment. Depending on the size of the group, it can take an hour or two to make sure everyone is heard. The patience and care that welcomes each voice makes the process feel like a sacred event; it immediately reminded me of a passage from Simone Weil’s La pesanteur et la grâce (Gravity and Grace): “The purpose of teaching should be only to prepare for the possibility of such an act [i.e., full attention to an object/person] through the exercise of attention.” Weil’s account of absolute attention as prayer echoes in the spirit of Still Waters; everyone listens to everyone is inspired by the reciprocal listening practiced in Quaker meetings and Alcoholics Anonymous groups. My college education purportedly taught me to write. Still Waters taught me to listen.
I returned for subsequent Saturdays, including weeks where special guests would come and read to the class before everyone broke into writing groups. The protocol didn’t change—everyone listened to everyone. Celebrity status meant nothing to the kids, who often only knew the guest via Stephen’s introduction. In that classroom, the words of a third-grader were just as important as the words of a Pulitzer Prize winner.
Still Waters in a Storm is a sanctuary for so many families in Bushwick; to me, over time, it felt like a second home, and it was one of the main reasons I didn’t want to leave New York. In the months leading up to December, my group of mentees did begin to feel like family, like little brothers. We would meet every Thursday and discuss whatever we felt like talking about that day: history, philosophy, politics, science, or, of course, writing. And, without fail, my youngest mentee would annihilate me at Pokémon card games. My oldest mentee would come to my rescue when the younger kids would ask me for help on their math homework—unlike me, he was very much a math whiz. Knowing that, we’d talk about school and the possibility of college—opportunities that at one time seemed impossible because, being first-generation students, none of us were fully informed about our options at home or at school. We were the table of nerdy Mexican-American kids with big dreams; like Don Quixote, we were looking for ways to make the impossible possible.
*
In the Summer of 2016, the kids of Still Waters finished their reading and discussion of Paradise Lost, and we took a field trip to One World Trade Center and went to the top of the Freedom Tower, where Stephen read a passage from Paradise Regained. That summer, along with William Blake and Oscar Wilde, we also read passages from the Gospel of Matthew, specifically the Beatitudes, the blessings Jesus delivered in the Sermon on the Mount. The beatitudes provided an eye-opening exercise in translation: as part of Still Waters’ ongoing Latin tutoring and curriculum, the children were encouraged to compare the beatitudes across English, Spanish, and Latin. Then the children wrote their own beatitudes, listing things they wished to bless and protect. As we went around the room, a theme was very clear: the centrality of family, and the importance of keeping them safe was paramount. There was growing anxiety that summer as the political rhetoric in the U.S. became increasingly xenophobic, particularly to immigrants from Latin America. Many of the fears and concerns of immigrant families would provide the inspiration for Kid Quixote’s adventures.
The Traveling Adventures project began in the Fall of 2016—each student received their own copy of Don Quixote in Cervantes’ original Spanish. Many of the children at Still Waters are bilingual, though it was immediately clear that being fluent in contemporary Mexican or Ecuadorian Spanish was not quite the same as knowing how to deal with a seventeenth-century Spanish parody of Medieval romance stories. The meticulous—and fun—process of translating Cervantes across these disparate registers could rival many graduate translation seminars—and yet some in the group were still in elementary school. Challenges inevitably arose, e.g., phrases that made no sense in contemporary Spanish because they had different idiomatic meanings centuries ago (in such cases Still Waters was fortunate to have the help of some of the world’s greatest translators from the Spanish, including Edith Grossman, who visited the schoolhouse and generously helped the children translate some particularly tricky passages).
It was the difficult passages that truly demonstrated the challenges of translation as a creative practice. The Kid Quixotes were learning translation as an art, something that didn’t always have a clear or “correct” answer. In his recent book, Stephen recounts these lessons through a series of math analogies:
There are words that match each other precisely, such as gato in Spanish with cat in English, like perfect squares match their roots and can be expressed as a precise, representative drawing. And there are other words or phrases, such as the antiquated idiom from Don Quixote, “No ande buscando tres pies al gato,” whose literal meaning, “Don’t go looking for three feet on a cat,” can take us only to the threshold of its real meaning, and we, in English, can only approach it by approximation. “Don’t go looking for trouble” comes close, but it lacks the visibility of the Spanish idiom. There’s nothing to picture when you read that. “Don’t go kicking the hornet’s nest,” which has visibility but a different personality (substituting danger for mere fascination) also comes close.” (Haff, from Kid Quixotes, pp. 123)
This need for approximation created some lively disagreements. One notable debate was over the best way to translate the phrase “no desface” in Chapter IV, the scene in which Don Quixote defends the farm boy from being whipped. Desfacer is an antiquated Spanish verb that wasn’t in the Spanish-English dictionaries at Still Waters, but with some help from an expert in Spanish literature, we learned it meant to undo. Since desfacer is not a word used in contemporary Spanish, the children were unsure how to treat its negation: is the farmer saying Don Quixote “can’t undo” this injustice or “won’t undo” it? To illustrate that there was no definitive answer, Stephen’s math analogies extend even further:
We remind ourselves that the “no desface” debate in the whipping scene doesn’t have a clear winner, unless you count the ever-changing tally in our democratic vote during the performance of the play. As we go back and forth, at every performance, considering the state of mind or set of circumstances that allow or forbid Quixote’s action, we come closer and closer to an answer—perhaps infinitely close—but can’t ever be exactly right or wrong, like an eternal decimal expansion or that desirous curve that never will meet its match. (Ibid.)
In other words, the nature of translation is perhaps best modeled by the asymptote. As if this weren’t meta enough, the ambiguity that naturally occurs in language is quite literally a part of the children’s performance: since there wasn’t unanimous agreement as to the best way to translate certain words, that disagreement persists live during every performance, meaning the translation potentially changes for every show. Traveling Adventures was becoming a reality, and it was breaking down the barriers between genres, languages, and cultures. It had turned a Spanish classic into a living text, one part postmodern comedy, one part love letter to a Brooklyn neighborhood of immigrants.
*
The election on November 8, 2016 changed everything. There was no surprise on my end; I grew up in a part of the country where people still wear their racism and xenophobia on their sleeves. When I woke up November 9, my first instinct was to see the kids.
No one was playing on the sidewalk. The streets of Brooklyn were quiet, and inside was no different. People were in tears, adults and children. It wasn’t mere disappointment; some of the kids spoke of parents possibly leaving the country, knowing that it might not be safe anymore. Fears of families breaking apart. Friendships being lost. As always, we listened to each other.
In spite—or possibly because of, that fear—Still Waters was dedicated to getting back to work. We read Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus” the following week, like sowing the seeds of “The Rescuing Song.” In a world of hateful villains, the kids resolved to make their own heroes. The Kid Quixotes carried on with their adventures with a renewed spirit. Reciprocal listening—everyone listening to everyone—had become more important than ever. There was an entire world that needed to be heard. The Kid Quixotes faced an extra challenge—they weren’t just trying to translate the novel into English, they wanted to modernize it to the problems and concerns of today. With each new section the children translated, parallel topics were explored: Bullying. #MeToo. LGBTQ rights. Patriarchy and feminist resistance. Xenophobia and family separations at the border. The Kid Quixotes began a correspondence with children detained at the border, bringing these voices to the attention of Traveling Adventures’ audience. “Everyone listens to everyone” was no longer limited to a classroom.
By 2017, I was already back in small-town Illinois to be with my parents. I missed seeing the bulk of Traveling Adventures develop in person, but returning to the East Coast the following year for grad school allowed me to catch them in New York on their mini tour. That first installment of Traveling Adventures, the performance I got to see at NYU, ended with Kid Quixote being attacked by a bully (just as Don Quixote is in Chapter IV). And just like the children who praised and blessed their parents in their beatitudes, Kid Quixote’s protector is her mother. She still asserts that she is Don Quixote—she is who she wants to be, and not even her mother can take that away. But as the young hero falls asleep, her mother looks over her and says, “Dulces sueños, Don Quixote.”
End scene.
*
This past April, Stephen released Kid Quixotes, a book about Still Waters in a Storm, The Traveling Serialized Adventures of Kid Quixote, and his personal journey overcoming mental illness and finding a new direction in life. Likewise, Sarah (now ten years old) released Becoming Kid Quixote, documenting her life and how she came to play the role of one of literature’s greatest heroes. Because of the pandemic, readings were done remotely; recordings are posted on Vimeo. As for Traveling Adventures, the pandemic has also brought about an unforeseen set of obstacles. Meetings are now held via Zoom—and as always, volunteers are welcome on Saturdays.
I caught up with Stephen via email this past week. The kids are currently finishing their reading and translation of The Aeneid, and will return to work on Kid Quixote in the fall (remotely, of course). The sad news is that Still Waters will be losing their storefront schoolhouse in Bushwick—renting such a space during lockdown just isn’t possible. It still hurts to think of this change, though I remind myself that what made Still Waters and Traveling Adventures what they are was the community, the kids and volunteers who truly made that program feel like a family. As Stephen wrote, the word of the year is “adaptation.” If the kids of Still Waters can make a seemingly impossible translation possible, then perhaps we all can adapt to whatever comes next.
photo credit: Still Waters in a Storm
Edwin Alanís-García is a writer, philosopher, and cultural critic. They’re the author of the chapbook Galería (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019) and their poetry has appeared in The Acentos Review, The Kenyon Review, [PANK], Peripheries, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. They’re an assistant editor for Asymptote, where they curate and edit Translation Tuesdays for the Asymptote blog. A graduate of NYU’s Creative Writing Program and the Harvard Divinity School, they divide their time between small-town Illinois and small-town Nuevo León.
*****
Read more from the Asymptote blog: