Only later did I learn that the words I was singing meant:
Oh you
big old world
Are you full of sorrow?
Tell me, just tell me, you mortal world
Are you over-troubled?
Only later, months and months later, did my ear pick out and recognize the meaning of Söyle, söyle—tell me, tell me. It was what I so desperately wanted to ask everyone that whole winter, “Tell me how I get through this, tell me how I survive?”
It began with my mother dying on a late December day in 2020. Winter had just begun, and the year was ending, and I hadn’t spent a single holiday or birthday with anyone but my husband and two children in months. We were in the middle of a pandemic. Travel was difficult, the threat of the virus lurked everywhere, vaccinations were not yet widely available. I wasn’t a person who had ever known how to stay still, but this seemed to be the primary skill I needed to cultivate in order to survive at the time.
I felt many things, but ultimately, I was safe. In the pandemic months leading up to my mother’s death, I translated a novel. It was (and is) a beautiful, heart-wrenching novel that allowed me to leave the circumstances of my life every time I worked on it. I entered pages that transported me to Angola, to Cuba in the 1970s, to ancient Greece, all while my youngest child, aged six at the time, met with his first-grade class through a screen and was often in the same room with me. The work was both an escape and a burden as I struggled to meet the deadline. I was tinkering, tinkering with so many words because I wanted my translation to convey that same sense of dread that we are all just marching toward our inevitable fates. I finally dispatched the manuscript off to my editor and, less than a week later, my mother died. I didn’t translate another book in the entire calendar year that followed.
What I did was study Turkish, a language with few, if any, grammatical or verbal similarities to any of the languages that I speak or have previously studied. I began the project with dreams of running away to a small Turkish village on the water, leaving everyone behind to clear my head and get a bit of space after a year of so much togetherness and so many emotional lows. I ended up addicted to the dopamine hit of Duolingo’s ringing bell every time I understood or translated a sentence correctly and I felt soothed by the meditative state brought on by puzzling through new grammar and agglutinated words.
In between, I filled my non-caretaking hours with the kinds of activities I always recommend to anyone who starts studying a new language. I found TV shows and movies and podcasts in Turkish to fine-tune my ear, and I brought Turkish recipes into my kitchen, too, radically increasing my family’s consumption of dates, eggplant, and lamb. I binge-watched the series Fatma in record time one week in early spring, despite only consistently understanding the words for “please” and “thank you” throughout, and as the summer progressed, I became a fan of Turkish romantic comedies, though I understood even less of dialogue meant to convey double meanings and sly jokes. Gupse Özay has now replaced, or is at least on par with, Peter Sellers as my favorite comedic actor. It helps that physical comedy seems to be her specialty.
Months into this project now, I still cannot comfortably converse in Turkish or do much more than simply write çok güzel (very nice) on a Turkish-speaking friend’s social media post. I understand slightly more now when I watch TV shows but still need to read every single subtitle. However, I have a world of grammatical rules and cases all neatly written out in my own hand in notebooks that I keep for my Turkish studies. I can get lost in these constructions in the way I sometimes used to imagine myself finally studying Latin in my retirement years, engaging in methodical exercises I can do from my sofa or my desk or even my bed. It is no longer the vision of a tranquil existence by the Turkish seaside that keeps me going but the delight that I find in learning the Persian or Arabic etymology of words I love both for their meaning and their sound (like kütüphane, meaning “library,” which is made up of the Arabic and Persian words for “book” and “house”).
To be clear, these months of grief have also involved meetings with both mental and physical therapists and a brief euphoric period of socializing shortly after being fully vaccinated and before realizing the reach of various variants. But the study of Turkish has allowed me a steady, consistent path to putting myself back together. On a deeper level, in seeking to incorporate into my days this language that bears no resemblance to the written words and spoken syllables with which I have surrounded myself for much of my life, I find a sense of connection to my ancestors. Not necessarily the ancestors that some family lore says were Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews who wound their way through the Ottoman Empire at some point and may have ended up speakers of Turkish, because we have never been able to confirm if that’s true. No, I mean the entire chain of my ancestors, going back an infinite number of generations. Their multiple crossings of land masses and seas whisper to me only through DNA tests, having gone mostly unrecorded otherwise. However, I do know that, somehow, they all ended up in Cuba, the country where my own mother lived and grew to adulthood, aspiring to one day be a teacher of French, that Romance language with so many similarities to her own mother tongue. Instead, she emigrated to the United States, where she found herself suddenly having to learn English as an adult and never quite came to feel that that the language was her own, despite having achieved full command of it for all the activities of her daily life outside our home. I suppose it is a bit of her bafflement in exile that I was channeling the winter after her death, when I felt so unmoored in the midst of grief and a global pandemic. I needed to scale the scaffolding of this unfamiliar house in order to find refuge inside of it. I needed to learn Turkish to understand how to survive loss.
