Voices on the New Diasporas - an MIT student journal
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Words That Do Not Translate
by Athena Nikolaidou, Class of 1983
In the Greek language there is no translation for the word privacy.
When one travels in Greece, apart from the few pockets where people are all jammed together, one will quickly see that the entire county is empty or sparsely populated. In fact, Athens is where five million or around 60% of the Greek population lives. All these people are crammed into small apartments in a valley surrounded by mountains that trap pollution. One might think that Greeks live clustered together due to economic necessity, or that most of them live in small apartments because they cannot afford the luxury of space, but sometimes I think it is because privacy is a concept that is neither found or needed in the culture.
I had never heard of the word or ever thought about the concept myself until I was in third grade when an American governess came to live with my Greek family in Greece.
My first encounter with privacy was when Linda, our first governess, came to live with us, moved in and permanently kept the door closed. We had never seen a door closed in any room in our apartment except the bathroom; even that had a lock that you could open with a coin from the outside in case there was an emergency. In fact, her door remained closed the whole time she lived with us. It opened when she came in or went out of her bedroom. Then she taught us about a strange custom of bending your two middle fingers and using the knuckles to make a soft tapping sound on the door: it was called knocking. (Nowadays, the WB channel on TV is full of shows like “Seventh Heaven” showing kids with their own rooms, and parents knocking on the door to be allowed to enter their space. But back then we did not have TV. ) In the Greek language there is no translation for the word knocking either. When we need to translate knocking on the door, we use the word “ktypo tin porta” which is the same phrase you would use if you needed to “bang on the door” in an emergency.
We loved Linda, but she never invited us into her room. When we needed her, we softly knocked on the door, and she would open the door an inch and stick her head out. If we needed her, she would slide out, but never really allowed us to catch a glimpse of the inside.
During the first week of our lessons, she told us that every day during English class or at night, for homework, we had to record our thoughts and experiences on a page in a special book that was called a “diary.” She said -- and we trusted her enough to believe her -- that whatever we wrote she would need to read and correct, but it would stay with her and that she would not be judgmental. She even gave us beautiful diaries covered with flowers and which came with a fancy latch and key. She wanted us to feel comfortable expressing our secret thoughts and deep feelings, knowing that only we had the key to go back to them. Little did she know that most Greeks do not have secret thoughts since they are not afraid to voice any thought. But even if we did, even though we did not know the word or the concept of privacy, subconsciously we knew the lack of it. At the same time Linda had not been in the country long enough to know that in Greece there is no such thing as privacy. “DO NOT READ – PRIVATE” on the cover did not translate and besides, where were we going to store a diary anyway? We did not even have a drawer to hide it in that we could call our own. We kept diaries like this as homework for many years and I have kept some of them. As I leaf through them now as an adult I should not be surprised that they are full of tedious entries describing mostly chores and obligations, and occasionally some happy celebrations. In the Greek language there is no translation for the word diary. The word that we use is “imerologio” which means calendar or time planner.
The next new concept was “alone time.” After dinner my entire family would go to the living room where the whole family might gather. My dad would plop himself on the sofa in the living room with the newspaper while my grandmother would argue with my mother about what channel to watch on TV and we kids would play games and fool around with each other, or we would wrestle with my uncle when he came by. In contrast, Linda, said she wanted “time alone” and would go to in her room and close the door. We were all insulted. Were we that bad that she did not want to hang out with us at night, particularly after the fact that we had such a good time together all day? What did one really do when one was all alone in a room anyway, particularly at a time when books were scarce and TV and music in one’s room were non-existent? In the Greek language there is no translation for the phrase time alone. Instead, in Greek the phrase translates into “I want to be by myself” which comes off as an insulting comment on the environment rather than a need for an individual’s space, privacy and silence.
Linda and the whole string of American governesses served as a lifeline for me growing up. They were able to give me the words I needed to articulate something that had no words in my own language. But that was later. How does one cope with the need for space growing up in a family and in a culture that does not have the same need? And it was not only a need for physical space, like a diary or a drawer or a bed, but the need for mental space i.e. books where you can be in a world all your own, in silence and in solitude. I never thought I actually found it, but I made do with what I had.
Parents here in the United States go on and on with pride about how much their kids read. They buy them books. They take them to the library. Many times children even have a soft, comfortable chair in their room for reading. There is no such thing in Greece. Holding a novel in my house in Greece was like waving a flag to point out that a kid had nothing better to do Therefore it was a signal to all adults in an extended family household, my dad, my mom, my grandmother, my uncle, my aunt, as well as any relatives visiting at the time, that I was available to be sent out on various tedious errands time after time. First, it was a quick trip to the baker to buy bread for my mom, and then a quick trip to the dairy store for milk for my grandmother and then a quick trip to the drug store for some nail polish remover for my aunt. And when there were no more jobs left, they would sit next to me and try to talk. In most cultures when someone sits on a sofa with their face in a book, people do not constantly barrage him or her with talk. I always wished that I was driven to read newspapers instead of books so that people would respect that and not disturb me in the same way they did not disturb my dad. When I go to Greece today, my mother still does that to me. Last summer when we were in Greece, Niki, my ten year old bookworm, was happy reading the latest Harry Potter and all my relatives asked me why she was reading such a fat book. Was she depressed? Maybe that is why there are so few books published in Greece and why Greece has among the highest newspaper and magazine publications per capita in the world. In the States, I read in Newsweek last month, 10% of kids are on Prozac. In Greece approximately 10% of the kids are on Books.
During the school year I found physical and mental space with homework. That was the only way for a kid to be really left alone. Everyone wanted us to be good students and we were given every possible advantage to do that. Silence and solitude were found with homework. I could actually do homework and find space, or I could pretend to do homework and read other more interesting books, while covering up my books with textbook covers.
It was harder the rest of the year. When we were not on vacation at the seaside in the country, my father made me go to work with him every day during school vacation. We had a family business that manufactured and sold dowry goods (now called household linens). At his whim, I was ordered to go to the factory or the store. It did not matter which one I went to. I would sneak away and hide in corners observing the world, listening in on adult conversations but avoiding at all costs to be talked to since all the employees were trying to suck up to me as I was the boss’ kid. And when I could not find peace by hiding, I found it among the heavy machinery. My favorite job at the factory was tending to two large pieces of equipment that embroidered twelve pillowcases simultaneously. It was fun to be the creative designer and pick the designs and colors, but the best part was that for the twenty minutes it took for the machines to embroider the pattern, all you could hear was the loud “clang clang” of the machines. The machinery was so loud that it was impossible to talk while it was on. I could find silence in noise.
At my father’s store my favorite spot to sneak away to was the display window on the ground floor. The store had many floors and it was located on Egnatia Street - the busiest street in the Balkans since Roman times. A main avenue that cuts through the city and traditionally connects Rome to Constantinople, this was the wholesale district for other merchants and distributors, peddlers and gypsies from throughout Greece, the Balkans, Turkey and the Middle East. The sidewalks were so jammed with people that there was a lot of involuntary body contact; a man could sneak up to a girl, pinch a girl’s butt, and the girl would not know who to curse at. The display room in my father’s store was the size of a real bedroom and displayed the fanciest home furnishings. I would spend hours in the display room all by myself, just sitting in that room away from it all. Despite the huge crowds walking on the street and some of them even stopping to look, I could watch them and revel in the fact that I was all alone and they could not talk to me.
Many times, however, I found space inside my head. I developed and still have this magic ability: I can be physically in a space but not really there. I look like I am, I can nod and act like I am listening, but nothing is registering. In fact I am in a world of my own choosing. I must have perfected this skill quite well since my husband and kids can relate entire conversations that I have no recollection of while I was in my own space. In Greece my parents called it “absent-minded” and “daydreaming” but modern day therapists in the United States sometimes call it ADD, or Attention Deficit Syndrome.
Now that I am older, I would like to have it out with my mom who still cannot understand me. I want to tell her: “You crowd me and overwhelm me with your constant chatter, and over-analyzing”. But in the Greek language, the words “crowd” and “overwhelm” do not translate. My mother is the only person in the family that does not speak any English. For many years she tried to learn from my American governesses, but she never really made any consistent progress. She remains truly Greek.
