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104 pages, Paperback
Published March 1, 2021
"To my delight the section of the letter my father was reading was about me. He initially translated a word used by his brother or one of his sisters as "beloved," stumbled over the next word and repeated this...and then repeated this a second time. I asked, 'But in Hungarian is it the same word?' 'It means the same thing.' 'But what are the words in Hungarian?'"
Brief Postscriptum
At the bottom of a page, in the corner, right at the edge, Che Van Lien had made a note in tiny handwriting, with a red ballpoint pen, as though it were a rough draft. He had jotted down four words whose significance he explained to me while we were talking about the etymology and roots of words:
thu: letter
tho: poetry
I found that pleasing--as if translating a poem, for me, was always a little like translating a letter, both exceedingly distant and infinitely close.
[As] I sat at the ancient table beneath the blackened beams, it suddenly dawned on me that the stranger was not the other, it was me. I was the one who had everything to learn, everything to understand, from the other.