alfabet / alphabet: a memoir of a first language by Sadiqa de Meijer was the perfect book to start–and finish–while taking the train from Glasgow to London and then flying back home. This pocketbook of 147 pages chronicled, in 26 essays, the author’s reminiscences and experiences as a child and new immigrant to Canada from the Netherlands. The single-word titles of each chapter began with a different letter of the alphabet and were convenient translations of Dutch and English words which also began with the same letter. Examples are kennis / knowledge and liefde / love. For the record, the sticky letters Q and X were for quarantaine / quarantine and xenofobie / xenophobia. I did find the overall connection to some chapter words to be a bit of a stretch.
I could feel the sudden shock and sadness de Meijer experienced when she first arrived in Canada as a young girl. Her group of friends was suddenly gone, and her beloved environment where she could ride her bike across bridges to explore canals was now transformed into a suburban Scarborough landscape where it was too far and dangerous to ride anywhere.
de Meijer revealed that as a native speaker of Dutch, there were feelings and deep emotions so rooted in her upbringing that she could never translate them into English. Thus Dutch is her innate “feeling” language. Yet as a writer now based in Canada, she admits that “I’m doing what millions of others also have to do: making a life in the other tongue, writing and speaking as if to strike new sparks between English and myself.”
The memoir is poetical, which explains why I needed to cross Great Britain, and then the Atlantic, in order to finish it. de Meijer has been a lover of poetry from a young age and she filled the book with her favourite Dutch poems and provided literal calqued translations for some and attempted to find other translators’ efforts to show the diversity in the art of poetry translation. I was thus immediately reminded of Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language. Whenever I encounter poetry the genre demands multiple rereads, so I always spent extra time going over each poem and mapping the calqued Dutch and English words, or looking at the ways each poet decided to translate certain lines.
Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue
