Estelle The Translator

Insight is the awareness of one’s own illness and/or situation.

This summary is as good as any textbook definition of this relatively amorphous concept that has completely infiltrated the fabric of psychiatric practice.

A man with Asperger’s comes to see me. He does not know why his wife wants to give up on the marriage; and frankly, neither do I. I explain to him that diagnosis carries with it the lack of empathy and inability to read emotions that makes the world so much of a puzzle to him. He is not a stupid man at all — but a distinguished scientist.

I have always been pretty good at translating. From one language into another was hard enough. Hebrew-into-English was my daily work in elementary school.

It didn’t take much to figure out that family relationships were the glue upon which everything hinged. Those sounded real and familiar as nothing else was in that time and place. I mean, water and sand were pretty dull.

I didn’t much like the woman-stuff but shepherding was obviously the only other way to make a living. And frankly, I never figured out how they went to the bathroom.

But often one word was equivalent to a lot of English words, so you get a “feeling” which words were correct and appropriate and make it sound as close as possible to published translation in a prayer book or Bible.

By the time I worked at translating French to English, both oral and written, I knew what standard educated English was supposed to sound like.

Translating French into the normal tone of academic English needed for a scholarly publication or discussion actually became fun.

I remember the glaring exception of a jovial biochemistry professor. Once he invited me to dinner at his house, as recompense for my devoted work. He uncorked a bottle of champagne for the occasion, bounced the cork of champagne off the ceiling. It struck him of the head and made him giggle a bunch — no formal loss of consciousness.

I remember vividly his dissertation on a pek of an asparaginase he had found which he alleged nobody had found before in a certain “mold,” which he insisted in his preliminary translation, was a “mushroom.”

The word “champignon” means both in French.

Oh the cruelty of it all! The hairsplitting discussion of Latin species classification (by Carolus Linnaeus, a Swede who spoke Swedish as I believe, few other than Swedes do).

I rhapsodized about the French dish of “Champignons al Grecque” or “mushrooms in the Greek Style” which I thought you could buy in any pork-butcher’s in France and I loved dearly, but I never seemed to scrape his Gallic self-esteem up off the floor.

Years later, studying psychiatry with the maven of marriage counseling in all of Wichita, where everyone (at least superficially) spoke English, I told my preceptor after the first session I observed (and minimally participated in) that it was the most difficult translation or interpretation session ever.

He told me that all couples knew whether they would stay together or not when they walked in the door.

I figured out this meant that they had decided what they would and wouldn’t hear.

Look at me now, describing emotions to a person with Asperger’s.

I still work as a translator/interpreter.

The only difference is that I have now moved to a higher level of impossibility.