She worked as a housemaid, then as a laundress
in small-town Winnipeg, full of emigrés speaking
every language except for her own: She was Icelandic
and as she worked she sang the old Icelandic hymns
and songs: the songs had all her joy, they brought
all her peace. She kept reaching for the language
that got lost in her life. She could never speak it
again, although it always measured her breath.
Late one summer, as she lay dying, she sang again
the Icelandic hymns, sang in her mother tongue
another tongue for us; and as we lay her
in a foreign grave, we, who know no Icelandic,
who know then almost nothig of what she loved
and lived by, say our prayers over her in English.
Einar P'all J'onnson
translated by Thorvaldur Johnson and M.P. O'Conor
classification: social commentary
My grandma Stephania never put in articles, and sometimes left out conjunctions too. She said "you put a little bit sugar"
Mark, when studying the Russian-related languages (did you know Mark speaks a little Russian?) explained to me that's how Russian is, and that grandma must have transferred this to English.
We know these people, who left their homes and came to Canada
whose language got lost, and their children, unable to speak their language were
bemused by their accent and peculiar language structure, never understanding that language is a filter through which we see and interpret our world.
When I studied US immigration patterns, and saw the echoes of the same patterns in Canada,
I learned that the US became the melting pot, but Canada in leaving cultures and languages intact, was more of a fruit salad. But in immigration, every culture suffers a similar loss of identity.
