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-- After the Lycéeby Rafael Rodriguez ('71)One day years ago we all graduated from the Lycee and its gentile ambiance off Fifth Avenue but we had yet to enter what we used to call the “real world”, some of us postponing this as much as possible by traveling to the vineyard or to Europe or to India or South America. Others took summer jobs and when the time came went to Harvard or any of the politically correct schools that the Lycee had carefully and over the years groomed us for. Few had been told in the Lycee environment that it is alright too not to be at the top of one’s class, that the real values are found inward and not on door signs... Some of us were in for a shock when the real world came about. Oh to be 18 again! We discovered New York together and quizzed one another on things like whether our parents would let us see the musical Hair, or Oh Calcutta! I saw Hair in Paris and subscribed like most of us to its Earth friendly humanistic values which are still relevant today. But this is about what happened after my time at the Lycee. Life spread us around back to the places that we had come from, or to yet new destinations, and because of my short time at our school I kept in touch with very few of the people that I formed friendships there with and that I have now the joy of rediscovering thanks to the work of les Alumnis. However some of my experiences at the Lycee remain as vivid today as they were the day when...how not to remember Professor Kieffer and his enthusisatic way of saying “si vous prenez le premier sujet, je voudrais que vous insistiez sur les points suivants..”, or Mrs Schecter our English teacher, and her ramblings about Cordelia and Tess of the Durberfeuilles (= D’Urbervilles) or when she asked us to write a paper on the American glorification of the myth of youth. These are unforgettable experiences as the Lycee environment prepared me for the transition into the United States after living in Europe through most of High School. The college years are an all American phenomenon where friendships are formed too and academic achievement becomes primordial in jumpstarting a career. I did well in college but I didn’t go to Harvard or Yale or Middlebury, schools that are so crucial to try to get our kids into today, I am not sure why, but instead, studied at local state and catholic schools where I got my degrees and prepared for what I wanted the most which is go to work. My first business card read International Procurement and Transfer of Technology, big words emanating from my short experience and an advanced degree in economics, also from the internships that I did on both sides of the Atlantic. But one day, while on assignment at the United Nations, my boss asked me if I had ever done translations, and I said yes, that I did some while in college, and some interpreting too, especially during the summers. I had even interpreted for Ms Universe when the pageant was held in New York City (this dates me!) But on that occasion when I was one of the many consultants at the organization they had forgotten to look for translators to handle a pile of documents almost as tall as myself and that were needed in 10 days. I got little sleep that night and for the next few, but was on the phone with friends in various countries, former colleagues in translation and all sorts of other contacts (Ruben Blades says in the song Padre Antonio that connecting one person to another through God is multiplied by ten - in this case it was through language.) The rest is history. I never looked back and have been doing translations, interpreting, teaching, consulting on conferences and occasionally other things, for all of 25 years. A friend asked me once during a lunch “Rafael are you still doing translations?” Of course, he too is doing more or less the same thing he’s done forever. Yes, I have made it a career to bridge cultures and to try to put out the fires of miscommunication, of seeing endless lists of words curiously juxtaposed to create something in various languages. The possibilities of alphabets with 26 or 32 or more letters are enormous, one never learns the whole list of words in a dictionary, though one may learn to say thank you in 100 African languages alone, for instance (one United Nations project printed cards with this.) In Love’s Labor Lost there is a reference to “a feast of words”... If Shakespeare deferred to Music, allow me to concur, and as we know, there are times when even no words is best and silence is gold. My inspiration, besides the need to make a living, came from my unforgettable grand-uncle and godfather who was an alchemist of words, of sorts, a lexicographer, a professor at most Universities of New York City and others too during his long lifespan of 97 years, and an author of books, often not without a sense of humor (Germanía en el siglo XVI, about the slang of the middle ages in Spain; An Injustice of Human Memory, about Samuel Johnson; Spanish Dont’s, about errors to avoid while speaking Spanish.) He was an amateur scholar of Shakespeare and of Ancient Rome, in short, he was the most fully realized person I knew, one who always had a reason to get up in the morning. Other things that gave me confidence in myself to start a business were also my own experience as interpreter and the fact that I had passed the UN test. I wanted to grow with a community so I went on with this business that started very small, on my parents’ dining room table, with my Citroen as the company car and Jasper, our wonderful Spitz as its mascot, to the big city of New York, six months later. I want it to go a second 25 years that I hope to see in this great Nation that my family came to many years ago. I have discussed mergers, buyouts and joint ventures but chose not to go public, sell, or take office space for any long period of time. I’ve mostly worked from my own home, whether it was the small piece of Manhattan that I bought, or my house in New Jersey, which I also bought and which was my parents’. Sometimes I have to get up in the middle of the night to touch base with some project in some part of the world. I’ve had to track down interpreters whose spouses tell me things like “my wife left Hong Kong two days ago and should be sleeping in her hotel room in Delhi at the moment, why don’t you try her there”! We’ve moved interpreters from Miami to Taipei and from Cape Town to New York; one time I asked my counterpart in Yaoundé, Cameroon: “How do you know that the interpreter received the plane ticket that we sent for her to travel to Dakar?” and he replied “Because I delivered it to her myself on my motorcycle, I am the guard at the airport.” The situations that arise can be tense, I won’t name the Presidents or Royals or less titled beings that I or my colleagues have met over the years because there are too many and this is par for the course in our trade. In some cases our work is with social agencies, although the interpreter rarely works pro bono. I have my favorite causes and charities, however. A plaque with the company name may still be in the language lab that we helped to start in a school in Florida. I wonder sometimes how much money we’ve made, total, perhaps better not, because it is the effort and the experience that count, and perhaps even more, the spirit that guides that effort. I can proudly say that there are almost three thousand invoices in the life of this company, which doesn’t sound like much, actually, but is still one every other day, there it is. Plus there are six missions for the United Nations, a Presidential Convention (also in New York), and Conferences at venues too numerous to list, on four Continents. Perhaps in the age of Global Warming we’ll be called to do a meeting in the Arctic? I’d like to think that I’ve enjoyed it, and that it’s enabled me to live and provide for myself and my family. I can say that at least in two cases I am working with the same organizations that I started with. In one office of one of these clients I have seen five people sitting in the same chair! Some of the people that I’ve worked with have become friends, whether it started as a client or employee relationship, making this business a beautifully balanced one. We’ve been together through grueling deadlines, like one Memorial Day weekend when the weather was gorgeous outside and I had five people in my apartment proofreading one another and translating away...(I’d rather not repeat that); we’ve also crossed many thresholds of what I call the technological continuum, remember the evolution of text processing?: from copies to scanning and from the Mac/PC chasm to the ease of File Transfer Protocol... and from endless notes on paper to the answering machine, to the beeper, to cell phones and to PDA’s. Yet today still technology has room for improvement, the computer is sometimes slow, and the email doesn’t get there and one has to carry the document oneself, like Parsifal with the spear that wounded Christ in the Wagnerian Opera. Since the classic problem of artificial intelligence is like “A cup fell on the table, it broke” and the machine cannot solve the question: which broke? I am confident that the human being is still quite needed to guide our planet and to decide what’s best, like arriving at consensus every time that good communication is needed, the reason why I named the company Pan International Conference and Language Services. Thanks for letting me reminisce and please do not hesitate to challenge me with any new project! |
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