yaa ustaadha ghadeer! (w/ lines from Nemerov's "Learning the Trees")

Back in the saddle this week with Sunday's triumphant return to Arabic class!

Correction:

I've gone back to Arabic class. Let's face it -- after seven months and some major lapses in memory, my return might be characterized as anything but "triumphant." In fact, I don't even remember how to say "triumphant" in Arabic. Or "saddle" for that matter...

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"I can see you're still thinking in English," my teacher says this morning. "Yes," I say with a nod, but only because the first word that comes to mind isn't aywa.

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When I walk the dog around our neighborhood, I try to identify everything I can using Arabic: ground becomes ard; tree, shajaara; flower, warde -- or is that flowers? aSfar, azraq, aHmar, I think, yellow, blue, red. Hasheesh akhdar (green grass, although there's not much of that), masbaH (swimming pool).

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    Before you can learn the trees, you have to learn   

    The language of the trees. That’s done indoors,   

    Out of a book, which now you think of it   

    Is one of the transformations of a tree....

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A classmate returns after a six month's absence. She still speaks in full sentences: "this weekend my sister-in-law and her children are arriving from Seattle," she says (or so I'm guessing). "We're taking them to Petra."

Ahib atakallam 3rabi, I respond. "I like to speak Arabic."

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I don't like to speak Arabic. I like to read it. I like to hear it. I like to write its ever-shifting consonants and vowels from right to left. I even like to try to decipher its odd grammatical rules and syntactical inversions. But do I like to speak it? The answer is, la.

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    The words themselves are a delight to learn,   

    You might be in a foreign land of terms

    Like samara, capsule, drupe, legume and pome,   

   Where bark is papery, plated, warty or smooth...

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I'm of two minds, I hear folks say. Afternoons, I'm also of two minds: while reading my son classics like Brown Bear, What Do You See?, I secretly try to translate them into Arabic. I can get the red bird and black sheep, but the purple cat stumps me every time.

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I had a dream:

Move to Jordan (check)

Learn to read and speak Arabic (?)

Translate Jordanian poetry (??)

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    Still, pedetemtim as Lucretius says,

    Little by little, you do start to learn;

    And learn as well, maybe, what language does   

    And how it does it, cutting across the world...