Found in Translation

1.

Not how I imagined meeting my playwright: I emerge from the stall, and there she is. Standing in front of the mirror, she applies makeup, then catches my eye in the reflection. We break into grins.

Oana?

Amanda?

Playwright, meet translator, in the most private public space of a building you love: the bathroom of a theater.

2.

I had flown from New York to Paris a few days before, still tweaked with jet lag as I watched the cooling gray skies from the daybed in my cousin’s apartment. The week before I arrived, Oana had flown from Cluj-Napoca, Romania, for rehearsals at Théâtre Ouvert with her French creative team and translator. They were working on a staged reading of the French version of Scenes from the Life of the Family Stuck, a play I had translated with my father from Romanian into English several years prior.

I had already been planning a trip to the City of Light to meet my cousin and see some theater, and when Oana told me she would be there as well for her workshop, I felt even more motivated to visit. I loved the thought of two Romanian writers meeting up in Paris, where so many Romanian literati and artists found inspiration amid the avenues, gardens, and cemeteries. The works of sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, dramatist Eugène Ionesco, philosopher Emil Cioran, artist Lena Constante, and more floated through my mind, and I felt a swell of pride in myself and Oana, two women theatermakers with our southeastern European roots in this city.

3.

I find my pride turned upside down, the whole situation uproariously funny, as Oana snaps a photo of us in the mirror. We laugh, and I wash my hands. “Translator and playwright in a bathroom” sounds like the setup for a literary groaner. But somehow the casualness of the space makes sense. My romanticized notions come back to earth as I think of the spaces where translation has entered into my life: the stage, the kitchen table, now the bathroom. Tender, messy, vulnerable places.

Happening upon Oana so informally, I feel as if I am running into a classmate, a neighbor, a cousin. Someone not ordinarily on another continent, separated by an ocean, mediated by screens and emails. If history and politics had taken another turn, closeness could have coalesced through physical proximity and culture. Instead, we found each other through drama, translation, and a longing for something just out of our grasp.

One last look in the mirror, and we walk back into the theater lobby.

4.

My parents met in Bucharest in the ’70s, two free spirits in the spheres of travel and politics. My mother worked as a press attaché for the Philippine embassy in Romania, and my father as a guide for the national department of tourism. One of the photos I have of them from this era, a glossy black-and-white, shows them seated on an armchair and couch in a lamp-lit, wood-paneled room decorated with framed landscape paintings of large trees. Dressed in business attire with legs crossed and absorbed in their own activities, my father reads a magazine, my mother takes notes. (Scholars—or nerds—through and through.) They married in Bucharest in 1980, and as the Ceaușescu regime took a darker turn, they fled to the States shortly after and made their home in Washington, D.C., and then Virginia, where they had first my brother and then me.

My father avoided speaking Romanian—or rather, avoided speaking to Romanians—when he first arrived. Too much trauma from communism, too much distrust of a surveillance state that forced family members and neighbors to report on one another. English was a new start, not to mention the language that he and my mother shared. Two kinds of accented American English filled our house, peppered with phrases from four Philippine languages and the occasional Romanian word. Not until I was 14, when a friend told me he liked my mother’s accent, did I realize that my parents sounded different from the people around us.