As I begin to refresh my memories of Waiting for Snow in Havana,I’m reminded of something I often observed in an extended segment of my own life: the period of time (almost 30 years) when I was actively involved in an immigrant subculture (Rusyns / Carpatho-Rusyns) here in the U.S. The group I was involved in had ancestral ties to the Transcarpathian Oblast’ (or Subcarpathian Rus’); these terms refer to a portion of western Ukraine which borders on parts of modern-day Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. I could give a lot of detail and reflect on many memories of my nearly three decades of involvment with the Rusyns, but that would mean branching off into something that’s too tangential to the topic at hand. I do want to make one point, however: memories of the Motherland, among Rusyns who had been born there and had come to the U.S. as children or, in a very few cases, as young adults were sometimes vivid but may well have been idealized and/or colored by nostalgia. As a result, I suspect that those memories were real enough to those who had them, but I also suspect that they may actually have been memories of a Motherland that never really existed. That is, those memories may actually have been impressions or feelings that seemed to take on reality over time. For the children and grandchildren of Rusyns born in “the old country,” this was definitely the case: the children and grandchildren had almost never traveled to Central Europe, so what they knew of “the old country” was their interpretations of what they had heard from their parents or grandparents. I suspect this is a general phenomenon among immigrants.

This leads me to a question directly related to Waiting for Snow in Havana: How much of Eire’s memory of Cuba has been filtered and colored by the fact that he has actually spent the major portion of his life here in the U.S.?

Dennis in Phoenix

The Cuba-shaped clouds that Eire sees may or may not be a consciously chosen symbolic device, but whether they are or not, the clouds suggest that Cuba is a a recurring element in how Eire views the world—even though the image of Cuba is, for Eire, ephemeral, shifting, never quite the same as before, and just out of reach.

The title also fascinates me for two reasons. First, I wonder what snow means in this contact; second, I wonder why the title in English (the language in which the book was written) and the title in Spanish (Eire’s first language) are different. The complete English title is Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, and the complete Spanish title is Nieve en La Habana: Confesiones de un cubanito ['Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Little Cuban Boy']. What significance, if any, is there for the fact that ‘Waiting for’ is omitted in the Spanish translation?

To me, at least, the omission of ‘Waiting for’ might have occurred for at least two reasons:

— Translating ‘Waiting for’ might have suggested that the book is the confessions of a boy who is living in Cuba (which is not the case).

— The translator might have decided not to translate waiting for because esperar, one verb used to translate wait for, can also mean ‘hope,’ and Eire doesn’t seem, now, to hope that snow (and whatever it suggests) will appear in Havana. Also, another verb used to translate wait is aguardar; it suggests that something is unchanged until something else happens (like waits in the English saying “Time waits for no man”). If that connotation is Eire’s intention (and I’m not at all sure that it is), then once again, what is the significance of snow and what could cause this “snow” to appear in Havana?

Maybe the above thoughts amount to reading too much between the lines, but then again, maybe they also make us aware that translation is probably more of an art than a science, and that direct, word-for-word translation is rarely possible since connotation, context, and shades of meaning are not overlapping constructs from one language to another, even if those languages share many similarities.

Further comments on my thoughts???

Dennis in Phoenix