In Translation

Unbelievably, we make the train. We race aboard, scrambling to find unoccupied seats that will carry us from Florence, through the Tuscan countryside, to Siena. I collapse into an empty chair in a companionable arrangement of four, two facing two, and sigh in relief; my friend grabs a seat farther down the aisle. A late morning has almost cost us our daytrip.
Sitting next to me, a young businessman taps on a laptop. An older man, his hands folded neatly on a newspaper, sits across from me. I offer a quiet buongiorno and settle in to look out the window.
My friend and I are in Italy to revel in the ancient and artistic history. Working our way through museums, cathedrals, and ruins from Rome to Florence, we’ve been both humbled and renewed in the face of such beauty and antiquity.
“American?” The older man breaks the silence in Italian. “Are you American?”
“Si,” I smile. He nods, and asks more. Where I’m from, where I’ve been. I stumble through understanding his questions and forming answers—so much for the pre-trip Italian crash course. I love his country, I say, its beauty and art, and attempt to tell the places and things we’ve seen.
“Pittore, pittore,” he says, meaning painter, pointing at himself and then feigning the use of a paintbrush, swirling his hand in the air. “Come Caravaggio?” he asks.
“Si, yes!” I say. “I saw some Caravaggios!”
He digs in his pocket and takes out a cell phone. He hands it to me, set to view pictures of him painting, and then of his work by itself.
“You did these?” I asked with much hand motioning to illustrate my words. He smiles and nods.
Outside the windows of our train car, fields of sunflowers stream past in green and yellow, runny watercolors under sharp blue skies. To be able to translate that blurry view into art! Tuscany passes, looking just as I expected—the warm earth-toned homes, cypress trees on rolling hills, those sunflowers.
He continues to speak, asking questions. I’m watching for every arched eyebrow, each word left hanging in a question. I answer, but my phrasebook is no match for real conversation. The man is telling me about his work. I think. His son, he tells me, is a painter too. But he knows I’m struggling.
He sighs, shaking his head, and we laugh. Shrugging in the language of frustration—there, something totally translatable.
He leans forward in his seat as if he could more fully engage me by bending closer, and I could decipher his meanings from the air. We are concentrating. The businessman smirks, looking up from his computer, as he watches us struggle with the most rudimentary exchanges.
We sit back exhausted. Smiling reluctantly, we watch the sunflowers whip by, painted scenes outside the window, new to my eyes, familiar and inspiring to the artist.
We stop. He stands up, bows his head, and smiling, he walks off the train.