Fries With Mayonnaise

How I got to Belgium was a curious path, which then became more curious even over the years. It is all Professor Jeff Smith’s fault, sort of.

After I returned from my trip across Europe, feeling older and wiser and ready to go back to school, I decided to throw my hat into the ring and enroll in The University of Texas at Austin. However, due to some oversight of my own about admission dates, I had to wait out a semester. So, what to do?

Wooden Shoe Like to Learn Dutch?

So read the bumper sticker on the door of Andre Lefevre, Professor of Dutch at The University of Texas. Andre was a very odd, little man from Ghent, with a snarky laugh that scruntched his eyes shut and caused a tremor in his shoulders to vibrate up and down. He had a very weird sense of humor, which I later learned was merely Belgian, and had a habit of pontificating to himself, something I am wont to do in class at times as well. Like me, Andre would amuse himself to no end telling jokes that no one would ever understand or care to get, but boy did he have a good time doing it.

Knowing that I had to take a foreign language requirement at UT, I wanted to be different. I had really liked Holland and Belgium during my somewhat innocent tramping abroad, so I chose Dutch. I went to see Andre and convinced him to let me sit in on his class to see if I could get up to speed to take the year end test to start at a more advanced level when I was actually admitted to UT. Andre was an iconoclast of sorts and libertarian, so he said yes.

Once enrolled, I continued the Dutch with Andre, Marianne, and Hanneke over the years. However, it was the first year at UT that I took Jeff Smith’s ARH 302, “Introduction to Art History.” Art History had been my favorite class at my last school and Jeff Smith is an amazing teacher who furthered that passion. His specialty is Northern Renaissance and he can make it zing. He is also big on in situ study as he now funds as many students as he can to see the real things in the real places. As such, he convinced me that I had to see the Flemish and Dutch Masters fleshed out on canvas, and Andre concurred.

After graduation, I had decided then to go to Antwerp to study at the UFSIA “European Studies Programme,” under the directorship of Luc Hermann. Not only was it cool that I got to spell Programme like that, but it gave me a legitimate reason to go live in Europe as I had been itching to go back since the day I had returned from my summer trip a couple years before.

And so, I left.

I arrived in Antwerp and found a cheap studio. Cheap because it did not have a shower in the building and you had to go outside on a busy pedestrian street and go next door to use one there. My friend Max, who eventually moved over to the same building after the programme started, used to delight in shocking the Belgian by going out in just a towel and bath slippers in sub-zero degree weather for his shower.

Though I could begin an entire blog on memories of Max and that year, which perhaps I shall at some point, it was the transition of an undergraduate who had only read about paintings in class and seen slides and had studied Dutch from Andre’s self-fashioned textbook to a budding graduate student who would later insist upon teaching in situ when possible as in the case of the Study Abroad Program in Castiglione Fiorentino and a lifelong passion for studying texts and cultures in the original language as I have done ever since.

Andre Lefevre, a stalwart name in the field of translation was to be my mentor in Graduate School for my MA/PhD program, but he died at a very young age of 50 from a cancer that he had kept secret from everyone, but which went ballistic on his body nearly overnight. He lit the fire in me to study languages not as mere tools, but as living organism that shape a culture and through which we can reach a new level of understanding. In my classes, I share his simple message that language has a primary purpose of communication, for when communication fails, and the result is miscommunication, problems ensue.

Because of his untimely death, I ended up moving away from Dutch as my focus in graduate school, turning the clocks steadily back, going from German to Ancient Greek to Sanskrit and ultimately throwing them all back together with my love of the works of James Joyce, which then lead me to Bologna some years later, adding Italian and a whole new series of adventures in Bella Italia...

It was the year in Belgium though that my true love of learning languages took deep root and has shaped how I view each culture and encounter with another language group in my life. The art of translation became my passion and likewise my avocation alongside that of teaching. It was the inception of The Language Doc for all intents and purposes. From Andre and Jeff I learned that you do not learn about a culture merely by studying or reading about it, you have to live it. You have to go there and along with the locals, eat Fries With Mayonnaise.