Belgae, belgaeing, belgone! *

What fun! It was great to do this again. Learning a language is a great exploration. There is always a new perspective. While there were other things I wanted to read in Dutch, and one I was reading before starting this book, I had not thought of Belgium in 1933. I think that learning a language forces you to be more open. As I wrote in the last blog, books are marketed to facilitate judging them by their covers. It's harder to do that in another language. This is not a book I would have chosen on my own. Where Dutch is concerned, I have to be even more open than I do in other languages. Such material is hard to find in Southern California. I read whatever there is.

In some ways, this book was more challenging than De eeuw van mijn vader (My Father's Century). Kaas is fiction. Fiction assumes a lot of prior knowledge. There you are, suddenly in the author's world. By contrast, nonfiction assumes that you don't know. When I started this book, I knew it took place in the Depression. I did not know about the position of Flemish people in relation to Belgian Francophones and their fellow Dutch speakers across the border in the Netherlands. It was easy relating to Frans Laarmans, his hard work and his dreams of better things for himself and his family. Having started a business and worked on someone else's start-up, I can say that Willem Elsschot got the atmosphere of such things exactly right. The business world is a place where people go to reinvent themselves. It means membership in all sorts of clubs and artificial elites where everyone is glad to be there.

Linguistically, I made a lot of progress, but I tried too hard. I have kept listening to Dutch language media as I did before. I understand more, but I am not a fluent listener. Reading is much easier. Dutch syntax and verb conjugations are starting to sink in. I don't know every word, but I know what part of speech every word is. Still, reading in such a new language can be daunting. I agonized for a long time over Laarmans' name. After I was halfway through, I read over the inner cover flap for the first time. There it was.

Before starting this book, I had gotten about halfway through Bill Bryson's Het verloren continent (The Lost Continent), which I had read in the original. Because I was familiar with the book, I read straight through, as I would in English. Reading known material in another language helps you focus on language learning. Because I am a translator, I also noticed what choices were made in rendering Bryson's work into Dutch. I would not have converted the distances into kilometers. That was jarring.

As you learn a language, you develop some affinity for where it's spoken. Before I started, I found myself rooting for Belgium. The urge to visit came together with the need so many commercials have for parodies and my own background in advertising. There is an orthodoxy that says all vacations must have perfect weather. Belgium's current campaign to attract visitors is a disaster. I went to work and had a great time.

There were two commercials that never made it. I couldn't work them out, but one is worth mentioning. It featured a disappointed family at a ski resort. They would love to see beautiful scenery but are confronted with the mountain problem. Everywhere they look, mountains get in the way of what would otherwise be an expansive view. Long lines and high prices for bad quality ski resort food make their vacation worse. Both problems are solved when the family decides to go to Belgium. It's easier to see more of Belgium's flatter landscape. Belgian food is a major improvement.

From here, it's on to other books.

*The title of this post is a pun. It combines the Latin word for the Belgian people and what baseball announcers say during a home run. "It's going, going, gone!"

Top 10 Things to See and Do in Belgium

Well, this is my top 10. If you start learning a language, you inevitably want to go where it's used. Reading about places also makes me want to go there. In my last blog, I mentioned wanting to see the Mak family's Schiedam and Medan. Now, I would like to see Willem Elsschot's Antwerp. I would like to see a lot of things in Belgium.

• The Hergé Museum. Often, I am more interested in the trivia surrounding something than I am in the thing itself. I lost interest long before the end of The Complete Sherlock Holmes, but I went on a guided tour of Holmes' London, which started from where his address would be, had it ever existed. So it is with Hergé. I did not grow up with Tintin. Although I find the comics boring, I like the drawings. From what I have seen, the museum looks great.

• The Magritte Museum. This is not a museum. Definitely worth seeing.

• The Brabo Fountain. Going there would be the beginning of seeing Willem Elsschot's Antwerp. I would like to walk around the area I have seen in so many of Dick Matena's drawings. I would attempt to recreate the wanderings of Frans Laarmans. A beer and some cheese would definitely be included.

• A Baseball Game. There are lots of clubs. Sports are best when they're played for the love of the game.
  

• The Beach. I like to go to the beach whenever I'm at a place that has one. I have been to beaches in Scotland and Chicago. Even in bad weather, a walk on the beach is great.

• The Waterfront. I have always liked looking at boats in the water.

• Bicycling. I have been to Europe a few times, but I have never ridden a bike there.

• Waffles. One of my most vivid memories of Belgium is buying waffles from street vendors. We don't have anything like them in the US. Our Belgian waffles are just giant flavorless things that look the part.

• In Flanders Fields Museum How come the Doughboys became the Bonus Marchers? What can we learn from this largely forgotten generation? They were pushed aside early on. Why? What have we been avoiding all this time?
  

• The Royal Art Museum. Europe has so many great art museums. This is one of them.
  

Chapter 6

When you do something in a new language, you always hit limits. As I neared the end of De eeuw van mijn vader (My Father's Century) I overcame many limits and ran into one when Big Mak started quoting Lucebert. Poetry can be hard in your own language.

This time, I ran into Dutch legalese for the first time. While I was able to read past the redundancy endemic to the field, I was unable to understand all of it as well as I would have liked. It was some consolation that the main character, who had experience typing contracts, also didn't understand it until his wife pointed out paragraph 9.

Even so, I wanted to understand all of it. As you learn a language, it's like listening to a faraway radio station start to come in, or looking through a lens that finally starts to focus. When you hit your limits, the faraway station fades to static.

Chapter 6 is an extension of the book's dynamic, alternating between the protagonist's great luck when he's out and his skeptical wife at home. This time, he comes home with a great salary and a contract. He has missed dinner, and his wife is unhappy. He points out in the letter that makes up the book that he's experienced in high register Dutch, while his wife is not. Then, she finds a flaw in the contract having to do with how at the end of employment, he will not be able to make any claims against the cheese company. During this ego deflation, his son chimes in.

Every so often, we see the letter reader, and I wonder who he is. I remember learning that half of acting is reacting. The reader's reactions fit, but I wonder what he's doing there. Does he have a role later, or is he a stand-in for us?