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Keynote Address: Texas Foreign Language Association
March 30, 2001 Laredo, Texas
“Caminos de la tarde:” Language, Literature, and
Teaching
Ray M. Keck
Professor of Spanish and Provost,
Texas A&M International University
When we think back over the century we just left behind, irreconcilable
dualities and contradictions thrust themselves upon our minds: violent
change and entrenched hierarchies; unspeakable cruelty and widespread
compassion; liberation and enslavement; advances in science and
a loss of religious fervor; delivery from hunger and terrifying
famines; an end to smallpox and a beginning of AIDS; mass communication
for increasingly banal thoughts and events. The history of pedagogy
in the twentieth century is, like political and social history,
conflicted and confusing. In her recent book, Left Back: A Century
of Failed School Reforms, Diane Ravitch maps the black forest of
tangled theories and clashing constructs that have encircled those
of us who live in education and in teaching. In these remarks, I
hope to persuade you that, as teachers of foreign languages, our
fundamental task is in truth a deep calling: we are to foster a
change of sensibilities, a process that literature can first spark
and then nurture throughout a lifetime.
Two
examples of how we language teachers might consider our craft will
serve to mark off the bounds of traditional and contemporary practice,
extremes that I believe we should avoid. The first approach we might
call the classical strategy. We inherited this method from studies
of Greek and Latin, courses in which students mastered grammatical
structures in order to read a classical text. In importing this
methodology into the modern language classroom, we expected a student
to grasp for himself or herself possible connections between the
grammar textbook and language embedded in a living culture. I recall
vividly how, as a beginning teacher in the Fall of 1970, a fine
preparatory school in New England offered me a job teaching Spanish,
and proudly initiated me into its tradition of foreign language
teaching. Although we were encouraged to conduct the classes in
Spanish, the work of each course was the same: students translated,
translated, translated— from English to Spanish—sentences
designed to test mastery of grammar. It never occurred to anyone
that any of these sentences would ever be uttered, even in imagined
conversations. The grammar of foreign language class was calculated
to measure a student’s grammatical prowess, his or her ability
to manipulate formally correct patterns. Some of you will remember
these exercises:
If I were to have seen you, I would have told you to bring me the
book by 10:00 p.m. unless you were sick.
Or another:
I will help you provided that you let me know in advance of your
needs and assure me that I can count on cooperation from everybody
else.
After battling similar farrago, we began to introduce students to
literature and literary analysis in the foreign language. Again,
any direct connection between the literary work and “life”
was strictly left to each student’s fantasy.
Thirty
years and innumerable embroilments later, all is changed. Consider
the following admonitions, by Benjamin Robinson, which appeared
recently in the winter issue of the journal of the Association of
Departments of Foreign Languages. An assistant professor of Germanic
languages and literatures at Ohio State University, Mr. Robinson
urges that we become “practical service departments,”
that we “sell to administrators and potential students...
[our] unmatched ability to teach the foreign languages that are
necessary for international business, for cross-community or international
public service, and for research and developmental exchange.”
Mr. Robinson calls his model “ a freshman integrated language
and culture seminar,” offering “an administratively
practical way of sparking intellectual fires in foreign cultural
studies and solidifying the administrative standing of language
departments.” We must show, Professor Robinson tells us, an
immediate connection between language, business, foreign service,
and research and development. A “culture” course, not
the traditional one stressing language and literature, will fit
the bill, save us from obscurity or extinction, and enhance our
standing in the school or university.
A
“practical service department” will undoubtedly enhance
our standing in some circles. Our society most readily rewards effort
directed toward individualistic and materialist ends. Administrators
within the academy and employers without will enthusiastically welcome
the promise of language study closely linked to the modern market.
In his brilliantly written and vatic book, Jewish Renewal, Michael
Lerner describes this phenomenon as “empiricist epistemology”
and “materialist ontology,” organization and origin
circumscribed by the particular and sensual aspirations of the individual.
Spirituality and ethics are reduced “to a merely subjective
expression of emotion or personal choice.” Lerner argues,
I think correctly, that for modern societies in the West, the ultimate
test of reality has become “that which can be presented to
our senses.” It follows, therefore, that foreign language
acquisition can be of great use in making the sale, closing the
deal, achieving a thriving place in the market society. Foreign
language courses must provide access to the culture of commerce
and economic development.
Separated
by thirty years, yet widely representative of tendencies in our
field, the two courses I have described—grammar puzzles in
one, foreign-language-as-commodity in the other—fail to address
why I continue to study and to teach Spanish and what has generated
for me the countless exciting moments I have spent in solitary reflection
or with students. Many years ago, a student commented: “When
I enter your classroom, I feel as though I step into another world.”
For that student, my teaching had achieved what I had most hoped
to do.
A
foreign language offers the new speaker a new way to see, to feel,
to think, to be in the world. It shows him or her that life thrives
and throbs and pulsates elsewhere, arrayed in a very different manner.
Not better, not worse, just different. But there is no need to divorce
perplexing perceptions of otherness from larger human questions
of value and meaning. It is futile, and indeed a misrepresentation
of human experience, to think that we can speak or teach the language
of business and research and development, somehow segregating it
from literary or artistic contamination. All students enter our
language classes pondering the same eternal questions: Who am I?
What will I become? With whom will I spend my life? What is love?
How can I express it? Will I suffer much? If so, Why? Why does anyone
suffer? What is death? When will it come? Our task is to lead each
student to perceive how these questions are posed and answered in
another culture, another tongue, another world.
We
will teach best, and our students will attach themselves most readily
to what we are teaching, if we allow the moral and ethical dimensions
of life, captured in literature and in art, into the foreign language
classroom with us. In its writings, in its literature, in its art,
a culture enters into dialogue with itself, portraying, examining,
questioning, judging. “Numbered, numbered, weighed, divided,”
the mysterious hand wrote, defining forever the reaches of national
reflection. A systematic, careful, and intelligent integration of
art and literature into the language curriculum discloses to a student
multiple realities, harmonies and conflicts, lives lived at great
verbal, physical, cultural, historical, and temporal remove. D.H.
Lawrence has described the eternal restlessness and illumination
that follows an encounter with art:
The
essence of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime
and
recreation. But moral. The essential function of art is moral. But
a
passionate,
implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the
blood,
rather than the mind. Change the blood first. The mind follows
later,
in the wake.
To “change the blood” should be the goal of every foreign
language class. It is only when we confront moral questions, seen
through the lens of another culture that we begin to understand
that culture, that we being to acquire new blood.
Somehow,
as foreign language teachers, we must have used and then abused
literature, conveying the impression that our purpose was to make
of each student a professional critic. Today, Professor Robinson’s
“practical” strategy offers a market-sensitive defense
at a time when there is much criticism of impractical courses in
literature, much talk of relevant courses in culture. And yet for
me, and I would wager for most of us who teach foreign language,
it is precious moments remembered in literature—special verses,
powerful scenes—that moved our hearts, created new blood within
us, and made us want to give our lives to studying and teaching
the new world before us.
In
thirty years of teaching and studying Spanish, a number of texts
have fixed themselves in my mind, passages that I regularly remember,
re-read, contemplate, or visit for inspiration, guidance, wisdom,
or relief from life’s inevitable pain and despair. Because
they have helped me in my quest for answers, for strength, for joy,
for meaning, these texts have become intimate companions and counselors.
They have at various moments aroused, stirred, re-directed my passions.
It is these texts that propel me to continue to teach. It is their
continuing, mesmerizing effect upon students of all ages that convinces
me of our mission as foreign language teachers to exchange old blood
for new. As a useful exercise to re-focus our thinking and to rekindle
our passion, I urge everyone who teaches a foreign language to make
his or her list of scenes or verses, defining expressions of the
culture we urge our students to adopt. In compiling my own list,
I restricted myself to lines or scenes so central to my being that,
without consciously meaning to do so, I have committed them to memory.
The
list begins with two lines the “Poema de Myo Cid” from
the twelfth century:
“¡Dios,
qué buen vasallo, si hubiese buen señore.”
“What
a great employee! If only he/she had a good boss!”
Rodrigo Díaz, el Cid, has been mistreated by his king, exiled
from his home and family. As he emerges in the poem, the Cid embodies
all the characteristics still at the heart of Hispanic culture:
a ferocious sense of self, tempered by a deep loyalty, even submission,
to the king and to the Church. Fearless warrior, faithful husband,
tender father, reverent Catholic, honorable friend, dutiful servant
of his king. Our moral qualities and the actions they reflect are
not dependent upon how we are received by our superiors, by society,
or the world. Unfair treatment does not justify a betrayal of principle.
“Antes quebrar que doblar.” Better break than bend.
The reverse proverb exists in English.
My
next example comes from the fourteenth century. When Juan Ruiz,
Arcipreste de Hita, a priest, catches sight of the beautiful Doña
Endrina crossing the plaza, his reaction, in the Libro de buen amor,
forever reminds us of the inexhaustible energy, power, and beauty
of youth:
¡Ay,
Dios, quán fermosa viene doña Endrina por la plaça!
¡qué
talle, qué donaire, qué alto cuello de garça!
O
God! How beautiful Doña Endrina is, coming across the plaza!
What
a figure! What grace! What a long, slender throat, like a heron’s!
I have often thought of these lines to remind myself that life forever
renews itself in vigorous and beautiful youth. But a scrutiny of
these lines discloses another fundamental obstacle to human understanding,
a fundamental task for the language teacher. The poetic power of
the image, doña Endrina’s “alto cuello de garça,”
so immediate and provocative in Spanish, descends in translation
to the very unpoetic, almost comic invocation of a heron. Our culture
determines our sense of the beautiful, a central truth any language
teacher will strive to demonstrate (show, not tell) in every possible
way.
Next,
from the fifteenth century, a moment in which a young man, riding
through the mountains, comes upon a beautiful young rancherita.
The poem is one of a series called serranillas, by the Marqués
de Santillana.
Moça
tan fermosa
non
ví en la frontera,
como
una vaquera
de
la Finojosa.
Such
a beautiful girl
I
never saw along the border
like
that cowgirl
from
la Finojosa.
Although la Finojosa rejects her errant suitor, and he rides away
disappointed, the memory of that moment, of her beauty, remains
with him and with us forever.
From
the early sixteenth century, Juan Boscán captures in three
short lines the joy and pain of a lover rejected.
Si
no os hubiera mirado,
no
penara;
pero
tampoco os mirara.
If
I hadn’t seen you, there would have been no pain.
But
neither would I have seen you!
Sadder than the pain of love would be the emptiness of never having
loved.
From
the sixteenth century, Spain’s Goldern Age of art and literature,
one famous verse from San Juan de la Cruz. In the midst of life’s
fever, the simple joys, San Juan reminds us, are what keep us from
despair, the daily repetition of
la
cena que recrea y enamora.
the
supper that restores life and love
I often think of these lines as I am on my way home in the evening.
No stresses in our professional or public lives can dim the simple
joy of returning home.
Santa
Teresa de Avila left magnificent books of mysticism, guides to prayer.
But she penned a few poems. This one is surely as beautiful and
simple a prayer as was ever written.
Nada
te turbe,
nada
te espante,
todo
se pasa,
Dios
no se muda.
La
paciencia
todo
lo alzanca.
Quien
a Dios tiene
nada
le falta.
Sólo
Dios basta.
Let
nothing upset you,
nothing
frighten you,
all
is passing,
God
is not moved.
Patience
accomplishes all things.
He
who is with God
lacks
for nothing.
Only
God is enough.
Occasionally,
a passage has left me ravaged by its musicality, the sheer beauty
of sound and image. Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer coupled to those
incomparable sounds a powerful depiction of love’s folly,
of the pain and pleasure of memory, of the incomparable mystery
of time. This poem a masterpiece for all time.
Volverán
las oscuras golondrinas
en
tu balcón sus nidos a colgar;
y
otra vez, con sus alas a tus cristales
jugando
llamarán.
Pero
aquéllas que el vuelo refrenaban
Tu
hermosura y mi dicha contemplar,
Aquéllas
que aprendieron nuestros nombres...
Esas...
¡no volverán!
Returning
again the dark swallows
will
hang their nests on your balcony
and
again, they will tap their wings playfully
against
the glass.
But
those who paused in flight
to
contemplate your beauty and my happiness,
Those
who learned our names...
Those....
will not return!
García
Lorca, thought by many to be Spain’s greatest poet of the
twentieth century, left a book of verses that has held me in a state
of wonder and awe for nearly forty years..... El romancero gitano...
The Gypsy Ballads. This little book spreads before us unique portraits
of human sensibilities, a gallery of life in southern Spain. The
book begins with a haunting ballad of how a little boy imagines,
and then encounters, death. In ballads that follow, we experience
with a young gypsy her frightening transition from girl to woman,
her first intimations of the hunger and violence that accompany
sexual passion. In another, a young gypsy nun, living in supposed
renunciation of the world, finds her conventual space adorned with
brilliant colors, redolent of sensual odors, hung with vibrant embroideries.
Her heart quickens as she sees dashing young men on horseback outside
her convent. All five senses tease and tempt her. Sexual longings,
like “rivers made to stand on end,” illuminated by the
light of “twenty suns,” beckon to her. The gypsy nun
hesitates momentarily, then sighs and continues quietly to sew as
patterns of light and shadow seem to play a game of chess for her
soul. For the Hispanic experience of life, our bodies and spirits
strive in perpetual conflict.
Our
next gypsy portrait depicts a young man, handsome and well-dressed,
a bit of a dandy, dying as his cousins knife him to death, perhaps
because he doesn’t fight like a man. Lorca hints that the
cousins may be jealous of this cousin, too cute and too gentle.
As the beautiful young man falls dead, Lorca captures in a description
of Antoñito’s profile against the sky one of the most
widely held convictions of Hispanic culture: each human being plays
a unique, unrepeatable part in the human story.
Tres
golpes de sangre tuvo
y
se murió de perfil.
Viva
moneda que nunca
se
volverá a repetir.
Three
bloody blows he took
and
died on his back, his profile raised.
Living
coin that will never be struck again.
From
Antonio Machado, in the twentieth century, what for me is perhaps
the most mysterious and haunting of all lines of Spanish poetry.
Evening is falling, and the poet is walking along, with his feet
on the Spanish countryside, his soul wandering through life.
Yo
voy soñando caminos
de
la tarde. ¡Las colinas
doradas,
los verdes pinos,
las
polvorientas encinas!...
¿Adónde
irá el camino?
Yo
voy cantando, viajero
a
lo largo del sendero...
—La
tarde cayendo está—.
I
dream my way
down
evening roads.
Gold
hills, green pines,
and
dusty oaks...
Where
can the road be leading?
I
sing my way along,
the
road stretches away,
evening
is coming on. (Tr. Alan S. Trueblood)
Machado’s lines capture a mystery felt throughout Hispanic
culture— greatest confusion and greatest lucidity—a
dreamlike walk down a dimly lit road.
Finally,
and most profoundly, from Don Quijote, two parallel declarations,
one at the beginning of the work, in Part I, the other near the
end of Part II. Taken together, they are the clearest possible statement
of the Hispanic conviction that we are who we are by dint of our
will, our desire, our deeds.
In
the first scene, Don Quijote, quite mad, lies beaten on the ground.
A friendly neighbor and laborer, Pedro Alonso, comes along and puts
the broken-up body of his friend on his donkey, and leads Don Quijote,
Alonso Quijana, home. Along the way, the mad knight imagines himself
and Pedro Alonso characters in a famous Moorish tale of love.. The
startled peasant corrects Don Qujote: I am only Pedro Alonso, he
insists, and you are my neighbor, Señor Quijana. Don Quijote
protests:
Yo sé quién soy, y sé que puedo ser no sólo
los que he dicho, sino todos los Doce Pares de Francia...”
I know how I am, and I can be not just the ones I have named, but
all the Twelve Peers of France.
In
Part II, Sancho finally gets his island to govern. After many cruel
tricks played on him by the islanders, Sancho recognizes the difference
between who he is and who he has imagined himself to be. He renounces
his governorship and embraces the simple life he has known and the
person he truly is—Sancho Panza.
Abrid camino, señores míos, y dejadme volver a mi
antigua libertad; dejadme que vaya a buscar la vida pasada.....
yo no nací para ser gobernador.
Make way, my lords, and let me return to my former freedom; let
me leave in search of the life I once had. I was not born to be
a governor.
The
first, by affirmation, the second by negation, both scenes affirm
the central theme of Cervantes’s masterpiece and a central
truth of the Hispanic tradition: we choose who we are to be. By
an act of our will, we forge our true selves. Each of the above
lines of poetry, and the two scenes in Don Quijote have, over many,
many years, reminded me of love, of pain, of beauty, of mysteries
I can never fully comprehend, of the ineffable gift of freedom to
craft my life, to discover and then to become the unique person
that I choose to be. These texts hold before us depictions of the
Hispanic experience of life, unique gifts for all humanity.
But
what of grammar? I began these remarks with a description of the
extreme position, the method we inherited from classical studies.
While it is clear that we must devise another strategy, one suited
to a spoken language, we must not fall under sway of the grammarphobes.
In the study of modern languages, we do our students an unspeakable
disservice if we allow ourselves to be persuaded that, because we
are teaching a living, breathing language, we must quickly skip
over grammar studies, or even more insidiously, we must go at it
little by little , give a student time to “become comfortable
with the language,” introduce grammar slowly so as not to
bore or discourage our audience. A recently popular, graduated series
for middle school and high school classes in Spanish and in French
followed this approach, emphasizing so-called direct communication,
keeping students in the present tense for much of the first year.
They may have felt good about it all, but those classes were babbling
baby talk.
Grammar
maps the partially-logical structure upon which language is built.
Amid tragic and unending disorder in the human family, grammar conveys
linguistic order, allowing any part of the human family to share
in the language and hence the experiences of another. We teachers
must decide which points are indispensable for coherent exchange,
and emphasize them from the first moments of study. In Spanish,
I have learned that mastery of the verb system forms the axis around
which the language spins. A first-year, non-native student of Spanish
should be well into the irregular preterites by November. If they
are not memorized absolutely and without hesitation, that student
will never achieve more than a shaky hold on the language. If a
native speaker does not master the verb system, teaching subtle
nuances of the subjunctive will prove an almost impossible task.
Perhaps
the study of grammar would not have suffered such pitiless rejection
in our time if we had been a bit more inventive and connected, from
the first days of the first year, our grammar lessons to great and
accessible works of literature, short pieces of immediate appeal
to be repeated and memorized, crucial first steps toward apprehending
what and how life can be in another tongue. In Spanish, as my earlier
remarks have probably suggested, poetry offers itself as our great
ally in conveying, beginning in the first month of the first year,
a deep feeling for how culture and language are one.
Whatever
the language you teach, I am sure you can harness great poetry in
the service of beginning language studies. In Spanish, both Antonio
Machado and Federico García Lorca have written many exquisite
poems in which all verbs are in the present tense, the vocabulary
simple, the themes diverse and profound. Many of Machado’s
best poems alternate between the preterit and the imperfect tenses,
ideal for when we are about to teach that mystery. The principle
is a simple one: find short and compelling poems whose grammatical
structures reinforce a particular point of grammar under consideration.
And most important, insist that the students learn the poem. In
recent times, to ask a student to memorize something was akin to
asking her or him to study grammar. We became terrified of being
told that the exercise was boring. Such thinking is terribly flawed.
It is like dreaming of building a cathedral, and then being unwilling
to think of the bricks and mortar and wood. I have many times spent
an entire class repeating and dramatizing a poem with students;
at the end of class, everyone leaves the room having learned the
words. Beautifully arranged words, grammatically correct, music
to the ears, and a message for the soul.
I
end with a poem that I believe offers us the Hispanic version of
Robert Frost’s celebrated “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening.” Both poems deal with travel, and both poems tantalizingly
invite us to relate the journey in the poem to the larger journey
of life, of the spirit. Frost’s poem is reticent, ambiguous,
spare. It is about a journey interrupted, a brief cessation of motion.
As he reflects upon the contrast between the woods, “lovely,
dark, and deep,” and the long journey before him, Frost’s
traveler may for a moment consider ending the effort. Is he willing
to continue, “miles to go before I sleep?” Perhaps not.
Lorca’s
poem, by contrast, thunders with energy, the frenetic, forward motion
of the pony into the darkness and into death. Although the rider
can see his destination, he will never reach that distant goal.
We are not told why, only that death will cut short his journey.
I cannot begin to tell you how many wonderful hours I have spent
with students reflecting upon this simple little masterpiece. It
is ideal for the last third of the first semester of first-year
Spanish. In a course for native speakers, it could come in the second
week.
Córdoba.
Lejana y sola.
Jaca
negra, luna grande
y
aceitunas en mi alforja.
Aunque
sepa los caminos
yo
nunca llegaré a Córdoba.
Por
el llano, por el viento,
jaca
negra, luna roja;
la
Muerta me está mirando
desde
las torres de Córdoba.
!Ay
qué camino tan largo!
¡Ay
mi jaca valeroa!
¡Ay
que la Muerte me espera
antes
de llegar a Córdoba.
Córdoba.
Lejana y sola.
Córdoba.
Distant and alone.
A
black pony, a large moon,
and
olives in my saddlebags,
although
I know the way,
I
will never reach Córdoba.
Over
the plain, into the wind,
a
black pony, a blood-red moon,
Death
is watching me
from
the towers of Córdoba.
Ay,
what a long road!
Ay,
my brave little pony!
Ay,
Death awaits me
before
I reach Córdoba.
Córdoba.
Distant and alone.
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