Two days ago, I found out that one of my professors, Natalia K., passed away. It wasn’t recent. It happened a year ago, and my classmates and I only found out through a post that tagged her on Facebook.
We hadn’t spoken directly in years, but websites like Facebook and Instagram allowed us to see into one another’s lives. I watched her travel with her husband and son. She watched me marry, birth, and raise my first child. And over the years, we exchanged pleasantries, and she assured me I was not as terrible of a student as I thought.
In my first semester of college, I missed six lectures in a row. When I returned, she pulled me aside after class and said, “You are failing this class.” Reader, I was averaging a B in the class. But that was her way of showing she cared about the success of her students through calm but firm remarks like that. It was her saying, “Hey, get your shit together.”
I originally intended to go to college to major in Russian Language studies. Something in me thought that would be a good idea (though as a high school student, I lacked the awareness of native speakers that sought, and still continue to pursue, work in translation services, but I digress.) After that first semester, I chose to minor in the language instead, and as a result, I saw my professor and classmates three times a week for the next three and a half years. It was a small program, and we were a tight knit community.
Music is what drew me to the language first. My dad was finishing his formal Spanish language lessons, I thought I’d learn a language too. Somehow this led me down a rabbit hole of music videos on Youtube, and I found pop artist Yulia Savicheva and the rest is history (This is also the part where I shake my fist at the sky that genetics did not bless me with the photographic memory my father has that made fluency in another language that much easier for him, but alas, I chose a Slavic language based on three alphabets, so I that’s on me.)
Kazakova taught me an appreciation for language beyond the meaning of words and phrases. She showed my classmates and I that language is a song. Through my studies, I appreciated poetic verse hidden within sentences and my mind was opened to listen to music, poetry, and literature in other languages to learn about their countries and cultures.
All of this is to say that language bridges barriers and that Natalia was very important to me, even if I did not always show it. I grieved her over the weekend and purchased a copy of Centuries Encircle Me with Fire: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, translated by Ian Probstein (Natalia’s husband.) Osip Mandelstam was my professor’s favorite poet, and the collection was published the same year she passed away. A part of me thought the book would bring some of her memory back to me, and it happily has.
As I share this with you, I ask that you consider who it was in your life that taught you an appreciation for language. Was it a teacher or a favorite author? Maybe it was your parent or grandparent. If you are open to sharing, I’d love to know who it was.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading. Below is a poem titled “And I Was Alive” by Osip Mandelstam in an English translation:
As always, thanks for reading.
- G
Teachers are so incredibly important. This is a lovely tribute.