The quality of genius

I once took a college literature class with a girl from Eastern Europe. I don’t recall which country she came from, or how she ended up at a school in the middle of Nebraska. She had dark hair and lively brown eyes, but she wasn’t the sort of person who would catch your attention in a room. Average-looking, a novelist might say, with a medium build and little fashion sense.

It came up in class one day that she spoke six languages. I’m usually skeptical when people say they speak six languages, but this girl was fluent. And funny. Maybe, when you amass the humor of six cultures in one mind, you develop a keen sense of irony. Maybe geniuses are just funny in general, I don’t know.

She told a story once about the governments of the world, and how they’ve developed think tanks to postulate responses to a possible alien invasion, should one occur.

“We won’t know how to stop them,” she said of the aliens, “but we will know how to talk about it.”

I still love her, for that observation alone.

She said she had learned all those languages by translating Shakespeare into whatever tongue she was studying at the moment. I think I curtsied to her after that.

She loved words, and the rest of us loved words, because most of us were planning to be English teachers, so we had a marvelous, geeky time, the way you do when you find your people.

One day we shared poems in class. I think hers was one she had translated, but she may have written it herself. It spoke of a dark winter night, the sort of night when the sky promises snow but withholds it.

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