Alone in Galicia: My Lunch With Mary Jo Bang
The food was great but the conversation was mind-blowing.
14 May 2019
I met Mary Jo Bang at the lobby of Eurostars Atlantico and we sat there until it was time for our 1.30pm reservation at A Mundiña across the street. She told me about her childhood: father left when she was four, mother remarried a violent man. When Mary Jo was in grade school a teacher asked her if she was going to college. No one in their family had ever gone—her mother had a seventh grade education, her stepfather got to eighth grade, and her mother had said that if anyone in their family was going to college it would be Mary Jo’s brother “because he was a man.” Mary Jo would get married and a man would take care of her, period. So Mary Jo replied to her teacher that college was out of the question, and her teacher got so angry she said she would speak to her parents after school. The concept of “after school” was mind-boggling to Mary Jo—Where would they go?—so she said Yes, she would go to college after all. So she went to college. She “fulfilled her working class destiny” by getting knocked up the first time she had sex. She got married, divorced shortly afterwards, and became a single mother. For fifteen years she worked at a gynecologist’s office, and then at 48 she took her MFA at Columbia University.
She told me about her six-month residency in Berlin, out in the burbs, a 45-minute bus ride to the grocery. Our housekeeping and feeding strategies are the same: take-out and doggie bags. She also describes herself as immature, which is the secret of my sanity.
At A Mundiña we had caldo gallego, a green salad, fish (hake and black rice for me, seabass and baked beans for her), and white wine. The cute waiter (short) recommended pain perdu for dessert—bread pudding with a cream filling.
Mary Jo told me about her Japanese student who is translating the Surrealist poet Takiguchi. The student had been sent to the US by his mother, who wanted him to learn English. His parents own an inn on a lonely island in Japan that serves only one thing: fugu, the blowfish that will kill you if it is not prepared properly. The restaurant is open only a few months a year, but is apparently profitable enough to pay for a twenty-year American education. Takiguchi wrote erotic poems whose meanings escaped her student; Mary Jo had to send him a diagram of female genitalia. Being a dutiful and efficient student, he did what he had to do for his research and acquired a girlfriend.
Then Mary Jo discussed her translation of Dante’s Inferno, which she managed without knowing Italian. How she did it: she used a dozen existing English translations of Inferno and compared them tercet by tercet, guided by the interpretations by leading Dante scholars. We got to talking about the church, about how the concept of purgatory is not in scripture but was added by the early church to further control their flock. If they knew they were going to hell, then their lives would be free; with purgatory they could work towards avoiding hellfire (while helping the fund-raising with indulgences). Mary Jo is particularly interested in how gay writers use codes to conceal their real meaning. (T.S. Eliot’s “Should I wear my trousers rolled” also works if the trousers are down; Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress; W.H. Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts.) I remembered that T.S. Eliot’s wife went mad, and Mary Jo said Viv Eliot used to bring home the sheets they had slept on in hotels, wash them, then return them to the hotels. Why? What was so embarrassing about those sheets that she had to launder them in secret?
I told her my story, too, up to my friend who went mad. By the time we finished lunch it was 4pm, time for her to go to the airport. Our conversation alone makes this residency worth it, but there is more to come.