{"id":40637,"date":"2022-07-25T21:03:04","date_gmt":"2022-07-25T19:03:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/?page_id=40637"},"modified":"2022-07-25T21:03:04","modified_gmt":"2022-07-25T19:03:04","slug":"sample-translation-liverpool","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/foreignrights\/authors\/james-worthy\/james-worthy-liverpool\/sample-translation-liverpool\/","title":{"rendered":"Sample translation Liverpool<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Worthy – Liverpool<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[pp. 23\u201343]<\/strong><\/p>\n

My father only really fell ill once he\u2019d recovered. He was clean. Clean as a whistle. Sparkling clean. Cancer clean. We ate a cheese sandwich in the parking lot of the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek clinic to celebrate. He was clean. The prostate cancer was gone, but not for good, it seems. No, the prostate cancer had only gone to fetch its big brother. And it was in early 2020 that the big brother walked into our lives. He introduced himself as Pancreatic Cancer, his hands were cold as ice. My father had bounced the little brother off every wall of the radiotherapy clinic, and then Big Brother came to take over.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It\u2019s 2001. My father and I are flying to Rome, Liverpool is playing against the local A.S. It\u2019s December. The stewardesses are wearing Christmas caps. Somewhere over Switzerland, my father reaches over and pulls up my jumper without asking.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are you doing?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just wanted to see whether you\u2019re wearing a Liverpool jersey under there. You know what I\u2019ve always told you, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes. Never put on a Liverpool jersey when you go to a match abroad.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPrecisely. No sense in putting a price on your own head. If they see you\u2019re British, they\u2019ll cut to the chase. Two Leeds fans were killed that way last year.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know, Dad. That\u2019s why I didn\u2019t wear a jersey, just a normal vest.\u201d<\/p>\n

A couple of hours before the match, my father and I are sitting on towels, picnicking in a Roman park, when ten men come running towards us. They\u2019re yelling all kinds of highly obsolete or nonexistent English swear words. I run away from the angry Romans, but as I sprint I hear only my own footsteps on the gravel path. I turn around and see my father folding up the towels.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat the hell are you doing, Dad?\u201d I shout.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are your mother\u2019s favorite towels.\u201d<\/p>\n

After a fifteen-minute run, we duck into a building. A man at the door stops us, points to my father\u2019s towels and says in his best English that this is not a swimming pool.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, what is it then?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is paradise,\u201d the man says, before knocking on a dark-purple door. When the door opens, I find myself face-to-face with the most beautiful woman in Rome. The screaming Italians are closing in. They\u2019re in an even bigger rage than they were at first, their designer coats are flecked with sweat.<\/p>\n

My father puts his arm around my shoulder and together we heel-toe our way down the corridor behind the deep-purple door. While my father hangs my mother\u2019s towels over the back of a chair, I tell our story to the bartendress. She sees that I\u2019m young, and puts a bottle of cola down on the bar. Before I can ask her for a straw, she peels off her blouse. There are straws between her breasts. Five of them. I feel like taking one of them, but I\u2019m afraid the other four will then fall to the floor. \u201cHow did those fellows know we were British?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause Italians don\u2019t go picnicking in the winter, darling.\u201d<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve got tickets for the match, but instead we watch it from paradise, because it\u2019s safe here. Batistuta and Totti are playing for the home team. Dick Jol is the ref. It\u2019s not a good match. It\u2019s the worst match ever, in fact, but by the time Jol whistled three times for the end of play, all the straws had been used up.<\/p>\n

Just before we leave, I see my father using his index finger to count off all the scantily-clad beauties. I don\u2019t know why, until we knock at the door of paradise again the next morning. The most beautiful woman in Rome opens it, and my father hands her a cardboard box containing fifteen fresh donuts.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The doctor asks my father how he\u2019s doing and whether he could perhaps assign a number to the pain.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnfortunately, this pain goes far beyond numbers, doctor.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell then, how would <\/em>you rate your pain, Mr. Pugh?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYesterday I felt like Fernando Torres, but today I\u2019m Alberto Aquilani.\u201d<\/p>\n

The doctor turns and looks at me questioningly.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe easiest way for my father to rate his pain, doctor, is on the basis of Liverpool player acquisitions. The worse the acquisition, the greater the pain. Aquilani was a hideous mistake, doctor. Which means that today he is in excruciating pain.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve never come across anything like this, gentlemen. How football-mad are you two, anyway?\u201d the doctor asks as he jots down the name Alberto in his notebook.<\/p>\n

\u201cA 10,\u201d my deathly ill father sighs.<\/p>\n

I go over to the bed and say that it\u2019s okay for him to lift my jumper.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re playing a home game today, right? At home, it\u2019s allowed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything\u2019s allowed at home, son.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cExcept for dying, Dad.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything\u2019s allowed at home, son.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Steve Finnan<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I have a room above a betting office that also serves as a tanning studio. The people who go in gamble away all their holiday savings, but come out again looking like they\u2019ve just spent two weeks on the Canary Islands. That too is Liverpool. It\u2019s still one of the poorest cities in Europe, but you see no poverty in the faces of the people. Only pride and birthmarks.<\/p>\n

Three old women are standing in front of the door, smoking. I look at the TV screens in the window. Horses with little men on them run from left to right. I walk into the betting office and put twenty pounds on the horse with the prettiest name. A man behind me starts to snicker. I turn around and look at him. He could be my father. He gives off an air of long days at the docks and stale bread.<\/p>\n

My father had a welding and construction firm at the harbor in Amsterdam-North. When I was little, I always smelled his fingers when he came home from work. They were full of burns and steel splinters. Then I could smell all the things he\u2019d made that day. Railings, boats, submarines, banisters. My father could make anything, but what he made the most was people happy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe horse with the prettiest name never wins,\u201d the man behind the counter in the betting office says. We look at the screen together. We watch my horse fail to make the finish. His Dream<\/em>. The name is prettier than the horse, and the dream was without a doubt prettier than the race.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At the corner of Lime Street is the pub my cousin told me about. This is where I will meet my father\u2019s oldest friend, a former classmate. I order a cider from the barmaid and look around in the meantime for a grey-haired man, but the pub is more or less deserted. Only a girl at the bar. She\u2019s using her thumbs to type sentence into her cell phone, at the speed of light.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is my daughter, Amber,\u201d the barmaid says. Amber is a lovely girl. If Lennon were still alive, he\u2019d write a song about her. Amber, Amber, Amber, her smile is the answer.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cMe and my boyfriend are having a row,\u201d she tells me in broadest Scouse. People from Liverpool are called \u2018scousers\u2019 and they speak \u2018Scouse\u2019, a nasal, bumpy dialect full of gutturals. Hard and gritty, but also melodious. Scouse sounds like a jazz trumpeter who\u2019s locked himself up in a sea container.<\/p>\n

I never heard my father speak so broadly. He was extremely proud of his background, but after a few failed job interviews someone told him it was because of his accent. His resum\u00e9 was worth no more than a blank page, because the trumpeter was playing in an unfamiliar key.<\/p>\n

My mother, by the way, was born in Amsterdam\u2019s Jordaan neighborhood, and people told her exactly the same thing. She couldn\u2019t find a job until she came to grips with her accent. I\u2019m very grateful to my parents for their adaptive skills. Some members of our family saw it as a form of betrayal. Precisely the same thing that bothered John Chapman about John Lennon. He had started believing in himself too much. Apparently, it\u2019s important not to believe in yourself more than your family or fans do.<\/p>\n

My parents entertained high hopes for themselves. They wanted to become much more than what they were. Two children of the backstreets. Scruffy clothes, boots down at the heels. But they never got too big for those boots of theirs, not that, no, they looked through the holes and saw a future that many said wasn\u2019t lying in store for them at all.<\/p>\n

They met in 1974 in a bar on Martelaarsgracht. My mother thought he was a taxi driver. Which, in Liverpool, he might have become. My father replied jokingly, and the rest is history.<\/p>\n

Everything is history.<\/p>\n

On their forty-fourth anniversary, my father was cremated.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cWould you be Chugga\u2019s son then, lad?\u201d an old man with tattooed knuckles asks me. He pulls up a stool next to mine and lays a keyring and a telephone on the bar. An old cell phone in a new holster, and the keyring is immense. My father had a keyring like that too. Maybe that\u2019s something all Liverpudlian men do, impress people with the size of their keyrings. As a little boy I often took my father\u2019s down off the mantelpiece. I thought: my father can really open a lot of doors.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou look like him,\u201d says the man.<\/p>\n

His words touch me. Lots of people I know say that I look like him, but that doesn\u2019t touch me. That say that because that\u2019s what I want to hear. And I want to hear it so badly. There is no greater compliment. I don\u2019t know this man, but he knows my father, and he says so. He says that I look like my father.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet me say right away that your father made the right choice when he left. I often think about the morning he sailed off. He asked whether I wanted to go along, but I told him I couldn\u2019t swim. That I was afraid of water. That was the truth, still is. But I think about that morning every day. If only I had left along with your father.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 1970 he signed on with the merchant marine. Liverpool in those days was a crazy place. The Beatles broke up in 1970. That created a lot of consternation. The city sort of lost hope. In our day, you had three choices. Either you went to work at the docks, or you took up soccer, or else you bought a guitar and started a band. No one I knew was a good enough soccer player or songwriter. The only one who made it was your father\u2019s cousin. He was the drummer with The Searchers. The second biggest band out of Liverpool. Chris Curtis was a genius. Lennon thought so too, but the other Beatles thought he was an idiot. That cousin of your father\u2019s toured with The Stones and wrote a couple of beautiful songs.<\/p>\n

\u201cChris gave all his old suits to your father. That\u2019s why he always looked so natty back then. Chris was eight years older than him. They were thick as thieves, those two. God rest his soul, Chris. Your father\u2019s too, of course. But your father and I were no Chris Curtises. We had no talent. So, your father went off to sea and I, I stayed behind and made a huge mess outta things.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you think would have happened with my father if he\u2019d stayed in Liverpool? Would he have made a huge mess out of things too?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf he\u2019d of stayed here, he wouldn\u2019t have lived to seventy. That much I know for sure. Maybe I used to be a complete burk, but your father was too. I remember this one time, when we were both about eleven and walking around town. I saw a busker, a big man with a violin. It was my idea to rob him. I took off running across the city with a couple of bags full of coins. I\u2019ll never forget the sound that made. When I looked over, I saw your father running with the violin in his hand. \u2018Bring that back, you silly tit,\u2019 I shouted at him. I never saw your father laugh so hard. When a scouser says \u2018back\u2019, it sounds like \u2018bach\u2019. Our \u2018ck\u2019 sounds like a \u2018ch\u2019. But I didn\u2019t get the joke I\u2019d made by mistake. I only found about Bach years later, in the nick. But your father knew who that was when he was only eleven. He was different. Too thick for the street, but too clever for prison.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat were you in the nick for?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not going in the book, is it?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course not. Why would I want to cross an ex-convict?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBack in the eighties, I robbed some dealers a couple of times. Was that wrong of me? I never bothered my head about it. I busted the things that needed busting. Your father had cancer, right? Well, I was a sort of chemotherapy, but then in the underworld. I never killed anyone. Not me. I stole drugs and money from the rotters. In fact, I was sort of a constable without the badge.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTell me again that I look like my father.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cJames, you look like your old man. You look like Chugga.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere does that \u2018Chugga\u2019 come from, anyway? Everybody here calls him that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cChugging is what the old steam locomotives used to do, we grew up with them. Your father was a sturdy fellow, and blessed with a sort of relentless strength. Chugga.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think back to the morning of his cremation. To all the clouds that came out of that smokestack.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The five months during which my father was dying were perhaps the finest in my life. Death crept towards him like a stray cat, but he wasn\u2019t afraid, he just put out a saucer of milk and some cat chunks for it. He looked death in the eye and patted death on the head. That\u2019s how big Dad was. A skyscraper of a man. He wasn\u2019t scared to death of death, he was like a father to it. Everything my sister, my mother and I did during those months was so full of love and meaning. One morning my sister and I printed and filled out a do-not-resuscitate order. My father needed to sign it too.<\/p>\n

As a teenager I\u2019d made numerous attempts to forge my father\u2019s signature, but I never succeeded. His signature was magic. An impregnable fortress of whorls and loops. That particular morning, the signing of the order took a good two minutes. I knew that pancreatic cancer was a real bastard, but I\u2019d never expected it to twoc my father\u2019s signature. My sister and I were material witnesses to initial larceny.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell then, help him out a bit,\u201d my sister said. She knew about my past as an amateur forger. The look in my father\u2019s eyes when I put down the ballpoint pen is one I\u2019ll never forget. If gratitude could dance, his eyes that morning were the LED-lit dancefloor. A raw gratitude, the likes of which I\u2019d never seen.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Before my father fell ill, I was afraid of the word \u2018palliative\u2019, but these days I wish I could erect a statue to it. My father drowned in an aquarium while we tossed the most beautiful fish into the water. That\u2019s what palliative care is. Allowing someone to drown in beauty.<\/p>\n

My father took about twenty pills a day. One to stop the pain, another to stop the fear, but after a while he became afraid of pills. One day he let me know that he would only take them if I did the same. So I pretended to. I put them in my mouth, but kept them under my tongue. Until, one evening, something went wrong. I became too nonchalant. I don\u2019t remember which medication it was. Trazodon? Oxazepam? Oxycodon? Temazepam? Whatever it was, that evening I jumped into the water with my father and together we did some synchronized nocturnal swimming. For a bit, I saw the fish that he was seeing. A rainbow of scales. All the fish were gorgeous. They blew mercy from their gills. The deeper we dove, the higher we got. When I woke up the next morning, I saw that I had sent IMs to all my exes.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Translated by Sam Garrett<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Worthy – Liverpool   [pp. 23\u201343] My father only really fell ill once he\u2019d recovered. He was clean. Clean as a whistle. Sparkling clean. Cancer clean. We ate a cheese sandwich in the parking lot of the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek clinic to celebrate. He was clean. The prostate cancer was gone, but not for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3251,"featured_media":0,"parent":40605,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-40637","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/3251"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40637\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignrights.debezigebij.nl\/wpg-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}