When I translated Russia into purple socks ...

Olga Livshin graduated from high school in 1996. She was a great student in my AP English class, an editor for what was then called The Legend (now it's The Scribe), and a charter member of the Francis Parker Writers' Club.

Olga writes about the year we in the Writers' Club all wore purple socks. By the time the picture below was taken, we had apparently moved on to funny hats.

It was wonderful to read Olga's memories about those times. We had a cool thing going back then. The students in the club were from every corner of campus. They were intellectuals, wallflowers, oddballs, poets, artists, study nerds, and just about everything in between. They came to the club from all different directions, through all different windows and portholes and trapdoors, some kids thinking of themselves as writers, others simply interested in ideas, and still others just confused and vaguely intellectual. What they shared in common, or what they came to share in common, was a desire to articulate themselves to the world. And the club provided them with the safe space they needed to do that.

Olga tells the story of how this safe space helped her "translate" her life. Given what we have read in so many of these 650 posts about how often young people hide their struggles from a world that expects them to be perfect, it occurs to me that we need to create more safe spaces for teenagers to talk honestly about themselves.

Olga got a BA in French and Communications and followed that up with a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literature. She taught Russian language and literature for six years, first at the University of Alaska and then at her alma mater Boston University. More recently she has been focusing on writing and literary translation and goofing off with her seven-year-old son Nathan. Her first book is being published in the fall.

What's your post about, Olga? "Loss of culture," she said. "And then not exactly finding it, but finding something else, empathy and literature in another language--just as radiant."

- C.H.

I was an immigrant ogre, one year into my US life in the 90s and a scholarship-bearing impostor at our school. My schoolmates drove spic-and-span, latest-model BMWs. My mom’s Chevy Caprice classic was the same age as me: fifteen years old. Its sagging fabric flapped over our heads with the wind; its exterior showed the splotches of wax my previously non-driving, Russian, non-English-speaker, writer dad put on it in high hopes for our new life.

My classmate Z. wore designer cocktail dresses to school. I had a repertoire of Ross! Dress for Less!—as the commercial sang. But while a friend complained about Z., her looks fascinated me. Those American teens from well-to-do families unfurled like huge flowers around me, both gloriously and humiliatingly.

Chris Harrington’s junior year English was an oasis from the strictures of class, and from high school perfectionism, and from my own need to grab every possible key to a better adulthood. However thick your accent, however badly you knew the latest movie with Keanu Reeves, literature gave you a hug in Mr. H.’s classroom. It confirmed that struggle and imperfection were thoroughly human. T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock said he should have been a pair of ragged claws. And the heroine of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” went crazy.

Departing a country is a death as well as a rebirth, a disappearance of cities and languages so thorough it screams: What’s your goddamn importance in the world? Edgar Allen Poe, Mr. H. claimed, “hung out a lot with his family members, who died,” and wrote poems about people slipping away like grains of sand on the beach.

The BMWs out the window. The immaculate blue sky. The beach. It seemed as if Pasternak or Anna Akhmatova may as well have never written a thing.

One day, Mr. Harrington announced the school would be forming a Writers' Club and he would be the advisor. I, with my shaky English, volunteered to be the president. And he let me.

Purple socks were our uniform, we decided. Every Wednesday morning, I packed my thick, cheap periwinkle socks for school, and at 1:45 I gingerly took them out for the 2–3 PM slot. For that hour, once every week, I did not care that the socks came from Ross or that I had come from a ravaged, floundering country.

On those Wednesday afternoons, about five of us listened to each other read our poems, prose, and various undefined cries of the soul. Mr. H. was the unobtrusive facilitator, giving subtle direction and generally allowing us time for free play.

Today I am a poet who writes in English. I have a book of poetry and translations of poetry coming out; I get to translate poets I adore, Akhmatova among them, and our contemporary Vladimir Gandelsman. The club of writers I like and admire is bigger. But this was the first time the magic knit together. We listened to each other. We treated one other with the empathy we craved.

Mr. H. and the Purple Socks crowd gave me a gift that shaped my life: translation for some themes of my previous, Russian life into American culture. The appreciation for literature. Hiking: all those hikes the Writers' Club took. Mr. H.’s belief that any teen might be not just a lost soul with raging hormones and overtired parents and cheap—or expensive—shoes, but a person deserving respect.

I still haven’t learned how to leave places I love. Every time my family has to move cities for work, finitude sweeps in on me like a bird of prey. I remember what it is like to sever ties, take ourselves out of a community, say goodbyes. But what I’ve found so far, after almost thirty years in the US, is that it’s good to take a leap of faith. Places, people, poems can—and do—get translated.