In Tudor City everyone’s a diplomat, with badges and plates to prove it. They’re insatiable in their untranslatable languages, wires to their ears, scribbling on note cards. I hear every language from Telugu to Pinghua to Adyghe (add-dig-za), untranslatable, but I know from tone of voice they are choppin it up like pimp skillets about some cold piece of work booghetto scrub getting all up in their drink-drank with their janky cabbage. I translate what it means into my own private language.
There’s the requisite obelisk, and above it a translation: “swords to plowshares … learn to war no more – Isaiah.” Below the obelisk, protests in every language, untranslatable, something about power corrupting absolutely.
The Consulates all look the same, like dark supper clubs for the old men who control the world, and the people who come out of them all have the ceremonial garb of Hollywood celebrities. One of them’s been boarded up – near 51st and 2nd there’s something resembling reality, a glitch in the matrix, with panhandlers and poison traps – then more New York rhododendrons and United Nations restaurants: Hofbrau’s and Blarney Stones, Mango Lassi stands, “balanced Thai to go,” Pushmina for sale. Passport joints are thick as hot dog booths around here. On Dag Hammarskjold Plaza the tourists take pictures of homeless people, thinking they are wearing native costumes.
Not Noah’s Ark but Noah’s Garden inside the Ford Foundation Building, Eden three atriums high, security guards with wires in their ears, in a bubble of untranslatable silence. Around them blah blah blah in every language, untranslatable. In “Bars and Books” a man writes notes, untranslatable, all I can read are the signs above: “Perpetuities” … “Fine Cigars”. I pass Pierre Loti Wine Bar – no one knows where Pierre Loti is, and when or if he will ever return.
