Landon Made Me

by Clifford Landers

            High school, it has been said, is life. Rivalries, relationships, triumph and disappointment – all emerge in those years of mid- to late adolescence. It is in high school that we take our first halting steps toward finding our role in the adult world, acquiring knowledge and proficiency that will serve us in a profession or as preparation for higher education. In high school we polish social skills and acquire a sense of belonging – or if less fortunate, learn what it means to be an outsider. In high school some of us had our sexual initiation – yes, even in the uptight 1950s. In short, after high school it was "only" a matter of honing, of smoothing out rough edges, of choosing the path the rest of our life would take.

            I can’t speak for anyone in the class of 1956 but myself, but in a very real sense Landon made me. A straight line from there to here? No, but still a line, with all its twists and turns that shaped and directed me toward who I became. If you care to accompany me on that journey, here’s how it all started.

              It's September 1952 and I’m enrolling in Landon as a freshman. My father took French in high school (at Andrew Jackson), and I expect I will also. But that year Mrs. Alexander doesn’t offer a class in French, so I take Spanish instead, with Miss Bryant. That seemingly insignificant occurrence was to set me on a path that even today exerts a powerful pull on my life.

             I took two years of Spanish, all Landon offered at that time, in ninth and tenth grades. Fast forward to college at the University of Florida, where after two and a half years without studying Spanish I talked my way – in Spanish – into the fourth semester of that language. Majoring in political science, I took Spanish as my required language, along with German.

            Where does Landon figure into this? Consider: just two years of elementary Spanish gave me a solid enough background to afford me proficiency in that language at the college level. Obviously, the quality of public education in the 1950s was light years ahead of the present day.

            After my political science B.A. in 1959, I went for a Masters in Spanish, and afterward decided to get a Ph.D. in order to teach at the college level. This was the era of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) resulting from America's reaction to the soviet sputnik in 1957. NDEA fellowships were designed to develop specialists in various fields who could also function in one of the so-called critical languages – Arabic, Russian, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese. I was fortunate enough to be awarded an NDEA fellowship to pursue a doctorate in political science, with Portuguese as my language competency, thus combining my strong interest in language and in Latin America.

            Portuguese? Latin America? There’s only one country in the hemisphere where that language is spoken – Brazil. So when it came time to do my dissertation, it was off to Rio de Janeiro in 1965, where I would spend eighteen months researching a political party. And now the story gets interesting. It was in Rio that I met Vasda Bonafini, who was concluding a preparatory course for teaching English as a Second Language. We got married that same year and recently celebrated our 45th anniversary.

            The Landon connection? Well, without the Spanish I had in high school there wouldn’t have been any Portuguese later, and without Portuguese no Brazil. My wife and I would never have met.

            The next four decades go quickly. I get my Ph.D. (as does my wife, who will teach at Columbia for 22 years). Skip ahead to 2001, when I retire after almost forty years of college teaching and return to settle in Naples, Florida. But there’s more to the story of how Landon made me.

            Back to 1952. As a ninth grader I worked on the school newspaper, the Lion's Roar. Four years later, as a senior (how different that word is these days!) I became editor. The journalistic experience awakened in me a love of writing. Starting in 1987, I began doing literary translation, bringing Brazilian literature into English; by mid-2011 I had done over 25 novels, as well as translations for the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other U.S. institutions. Again, thank you, Landon. 

             Finally, in 2001, my first book, Literary Translation: A Practical Guide, was published in England and the United States. It has since been translated into Chinese and Korean – just why, I haven’t a clue. Without Landon, without Spanish, without the Lion's Roar, I can’t imagine what turns my life might have taken.

            A career. A wife. A retirement activity that keeps my synapses firing. Yes, Landon made me.

       Clifford Landers                             Vasda Bonafini Landers

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