Isabel Allende, on living in two languages

Language is essential to a writer. and language is as personal as blood.

I live in California, in English, but I can only write in Spanish. In fact all the fundamental things in my life happen in Spanish, like scolding my grandchildren, cooking or making love.
-Isabel Allende

I often seem to want to punish myself for all the time I spend in English in Spain, working for British or American clients, keeping up with my people in the States, writing this blog......
I liked this look at a mirror image. Hmmmm, maybe I can get my two linguistic selves to coexist peacefully, just by accepting both of them as part of me.

Quisiera hablar, y escribir......¿peor?

Oh how I wish my Spanish were weaker.

I miss those heady, blissful days when my Spanish skills were young and grave grammatical errors flew out of my mouth and off my pen...and I kept right on, oblivious. Blissful.

I must be in the cursed, dark stage of bilingualism. The almost there stage.

I live in Spanish, when I'm not working. But, on the fly, oh how I can make mistakes.

Each of which, invariably, reports itself to my gotta-do-right, damn-I-want-to-speak-this- language-well conscience. Exactly two and a half minutes after it's been committed.

I mispeak and ACK! then I hear it. When it's hanging there in the air in front of me, blocking my view. Worse still, I hit send on a routine e-mail and WHOP! comes a 2X4 across the side of the head. GRAMMAR, ERIN!

Ah, some days. To return to the happy ignorance of my Spanish youth...

I wouldn' t trade bi-lingualism for anything short of its sister tri, but oh, what I'd do to break through to that error-free stage. It's coming, right, linguists? Is there anything that will keep you working toward mastery more than a language?
Anything?


Update: Wheylona, who very accurately describes herself as the house language teacher and linguist, left such a cool response to this post, I have to quote a bit of her comment here:

...Try not to think of language as art but rather as a tool. Use it, pound the hell out of things with it, get things done, and eventually you'll see you've created all manner of beautiful things without even trying!

Full belly laugh from an amateur translator

There I was, agonizing over how to translate the Spanish word propiciar in the Reverte quote, when I gave up, frustrated. Propiciar means "to favor the execution of", more or less, and I just couldn't see myself ending a quote that way. I wanted the quote to end with a bang, as it does in Spanish. I'd already tried finding inspiration in my Spanish dictionary. Nothing. I went straight to the big guns: the Real Academia Española. "Favors the execution of". Bleh.

Simultaneously desperate not to write a sentence I didn't like and ecstatic not to be a professional translator, I decided to invent my own word. It seemed to me that propiciar would, of course, translate as propitiate.

Giggling at my own cleverness, I surfed over to Ask Oxford. I typed in my word, hit search, waited patiently to read "sorry, no listings" -----

and a few moments later, read this:
propitiate: (verb) win or regain the favour of; appease

Seems our word has Latin origins. My invented English word exists!

So how come that never happens when I make up Spanish words in the middle of a conversation?

La palabra más bella

A quick stop at Expatica tipped me off to a contest sponsored by the Escuela de Escritores to find the most beautiful word in the Spanish language.

Spanish speaking "notables" have been invited to submit their nominations, along with the general public. All submissions, notable or not, must include a short note defending the intrinsic beauty of the chosen word. I've confessed more than once to being madly in love with the Spanish language; the contest entries remind me how much I also love the way Spanish speakers talk about their native language, the way they identify with, define and explain words, with a three dimensional tenderness I don't often find in English speakers.

I find it amusing to see how people chose their words. Some entries propose words with beautiful meanings: madre, amor, amante. The politicians were big on meaning, and acted like....well..... politicians as they prepared their entries. Zapatero, the president of the Spanish government, chose generosidad, because "it makes us more human". Rajoy, the opposition leader, chose palabra (word), because a man's word is his most important asset, according to Mr. Rajoy. Other political figures chose verdad, and libertad, and república. Words as ideas.

Writers, on the other hand, and many of the non-notable entrants, wrote about the feel of the word, the acrobatic demands on the tongue, the percussive explosion as the word leaves the mouth. My favorite non-notable entry is the following:

berberecho

(A berberecho is a tiny, tasty litle clam I had the pleasure of meeting a few weeks ago in a Salamanca pulpería. I can highly recommend both the word and the ración.)

Berberecho. Said the Madrileño who nominated it: "It has a CH and 2 B's. What more do you want?"

My kind of wordsmith.

I haven't voted yet, although most of my favorite Spanish words do already appear on the ballot:

azahar orange blossom
albahaca basil. Just say it, it's gorgeous.
libélula firefly
almohada pillow, another Arab-derived beauty

I've long loved calabacín , as well, and berenjena. Zucchini and eggplant, in English, but oh! how the sound of them in Spanish. It's enough to make you eat your vegetables.

Cucuruchu is another favorite, a delightful word I kicked myself for not sharing with you here. Happily, I've been given a second chance. It means?

Ice cream cone.

Ojalá is high on my list, though I am never happy with translations. "If God wills", shall we say, Spaniards? Another Arab-born Spanish beauty.

And my favorite Spanish word? It's already there, and I suspect in the end it'll earn my vote. Perspicaz. It means clever, astute, shrewdly intelligent. Perspicaz. A beautiful Spanish mouthful.

What's your favorite word? In Spanish? Or any language?



Postscript: Lila Downs, the Mexican singer/artist, wrote one of my favorite entries, nominating the word camino (road, path, route). Her reason?

Porque es donde siempre he andado y me hace pensar en tomarlo sin tener que imaginar dónde me lleve, y es mi guía para el presente.

Because it is where I have always walked (been, existed, in a sense), and it makes me think about taking it without having to imagine where it might carry me. It is my guide for the present.

Ah, a wandering word. I knew I liked Lila Downs.

Dos Días

I was having one of my dangerous between-meetings lunches the other day - 2 glasses of Ribera and two very tasty pinchos, when the friend on the other side of my wine glass let this slip, mid-paragraph:

"La vida son 4 días"...

Life is 4 days.

You're grinning, aren't you? There's more. Her comment led me to this gem, a classic Spanish saying if I ever learned one:

¡A vivir, que son dos días y uno llueve!

Get living! Life is 2 days and one of those 2......

It rains.


Some days I feel so wonderfully at home here.

Wishing Verbs

Moving back and forth between languages sometimes produces the most delicious images.

Today as I edited the Spanish lesson that forms the heart of one of the newsletters my marketing team sends out every week, I stumbled across a little word changeling I just can't get enough of.

In a lesson on the subjunctive, the Spanish teacher who prepares our lessons translated verbos de deseo as "wishing verbs".

Wishing verbs.

How absolutely delicious!

I need to use more "wishing verbs".

Can you say pero 1000 times fast?

Oh! So many blog ideas, so little time.

I need to run off to my Spanish class with Bego, where I hope to repeat pero and claro and dólares until I get that darn single r down.

Perfectionism carries through to second languages, I assure you. It's a bit like golf: I'll be working my whole life on that r, I suspect, struggling to sound just ever so slightly more like a native. I'll never get there, of course, but just working on it gives me confidence. No, my r just isn't Salmantina, and the luego I let slip without thinking has way too much e in it, but hey, I've done my time at the Spanish driving range. That's got to count for something.

Will back late this afternoon to post!

I be dancing

Grin.

I dreamt in Spanish last night.

Grin.

Actually I doubt it was the first time, I really do, but you have to understand that until recently I, whose buttoned-down picture appeared not only on my own corporate mahogany desk but deep, deep in Webster's - alongside the word repressed if I recall correctly, I hadn't remembered a single dream in years. I bolted when people started swapping vivid dream stories. "Oops, I think I hear my mother calling."

Then one night maybe a month ago, someone asked me what my dreams were like. So that night I reminded myself - well, and I asked, to be honest, ever so sweetly - excuse me, unconscious? ahem, since they are MY dreams, do you think maybe....just maybe?

My fall from blogging will soon make sense. I don't sleep so much anymore. Keep waking up and scribbling stuff QUICKLY before I lose it.

Be careful what you ask for.

Meanwhile, I have been very worried about my Spanish. I was missing it terribly for a while, craving castellano conversation. I've been thinking way too much in English lately, for a lot of reasons. I'm sure this is a whole post for another day, but my Spanish voice isn't my English voice. They are both me but they just don't express the same things. In either language I am always stopping, word hoarder that I am, to say, ok, so, I don't have a word in THIS language, but in the other, I'd tell you..... (Annoying habit, I know, I know. What do people who speak 5 language DO, exactly? How do they balance five images for everything they ever talk about, no two quite the same? Anybody know?))

Anyway, dreams. Last night I woke, started scribbling frantically and realized a full page and a half later that I was rambling away in Spanish, about a dream in Spanish.

Made my night. She's still in there.

And she speaks beautifully in dreams. Flows easy, rrrrrrs and jjjjjjs and oh, that perfect intonation. She sings like a native Castilian.

Little People

Sorry to have disappeared for a whole week. Then again, what's an expat blog without a long absence explained by ADSL trouble? I now have a new ISP, crossed fingers, and a lovely collection of unwritten post ideas scribbled on random scraps of paper.
**********

I've been collecting expressions in Spanish. As a further step in my neverending quest to sound more like I live here, since I do live here, I'm trying to pepper my Spanish with slang. And colloquial expressions. To sound less like the books I read, which my teacher Bego tells me just will not do.

Yesterday I stumbled onto a gem.
Straight from the mouth of my effervescent officemate, the lovely Sol, who in a moment of frustration threw up her arms and let this beauty fly:

¡Es que me crecen los enanos!

Allow me translate: Her midgets are growing.

Confused? So was I. But isn't it a fabulous phrase?

Turns out it's a my-luck-is-so-bad, nothing's-going-my-way, I-can't-get-anything-to-go-right castellano classic.

It's shorthand for a longer complaint:

Me pongo un circo and me crecen los enanos.

My luck's so bad I start a circus and my midgets grow!

Now, for my own arm-throwing moments, I've always been partial to blues lyrics: "If it wasn't for bad luck I'd have no luck at all" comes to mind, sung off key while faking a little Albert King air guitar. And I've been known to use "I can't stand up for falling down", although I suspect the Elvis Costello quote dates me. But I'm switching. From now on, me crecen los enanos. In English and Spanish.

You have to love a phrase born of frustration that conjures up such a fantastically fun visual. Who can be frustrated with visions of a circusful of tall midgets?

May your midgets be short, your fat ladies large and your fire-eaters fearless.
And may the gods be with my ADSL.