Always Living in Spanish:

Recovering the Familiar, through Language

By Marjorie Agosin
In the evenings in the northern hemisphere, I repeat the ancient ritual that I observed as a child in the southern hemisphere:  going out while the night is still warm and trying to recognize the stars as it begins to grow dark silently.  In the sky of my country, Chile, that long and wide stretch of land that the poets blessed and dictators abused, I could easily name the stars:  the three Marias, the Southern Cross, and the three lilies, names of beloved and courageous women.

But here in the United States, where I have lived since I was a young girl, the solitude of exile makes me feel that so little is mine, that not even the sky has the same constellations, the trees and the fauna the same names or sounds, of the rubbish the same smell.  How does one recover the familiar?  How does one name the unfamiliar?  How can one be another of live in a foreign language?  These are the dilemmas of one who writes in Spanish and lives in translation. 

Since my earliest childhood in Chile I lived with the tempos and the melodies of a multiplicity of tongues:  German, Yiddish, Russian, Turkish, and many Latin songs.  Because everyone was from somewhere else, my relatives laughed, sang and fought in a Babylon of Languages.  Spanish was reserved for matters of extreme seriousness, for commercial transactions, or for illnesses, but everyone's mother tongue was always associated with the memory of spaces inhabited in the past:  the shtel, the flowering and vast Vienna avenues, the Minarets of Turkey, and the Ladino whispers of Toledo.  When my paternal grandmother sang old songs in Turkish, her voice and body assumed the passion of one who was there in the city of Istanbul, gazing by turns toward the west and the east.

Destiny and the always ambiguous nature of history continued my family's enforced migration, and because of it I, too, became one who had to live and speak in translation.  The disappearances, the torture, and  clandestine deaths in my country in the early seventies drove us to the United States, that other America that looked with suspicion at those who did not speak English and especially those who came from the supposedly uncivilized regions of Latin America.  I had left a dangerous place that was my home, only to arrive in a dangerous place that was not:  A high school in the small town of Athens, Georgia, where my poor English and my accent were the cause of ridicule and insult.  The only way I could recover my usurped country and my Chilean childhood was by continuing to write in Spanish, the same way my grandparents had sung in their own tongues in diasporic sites.

The new and learned English language did not fit with the visceral emotions and themes that my poetry contained, but my writing in Spanish I could recover fragrances, spoke rhythms, and the passion of my own identity.  Daily I felt the need to translate myself for the strangers living around me, to tell them why we were in Georgia, why we are different, why we had fled, why my accent was so thick, and why I did not look Hispanic.  Only at night, writing poems in Spanish, could I return to my senses, and sooth my own sorrow over what I had left behind.

This is how I became a Chilean poet who wrote in Spanish and lives in the Southern United States.  And then, one day, a poem of mine was translated and published in the English language.  Finally for the first time since I have left Chile, I felt I didn't have to explain myself. My poem expressed in another language spoke for itself... and for me.

Sometimes the austere sounds of English help me bear the solitude of knowing that I am foreign and so far away from those about whom I write.  I must admit I could like more opportunities to read in Spanish to people whose language and culture is also mine, to join in our common heritage and in the feast of our sounds.  I would also like readers if English to understand the beauty of the spoken word in Spanish, that constant flow of oxytonic and paraoxytonic syllables (Verde gue te quiero verde), * the joy of writing--of dancing-- in another language.  I believe that many exiles share the unresolvable torment of not being able to live in the language of their childhood.

I miss that undulating and sensuous language of mine, those baroque descriptions, the sense of being and feeling that Spanish gives me. It is perhaps for this reason that I have chosen and will always choose to write in Spanish.  Nothing else from my childhood world  remains.  My country seems to be frozen in gestures of silence and oblivion.  My relatives have died, and I have grown up not knowing a young generation of cousins and nieces and nephews.  Many of my friends were disappeared, others were tortured, and the most  fortunate, like me, became guardians of memory.  For us, to write in Spanish is to always be in active pursuit of memory.  I seek to recapture a world lost to me on that sorrowful afternoon when the blue electric sky and the Andean cordillera bade me farewell.  On that, my last Chilean day, I carried under my arm my innocence recorded in a little blue notebook I kept even then.  Gradually, that diary filled with memoranda, poems written in free verse, descriptions of dreams and of the thresholds of my house surrounded by cherry trees and gardenias.  To write in Spanish is for me a gesture of survival.  And because of translation, my meory has now become a part of the memory of many others.

Translators are not traitors, as the proverb says, but rather splendid friends in this great human community of language.