Challenges of Bilingual Writer

Writing professionally in two languages, Spanish and English in my case, poses stimulating challenges. After more than fifty years of living in the United States, I still find it laborious to write in English. The main reason is that, even after so many years, I frequently think in Spanish when I write in English.

One explanation is that I only had a serious immersion in English at the age of 31, when I came to the United States from Argentina. At that age many linguistic structures of thought are already formed. While children have extraordinary ease in learning languages –​​the younger the easier– the arduousness of this process increases with age.

Writing in both languages has an additional pitfall: what may be appropriate in Spanish is not necessarily so in English, and vice versa. For example, my first drafts of articles in English often are too wordy, so I need to keep editing in subsequent readings. While Spanish allows a more ornate way of expression, with the frequent use of symbols and figures of speech, in English there is an economy of expression not necessarily simpler, but merely less convoluted. This is evident when translating from one language to another, where the English version is usually shorter than the Spanish.

The baroque

In an interview published in the autumn issue of The Paris Review (1984,) Julio Cortázar makes these important comments on writing:

When Cortázar is asked why he believes that José Lezama Lima makes a character in his novel Paradiso say that the baroque is what interests readers in Spain and Latin America, Cortázar responds: “I cannot reply as an expert. True, the baroque is greatly important in Latin America, both in the arts and in literature as well. The baroque can offer a great richness; it lets the imagination soar in all its many spiraling directions, as in a baroque church with its decorative angels and all that, or in baroque music.

But I distrust the baroque. The baroque writers, very often, let themselves go too easily in their writing. They write in five pages what one could very well write in one. I too must have fallen into the baroque because I am Latin American, but I have always had a mistrust of it. I don’t like turgid, voluminous sentences, full of adjectives and descriptions, purring and purring into the reader’s ear. I know it’s very charming, of course.

It’s very beautiful, but it’s not me. I’m more on the side of Jorge Luis Borges. He has always been an enemy of the baroque; he tightened his writing, as if with pliers. Well, I write in a very different way than Borges, but the great lesson he taught me is one of economics. He taught me when I began to read him, when I was very young, that one had to try to say what one wanted to with economy, but with a beautiful economy. It’s the difference, perhaps, between a plant, which could be considered baroque, with its multitude of leaves, often very beautiful, and a precious stone, a crystal –that for me is more beautiful still.”

Making a difference

Perhaps the best example of the refined style Cortázar prefers is precisely that of Jorge Luis Borges. In The Paris Review (# 28, Summer-Fall 1962), the prestigious French author André Maurois wrote, “Jorge Luis Borges is a great writer who has composed only little essays or short narratives. Yet they suffice for us to call him great because of their wonderful intelligence, their wealth of invention, and their tight, almost mathematical style.”

Borges himself defines the baroque this way: “I venture the baroque is a style that deliberately exhausts (or wants to exhaust) its possibilities and borders on its own caricature.” In a talk with the Argentine poet Roberto Alifano, a friend and collaborator of Borges, the Romanian writer Emil Cioran said, “Borges’s style is intelligent, of a mathematical concession, in which nothing is left out and nothing is missing; his writing makes us touch every step of that disturbing mystery that is perfection. I think I have written that if Borges interests me so much it is because he represents a specimen of humanity in the process of disappearing, and because he embodies the paradox of intellectual statelessness, of an immobile adventurer who is at ease in various civilizations and in various kinds of literature, a magnificent monster and a condemned one, of course.”

In an interview with the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa in the Fall issue of The Paris Review (1990), when asked what Latin American writer he prefers he said, “But if I were forced to choose one name, I would have to say Borges, because the world he created seems to me absolutely original. Aside from his enormous originality, he is also endowed with a tremendous imagination and culture that are expressly his own. And then of course there is the language of Borges, which in a sense broke with our tradition and opened a new one.

Spanish is a language that tends toward exuberance, proliferation, profusion. Our great writers have been prolific, from Cervantes to Ortega y Gasset, Valle-Inclán or Alfonso Reyes. Borges is the opposite–all concision, economy and precision. He is the only writer in the Spanish language who has almost as many ideas as he has words. He’s one of the great writers of our time.”

Borges believed he had achieved a refined style at a relatively advanced age. In one of his conversations with the Argentine writer Fernando Sorrentino, Borges said, “To reach the point of writing succinctly in a more or less decorous way I had to reach the age of 70.”

Whatever our opinion of Borges and his style, he is one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. The writer Susan Sontag said in a Letter to Borges, written ten years after the death of the great Argentine writer: “All I mean to say is that we miss you. I miss you. You continue to make a difference. The era we are entering now, this 21st century will test the soul in new ways. But you can be sure, some of us are not going to abandon the Great Library. And you will continue to be our patron and our hero.”

Iceberg theory

In English, one of the writers best known for his minimalist, concise writing style is Ernest Hemingway. He developed the “iceberg theory,” according to which the deeper meaning of a story should not be evident on the surface but should be expressed implicitly. In October 1954, Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for Literature for “his mastery in the art of narrative recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence he has shown in a contemporary style.” Hemingway brought new energy to American writing.

He learned it from his years as a newspaperman at the Kansas City Star. The Star Copy Style, believed to be used at the time says, “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.” Hemingway used these guidelines in his own writing and acknowledged his debt to the Star saying that they were, “the best rules I ever learned in the business of writing.”

The art of cutting

In a letter commenting on writer Annie Dillard’s influence on him, the American writer Alexander Chee writes, “In her class, I learned that while I had spoken English all of my life, there was actually very little I knew about it. English was born from low German, a language that was good for categorization, and had filled itself in with words from Latin and Anglo-Saxon words and was now in the process of eating things from Asian languages. Latinates were polysyllabic, and Anglo-Saxon words were short, with perhaps two syllables at best. A good writer made use of both to vary sentence rhythms.”

Perhaps what is most important is to use a style that follows what we are trying to communicate. A technical article may employ a different style than a news story, a literary text or a novel. In the end, what really matters is that the style fulfills the essential function of every single piece of writing: to communicate effectively with the reader.

The magic of words

Either in English, Spanish or any other language, there is a special magic to words, best expressed by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda when he wrote Memoirs:

You can say anything you want, yessir, but it’s the words that sing, they soar and descend… I bow to them… I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down… I love words so much… The unexpected ones… The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop… Vowels I love… They glitter like colored stones, they leap like silver fish, they are foam, thread, metal, dew… I run after certain words… They are so beautiful that I want to fit them all into my poem… I catch them in midflight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives… And I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them, I let them go… I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves… Everything exists in the word…

Whether writing in their native language or their acquired one, this interaction enriches the native language of bilingual writers; this has been my experience. As American poet and translator Dorothy Potter Snyder writes in Luvina: Revista literaria de la Universidad de Guadalajara No. 111, Summer 2023, “I clarify my thoughts by decanting them first through the filter of one language and then through the other, as coffee comes out clear and strong through the collaboration of water, paper, and bean. My two languages inform, question, and help each other. Together, they show me what I want to say.”

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