Verde

The dream is this. A perfectly ordinary woman I work with tells me she is an alien. She tells me this because we are friends. She puts a black rubber patch over the left side of my face that, she says, will retrain my brain, let me understand her language, which is too strange to learn using Duolingo. She asks me to take a nap. I do and when I wake (in the dream), the first thing I notice is that I stink. Humans stink.

I wake up (for real) gagging.

The point of the dream, I decide over breakfast, is that a new language is more than just different words for the same things we’ve known all our lives. Each language is a world where we see—smell—differently.

I find myself wishing I hadn’t woken up so abruptly. What was the word for stink in my alien friend’s language? For friend? Or is that thinking small again, in mere words? Was friend possible in her language? Or smell? Maybe it wasn’t that I smelled bad, but that the concept of smell for the aliens did not exist—or did not exist until my body dropped into their world. Maybe my presence created the need for new words. Like alien, perhaps.

I took my first Spanish class when I was 50. We were spending two weeks in Guanajuato, Mexico, so that my daughter, 16, could study Spanish. She was in the advanced class. I was in the most basic one, in which you learned numbers and colors. On the second day, I learned verde. Green. I shivered. I was in a concrete, windowless room, but I could see verde—leaves, limes, avocados. I had worn out good old green. After 30 years teaching writing in an English department, when I said the word, all I saw were the letters G R E E N, like tiles in a game of Scrabble. But verde. I rolled it around on my tongue. I could taste it. I could smell it. Verde smelled like being alive.

This morning, I read an article in The New York Times—“Can Learning a New Language Stave Off Dementia?”—that examined whether mastering a second tongue is like sending your brain to the gym. It’s a seductive idea and a popular one. Half the people I know my age are busy using apps to learn Mandarin or Hebrew. But as with most things, the truth is probably more complicated. According to the article, research shows that if you regularly use two languages, being bilingual probably does create secret tunnels that will help smuggle words from your brain to your tongue as you age. But learning a few new vocab words a week probably won’t help. And there is a dividing age. Learning a new language after 60, experts think, is too late. What about 50? I thought. Does 50 count?

After verde, I threw myself into Spanish. I took a sabbatical year and, on the suggestion of a Spanish professor friend, spent it in Montevideo, Uruguay, taking language classes. Verde led me, step by step, from reading Uruguayan poets to translating Uruguayan poetry to living in Uruguay part of each year. A simple color was a door opening to a new, and newly vivid, world.

But with friends my age, my conversations these days, whether in Spanish or English, seem to consist of everyone trying to remember details from a movie whose title we cannot recall. No matter how many languages are spoken at a dinner table, no one seems able to remember the name of that British actor in a mystery series we all watched on Netflix. Or even if the series was British and not Icelandic or Norwegian.

So, the whole idea that a second language can save your failing memory may be a vain hope. But my daughter learned first Spanish, then Japanese, and is fluent in both. My son tackled Spanish, then Mandarin. They can call me variations of “mother” in three languages—each bringing with it a different conception of what a mother should be. I have to have faith that this will help them—and maybe the world.

In Spanish, to wait is esperar, the same word as to hope. When we wait for a bus, even in English, do we not live in hope? Being a translator is like walking the frontier between two ways of thinking. It means wondering why sky and heaven are the same word, cielo, in Spanish and which is more appropriate in a certain line of verse. It means suddenly realizing how very clever I.O.U. is in English and how there is no clever equivalent in Spanish.

In Japan, historically, there was no word for the color green. It was considered a shade of blue. Even today, green traffic lights are still called blue, ao (青). As are what we would call green apples, ao-ringo (青りんご), blue apples.

Green as blue, verde as azul. Heaven as sky.

Words change the way we see, taste, smell, and live in the world.

In America, every time we have an election, someone tells me afterward that they are thinking of moving to another country. Voting, as it were, with their feet. Sometimes they mention a country. Fiji. France. But rarely do they say they are learning French or reading Fijian newspapers online, or picking up the burdens of a new political system in exchange for the weight of our own. The discussions mainly center around the cost of living. (Is Thailand affordable?) And that, I confess, makes me angry.

Fiji has three official languages: Fijian, Fiji Hindi, and the colonial language, English, which is still used in government and education. The country is struggling with Indigenous land rights issues and the return to democracy after a 2006 military coup. In France, one of the first countries to make language the core of nationhood, the official language is French. But Arabic is the second most common language, spoken by approximately four percent of the population—this in a country where Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right, anti-immigrant National Rally party, is one of the most popular politicians.

Name any country in the world, and it comes with problems, social, political, economic. It comes with its own language or languages. And with its own way of seeing the world.

To fly there simply to lie on a beach, to escape the weight of your language and refuse to take on another, stinks.

When I was in Chile in the summer of 2023, I attended a long list of literary events to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1973 coup that overthrew the elected president, Salvador Allende.

A poet read from a collection she had published before she was sent to prison, and tortured, for years. The daughter of tortured political exiles—who was also the niece of an infamous torturer—read from her memoir. People stood up after the presentations, not to ask questions but to tell their own stories of imprisonment, torture, losing parents and children.

I always carry a packet of tissues, and my role on those nights was handing them to the people who were crying. It was difficult. I sat there, a citizen of the United States, the country that had largely been responsible for the dictatorships in Chile, in Argentina, in my beloved Uruguay. Sat there, knowing it was English, my language—or a painfully bureaucratic version of it—that was used to plan Operation Condor, described by the CIA as “a cooperative effort by the intelligence/security services of several South American countries to combat terrorism and subversion.”

I sat and felt the weight of it. As if in that moment, I woke up and smelled my own body.

Alien as alive. Alien as raw to the world.

But it was a gift to be able to understand what people in those rooms were saying. They spoke, and I heard them. I cannot imagine sitting there, knowing only English, not having any idea why they were crying.

In Spanish, I pay close attention to what people are saying to me. I look them in the face, nodding as they speak. I can’t listen while scrolling through my phone if I want to understand. My daughter tells me that she feels like a different person in Japanese. I have the same sensation in Spanish. I find that I am a better listener, even when the stories are not like the ones in Chile but just about grandchildren or the poems someone has written. Learning Spanish has made it easier to make friends, real friends, who tell me what matters in their lives.

But I also think I am not nearly as funny. Making jokes in Spanish is often beyond me, though I can understand jokes. Usually. And I am pretty sure I often seem clumsily insistent. The subjunctive tense, home base of politeness, will never be natural for me. I am even more sure—the penalty of learning a language late—that my accent sometimes makes what I say utterly and completely incomprehensible. And even on a good day, when I open my mouth, I sound, well, alien.

When I am on a radio program in Uruguay, talking about the poets I have translated, if my answers to a host’s questions make sense, he will nod and move on to another question. If not, he’ll say, “So, what you are saying is—” and repeat, in a clearer version, what I was struggling to express. It works. It is just another form of translation.

Language the bridge we are building together, language the bridge we walk across.

In March 2020, Covid arrived in Uruguay. I was in a rented apartment in Montevideo, working on an anthology of Uruguayan women poets, but the pandemic cut me off from the writers I had come to Uruguay to see, and suddenly my Spanish was limited to the news on the radio, to the books I was translating, to hurried exchanges when it was my turn to shop.

During one excursion, I bought a tin of 120 Faber-Castell colored pencils. Then, for the first time in my life, I started to draw. Another form of translation. I drew the small houseplant in my kitchen, the only green that wasn’t 10 stories below. There was an entire row of greens, and I used them all: verde limón, salvia, jade, verde claro, verde bosque, verde oliva, verde menta.

Today, at home in Wisconsin, I got them out again. I notice the greens and blues are on the same level of the tin, blending as if I were in Japan, as if they belonged to the same word world, espuma del mar, verde azulado, turquesa, azul eléctrico, azul pavo, celeste.

Mint green. Sky blue.

How can you not taste those words—in any language?

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