Save the Spanish

So, let's talk about my English-speaking friends: One friend in Galveston told me that he doesn't check my blog anymore, because I use too much Spanish. Can't read it, he said. Another was a little more inquisitive, a little more willing to do some work. Asked me how she could learn Spanish, I recommended Babelfish, the Altavista translator. At least, that way bad translations of most languages of the world are a click away. Then, this week, a new pal told me to "save the spanish." Meaning leave it out, no lo uses, sácalo pues.

Pero a pesar de estos comentarios, voy a seguir escribiendo en cualquier idioma que se me dé la gana. Even if just to mess with the English speak-easy folks. How interesting none of the Spanish-speakers have complained about the English yet. But no, all the Spanish-speakers I know already speak English or want to very very very badly.

Moorishgirl writes in an article in the Boston Review about native speakers of one language making the decision to write in another. The list of writers who switch languages is most compelling, as well as the conclusions drawn from their decisions:

Joseph Conrad, for instance, did not write in Polish, his mother tongue; instead, and after 20 years of world travel, he settled in England and embraced its language in his work. Milan Kundera chose French rather than Czech for his later books because he wanted to free himself of expectations and censorship. Elias Canetti, whose native language is Ladino, opted for German, though he lived most of his life in England and Switzerland. But for others, the decision to give up their mother tongue was not a choice at all. It was the inescapable result of colonial education—witness, for example, the vast literature in French that came out of Africa in the wake of France’s century of hegemony: Assia Djebbar, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Camara Laye, and Léopold Sedar Senghor, to name just a handful.

What is striking about these shifting linguistic allegiances is that they tend to favor the language that is culturally dominant on the international scene.

My point exactly. While there is a long tradition of writers shirking their less-dominant mothertongues to use another more-dominant language, I cannot locate a similar tradition that would operate in reverse. English speaking writers deciding to write in Spanish being the most obvious example. But Russians who switch to Kazakh, Germans who switch to Turkish, French who switch to Arabic, Spanish-speaking Peruvians who switch to Quechua, the list could grow further. Does anyone know of cases like this that escape me? Me fascina la posibilidad de cambiar de idiomas, como ya sabrán ustedes.

In an interesting endnote, a conversation with Jen Hofer in Tijuana this summer on this very subject has kept me thinking. As I understood her point: Writing in Spanish for a native English speaker is very difficult: instead of knowing ten ways to express something in English, knowing only six in Spanish. And then the big questions: Is it a colonial move for a speaker of a dominant language to take over a less-powerful one? To move into it and claim it? Is it a form of imperialism? The benefits of "moving up" the language food chain are obvious, but the politics of it are messy. Accusations of selling out or of not being true to your roots or your people. But what would be the benefits of "moving down" (even the term is ugly and locked in an imperialist way of thought)? Is switching down an imperialist move? A way to exoticize oneself? A cop-out pues?

Don't know myself, but I do know having the questions in my head has propelled me towards imagining a liberatory practice of translation, rather than trying to dissappear into another tongue. Pero seguiré escribiendo en español aunque, claro, no voy a salvar el idioma. Because the little misunderstandings que brotan when the languages trip over each other, los valoro tanto tanto.

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