From Gringo to Latino: Our famous professor in his own words

Econtré un artículo intrigante en mi copia del Washington Post. Enjoy! (posteado por Juliana)


The Writing Life

Look, Ma, no translator! A Chilean writer tries his hand at accent-free prose.

By Alberto Fuguet
Sunday, May 13, 2007; Page BW11

I'm writing this piece in English.

I don't want to be translated this time.

For the record: I don't believe in translations; there is, I've concluded, no such thing. There are only adaptations that compress or expand or sift a whole culture into another, while trying to retain its shine.

Ezra Fitz, my latest translator, has done a remarkable job of transforming my Spanish into an English that I can read without being reminded every 10 lines that it was written in another language. Or, what can be worse, that it was written by anyone but me. Not a nice feeling. I could have asked him to help me with this piece, but I preferred not to. Not because I didn't want to collaborate with Ezra, but because I wanted to take a risk, see what it would be like to go it alone, not have that little line under this piece that says "translated by. . . ."

Of course, there is nothing wrong with "translated by. . . ." I'm very happy to be available in Dutch and Finnish and -- coming soon! -- Polish. I have no problem being translated into languages I can't speak or read. I just don't like the idea of being translated into English because, after all, it's a language that was once my own.

Here's how it happened: English is my real language. Better said, my mother tongue. It's the first language I ever spoke. You see, I used to speak in that perfect Valley English of Encino, Calif. But then I returned (went for the first time, actually) to Chile, the country of my parents. I didn't know Spanish at all and was just starting puberty -- a bad time to be an immigrant. We went south on vacation and never came back. I had to learn Spanish fast.

Then I noticed something.

In Chile, I was a gringo. To be American in a continent where Americans are regarded as bullies, imperialists and fast-food cowboys was not what a young boy wanted to be, but there was no doubt about it: In this new language with its puzzling accents and weird letter ñ, I had an accent. I quickly realized that when you write, there is no such thing as an accent. So I guess I became a writer not because I wanted to tell stories -- I became one in order to survive, fit in.

To not have an accent.

But before I became a writer, I had to become Chilean, and, to be a Chilean, I had to conquer the language, excel in it. Not just the written one, but the spoken one, too. Along the way, I met people with accents. Older people. A Jewish grandmother of a friend in California spoke with a thicker accent than Henry Kissinger. In Chile, I bumped into an old Lithuanian who, after 50 years, spoke as if he had arrived yesterday.

Didn't accents ever go away? Was this a sort of curse for leaving home?

I worked hard, did my best to erase the English from my head, heart and tongue. Eventually, I succeeded. I began to talk in perfect Chilean, and, as an unexpected side-effect, I began to write, think and dream in what people down here call "the language of Cervantes."
Am I bilingual?

Not at all. I only wish. I'm unable to translate myself, and I'm very bad and slow at translating others.

Do I know English?

Yes. Some people believe there is such a thing as bilingualism. I have my serious doubts. One can speak, even write in different languages, but one of them must dominate. And in my case, by now, it's Spanish. I am a Spanish-language author and, more important, a Chilean. In the United States now, I have an accent. I stumble on spelling and, though I may talk all day in English, at the end of the day, I will need to revisit things in Spanish.

That said, I do miss English and have retained a number of tics. I love to see movies in English and read English-language books in, well, English. I tried Philip Roth in Spanish, and no, it didn't work for me. I also don't understand -- literally -- books that have been translated through another language into Spanish. Orhan Pamuk en español is a bore who can't capture my imagination, but in English his adapted Turkish soars. Same with Japanese. I can't read Murakami in Spanish. The retranslated prose gives me the creeps.

Another strange handicap I have from childhood is the alphabet. I'm not able to recite it swiftly, automatically, in Spanish. When I have a dictionary in hand, say, and need to remember if G comes before H or K, my brain goes directly to English, and I have to translate the results. The answer I guess is that I learned my ABCs but never read the essential children's textbook in Spanish, El Silabario Ilustrado. I arrived, I suppose, too late.

I sometimes feel the need to write in the language of my childhood. On my blog, I tend to post a lot in English, which, in South America, is considered snobbish. My little scribblings in my writer's notebooks are, usually, in English, as are my to-do lists. When I have to talk to someone whose Spanish is not too good, I go straight to English.

In the end, I guess I'm writing this piece en inglés because I knew I would be less self-conscious tackling personal questions such as: Why write? Or: Confessions from my writing life. I know when I use English, I return to my childhood. I'm more pure, more honest -- or maybe just more naive. Some emotions are easier for me in English than in Spanish. It's easier in general to be emotional en inglés. In English, you open your heart; in Spanish, you are taught early on to hide it. And Spanish, especially literary Spanish, is much more solemn and important-sounding.

For me, English is a lost paradise. A place I don't associate with books or loss or loneliness or violence. As you can guess, I've had a rougher time in Spanish, which, of course, is neither the language's nor the country's fault. It has everything to do with timing. I transformed myself into a Spanish-speaking person at exactly the time when I began to grow and things around me began to crumble. So English remains there, far away, and yet close, untouched, unblemished -- smelling of sprinklers, Slurpees, summer sweat and the aqua-blue chlorine of swimming pools that perfume the California night