Born again in a second language

[mgc1961]

In her exploration of the Catholic religion, “Letter to a Priest,” written the year before her death in 1943, Simone Weil noticed at some point that “for any man a change of religion is as dangerous a thing as a change of language is for a writer. It may turn out a success, but it can also have disastrous consequences.” The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, who was one such writer, talks of the change of language as a catastrophic event in any author’s biography. And rightly so.

When you become a writer, you don’t do so in abstract, but in relation to a certain language. To practice writing is to grow roots into that language; the better writer you become, the deeper the roots. Literary virtuosity almost always betrays a sense of deep, comfortable immersion into a familiar soil. As such, if for any reason the writer has to change languages, the experience is nothing short of life-threatening. Not only do you have to start everything again from scratch, but you also have to undo what you have been doing for almost as long as you have been around. Changing languages is not for the fainthearted, nor for the impatient.

Painful as it can be at a strictly human level, the experience can also be philosophically fascinating. Rarely do we get the chance to observe a more dramatic re-making of oneself. For a writer’s language, far from being a mere means of expression, is above all a mode of subjective existence and a way of experiencing the world. She needs the language not just to describe things, but to see them. The world reveals itself in a certain manner to the Japanese writer, and in quite another to the one who writes in Finnish. A writer’s language is not just something she uses, but a constitutive part of what she is. This is why to abandon your native tongue and to adopt another is to dismantle yourself, piece by piece, and then to put yourself together again, in a different form.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/born-again-in-a-second-language/?hp&_r=0

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. Well, I think I can speak to it

My native tongue is not American. In fact some accuse me of using ellipsis too much, both a Mexican and British Literary tools. I learned to use them young, they became part of who I am.

But I became a writer (serious one) in American. Yes, I have short stories I wrote in HS and poetry, in Spanish. I have tried to write Spanish, but in a literary way, I don't think that way. What I still have, is a penchant for long sentences. Both also sins of Queens English and Spanish.

I know there is a market out there in Spanish for sci fi and fantasy. The genre is still in baby stages, and most are translations from both the English and American markets. Mexico has a tradition of fantastic realism that one of these days I will try in English, so it should not be hard to produce good quality work within that tradition in Mexico. But I just simply don't think that way.

I admit, recently I started to read Mexican literature in it's native tongue. Partly it is to recover a facility of language that is in some ways no longer there. Writing in it seems daunting.