English is like peanut butter in my brain. If I think about a word too long—its sounds, its letters, how its parts are put together—it gets stuck. It gets mired in incredulity, my mind balking at how these sounds come together to mean this word, to mean anything really. Ugly English syllables jam together, each one like a thud, like something dropped and broken and carried on anyway. The words they make are like ill-fitting boots in the snow. Not quite enough, but they’ll do. Take the word ‘the’. A word we use in every paragraph, in damn near every sentence. It’s functional. It does its job. But it also falls flat. There’s no song, no art, nothing that makes ‘the’ dance. But in Spanish? The ‘els’ and ‘las’ flow and swim through sentences connecting with a rhythm that doesn’t exist in English.
This morning, I was having random thoughts about the differences between big cats—you know how the mind tends to wander. (Or maybe this is just how a writer’s mind wanders, but I digress.) And as I was thinking of jaguars and panthers suddenly my brain turns to peanut butter trudging through syllables. PAN-ther—it’s dull and plodding, nothing like the graceful cat cursed with such a name. Now consider the Spanish—pantera. All soft vowels and melody. All flow and grace. You can feel it stalking through the jungle as it rolls off your tongue. And even though the translation is obvious, you don’t have to know what it means to know that it just feels right. Where English words fall flat, Spanish breathes life into them. Words—palabras. Tell me, which one sings in your mouth? Which one dances on your tongue?
Words like fuerte and duro bear the soul of their meaning better than strong and hard ever could. Better yet, in Spanish loud music is fuerte, but in English ‘strong’ does not convey the same sentiment when it comes to volume. My voice might be fuerte in Spanish, but English requires ‘strong’ and ‘loud’ to say the same thing. Left on their own, they each miss the point entirely. But fuerte is a poetic recognition of the power of noise. In English, we can string together a beautiful sentence, but the words stand on their own in Spanish. ‘Beautiful’ . . . meh. It may even be one of the better English words. And yet hermosa feels so much more authentic.
So why not just write in Spanish? I wish. While technically it is my first written language—I did learn to read and write in Spanish before English—my education in the Mexican public school system ended in the first grade and my reading and writing never progressed much past that point. So instead I construct English sentences to work around a single word begging for its place to shine.
I remember reading Caramelo for the first time and being in awe of how Sandra Cisneros sprinkled love into the English-language novel—the little bits of Spanish twinkling like stars (¡estrellas!) in the heavy English mud. At the time it didn’t feel like something I could do. Not with the types of stories I was writing at the time, not with the audience I thought I was courting. But then pieces of Julio’s story started popping up, demanding to be put down into words, and those words were bilingual just like him, just like me. The first draft came out a tangled mess of Spanglish—nothing like Caramelo. Somehow I thought it was possible to reach both English and Spanish readers with the same novel. It wasn’t. The first version of Popcorn was completely unintelligible to monolingual readers of either language, of value only to the fully bilingual.
The second version got better as I plucked out full phrases and limited sentences in Spanish to dialogue. The third found too many palabras hermosas singing in my ears, forcing my fingers to dance them out on the keyboard. Maybe too many beautiful words are the same as too much of a good thing. I started reading Caramelo again and remembered the way her sparse use of Spanish made it all the more powerful. The fourth (and final) draft pulls everything back to the original question of language and the purpose of each word in a sentence, each sentence in a paragraph, each paragraph on a page, and so on. And in that vein, some words just have to be in Spanish—because they are hermosa, because they are fuerte, because they are duro (not just hard, but lasting!)—because they just fit in a way that the English equivalent never could. A lot of the dialogue remains in Spanish and I also make use of words with obvious translations—such as the panther/pantera example. I hope that what I have arrived at is a richer level of story, that the use of Spanish adds to the depth of understanding and feeling for all readers, regardless of whether they are familiar with the language.
There is precedence for this in everyday life. We recognize the power of words foreign to our primary tongue all of the time. Cliché, dé jà vu, faux-pas, de jure, percapita—the overwhelming majority are French or Latin, why not Spanish? Why not make full use of our vocabularies as writers? Why not expand our lexicon as readers? Why limit ourselves to the reach of one language?
I love learning about the process it took to get to the final draft and realizing the power words can have.