Poets on Translation: A Strawberry-Flavored Sigh

Poets on Translation is a series of short essays in which poets examine the intersections of poetry and translation in relation to questions of language, identity, authorship, and more.

Unconditional love lives an ocean away. Summers, I visit.

Mornings in Madrid I walk with my grandmother to Manolo’s, the butcher. When he sees me for the first time each summer, he says, “No wonder Grandma looks so happy these days!” He remembers my name.

Then we are off to see Almudena for chicken and eggs, her sons taller with every summer. One year, the skinniest and eldest has begun to man the counter.

At the fruit market, if they look good, and feel right, my grandmother buys me a chirimoya, a heart-shaped fruit with smooth green skin I only get to eat when I’m in Spain. In the middle of the pale custardy flesh, bright black seeds await, smoother than any I have ever felt on my tongue. Chirimoya. From the Quechua word chirimuya.

The fish market is last. Prawns with their heads still attached. Whole fish with a stilled look in their eyes. Fish with names such as gallo (rooster fish?), lenguado (sand tongued fish?). Mejillones (Male big-cheeks?), and caballa, which sounds a lot like caballo, the Spanish word for horse, although the blue-green iridescent fish with tiger-like stripes is clearly not.

Some days, if there is time, we make an extra stop at La Tienda. Glass cases filled with half-moon rolls. Cat tongues, plain or covered in chocolate. Cream-filled gazelle horns and cream-filled comb-overs. Three-layered thousand leaves. And my favorite: a strawberry-flavored sigh: swirls of moist meringue piled up high like a lady’s hairdo, but pink and squat.

After the large, midday meal, the over-table begins: my grandparents, my mother, and the day’s assemblage of uncles, aunts, and cousins sit around and have animated conversations. One day, my grandfather is telling a funny story when my grandmother gets mad. Félix! Te vas a condenar por la lengua! As in, You are going to condemn yourself by your tongue (maybe immediately, given the near future tense). Or: your tongue is going to damn you! Or: you’re going to go to hell for saying things like that about César and Rosalía, especially about César, whom I’ve known since childhood and who has done us many favors we can never repay and, anyway, I like to gossip about different people.

At night, my grandmother tucks me into bed. “Until tomorrow, Grandma.” To which she replies, “If God wills it.” The first time I hear her say this I grow terribly worried she might die overnight; my grandparents are unimaginably old. After she says it three or four nights in a row, all of which pass without her dying, I decide she is being dramatic.

It will be many years before I learn about calques. إن شاء الله. In shāʾ Allāh. Si Dios quiere. If God wills it.

“Where are you from?” people ask. Over the years, I’ve come up with a well-rehearsed answer: I was born in Spain to a Mexican-American father and a Spanish mother. But I mostly was raised in the country of California.

“What is your mother tongue?” people ask. It’s complicated, I say. But people have told me there are many ways to know: What language did you first learn? In what language were you educated? In what language did you first fall in love? Make a list of carpenter tools in each language; the longer one is your mother tongue. My answers, however, have never seemed quite right.

When I move with my parents from Madrid to Sacramento, I am a toddler. I speak only Spanish, and my first friend, Jennifer, speaks only English. When Jennifer and her mother return home after a playdate, her mother calls my mother and says, “Jennifer keeps asking for leche. What is leche?”

My Spanish is more like my mother’s mother tongue than my father’s. It is my mother who spends two decades of her life at home, taking care of my sister and me. English is all around us and my mother insists we speak only Spanish in the house for fear my sister and I will lose the ability to communicate with her family, all of whom remain in Madrid.

In Spanish-speaking countries outside of Spain, people don’t usually ask where I’m from; they assume I’m from Spain. My Spanish betrays me, shot through with markers that suggest this. In college, I grow ashamed that my Spanish aligns with the country’s colonizing history, its unspeakable atrocities, the repercussions of which I can see still trickling into the present day. It’s my shame that teaches me to purposely speak more like my father.

In Spain, it’s only after speaking with someone for a while that I sometimes see puzzlement and curiosity surface in their eyes: “Where are you from?” My cadence is not the cadence of Spanish from Madrid. I still use some slang from circa 1969, the year my mother immigrated to the United States. I have many lacunae in Spanish related to taxes, mortgages, and legal bureaucracy. Spanish is and is not my mother tongue.

I have built a life in English, but a whole Spanish-language self sits within me wherever I go. I feel it waiting—patiently, invisibly, as if behind a curtain—for the next opportunity to spring forward, unbridled; it is so alive. Yet people in my English-language life have little if any idea that this self, this other I, exists; it is painful. English is and is not my mother tongue.

I’m considerably less pained by the fact that I still don’t know the English names for many of the fish I’ve eaten in Spain over the years. The dictionary says that rooster fish is John Dory. Male-big-cheeks are mussels. Caballa, closely related to a horse in name only, is mackerel. Sand tongued fish may translate as flounder but not exactly; different fish live in different seas. 

And I still don’t know many of the names for carpenter tools, in either tongue; those I do know, I know in both.

Yoko Tawada has said that on first reading Paul Celan’s work translated into Japanese, she had the feeling his poems were peering into Japanese. In trying to understand how Celan’s poems were able to reach outside the German language, Tawada thought, “There must be a chasm between languages into which all words tumble.”

When I write, when I translate, I dive into the chasm between—and within—languages. I peer. I tumble. I tinker. I feel for the seams of syntax, rip them, mend them anew. I climb toward and through the channels within words. Words as thresholds. Words as gates and gated, too.

Throughout my life I’ve found myself around people whose English, like my mother’s, is accented by the underpinnings of another language. During my first semester in grad school, I heard a professor say he’d been to jail, before realizing he’d said Yale. I once heard anger rhyme with danger; a sight rhyme I’d never seen announced itself in my ear.

It seems to me that sometimes inside a word, another word waits to be freed from a spell. How is it, I often wonder, that adding or removing a letter can magically coax forth different speech? Fold back the s in said and it becomes aid. Can what is said be aid? Sometimes a word may switch languages in this way. Fold back the u in you and it becomes yo, which means I in Spanish. What is the difference between us?

At times, my mother / not-mother tongues try to merge, as evidenced in pesky, flea-like words that appear or disappear, seemingly on a whim: definite and indefinite articles; personal and possessive pronouns; and prepositions—arguably the most notorious of all. An insistence on borders, linguistic and otherwise, does little to change their permeability; languages are inflected by shifting histories of contact, context, and migration.

Perhaps what we call “errors” also bear witness to an eros, an underlying longing for oneness across languages that betrays a sense of our own smallness, the insufficiency felt by a lone self in a world so plural.

Leche. Chirimoya. Strawberry-flavored sigh. If God wills it.