After reading stories by Hemingway and Fitzgerald for most
of my life, I always wondered why they rarely included translations in their
work when writing to English speakers.
Both men were of the expatriate generation of writers, living in Paris,
Madrid and Switzerland, and their works of literature include sections,
conversations and sometimes even paragraphs in a language they can’t assume
their reader understands. Is it a
literary device? Something done to
prove a point to the reader? They
wrote almost exclusively about life in foreign countries, between Africa, Spain
and Austria, and what they do write in America is filled with discontent and
existentialism. Studying
literature, the foreign tongues must be techniques, done on purpose. But literary figures are often unaware
of the techniques they use, and even more so of what they mean. Hemingway used his Spanish and Italian
for different purposes, and as I begin to chronicle my time here in story, I
begin to realize why.
Living in a foreign language, your brain becomes accustomed
to thinking in both. I think in
one, then translate to the other.
Every thought I have, I have it at least twice. And now, as I begin to write,
conversations stay in the language they were had originally. And I’ve stopped translating in my
stories.
As my time here continues, I find Panamanian sneaking into
my English. The longer I live in a
foreign language, the more I simply think of my experience here in
Spanish. Speaking with other
volunteers isn’t even a respite – we use spanglish with each other. A turtle poners – a phrase that means nothing in English or Spanish. I’m acostombrandome-ing
to the culture – if I translated that, it would literally mean I’m
becoming-accostomed-myself-ing to the culture. What does that even mean?
So now, as I begin to translate my experiences into stories
– whether it’s a blog post or a short story – I keep Spanish in Spanish and the
rest in English. And now, as I
re-read all my favorite Hemingway, I realize, it has nothing to do with
literature. It’s all in how you hear
it in your head. He wrote about
his experiences in the only way that made sense to him, whether a true story
(like the Green Hills of Africa), or
based in something like truth (the Nick Adams stories).
Language is an interesting thing, written and spoken. Dialects change not only from country
to country, but also from province to province. Words mean different things, based not only on location but
also on context. Perhaps bilingual
literature is only trying to demonstrate this fluidity. Perhaps the only way to fully
understand another culture is to become fluent in their dialect.
A classmate in college wrote her thesis on literary
translations. How the simple act
of translating something into another language changes the meaning of the
story. Perhaps that is the same
phenomenon I am experiencing. The
moment I try to explain my time here to someone else – especially someone
outside of the Peace Corps world, there’s a disconnect. I cannot explain it in a way that
people truly understand until they see it alongside me, in the language.
But that’s almost the beauty of the Peace Corps world. I can talk to my friend in the
Philippines about a frustration in my site. I can write letters to my friend in Ethiopia. We are in completely different
countries, with completely different languages, but somehow, we understand each
other. Each Peace Corps experience
is unique, but in that uniqueness, we are somehow able to understand each other
that much better.
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