19
JunOn language (One lustrum at Berkeley)
This is the third time I change language for academic reasons. The first one was back in the eighties, in the middle of the linguistic normalization process in some of the Spanish autonomies. Mine was Valencia, where I moved in from my hometown, Valladolid. Some of our classes in school were, then, in Catalan language (or Valencian, according to the Statute of Autonomy). Particularly the math classes. The mix of an astonishing good math professor, Joan Pons, and the new academic language made my life, for once, completely thrilling. It is true that at that time I was already able to read, write, and speak in Catalan. In spite of my Barceloní accent, or perhaps thanks to it, my Catalan professors (Carme, Empar, Vicent, just like that, with no lastnames) tolerated my linguistic exuberances.
The second time was a little more complicated. I moved from Valladolid to Paris in order to pursue my doctoral studies and to work as a maître assistant (lecturer) at the École Normale Supérieure. DEA (doctoral) classes used to be in French, and participation in French was required. Papers and mémoires should also be in French. A couple of times, I asked for perrmission to explain this or that idea in Spanish, but my professors would not allow me to do it. Thankfully, Carlos Heusch, Michel Garcia, and the entire Garcia family made my life much easier. They certainly understood the meaning of moving to a completely different academic world.
English represents a completely different problem altogether. Some months ago, while I was reading Enrique Vila-Matas' Bartleby y compañía, a book on those writers who have decided to stop writing, I discovered Felipe Alfau. Felipe Alfau moved to New York City as a teenager in 1916, and although he started writing in Spanish, he decided, at a certain point to start writing in English. Here is the beginning of his second and last novel, Chromos:
The moment one learns English, complications set in. Try as one may, one cannot elude this conclusion, one must inevitably come back to it. This applies to all persons, including those born to the language and, at times, even more to Latins, including Spaniards. It manifests itself in an awareness of implications and intricacies to which one had never given a thought; it afflicts one with that officiousness of philosophy which, having no business of his own, gets in everybody's way and, in the case of Latins, they lose that racial characteristic of taking things for granted and leaving them to their own devices whithout inquiring into causes, motives or ends, to meddle indiscreetely into reason which are none of one's affair and to beome not only self-conscious, but conscious of other things which never gave a damn for one's existence.
And then he continues:
In the words of my friend Don Pedro, of whom more later, this could never happen to a Spaniard who speaks only Spanish. We are more direct but, according to him, when we enter the English-speaking world, we find the most elementary things questioned, growing in complexity without bounds [...] leading one gently from a happy world of reflexes of which one was never aware, to a world of analytical reasoning of which one is continuously aware, which closes in like a vise of missionary tenacity and culminates in such a collapse of the simple as questioning the meaning of meaning.
Although the following paragraphs are just as exciting, I won't reproduce them here. Rather, I would recommend you to read Felipe Alfau's complete novels (two: Locos. A Comedy of Gestures, and Chromos). You won't regret it for a second.
My sentences are way too long. My regular use of metaphors in Spanish does not work in English. My rythm does not work in English. My humour does not work in English. The mix of coloquial and high registers, so usual and effective in Spanish, does not work at all in English. There was a time in which being a professor in an American Spanish Department did not necessarily involve writing books and articles in English, and, in any case, in my department most classes are taught in Spanish. But the fact is that I barely have students form my department. Most of them come from otheer departments, such as Comparative Literature, Jewish Studies, etc. And besides, I do not want, by any means, to become a stranger. I want to ge the language, to use it as if it were as mine as it is Spanish, or s I feel they are Catalan and French. If I could (although I know I cannot), I would like to do just like Felipe Alfau, or, in some dreams in which I am extremely generous with myself, like Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov. I would only write in English, and, on the back, I would write in Spanish because it would be like breathing.
It is perfectly all right. I have been learning the language for the last five years. I have been working very hard on this. I have had to learn, along with the language, a whole new way to think up my ideas (if any); that is to say, to create them anew, for changing a syntax, a morphology, a consequutio temporum, means also to change the ideas themselves by shipping them blindly to another continent where things happen in a different way.
[My dear students and friends have helped me, and still help me patiently, with language: Seth, Heather, Jerry, Michael, they all have my eternal gratitude]
This is a beautiful and moving post. As I read it, I couldn’t help thinking of our conversation in Coquelet last week, in which I attempted to entertain you with an invented story about you learning a language such that I might try to explain my difficulties with Latin and other languages. Specifically, I had in mind my telling you that you had, in effect, ruined my story because despite my selection of a very difficult language and mentioning of a few others that in America are generally considered totally arcane or otherwise defunct, you already had studied it.
Thank you for a real story and for the incredible Felipe Alfau passages, all tucked neatly in what I have always thought to be your wonderful English. All of these, story, citations, and English, gave me many thoughts to ponder about my English and Spanish, learning, and writing, and whether any of us is really a native speaker of any language.
Dear Jesús, I cannot help but, honoring your subject, write this in English. That way everybody will be able to notice that the command of the English language achieved by other Hispanic immigrants to Anglican (linguistically speaking, I mean) societies is not as good as yours happen to be. It's the first time we correspond in English, and it feels weird, weird de toda weirdedad. Here is a story, rather dormant in the nooks and crannies of my memory -or in the void which takes the place where it was supposed to be. Many years ago, perhaps in the early to mid nineties, one Thursday evening I happened to run into a very illustrious and dear maestro of mine in the library of the sinister institution where I used to work (?) then. Don't ask me about the particulars, but we ended up talking about Antonio G. Solalinde -one of our predecessors in testing the American academic waters. This old master knew Solalinde very well, because they both were a part of the glorious Centro de Estudios Históricos (he as a student, Solalinde already as a young researcher), and disciples of Menéndez Pidal. He told me that Solalinde was married to a woman called Jesusa Alfau de Solalinde, author of a much quoted book on the names of tissues in medieval Spanish. I asked him if this woman was also a student in the Centro, and he told me that she was not, that she was born in Spain, but moved to America with her family when she was very young, and finally settled in New York. Apparently she met Solalinde there. And this old philologist, with an almost unperceptible sparkle in his eyes, hardly visible behind the thick glass of his spectacles, added -please allow me the poetic license of using the oratio recta here-: "Who was interesting, though, was Jesusa's brother. He was a rather peculiar and eccentric man, who wrote a couple of novels in English, and who was an egregious supporter of Franco. I meet him a couple of times in the US, and once he showed me the original of one of these novels that he decided not to publish, and read me some parts of it, in which he reflected on the life and feelings of the Spanish people living in exile in the USA. I was very much interested in it, since at that time" -added the old professor- "I was almost sure that I would need to stay in the US in order to make my living, because of my situation in post-war Spain, and I could see myself as one of this exilees". He did not, of course, but that is a different story. Which means, of course, that this is a small world, that life is full of senderos que se bifurcan, as Borges said, but also of senderos que se unen, and that I was, as you may well imagine, stunned when I was slowly realizing -ah, the drowsiness caused by the allergy drugs!- that your Felipe Alfau was the same lad my old professor told me about maybe a dozen years ago, when Alfau (and my master, for that matter) were still alive. Obviously, I have already ordered a copy of Chromos. And as a gift (hopefully a poisonous one), here's some homework for you: why one of your predecessors in Berkeley, another of these philological emigrants, Erasmo Buceta, stopped writing academic books and articles in 1936. Apparently he was born in Pontevedra, 1892 (like, interestingly enough, Agapito Rey, another of our predecessors), and he settled in the USA in 1916 -the same year, interestingly enough again, Felipe Alfau did. Here, write a novel -in English, of course. Un abrazo fuerte.