_Changing Language, Changing a Way of Being
(from the French)
Hector Bianciotti
published in Hopscotch (Durham, NC) 1:4 (1999)
As far back as I can remember, I was conscious of each word I was about to pronounce. Fearful would surely be the more fitting term, because I was raised with the fear of not speaking well enough the language of the country where I was born. I had to be part of the community where my immigrant parents had settled. That language was Spanish.
I should say that there was no school in the region, only teachers who stayed for several months each year in the home of one or another of the farmers, all of Italian origin like my family.
I spoke Spanish, therefore, but behind that there was a forbidden language which my father and mother spoke between themselves, by habit or perhaps to preserve their intimacy. In fact, it was not a language but a dialect, Piedmontese. The difference between a language and a dialect is not a question of quality but of statistics: the greater the number of people who share the same kind of speech, the greater the chance that a literary work may see the light of day and, consequently, that a dialect becomes a language. Dante consecrates Italian, which was but a multiform degeneration of Latin until he came along.
This dialect, forbidden to us children so that it would not contaminate our modest Spanish, I understood and would have been able to speak it. I didn’t even try. Soon enough it would become like a buzzing where some of the closed sounds intrigued me, the u especially, and a certain tendency of the voice to come out nasal.
I worked hard to speak the language well. And I was so fascinated by the written, printed thing, that being incapable of literature, as soon as the occasion presented itself by way of a women’s journal that devoted one or two pages to children, I committed plagiarism. A dictation on Puss in Boots was published under my name. I must have already noticed that people don’t remember much. I was eight years old at the time. So as not to commit an anachronism that would have been found out in the long run, I had not yet read “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.”
My commerce with Spanish was difficult, as for every Argentine aspiring to literature---a problem that is never fully resolved, if we except the case of Borges. We do not like Spain, our brief past is punctuated by wars of independence. I even think that some among us feel that Spain does not deserve the Quixote. At heart, this conflict is not connected to the wars of independence, I think, but quite simply to the way of speaking, the intonation of the typical Spaniard, the Castilian, so full of certainty, of emphasis, and of that bravado one finds in people who lack imagination. The Argentine is skeptical, he welcomes doubt willingly. This amicable habit of doubt, might it derive from the language itself, from the wavering of the language he spoke as a child? That’s possible.
I used to write poetry. I still recall my amazement at the first rhyme I heard or contrived---what could be more magical than that phenomenon which grants the rhyme the power of making a given thought seem inevitable, as though it came from higher up than the one who thinks it?
Somewhat rashly, one day I attempted prose, which is usually servile, utilitarian, and gets mixed up with speech; but which possesses enigmatic laws that we cannot decree, that we cannot even obey, but at most seek to obey. In prose, I found myself face to face with the framework, the skeleton of the language: syntax. I felt defenseless.
Once, at the counter of a Paris bistrot where a drunkard was trying without success to tell a story, a regular declared to the onlookers, “He’s lost his syntax.” I was a bit like that drunkard, in my own language. When, early in 1961, I settled in Paris and I was alone, from the standpoint of language, inside a tongue that I read but did not speak, I began to become aware of my deficiencies and defects. Through the years, through the books that I wrote in Spanish, little by little I improved my language. For an Argentine reader, it was not Argentine nor, for a Spaniard, was it Spanish. But as much in Spain as in certain Latin American countries, they emphasized the qualities of my style. I had opened a path for myself, I had acquired a manner that was my own.
Well, gradually as I wrote, the French language was becoming familiar to me. I worked surrounded by dictionaries so as to avoid Gallicisms---behind a veritable rampart of dictionaries. Little by little, when I looked for a word, French words would cross my mind before I found the equivalent in Spanish; then, a turn of phrase, later an entire sentence which I translated on the spot. From that strange though rather solid Spanish that I had managed to handle with assurance, I passed again into a situation of insecurity.
Finally, one day, the long first sentence of a story came to me in French and my efforts to translate it ended up in vain. That sentence pleased me, I was unable to renounce it. I continued to write in French.
That was three years ago. Up until then, I had written numerous articles in French, since the first one published by the Quinzaine Littéraire in 1969. Three years later, I became a literary columnist at the Nouvel Observateur. My apprenticeship in French---which will never be over---really started with writing reader’s reports for the publisher Gallimard, more than twenty years ago. Journalism forced me to learn the rest. But journalistic writing, with which I am not too uncomfortable, is a practice that concerns external matters, things we know, about which we want to inform the reader. Whereas literature does not know what it’s speaking about---it is produced in spite of the subject that we’re speaking of; in vain has the novelist tried to plan out a scene, thought over the description of a character, it is between the pen and the paper that the literary quality slips through, appears, and the writer does not take it in until after the event.
For two years I have been trying to write a novel in French. Writing has always been an arduous activity for me; doing it in French has not been more so than in Spanish; only, when I resign myself to a paragraph, I am not as sure as I used to be in my first language. After all, when I don’t find the French word I’m looking for, it’s Spanish and also Italian that come to my aid now. In fact, for a long time I think I’ve dreamed in French. The great difficulty, I believe, springs from the fact that, as much in Spanish as in Italian, even an illiterate uses every verb tense when he speaks, while in French we just use some of them. So, each tense for each verb form implies, for example, that the subject has thought for a greater or lesser time, and from a greater or lesser proximity: a bit more, a bit less in duration, and his opinion is different because the objects of thought change in dimension, in their connections, in their placement according to the subject’s point of view and the time that he has devoted to them. It’s the whole subtle system of transmission, of the memory’s resonances, the whole psychological density that one abolishes in not making use of every form and tense of the verb.
I do not know yet if French has accepted me; I am certain, on the contrary, that little by little Spanish has left me, since the day when French syntax broke ground in my native tongue---in my case, geographical rather than native---and occasionally I become aware of the beauty or ugliness of a Spanish word that I had never noticed. That’s the sign itself that the language is becoming foreign.
To change language is to change a way of being, to feel differently. I will give but one example: in French, solitude is intimate, we might even say that the lips want to conceal, in pronouncing it, the word that names it; in Spanish, soledad is immense, we are inside of solitude more than we feel alone. We can be desperate in one language and barely sad in another---I am barely exaggerating.
Sometimes I think that bilingualism is a form of freedom; sometimes, that it could end up by erasing identity. I like to think that in the forbidden language of my childhood, the one my parents spoke between themselves, there was that closed sound of the fifth vowel, that u sound which does not exist in Italian, not in any of its dialects, except in Piedmontese, and which is the u of French. A very intimate sound, like a tiny parcel where a part of me had long ago nestled, and which would have caused me to make the voyage unawares, from one language to the other---taking me away from my own in order to deposit me at the edge of another.
(from the French)
Hector Bianciotti
published in Hopscotch (Durham, NC) 1:4 (1999)
As far back as I can remember, I was conscious of each word I was about to pronounce. Fearful would surely be the more fitting term, because I was raised with the fear of not speaking well enough the language of the country where I was born. I had to be part of the community where my immigrant parents had settled. That language was Spanish.
I should say that there was no school in the region, only teachers who stayed for several months each year in the home of one or another of the farmers, all of Italian origin like my family.
I spoke Spanish, therefore, but behind that there was a forbidden language which my father and mother spoke between themselves, by habit or perhaps to preserve their intimacy. In fact, it was not a language but a dialect, Piedmontese. The difference between a language and a dialect is not a question of quality but of statistics: the greater the number of people who share the same kind of speech, the greater the chance that a literary work may see the light of day and, consequently, that a dialect becomes a language. Dante consecrates Italian, which was but a multiform degeneration of Latin until he came along.
This dialect, forbidden to us children so that it would not contaminate our modest Spanish, I understood and would have been able to speak it. I didn’t even try. Soon enough it would become like a buzzing where some of the closed sounds intrigued me, the u especially, and a certain tendency of the voice to come out nasal.
I worked hard to speak the language well. And I was so fascinated by the written, printed thing, that being incapable of literature, as soon as the occasion presented itself by way of a women’s journal that devoted one or two pages to children, I committed plagiarism. A dictation on Puss in Boots was published under my name. I must have already noticed that people don’t remember much. I was eight years old at the time. So as not to commit an anachronism that would have been found out in the long run, I had not yet read “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.”
My commerce with Spanish was difficult, as for every Argentine aspiring to literature---a problem that is never fully resolved, if we except the case of Borges. We do not like Spain, our brief past is punctuated by wars of independence. I even think that some among us feel that Spain does not deserve the Quixote. At heart, this conflict is not connected to the wars of independence, I think, but quite simply to the way of speaking, the intonation of the typical Spaniard, the Castilian, so full of certainty, of emphasis, and of that bravado one finds in people who lack imagination. The Argentine is skeptical, he welcomes doubt willingly. This amicable habit of doubt, might it derive from the language itself, from the wavering of the language he spoke as a child? That’s possible.
I used to write poetry. I still recall my amazement at the first rhyme I heard or contrived---what could be more magical than that phenomenon which grants the rhyme the power of making a given thought seem inevitable, as though it came from higher up than the one who thinks it?
Somewhat rashly, one day I attempted prose, which is usually servile, utilitarian, and gets mixed up with speech; but which possesses enigmatic laws that we cannot decree, that we cannot even obey, but at most seek to obey. In prose, I found myself face to face with the framework, the skeleton of the language: syntax. I felt defenseless.
Once, at the counter of a Paris bistrot where a drunkard was trying without success to tell a story, a regular declared to the onlookers, “He’s lost his syntax.” I was a bit like that drunkard, in my own language. When, early in 1961, I settled in Paris and I was alone, from the standpoint of language, inside a tongue that I read but did not speak, I began to become aware of my deficiencies and defects. Through the years, through the books that I wrote in Spanish, little by little I improved my language. For an Argentine reader, it was not Argentine nor, for a Spaniard, was it Spanish. But as much in Spain as in certain Latin American countries, they emphasized the qualities of my style. I had opened a path for myself, I had acquired a manner that was my own.
Well, gradually as I wrote, the French language was becoming familiar to me. I worked surrounded by dictionaries so as to avoid Gallicisms---behind a veritable rampart of dictionaries. Little by little, when I looked for a word, French words would cross my mind before I found the equivalent in Spanish; then, a turn of phrase, later an entire sentence which I translated on the spot. From that strange though rather solid Spanish that I had managed to handle with assurance, I passed again into a situation of insecurity.
Finally, one day, the long first sentence of a story came to me in French and my efforts to translate it ended up in vain. That sentence pleased me, I was unable to renounce it. I continued to write in French.
That was three years ago. Up until then, I had written numerous articles in French, since the first one published by the Quinzaine Littéraire in 1969. Three years later, I became a literary columnist at the Nouvel Observateur. My apprenticeship in French---which will never be over---really started with writing reader’s reports for the publisher Gallimard, more than twenty years ago. Journalism forced me to learn the rest. But journalistic writing, with which I am not too uncomfortable, is a practice that concerns external matters, things we know, about which we want to inform the reader. Whereas literature does not know what it’s speaking about---it is produced in spite of the subject that we’re speaking of; in vain has the novelist tried to plan out a scene, thought over the description of a character, it is between the pen and the paper that the literary quality slips through, appears, and the writer does not take it in until after the event.
For two years I have been trying to write a novel in French. Writing has always been an arduous activity for me; doing it in French has not been more so than in Spanish; only, when I resign myself to a paragraph, I am not as sure as I used to be in my first language. After all, when I don’t find the French word I’m looking for, it’s Spanish and also Italian that come to my aid now. In fact, for a long time I think I’ve dreamed in French. The great difficulty, I believe, springs from the fact that, as much in Spanish as in Italian, even an illiterate uses every verb tense when he speaks, while in French we just use some of them. So, each tense for each verb form implies, for example, that the subject has thought for a greater or lesser time, and from a greater or lesser proximity: a bit more, a bit less in duration, and his opinion is different because the objects of thought change in dimension, in their connections, in their placement according to the subject’s point of view and the time that he has devoted to them. It’s the whole subtle system of transmission, of the memory’s resonances, the whole psychological density that one abolishes in not making use of every form and tense of the verb.
I do not know yet if French has accepted me; I am certain, on the contrary, that little by little Spanish has left me, since the day when French syntax broke ground in my native tongue---in my case, geographical rather than native---and occasionally I become aware of the beauty or ugliness of a Spanish word that I had never noticed. That’s the sign itself that the language is becoming foreign.
To change language is to change a way of being, to feel differently. I will give but one example: in French, solitude is intimate, we might even say that the lips want to conceal, in pronouncing it, the word that names it; in Spanish, soledad is immense, we are inside of solitude more than we feel alone. We can be desperate in one language and barely sad in another---I am barely exaggerating.
Sometimes I think that bilingualism is a form of freedom; sometimes, that it could end up by erasing identity. I like to think that in the forbidden language of my childhood, the one my parents spoke between themselves, there was that closed sound of the fifth vowel, that u sound which does not exist in Italian, not in any of its dialects, except in Piedmontese, and which is the u of French. A very intimate sound, like a tiny parcel where a part of me had long ago nestled, and which would have caused me to make the voyage unawares, from one language to the other---taking me away from my own in order to deposit me at the edge of another.