Writing professionally in two languages, in my case Spanish and English, is an exciting challenge. After more than fifty years in the United States, I still find it difficult to write in English. The main reason for this is that even after so many years, I often find myself thinking in Spanish when I write in English.
One explanation for this is that I didn’t begin to seriously immerse myself in English until I came to the United States from Argentina at age 31. At that age, many linguistic thought structures are already well developed. While children learn languages with extraordinary ease – the younger they are, the easier it is – this process becomes increasingly difficult as they get older.
Writing in both languages presents another problem: what is appropriate in Spanish may not be appropriate in English, and vice versa. For example, my first drafts of articles in English are often too wordy, so I have to revise them when I read them later. While Spanish allows for more elaborate expression, with frequent use of symbols and idioms, English expression is not necessarily simpler, just less convoluted. This becomes clear when translating from one language to another, where the English version is usually shorter than the Spanish one.
The Baroque
In an interview in the autumn issue of The Paris Review (1984) Julio Cortázar makes these important remarks about writing:
When Cortázar is asked why he thinks José Lezama Lima has a character in his novel Paradiso say that the Baroque is what interests readers in Spain and Latin America, Cortázar replies: “I cannot answer that as an expert. It is true, the Baroque is very important in Latin America, both in art and in literature. The Baroque can offer great richness; it lets the imagination soar in all its many spiral directions, like in a Baroque church with its decorative angels and all that, or in Baroque music.”
But I am suspicious of the Baroque. Baroque writers often take it too easy in their writing. They write in five pages what could be written in one. I must also be addicted to the Baroque, because I am Latin American, but I have always been suspicious of it. I don’t like pompous, voluminous sentences that are full of adjectives and descriptions and purr in the reader’s ear. Of course, I know that this is very charming.
It’s very beautiful, but it’s not my thing. I’m more on the side of Jorge Luis Borges. He was always an enemy of the Baroque; he narrowed his writing as if he had a pair of pliers. Well, I write very differently from Borges, but the great lesson he taught me is one of economy. When I started reading him, when I was very young, he taught me that you have to try to express what you want to say in an economical way, but with a beautiful economy. It’s perhaps the difference between a plant that you could call Baroque, with its many leaves, which are often very beautiful, and a precious stone, a crystal – which for me is even more beautiful.”
Make a difference
Perhaps the best example of the refined style that Cortázar prefers is precisely that of Jorge Luis Borges. The Paris Review (#28, Summer-Autumn 1962) the renowned French author André Maurois wrote: “Jorge Luis Borges is a great writer who has written only small essays or short stories. And yet they are enough for us to call him great because of their wonderful intelligence, their inventiveness and their taut, almost mathematical style.”
Borges himself defines the Baroque as follows: “I say that the Baroque is a style that consciously exhausts (or wants to exhaust) its possibilities, bordering on its own caricature.” In a conversation with the Argentine poet Roberto Alifano, a friend and collaborator of Borges, the Romanian writer Emil Cioran said: “Borges’ style is intelligent, of a mathematical concession in which nothing is omitted and nothing is missing; his writings make us touch every step of that disturbing mystery that is perfection. I think I wrote that Borges interests me so much because he represents a specimen of humanity in the process of disappearing and because he embodies the paradox of intellectual statelessness, an immobile adventurer who feels at home in different civilizations and in different types of literature, a magnificent and naturally condemned monster.”
In an interview with Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa in the autumn issue of The Paris Review (1990) when asked which Latin American writer he preferred, he said: “But if I had to choose a name, I would have to say Borges, because the world he created seems to me absolutely original. In addition to his enormous originality, he is also endowed with an enormous imagination and culture that are expressly his own. And then, of course, there is Borges’ language, which in a certain sense broke with our tradition and opened up a new one.”
Spanish is a language that tends towards exuberance, proliferation and excess. Our great writers have been prolific, from Cervantes to Ortega y Gasset, Valle-Inclán or Alfonso Reyes. Borges is the opposite – he is concise, economical and precise. He is the only Spanish-speaking writer who has almost as many ideas as words. He is one of the great writers of our time.”
Borges believed that he had developed a refined style at a relatively old age. In one of his conversations with the Argentine writer Fernando Sorrentino, Borges said: “To reach the point where I could write more or less decently succinctly, I had to be 70 years old.”
Whatever we think of Borges and his style, he is one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. The writer Susan Sontag said in a Letter to Borgesten years after the death of the great Argentine writer: “I just want to say that we miss you. I miss you. You continue to make a difference. The era we are now entering, this 21st century, will test the soul in new ways. But you can be sure that some of us will not give up the Great Library. And you will continue to be our patron and our hero.”
Iceberg theory
One of the most famous English writers for his minimalist, concise writing style is Ernest Hemingway. He developed the “iceberg theory”, according to which the deeper meaning of a story should not be apparent on the surface, but should be expressed implicitly. In October 1954, Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for Literature for “his mastery of the art of storytelling, which he recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Seaand for the influence he has shown on a contemporary style.” Hemingway brought new energy to American literature.
He learned it during his years as a newspaperman at the Kansas City Star. The Star Copy Style presumably used at the time is: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use powerful English. Be positive, not negative.” Hemingway followed these guidelines in his own writing and acknowledged his debt to the Star, saying these were “the best rules I ever learned in the writing business.”
The art of cutting
In a letter commenting on the influence of the writer Annie Dillard on him, the American writer Alexander Chee writes: “In her lessons I learned that although I had spoken English all my life, I actually knew very little about it. English had arisen from Low German, a language that was easy to categorize, and had filled itself with Latin and Anglo-Saxon words and was now eating things from Asian languages. Latin words were polysyllabic and Anglo-Saxon words were short, perhaps disyllabic at most. A good writer used both to vary the rhythm of the sentence.”
Perhaps most importantly, we should use a style that is appropriate for what we want to communicate. A technical article may use a different style than a news story, a literary text, or a novel. Ultimately, what matters is that the style fulfills the essential function of any text: to communicate effectively with the reader.
The magic of words
Whether in English, Spanish or any other language, there is a special magic in words that the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda expressed best when he wrote: Memories:
You can say what you want, yes, but it is the words that sing, they rise and fall… I bow to them… I love them, I cling to them, I run over them, I bite into them, I melt them… I love words so much… The unexpected ones… The ones I wait for greedily or chase until they suddenly fall… Vowels that I love… They glitter like colored stones, they jump like silver fish, they are foam, thread, metal, rope… I run after certain words… They are so beautiful that I want to put them all in my poem… I catch them in mid-flight as they whiz past, I catch them, clean them, peel them, I sit in front of the bowl, they have a crystalline texture for me, alive, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like seaweed, like agates, like olives… And I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I swallow them, I crush them, I garnish them, I let them go… I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like splinters of polished wood, like coals, remains of a shipwreck, gifts of the waves… Everything exists in the world…
Whether they write in their native language or in an acquired language, this interaction enriches the native language of bilingual authors; that is my experience. As the American poet and translator Dorothy Potter Snyder writes in Luvina: Revista literaria de la Universidad de Guadalajara No. 111, Summer 2023, “I clarify my thoughts by pouring them first through the filter of one language and then through the other, just as coffee becomes clear and strong through the interaction of water, paper and beans. My two languages inform, question and help each other. Together they show me what I want to say.”
