The other week, I took part in an event to celebrate 200 years of Spanish at UCL, which is where I did my undergrad degree and where I first started doing translation, at least in some form. At the event, I was interviewed alongside an author whose novel I translated last year, and while she was interviewed in Spanish, I did my bit in English. It was all fine, but when this happens it always makes me a little self-conscious. I am not the only translator who rarely uses the language they translate from and who says that they lack the confidence to speak it; this of course doesn’t mean that we cannot translate from it. I often joke that my Spanish is rusty, describing it as ‘a homeless orphan’ kind of Spanish, and part of the problem is that I just don’t speak it enough. I am always reading it, of course, but these days I worry vaguely that it is becoming a little ossified. How can I re-awaken it, get back into the habit of speaking it?
While the genesis of the writing project I am working on for this residency is one of wanting to explore certain tensions in my relationship to my work, a tension that might be described as negative, I have also been thinking about the positive: my love for translation, my love of reading, my love for the Spanish language. Looking back over the previous blog posts for the BCLT residency, this one by Jen Calleja strikes me: https://www.newwriting.net/2023/05/a-close-relation/
In it, she talks about her relationship to the German language, how she “just felt like German attuned with my personality in some way. I liked the way it felt to speak its hard and soft sounds, I liked that it kept to its rules, French and Spanish were so fluid and flamboyant, whereas German felt stable and subdued.”
Do languages have personalities? Do their personalities align with our own, or are we drawn to some languages because of their difference to us? Sometimes I wonder whether learning Spanish (which I started to do at school like Jen) allowed me to access certain aspects of my personality that were subdued, hidden, repressed, dormant, or simply less dominant than others: sociability, openness, expressiveness. It is of course something of a stereotype that all Spanish speakers are highly sociable, loud, or flamboyant, but there is something about the Spanish language itself, as Jen points out – the vowels so much more open than many forms of English, which can be clipped and reticent, the relaxed ability it has to express so much with relatively few words compared to English – that does in some ways embody these sort of over-the-top qualities. Perhaps I was drawn to these aspects, part stereotype, part real, because they were simultaneously different from and desirable to me.
In our personal lives, a common pattern is that we can be drawn to romantic partners who embody certain personality traits that we ourselves do not possess – the partner then becomes a way for us to safely express such traits, although the opposite can of course happen, where what first drew us to our partners becomes the very thing that irritates the hell out of us. In Freudian therapeutic terms, this is a classic defence mechanism known as projection: when we haven’t managed to integrate certain aspects of the Self, those aspects we have walled off become bad, and we project them onto others in order to protect the Ego from anxiety.
Is Spanish, then, a site where I can safely play with those aspects of myself I perhaps deem or have deemed unlovable, frightening, or not really a part of me: the loudness, the sensuality – as well as a way for me to feel pleasure in expressing aspects of myself that do not always come naturally: ease of expression, emotional openness? My worry about my rusty Spanish comes from the sense that I tend to stay on the surface: reading Spanish, and translating it, is maybe not as risky, as real, as open to mistakes (and thus learning via real interaction with others) as actually speaking it, living in it, having relational conversations in it; perhaps using it primarily for work, for translation, allows me to be a tiny bit avoidant about it.
I recently watched a video on Instagram of a woman talking about how you should pick the language you want to learn based on your personality, and by that metric, or according to her video at least, I picked the wrong language with Spanish: supposedly I should be ‘impulsive, have hot blood and be spontaneous,’ but I worry vaguely that I don’t fit any of the other language-personalities she describes, either: I’m not ‘just a cool girl who can’t be bothered who is super magnetic’ (French), I don’t ‘have no filter whatsoever’ (Hindi), and I’m not ‘at [my] core royalty and […] very proud’ (Arabic); I don’t think I’m ‘just like, really, dramatic and cutesy’ (Korean), am not sure I am a poet at heart (Urdu), although this one is possibly the most like me, and I definitely don’t ‘like logic, analytics, order, math’ (Chinese). So perhaps English, ultimately, is the ‘right’ language for me, a quiet, slightly socially awkward person who worries about being precise in almost all aspects of her life. Or is there another language out there that ‘fits’ with my personality?
I am in fact currently learning another language: Greek, which shares many of those stereotypical aspects with Spanish (last week we learned a phrase that means ‘slow down, please,’ which is just the repetition of one of the words for ‘slow’ and is also a saying used to distil the idea that Greek culture entails doing things in a languid, unhurried fashion – it reminded me of ‘mañana’ in Spanish). The nicest thing about it, apart from my classmates and our brilliant teacher, is the return to the status of absolute beginner: it is humbling, freeing, and quite fun. I am not learning in order to one day translate from Greek, but rather just to be able to speak a little bit when on holiday with friends, and it is reminding me that the initial pull for me of a language is about play and exploration. Maybe all I need is a holiday to Spain where I can order a plate of fish and a glass of white wine (about the level of Greek I can currently handle) as a way to return to my early love for the language and shake off some of that rust.
