The Great Spanish Spectacular
On Thursday, I made a trip to Zimmerman Library and, giddy, wandered up and down the aisles. I found a few gems, including Phonologies of Asia and Africa. Then I made my way to find a new copy of The House of the Spirits because I had to return my loan — almost finished — to Libby. Sitting beside it on the shelf was the original Spanish version. I bit my lip, then scooped it up. I would examine its worn spine on the bus home. Back in my apartment, I started reading.
To my great surprise and glee, I followed along.
The going was slow, halted. I came across a verb that I knew but had to think for a moment, casting my eyes upward to the ceiling like the translation would be scrawled there. At other times, I thought that the translation was based on my limited information, not a one-to-one conversion. Naturally, I am no translator, but I am a reader, and I was so stunned for just a moment as I brushed my finger along the page, caressing the words that I finally knew. Some of the sentences I didn’t even need to translate; I just knew what it meant.
I learned from the pages I read. I learned that ojerosa means the dark circles that bruise the under side of the eye. I have Google Translate on hand when I stumble on something new, but with each page, I felt like I was crawling closer to the fluid and energetic flow of truly speaking and understanding Spanish.
Spanish is the language of my family. Recently, I listened in as closely as I could to my father speaking Spanish with the nurses when he was in the hospital. I wish I had grown up speaking this language. I study a great many tongues but Spanish is el idioma mas importante. I prioritize it. And the thing is, as I prepare to start my graduate program in Linguistics, I feel a certain urgency to get as far as I can, to gobble up as many words and verbs in particular that I can as the start term approaches. Because I enjoy making lists, I assembled a compendium of words related to the body, fashion, locations and transportation, the natural world, and so on and so forth. There are three hundred verbs in that list — I am carefully sifting through a dictionary for the soul of all of them.
My Spanish journey has started and stopped for years. Only now do I feel like I am gaining traction as I pace, faster and faster, gliding upward and into the air. Direct object pronouns, reflexive verbs, comparative adjectives, imperatives, first and second and third conjugations. I love studying them all. Hooked to my textbooks, I cherish each new lexeme like it were a fragile and wild bird to coax into flying alongside me.
It is impossible not to feel awe when you are immersed in the blood of a language, its beating heart, its twitching muscles. Spanish is in some ways not so different from English, except for when it is positively alien. I like setting it down next to Portuguese, a language that I never knew I needed to study (but that is another blog for another day), like seeing how it wakes itself up when I approach it, all stretching arms and yawns and spills the secrets of its topicalization. I curl up alongside it and listen to it breathe.
As the semester progresses, I intend to read more books in Spanish. After all, there is an entire section in this beautiful language at the library. It is spectacular. For now, my quest is with Isabel Allende, with a legacy of magical realism in this magic tongue. I feel like a book opening up. The future is in Spanish, the future is in this world that is with my soul. I grew up afraid to claim my Hispanic heritage, feeling as I did that I didn’t have the right to claim it. Now, though, I speak slowly but deliberately. Baby steps.
