The Facts of Life on the Hyphen*

Por Gustavo Pérez Firmat

Years ago, when I was translating into Spanish something that I had written originally in English, I ran across the phrase, "the facts of life." After scrolling my mental thesaurus for a while and not coming up with anything that sounded like Spanish, I turned to my reference shelf and, after ruffling around in several dictionaries, finally located the phrase in a book of idioms. It turns out that in Spanish the facts of life are called los misterios de la vida, "the mysteries of life." Think about that: the same biological drives that for the English-speaking world are plain and simple facts, for us in Hispanic culture are nothing less than enigmas, conundrums, mysteries--as if the birds and the bees were creatures from another planet.
This curious cultural difference helps to explain a few of the facts--and mysteries--of my upbringing in Havana and in Little Havana, but I mention it here because it seems to me that for people who grow up and grow old straddling two cultures, for those of us whose good or bad luck is to spend our lives on the hyphen, the world sometimes appears as an odd coupling of fact and mystery, of things that reassure us and things that rattle us, of events that make us settle and events that make us sink, of destino, which means destiny, and desatino, which means mistake. And nowhere is the merging of destino and desatino, of vocation and equivocation, more apparent than in the language we write and speak and breathe and live in.
The reason, of course, is that a language is much more than a passive, malleable instrument of communication. In Spanish when one speaks a language well one is said to "dominate" it. But my mother tongue has it backwards--because we don't dominate languages, languages dominate us. It is the language that determines the domain, the dominion, and we as speakers cannot but submit to its territorial imperatives. A language shapes what we can and cannot say, think or feel in ways of which we are not even aware. Language acts are acts of identity. We are what we speak.
This is true a deep philosophical sense, but also in quite obvious ways. Take kinship terms, for example. Spanish has several kinship terms that English lacks, among them concuño and compadre. In English, the husband of my sister-in-law is only the husband of my sister-in-law; but in Spanish, he’s also my concuño. In English, my son’s godfather is only my son’s godfather; but in Spanish he’s also my compadre. The kinship system of the Spanish language may well correspond to a more generous or encompassing definition of who counts as a family member; it may well be the linguistic correlate of the so-called “extended family.”
Or consider pronouns. Some of you may know that Spanish has a many more pronouns than English. In English you are always “you”--singular or plural, male or female, subject or object. But in Spanish, you could be tú or usted, or te or ti, or lo or la or le, not to mention vos and vosotros. On the other hand, although the Spanish language has a more diversified pronoun system than English, in some situations Spanish employs pronouns much less frequently than English. This is true particularly of subject pronouns, which in Spanish are often omitted because they are implied by the verb ending. For this reason, speakers of English say "I" much more often than speakers of Spanish say yo. Take the English version of Descartes' famous syllogism, "I think, therefore I am"--in Spanish, the phrase would be "pienso, luego soy," where the personal pronouns are omitted because the verb ending designates the person and number of the subject.
Now if it is true that language molds how we view our place in the world, the deletion of subject pronouns, the so-called “pro-drop feature”--which according to linguists occurs as often as 80% of the time--is by no means a trivial matter. Some years ago Esmeralda Santiago published a moving account of her childhood in Puerto Rico entitled When I Was Puerto Rican. When her memoir appeared in Spanish, translated by the author herself, the title became Cuando era puertorriqueña. Every word in the English title has an exact match in the Spanish title--when / cuando; was / era; Puerto Rican / puertorriqueña--every word but one, that is: the first person pronoun "I." In fact, the Spanish title doesn't even make clear that the phrase should be read in the first person, for Cuando era puertorriqueña could be also be translated as, "When she was Puerto Rican," or even "When you were Puerto Rican." And yet, whatever else one may lose when translating an autobiography, the one thing that shouldn't get lost in translation is the first-person pronoun, though this is precisely what happens here. While English gives Esmeralda top billing, Spanish erases her, turning the plain English title into something of an enigma, another of the mysteries of life. (Interestingly, the Spanish does add something to the English--gender: "puertorriqueña.")
The piece of writing that I referred to at the beginning of my talk is a memoir entitled Next Year In Cuba, which I wrote first in English and then translated into Spanish. Many things about the translation gave me trouble, but the single most difficult part was figuring out what to do with my "I's." Every time I translated a first-person sentence, my impulse was to begin the sentence with yo. But when I did so, the first person pronoun became obtrusive, less an "I" than an "ego," an advertisement for myself that my mother tongue seems to frown upon. To say "I" in English is a normal, nearly imperceptible form of self-expression, a convention of thought and syntax; but in Spanish, the iteration of yo quickly turns into an exercise in narcissism. It’s well-known that Spanish and Spanish-American literature boasts few autobiographies. Undoubtedly there are many reasons for this, but one of them may well be the inhospitableness of the Spanish language to subject pronouns. When the language itself makes the writer's "I" grammatically redundant, autobiography verges on barbarism, and self-disclosure risks becoming a slip of the tongue. Henry James once wrote that the two most beautiful words in the English language are "summer afternoon." Sometimes when I’m struggling with the facts and mysteries of life on the hyphen, it has occurred to me that the three most beautiful words in the English language could well be: “me,” “myself,” and “I.”
And yet, sin embargo, it's not as if I'm capable of renouncing Spanish. The more I live and write in English, the more I need and miss Spanish. One of the most disabling forms of low self-esteem arises from the conviction that one cannot speak one's native language well enough, the shattering sense of inferiority that arises not when words fail you, but when you fail them. In my Spanish classes, I have seen it again and again in students of Hispanic background. I have seen how they squirm and look away when they think you think they should speak like natives. I have often squirmed and looked away myself, feeling that no matter how good my Spanish may be, that it is just not good enough, not what it should be. Criticize my English, and your words will never hurt me. Criticize my Spanish, and you’re undermining my deepest convictions and theories about myself.
It’s been said that our mother tongue is the only one in which we have a right to make mistakes. But for many of us whose mother tongue is Spanish but who live in an anglophone world, exactly the opposite is true: Spanish is the only tongue in which we cannot afford to make mistakes. And not because handle English better than Spanish, but because my deficiencies in English do not undermine my sense of self. For most of my adult life, the language I have felt uneasy about has been Spanish, my mother tongue, rather than English, my second language. When I’m speaking English, my Cuban accent doesn’t faze me. But if I’m speaking Spanish and I hear myself fumbling for words, I cringe. Every time I commit an inadvertent Anglicism, every time I say consistente instead of consecuente or aplicación instead of solicitud, I want to run and hide.
Indeed, I sometimes think that every single one of my English sentences takes the place of the Spanish sentence I wasn't able or willing to write. And if I handle English more or less well, it is because I try to write such clean, clear English prose that no one will miss the Spanish that it replaces.
That it replaces, and that it can never replace, because my American "me" continues to long for a sense of community that exists only in Spanish. Let me compare another set of titles. The Spanish version of Next Year In Cuba is entitled, El año que viene estamos en Cuba, “Next Year We Will Be in Cuba.” When I began on the translation, my title was simply, "El año que viene en Cuba," but at some point I added the verb because with it the phrase sounded more idiomatic. It wasn’t until much later that I became aware of the crucial, though unintended, difference between the Spanish and the English titles. The word that the Spanish title adds is, estamos, "we are" or “we will be,” which supposes that the speaker is a member of a community. The Spanish title not only places the speaker in space, but also makes him part of a society of like-minded individuals, all of whom hope one day--next year--to return to Cuba: rootless individualism gives way to collective wishful-thinking. Estamos is a verb of consensus. In Spanish when you ask, ¿estamos?, you are asking whether the people you are speaking to agree with you. Buried inside the verb is the first-person plural pronoun, nosotros, which, broken down, becomes nuestros otros, “our others”--that is to say, the others in our I. "Next Year in Cuba" names one man’s hope; "El año que viene estamos en Cuba" expresses a community's sense of itself, its shared values and expectations.
As someone who was born a yo but will probably die an "I," I find that my negotiations with the two languages occur in those inner and outer spaces between yo and you, between se and self, between tú and two, between mystery and fact. If I'm grateful to English for making my displays of individuality seem a little less barbaric, I'm grateful to Spanish for not letting me forget the intense, intricate and sometimes baffling web of human connections that have made me who I am. English has given me many things, but nothing as fundamental as what Spanish has given me: the conviction that the highest form of self-expression is communal, that the only way to speak for yourself is to begin each of your sentences with nosotros.

*Preface of the revised edition of the book Life on the Hyphen (1997)