My tongue is Simón Bolívar’s wet dream

Your Spanish, my Spanish, our Spanish

Sometimes it feels as if the tacos have been rubbed out of my tongue. For four years, I’ve been speaking a language that doesn’t belong to me, one that exists only through synonyms that are foreign to me. I’ve been living in the US for four years. The problem is not English — though I sometimes mistake a conjugation — but my own native language. My Spanish has not worsened, but it definitely has changed. My mexicanisms appear with lesser and lesser frequency in my daily speech. When I’m teaching Spanish and my undergrad students ask me the word for short, I have to fight my own instinct. I no longer say chaparro but pequeño. No longer cuate but amigo. No longer my Spanish but Spanish 101.

For a while I thought that this neutral Spanish (neutral for whom?) was limited to my classroom. That it was just a pedagogy tool so my undergrads could communicate with any Spanish-speaking person, as if the mark of a good teacher was her disappearance. However, on 3 December 2023 I realized that the erasure had started affecting me. That day, at around 8pm, I texted my mom: « how is this called? ». Attached was the image of the kitchen basin. Fregadero, she answered. I felt as if I was learning Mexican from my mom as I had done when I was a baby. Or perhaps I was un-learning Colombian because I had been listening to my boyfriend and his friends call that kitchen basin a lavaplatos during dinner. My boyfriend had colombianized my Mexican. But my friends had also argentinized it, chileanized it, venezuelized it, ecuadorized it. My Spanish is the kind that libertador Simón Bolívar dreamt for his Gran Colombia: Latin America united. My tongue is Simón Bolívar’s wet dream.

The irony of this essay existing in English does not escape me: an essay about translation, written in one language, translated into another. A translation whose edits in English I will have to translate back to the Spanish original. An essay that is necessarily two: a box within a box. It feels like trying to fit all the different shapes into the same round hole of a baby’s first shape-sorting toy. The words on the page are missing the rolling of the r, the short and intense vowels, the nuances of the accent that reveal my Mexican origin no matter how hard I try to fit into a Colombian parche. But still I keep trying to write, because if this essay in Spanish showcases the relation between supposed Spanish neutrality and the hegemony of the European Spanish dialect, the essay in English showcases what is lost in translation. It has to be written in English to show that it cannot be written in English.

Just as my mom had to re-teach me my own Spanish, the writer Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012), Mexican representative of the Latin American Boom, had to teach his language to María Bamberg, his German translator. Both of them spoke Spanish, yes, but not the same language. Bamberg’s Spanish was of Argentinian origin, and therefore deaf to the Mexican regionalisms of Fuentes’ most famous novel, La región más transparente (1958), or Where the Air is Clear. Due to the linguistic difference, on 20 April 1972, Bamberg wrote to Fuentes with a first list of requirements in the form of clarifications. This led to a series of letters that inaugurated, almost by chance, a his-Spanish-to-her-Spanish dictionary. Among the words that compose this list are: daiquirí, trastabillado, afrenta, yanqui, popote, chamaco, garnacha, joto, andar abusado and mariachi. At least « mariachi » I hope, dear reader, you understand. (A note from my [originally Dutch] editor here mentioned that for the more adventurous drinkers among the readers, daiquirí might be familiar too.) This collection of words revealed that Bamberg did not understand the Mexican in one of the most Mexican novels in history, making her completely dependent on an air-mail exchange. According to the publisher that commissioned the work, Deutsche Verlagsanstalt Stuttgart, the translation had to be done by the end of July, which gave her only three months to translate herself twice: from Spanish, to Spanish, to German.