Translated Self

Portuguese was my first language, but it was quickly followed by English. To this day, I have the impression that when I speak in English, I bury bits of myself in the process.

The first piece of writing I translated was a poem by Ana Martins Marques about an umbrella and how it keeps a pedestrian company, the two moving together in the same rhythm and step. I was living in Brooklyn when I came across the poem in a Brazilian magazine named Piauí. I sent the poem to my mother—out of the impulse I still harbor to share with her the things I love, as an act of love—and she said something like, “I could see this poem reading well in English too.” My mother often does this—gently offering suggestions so that they feel like they’re your own. So, I decided to translate “The Umbrella,” first by taking a pen and writing on the right side of the poem, choosing the first words that came to mind—a habit that I’ve since carried as a translator, as I like to watch the shape of the English grow gradually and imperfectly alongside the Portuguese.

The shape of the translation will never be the same as the original, of course, though I do look out for the places where the lines jut out unnaturally, where pauses and space need to be restored. This perennial tinkering, this drive to perfect, is a trait shared among the translators I know (why or how else would you do it?). But there’s also the part of me that enjoys taking my time while translating because I want to be near the Portuguese. I like circling around the poems, never quite hitting their centers.

Renee Gladman says translation is “a way of being present with that sense of knowing that not everything you’re feeling or experiencing is visible or legible.” Translating is like being close and distant at the same time, edging near meaning before it slips away.

When I teach translation, students will often think that they’re failing the original language somehow—that they have lost its essence in their translations. We talk about ways of approximating this essence, of salvaging it, of recreating a language’s effects in English. Translation is much more of a gain than a loss, I like to stress. But I know what they mean. Many of my students are second-generation Americans, the children of immigrants. They want to translate to get closer to their heritage, to reconnect with their mother tongue. They feel the distance and they want to bridge it.

When I think about why I started translating, I think about how it was a natural extension of my interest in writing. But I also think about how it became a way for me to reach toward a language that felt increasingly far, toward the part of me that seemed to get quieter by the year. I’m a Brazilian who has lived most of my life outside of Brazil, and mostly in the United States. I grew up speaking Portuguese at home. But the more years I’ve stayed in the US, stretching from my high school years onward, English has become my own language more than I’ve been inclined to admit.

Portuguese was my first language, but it was quickly followed by English. Portuguese was the language I spoke with family, and English was the language I primarily spoke at school. My vocabulary in English is more complex; it’s become my primary language of expression. Most of the time, English words come to mind first. But to this day, I have the impression that when I speak in English—absorbing its quicker, staccato pace—I bury bits of myself in the process.

Some think the idea of a mother tongue is limiting, even outdated, given that many of us inhabit more than one culture or language. Yasemin Yildiz writes in Beyond the Mother Tongue that it excludes our “ability to live multiple belongings.” The translator from Portuguese Bruna Dantas Lobato once said there is “this assumption that one can only have one true language, which is the mother tongue, but of course, that’s often not true . . . Our bodies, they’re constantly in movement and our relationships are ever-changing.”

Our bodies adapt. For example, we long to speak the dominant language around us, to feel comfortable and like we belong. When we can’t communicate, our bodies turn inward, retreating.

Language is a physical experience. You can feel it move through your body at its own unique tempo and temperature. People say they carry themselves differently depending on the language they speak—linguist Julie Sedivy records in her book Memory Speaks that in a sample size of over a thousand bilingual and multilingual people, two-thirds reported that they had varying personalities across languages.

When I speak in Portuguese, the tone of my voice is a bit deeper. When I’m at ease in my Portuguese (which is not always the case), I stretch my words for more beats than in English. Speaking Portuguese can feel like a release, like singing. The sound, more than the actual meanings of words, arouses a warm and easy sensation of belonging. When I hear the language’s wave-like inflections, I feel embraced.

Language is a physical experience.

“A bilingual mind is like a household that contains more than one person,” writes Sedivy. “Intimate living arrangements between two people have a way of changing their interpersonal dynamics, and perhaps even their personalities, and in the same way, cohabiting languages are bound to change each other.” One language inflects the other, which can sometimes mean you are never fully inhabiting either. Rather than a single busy household, it can feel like two that you continuously shuttle between.

Edward Said, who called English his “school language” and Arabic his “native language,” writes that he “felt fully at home in neither” language. “Every time I speak an English sentence, I find myself echoing it in Arabic, and vice versa.” I also don’t think I’ve ever been fully myself in either language. I like to get angry in Portuguese and analyze in English. I like to sing in Portuguese and joke in English. I like to soothe in Portuguese and ask questions in English. When I must stick to one, it’s like there are parts of me that I have to put aside.

The writer and translator Madhu H. Kaza moved from India to the United States as a child and while she “assimilated” and lost her accent, she says “a vital part of me got stopped at the border. My inner life remained untranslated, its contours beyond what the receiving culture wanted to or could comprehend.” She asks, “What does it mean to be a translated self . . . What does it mean to live with this untranslatability, this silence between languages within you?”

The author Jhumpa Lahiri experienced this “linguistic exile” growing up in the United States, where her mother tongue, Bengali, was “considered foreign.” Years later, when she chose to live in Italy—and wrote an entire book in Italian, In Other Words—she re-experienced this form of exile, even if from a more voluntary place. She expresses in Italian (here, in a translation of the book by Ann Golstein): “When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement . . . An absence that creates a distance within you.”

How do you fill the absence, the silence?

Translation itself can be a way to fill the silence. Immigrants who translate, or translators who grew up in bilingual homes, often have a particular approach to translating. They don’t want to erase the existence of the original language, to fool their readers into thinking their translations are not translations at all. They want to find ways to gesture at the other language, the other culture, to have it poke through the English, to have their translations exist in this in-between state that they also inhabit. (This is often the most exciting aspect of my class discussions with my students, who then realize that translations can actually open language, let other languages in—be rich and expansive and inclusive.)

But sometimes, the absence and silence takes you over. After years in the United States, my Portuguese was mostly suppressed, my mouth lost its shape within Portuguese words, and I stumbled when speaking (what is known as language attrition). When I first noticed this in college, I started calling my parents every day. I read books out loud in Portuguese to myself, read Brazilian poetry, and, eventually, I would translate it. Ever since “The Umbrella,” I’ve sent my translations to my parents first, not only because they make excellent editors, but because it’s become another way of bridging our own distance, as we haven’t lived in the same country for thirteen years.

The writer Norman Manea has compared translation to the experience of exile itself: “It’s a textual migration, a process of migrating from a place (a language) of departure to a place (a language) of destination.” Like a person who leaves a place, a translation also experiences a degree of loss, a degree of longing for what was left behind, but nonetheless carries what was lost with it. But also like a migrant, a translation never fully arrives. There are always opportunities to oscillate back and forth between places, between languages. Translators, much like immigrants, see things two ways, from both sides.

When I teach translation, the first exercise I give my students is to define “translation” in one to two sentences. The results are fascinating and varied and, by the end of our first hour-and-a-half together, the students’ opinions on what translation means have often changed. In my own definition, I return to a poem I translated by Ana Martins Marques called “Translation”:

This poem
in another language
would be another poem

a slow clock
that tells the right time
of some other place

a child who invents
a language just to speak
with another child

a house on the mountains
reconstructed on a beach
corroded bit by bit by the sea

what’s important is that
at some determined point
the poems become a pair

like in certain physics problems
of old schoolbooks

In another language, a poem becomes another poem with its own personality. The two poems become “a pair,” existing side by side, but never wholly one. It’s a close definition of what it means to be a translated self.