Reading Spanish: By Way of an Essay

I first studied Spanish in junior high school. There were, as I remember, four languages you could select: French, Spanish, German, and Latin, the last of which was chosen by only a few top students. Spanish was assumed to be the easiest, and I had some slight connection to the language because my father had been stationed in Panama during the Second World War, but I don't think I could do more than count from one to ten when I began. (I was green enough that when I first came to class I thought there was someone there with a last name that sounded like "Hustead," that is, usted.) I learned the lessons along with the other students — I still remember bits and pieces of those first-year dialogues — and I got good grades, but as soon as I had fulfilled the requirements for a diploma I gave it up, not anticipating that it would be of any use in my future — which at that point was basically what I thought about all of my subjects, other than perhaps biology. I remember memorizing the names and most famous works of a few Spanish authors, but I don't remember reading anything literary except for bits of Pío Baroja's Las inquietudes de Shanti Andía and an anecdote by Ciro Alegría called "Hueso y pellejo" (Skin and Bones).

When I got to college I took French for a while, since that corresponded more to the writers I was reading then, then I dropped out for a couple of years and went to live in Manhattan, reading and book-buying on my own. Though the Latin American literary "boom" was already old news at the time, the major writers were still around and American publishers had discovered that their work was marketable. I don't remember exactly what got me started on contemporary Latin American literature. It may have been a friend's copy of an anthology entitled Doors and Mirrors: Fiction and Poetry from Spanish America, or it may have been hearing good things about One Hundred Years of Solitude. I was already interested by late 1976, which is when I bought a copy of García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch when it appeared in translation in the US. At some point I started, very haltingly, trying to work through some of the literature in the original. I think I began with a volume of stories that had an English version on the facing page, and in spite of my previous exposure it took me a while to develop a useful reading knowledge of Spanish. Eventually I went back to college and focused on the language and its contemporary literature, and wrote a bachelor's thesis on Cortázar that I would probably wince to read now.

I've used the language in various ways since then, but above all for the simple joy of reading it. My understanding of the grammar is solid, but there remain persistent gaps in my vocabulary depending on the author and the subject matter. If I want to read something badly enough I will read it without a crib, but I don't object to having a translation at hand for occasional reference (and out of curiosity — i.e., How would you translate that phrase?)

Unless the material is more didactic than literary, my usual practice involves reading books in Spanish twice. The first reading allows me to decode anything I can't immediately understand, to look up unfamiliar words, etc., as well as to rush to the end to find out how the story comes out. The second reading, begun as soon as I finish the first, is entirely different in character. Having deciphered the author's words and gotten a sense of the structure of the book, I can simply indulge in the pleasure of understanding the text and appreciating the author's style and inventiveness — all of the things, in effect, that can't be readily summarized or transferred to another form.

Which leads, of course, to the question of whether those things can be translated. To that, I'd have to say that the answer is yes and no. There are very good translators around; people like Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman have done wonders with twentieth-century Hispanic literature, and glancing back and forth between versions I'm impressed by how well most things do in fact carry over. There will always be some issues; in García Márquez's brilliant short novel Del amor y otros demonios, for example, the same word — rabia — means both "rabies" and "fury," and there is no easy way in English to convey that potentially significant point. (In the novel, an adolescent girl is bitten by a rabid dog, but the nature of her real affliction is very much for the reader to determine.)

But to me one of the advantages of reading a book in another language is that it forces me to work harder. I can't let my concentration wander and skip a few pages. I have to read, page by page, sentence by sentence, word by word, and engage in the miraculous process of moving meaning from mind to mind by way of text.