Language as a Shield, Translation as a Bridge

A professor I had a long time ago, the great poet Benilda S. Santos, once asked me if I found using a second language – English in this case – helped me in any way in expressing certain thoughts and emotions better than my mother tongue.  Back then such a question didn’t really make sense to me.  I was writing in whatever language the poem came.  Or so I declared.

Through the years I started to write some poems in both languages at almost the same time – jumping back and forth, testing the limits of expression in each.  Sometimes I found it necessary to use one language to release ideas and images that the other could not quite capture easily.  I would then translate those parts.  But then I also found that there are some subjects that needed some kind of distancing in order for me to even attempt to tackle them.

The death of my father was one of them.  Perhaps because instinctively I knew that using the very language that I grew up with will rebound even harsher on me.  With using a second language I am somehow afforded a kind of shield, a layer of protection from that which might hit me too hard that I wouldn’t be able to finish the task.

I have to admit that I am a fairly slow reader.  I had a friend back in high school who claimed he could speed read.  He seemed to me like one of those contraptions in an office:  the grand paper shredder.  In goes the sheet, out come paper spaghetti.  Words disposed in a jiffy.  He read A Tale of Two Cities in a week.  I only managed the first half by the end of the semester.

A few weeks ago I chanced upon the slim book Shadow Child by Dutch author PF Thomese.  Written in vignettes, it tells of the loss he and his wife have had to endure when their baby died.  It is a small book but with such devastating power that leaves the reader gasping.  It made me wish I could read it in the original and then translate it into Filipino.  But that exercise (aside from the fact that I only know a few words of Dutch) might be too awesome an experience.

Perhaps it is enough that I have somehow reached the shore by another bridge, that second language of English.  Who knows, maybe one day I can learn enough Dutch and make my own bridge?  Then again, one could ask “Does grief sell?  Isn’t there enough of that in the world?”

Opposites are essential.  You know one thing because of another.  Dry cracked earth that runs in a path is the memory of a river that once rushed.  Burst of sunlight, whip of lightning and storm.

-o-