On Writing in English
I’ve spent the larger part of my writing. I wrote my first short story at the age of seven and haven’t stopped. Some seasons have been drier, others more fruitful, but I have always written something at some point in my life.
I’ve been awarded second place in four nationwide Chilean short fiction contests (Embajada de Canada 1993, DUOC-UC 1995, 1996 and Intendencia de Santiago 2005).
I’m fluent in English and Spanish and feel comfortable writing in both languages, though English will always be the choice I gravitate towards. I think it is a language of precision: there exists a word for most any human thought or emotion.
And it is here where the beauty of the English language lies.
Precision and flux.
When you have a sole word for an emotion or concept or idea, you can allocate more descriptors to it, and the sentence springs forth, with the idea remaining taut and contained within the words selected. It is all assembled like a song in terms of how lovely the finished piece will sound; with the melody, rhythm, texture and form arranged just so, or you can think of it as clockwork - how intricate (and therefore beautiful) the result will be if the elements work together in tandem.
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.W.B. Yeats, Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
In Spanish, the word spread and tread do not exist, not in terms of the mental images they convey in the poem. We’d have to use more than one word for an accurate translation, or we could use one sole word to respect the artistry, but the imagery would not be the same.
This is what I mean.
The point where preciseness, tautness of idea and musicality meet are a feature of English. The one I love most. But when you must express an emotion, idea or concept in many words and then add descriptors, things get… well… wordy. The flow becomes a bit more stagnant.
And who doesn’t marvel at the beauty of the waterflow within a river bed?
It’s all about flow.
Folks will say that Spanish is wondrous in the amount of vocabulary it has: wordy, heady and musical. The way the “r” rolls off the tongue, the lexicon; and while this may be so, as a native speaker and writer in both languages, I can attest to the fact that more is not necessarily, lovelier.
It just means, more. A bit clunkier, a bit messier.
Or maybe I just love English.