Working in Two Languages

In Finland, I've been aware of the influence of the language on my work. Because it was the language of my childhood (the first language of my mother and grandmother), I have always felt close, and though I don't always have the meaning, I have the sound and rhythm of the language inside. The language haunts me, and I continually desire to hear it and learn it.

Recently, I came across two writers talking about what it is like to go between languages.  Luiselli was born in Mexico City and now lives in New York City. This is what she says:

I often write in English and then self-translate into Spanish, and vice-versa too. It's a messy process, but that messiness creates a space for more clear, lucid things to emerge. Not always, though. Often I just dwell for long periods in this completely confusing space, not knowing which language I should write in. I go back and forth and it's very unproductive, until one day something happens and I'm able to write, at least so far. That's what happened to me with Sidewalks and Faces in the Crowd. 

Also, when my writing is getting translated, I rewrite a lot, and work on it with the translator. I often bring those modifications back into the original. So the ghost of translation always haunts the original.

The holes between the languages is a place of fascination. The interviewer Jennifer Kabat observed, in conversation with Luiselli, "there's always this act of translation, and questions about what language you write in and how you play with the holes between the two languages. Translation in itself leaves this sort of ghostly imprint of the past."  In this interview, the topic is Luiselli's book Faces In the Crowd, which contains a story about the Mexican poet Gilberto Owen, who also lived in NYC in an earlier era, and coincidentally he lived near Luiselli's apartment.

Haruki Murakami, a Japanese novelist, described how he became a novelist in the introduction to Wind/Pinball, his latest novel. After he wrote his first novel, he was unhappy with the results. So as an experiment, he rewrote the beginning in English. Because his knowledge of English was limited, this forced him into very simple sentence structures. He had to compress his thoughts into a smaller container.  This explanation was excerpted on LitHub:

Having discovered the curious effect of composing in a foreign language, thereby acquiring a creative rhythm distinctly my own, I returned my Olivetti to the closet and once more pulled out my sheaf of manuscript paper and my fountain pen. Then I sat down and “translated” the chapter or so that I had written in English into Japanese. Well, “transplanted” might be more accurate, since it wasn’t a direct verbatim translation. In the process, inevitably, a new style of Japanese emerged. The style that would be mine. A style I myself had discovered. Now I get it, I thought. This is how I should be doing it. It was a moment of true clarity, when the scales fell from my eyes. 

Some people have said, “Your work has the feel of translation.” The precise meaning of that statement escapes me, but I think it hits the mark in one way, and entirely misses it in another. Since the opening passages of my first novella were, quite literally, “translated,” the comment is not entirely wrong; yet it applies merely to the process of writing. What I was seeking by writing first in English and then “translating” into Japanese was no less than the creation of an unadorned “neutral” style that would allow me freer movement. My interest was not in creating a watered-down form of Japanese. I wanted to deploy a type of Japanese as far removed as possible from so-called literary language in order to write in my own natural voice. That required desperate measures. I would go so far as to say that, at that time, I may have regarded Japanese as no more than a functional tool.

Murakami goes on further to say:

Since I was born and raised in Japan, the vocabulary and patterns of the Japanese language had filled the system that was me to bursting, like a barn crammed with livestock. When I sought to put my thoughts and feelings into words, those animals began to mill about, and the system crashed. Writing in a foreign language, with all the limitations that entailed, removed this obstacle. 

Both of these writers indicate that the limitations of the new language imposed a constraint, and initially, this was useful as they began to write.  The simple and direct style was a necessity, and the style achieved a sense of mystery that might not have existed otherwise.