Spanish disquisition: or, how a bookish Gringa learned to stop worrying and love el idioma

Washington Monthly, Oct, 2002 by Liesl Schillinger

As my education continued, I kept up the French and German, and added Russian and Italian. When I acquired friends from Puerto Rico or Mexico, they spoke to me in Spanish, and I responded in Italian or French. I wasn't a xenophobe; I traveled great distances in search of immersion in other cultures--to France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Africa, Japan--but avoided Mexico and Spain. When I went to Central America, I chose Belize, the only English-speaking country on the landmass. In New York City, where I moved after college, I assumed that the subway signs in Spanish, the Spanish newspapers, and the Spanish-speaking people around me had nothing to communicate that I couldn't ignore. Don Quixote and A Hundred Years of Solitude were available in translation, Death in the Afternoon was written in English in the first place, and I figured that would hold me. But then, like Edmund, I came around.

These days, Spanish is my favorite foreign language. The irrational mindset I once had against Spanish has been replaced by an immoderate, visceral passion for it. I love Spanish more than French, more than Russian, more than Italian (nobody loves German). I subscribe to the bi-weekly Spanish-language glossy women's magazine Vanidades, read it from cover to cover, and cook the recipes in it. Over the last two years, I have read and spoken so much Spanish that my French is now changed: I unconsciously say y when I mean to say et. The weight and rhythms of Spanish expression transport me; its physicality, drama, and lack of trumpery I find breathtaking. I just can't get enough. Illogical as this turnaround may be, I would lice to try to break it down for the diehard Edmund/Aslan/anti-Espanol contingent, to see if I can't convert them, too.

La Belle Epoque

Every time you speak another person's language, you wrap your mind around another way of contemplating the world. Language dictates perception. You can not frame what you see, or what you think, without coding it into language. For instance, in my opinion, French is a lovely, but preening language--judgmental but insincere. It is best used to spout longwinded, more-or-less empty intellectual declarations, to issue artistic judgments, or to unwrap pretty curlicues of flattery and praise. Part of the problem is that too much rhymes in French. Willy-nilly, you find yourself putting together words that sound good paired. Try to speak in French for 10 minutes without praising or criticizing something immoderately, or without saying something you don't actually mean. It can't be done. It's a language of persiflage and artifice, in which, even when you mean to build a simple cabin of words, you end up with a wedding-cakey Garnier opera.

Russian is a sentimental, even mawkish, language, richly mined with hidden menace and self-deceptions. Consider only two of Russian's aural confusions: Lubyanka, the longtime headquarters of the KGB, sounds very much like liubyashy, which means "loving." Lyubit means love, ubit means kill. Does Kyrill lyubit or ubit you? You might not find out in time. Also, Russians use the word Mama more frequently than probably is healthy for grown-ups. Furthermore, it's vaguely distressing the way the Russian language exaggerates and caresses dreary realities. For instance, a nice-looking woman is called a "bread-roll," bulochka. The language even contains a specific, affectionate term to describe the endearing (to Russians) wetness of a baby's diaper, mokrinky. Meanwhile, the word mokritsy, different only by one consonant cluster from mokrinky, means woodlice. You see the trouble.