My Spanish has been, functionally speaking, stagnant but functional for about ten years, since I spent six months in Argentina, followed by most of a decade in the linguistic wasteland of the Denali Borough. My occasional visits to Spanish-speaking countries/regions remind me how little I know, but also hint at the fluidity of self and imagination that comes from shifting, however minimally, into another vocabulary. I returned from Colombia thinking about the essence of words, the relationship between definition and the thing that needs defining.
Mine are not unique thoughts; linguists, poets, and stoners have long tread this ground, and I’ve gained no more clarity than anyone who has engaged with a dictionary or a toddler probably has; please, weigh in.
Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst who ventured into linguistic theory studied the nature of “the real,” and how language shapes our relationship to it. “It is the world of words that creates the world of things,” Lacan wrote. “The man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.” For many North Americans, this means only English, what Nicole Stellon O’Donnell recently referred to as “the sadness of speaking one language.” (In Buenos Aires, I wrote a ten page paper in Spanish on Lacan’s “mirror stage” in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s work; it was a terrible experience for all involved).
Our pre-travel practice mostly involved me speaking, my partner blinking at me until I said the same in English, followed by a bumbling grammar lesson. Driving south to the Anchorage airport, he asked some seemingly simple questions about the use of “que,” “como,” and “cual,” usually translated as “what,” “how,” and “which,” but used in ways that contradict that simplicity. I gazed out the window, contemplating the intrinsic difference between “what” and “how.” What is “what,” exactly?
I learned recently that a prominent mountain visible from the highway, which I had previously thought of as “the knife-edged diagonal ridge,” has an officially designated name: Riley, the same as the creek in the valley below. Knowing the name changed how I might describe it, and some of the visual details—the “hows”—might be lost to the “whats.” We talked about the different answers the question “What is that mountain?” elicits, as opposed to “How is that mountain?”
Craig looked skeptical of my teaching ability as he realized I was momentarily unable to offer a straightforward translation to the question, “What is your name?” as I contemplated the nature of what-ness. ” This was more fundamental than previous moments linguistic paralysis: discussing the very North American notion of “wilderness” with Spanish-speaking Denali tourists, or giving a presentation on Alaska wildlife in college and not sure how to make the word “alce” definitively mean “moose” and not elk (I opted for awkward descriptions of “big hands of bone on its head”).
Elizabeth Dodd delves into the language used to describe the geography of rivers in her essay “The Middle Fork.” In Colombia we met a local bilingual guide who spoke to us in English, describing the trail’s ascent to “where the river comes together with” another. Dodd’s questions in mind, I identified yet another gap in my Spanish: Are rivers spoken of using the same words as tree branches or eating utensils, in terms of up or downstream travel? Margaret Noori, one of Dodd’s linguistic consultants, said that, “The water would be described as dividing the same way no matter which direction we came from, but…what one does upon arrival and departure at the river that has endless possibility.” We thanked the guide, and continued towards the fork, he away from the confluence.
Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa wrote of the first time she heard women refer to themselves with the feminine pronoun nosotras: “I was shocked. I had not known the word existed…We are robbed of our female being by the masculine plural. Language is a male discourse.” Nosotras gave her a voice.
Language can be male and female and neither; it can be colonial, violent, and liberating, constricting and creative.
Which words, or spaces without words, have caught your imagination?
Erica Watson is an essayist living on the boundary of Denali National Park. She completed her MFA in nonfiction at UAA in 2014. Her work has appeared most recently in Pilgrimage, The Fiction Advocate, and Denali National Park’s Climate Change Anthology, and she is a recipient of a fellowship to Fishtrap’s summer 2016 program. She will eventually update her website at ericawatson.wordpress.com.
In response to your question: Which words, or spaces without words, have caught your imagination?
Lately I've been thinking how much pain is created by the inability to say these words: "I don't know how to do this."
Anonymous: I don't know if this will speak to your relationship with those words, but have you heard this podcast (I know, I'm one of those people who suggests a podcast for everything)?
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-three-hardest-words-in-the-english-language-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/
It might be of interest to you.
Erica, Thanks for the feedback. 🙂
Great podcast – thanks for the intro to freakonomics!
PS Surprising how many little kids were afraid to say "I don't know." I thought it was only adults. Thanks for all your food for thought.
Erica,
Loving your posts! Glad to see you referencing Meloy and Dodd in this one.