06/06/2026
/// You know how certain fiction writers have a sideline as translators — Murakami, Lydia Davis, and recently Jhumpa Lahiri?
That was never going to be me.
I was the opposite of a polyglot; I was a counterglot.
But it was in my native tongue that my language disorder expressed itself most weirdly.
I grew up in a Dominican home where my parents spoke zero English and didn’t want to hear it from us, where Spanish language TV and radio were on all the time, and yet my Spanish vanished so fast it was almost a conspiracy. By the time I was in high school I couldn’t have asked you what the weather was, and yet my siblings (the ones born in the DR) were all still fluent, and when my sisters spoke Spanish no one confused them for anything except Dominicans.
[...] I tried repeatedly to fix my Spanish, taking classes in graduate school, hiring tutors, studying on my own, but it all came to grief. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I finally made the decision to live in Spanish full-time and see what the f**k would happen. In 1999 I used a Guggenheim fellowship to move to México City for a full year—and in that time I refused to speak English for more than an hour a day (exceptions made for my dear friend and neighbor, F—). I actually used a damn stopwatch to keep track.
Longstoryshort: at the end of my year in México something shifted. All that stubborn insistence got around—or through—whatever block I had. For the first time since I learned English I actually managed to acquire language. True, it was the language I should never have lost in the first place, but such are the wages of immigration. What had me flying was that I was no longer a complete embarrassment in my mother tongue. I could once again speak to my abuelo fluidly.
But some blocks can be broken and still not be defeated. This was one of them. Turns no matter how hard I tried after I came back to the States, how many books I read in Spanish or how many movies and shows I watched without subtitles—or how I often I spoke Spanish...— my Spanish never improved beyond what I acquired in México.
Not the most optimal sitch, especially considering how ferociously judgmental Spanish-speakers are with us No Sabos kids, but what can you do? I survived being an immigrant in English, I could survive being an immigrant in Spanish, and it’s not like I was a complete loss.
[...] But cierto: I mess up words and tenses and conjugations all the time, but I figure what with half the world struggling with a language not their own like I did when I was kid, I’m in good company. And being in good company I’ve learned to accept my linguistic flojotude, to approach my weakness with a mixture of shamelessness and humility, to stay game. Subjunctive ruins my day and no matter what I’m talking about — could be the simplest s**t and the simplest sentence — I still find myself sifting through my vocabulary, trying to locate the right word, the right structure, the right conjugation to communicate what I’m feeling, thinking.
It’s how I write, always, and now how I speak my mother tongue. English flows, alas, but Spanish is brick by brick, bird by bird.
There are worse fates than having all your languages be second languages. I know because I’ve lived a few of them. ///
I was the opposite of a polyglot; I was a counterglot
