Poetry at the Border of Language

On a rainy night outside a bar in the East Village, another poet tells me a secret: she’s afraid of forgetting her language. As an immigrant with little possibility of going back to her own country, she’d turned to poetry as a way of keeping her language, Spanish, alive. Her confession brings to mind a question one of my professors asked me: Why write about this in English if you can write about it in Spanish? The answer, which I could not accurately provide at the time, is one of form.

I began writing when I was eleven, maybe earlier. I wrote exclusively in Spanish, often stories about girls living in lands far away, in contexts radically different from my life in Panama. But when I began writing poetry in college, 4,500 miles away in Massachusetts, it was in English. I wrote, and did so in English, from an intense desire to share where I came from with those around me. Most people had little knowledge of my country, and I constantly felt like I had to explain my existence, both in overt and subtle ways. Writing in my second language forced me to detach from the narratives I had grown up with, and allowed me to examine place and identity critically. My initial poems discussed history and place from a remote perspective—I wrote poems from the lens of my parents or family, and completely removed myself as the observer in poems that centered on political questions. After prompting from my professor and friends, I began to write poetry in Spanish. Making this choice allowed me to finally enter my own perspective, and I wrote poems that could straddle both the outsider perspective I was experiencing by being so far away, and the proximity perspective that was utterly connected to the language I grew up with. I’ve come to understand this dynamic as the curse of multilingualism; that each language is first and foremost a form which allows us to access different perspectives and experiences in a way that can and do change our poems.

When your reality is one of multiplicity, different languages and your relationships to them allow you to express realities in a fundamentally different way. To choose to write in one language is to make choices about how you want to be understood, the context you want your writing to be surrounded by, and about who, if anyone, you are speaking to.

The Lebanese-French-American poet and artist Etel Adnan (1925–2021)—whose work I often turn to—famously wrote poetry in both English and French. Having spent much of her adult life moving between San Francisco, Beirut, and Paris, Adnan’s life was shaped by three languages. She wrote many of her famous works in French early in her career, including the iconic novel Sitt-Marie Rose (Des Femmes, 1978), and her famous book-long poem L’apocalypse arabe (Papyrus Éditions, 1980), published in English as The Arab Apocalypse. During the Algerian War, Adnan famously stopped writing in French, out of solidarity with the Algerians. She produced some of her most accomplished poetic works in the English language, including one of my favorites, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (City Lights Books, 2005), a series of autobiographical lyric essays examining the significance of place throughout her life. For Adnan, language was easily discarded when it did not serve her message. She switched from French to English, as a way to produce art that distanced her from a political ideology she rejected, and then to ask questions about migration that became pressing when she acquired American citizenship.

Much like Adnan, the Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik (1936–1972) also wrote across languages, producing the work that would catapult her to literary success in both Spanish and French. A Spanish speaker, she began writing poetry in the language, but her depression, exacerbated by intense feelings of inadequacy and isolation in Argentina, pushed her to desire novelty. At the age of twenty-four, Pizarnik took the leap, and moved to Paris to study French Literature and Philosophy at the Sorbonne. Her poems and diaries from that time reveal someone increasingly concerned by language:

“15 de octubre: Ayer, después de haber leído La vida es sueño sentí un dolor increíble al pensar que ésa es mi lengua. Mi actitud será infantil. Lo es, sin duda. Pero mi sufrimiento era real y casi decido «olvidarme» del español y comenzar a escribir en francés.”

trans. “October 15th: Yesterday, after reading Life is a Dream, I felt an incredible pain to think that that is my language. My attitude may be childish. It certainly is. But my suffering was real and I almost decided to forget Spanish and begin writing in French.”

Pizarnik had arrived in Paris with dreams of creating a new version of herself and leaving behind the insecurities and unhappiness that had plagued her earlier life in Argentina; she would define her life in Paris as a “self-exile.” Her desire to write in French seems to have come from a desire to bring herself closer to the world she was now in. Paradoxically, however, being surrounded by French and writing in French also seems to have ignited her desire to continue writing in Spanish.

She produced some of her most notable poetic works in Spanish while in Paris, including Arbol de Diana (1960) or Diana’s Tree, which catapulted her to fame. Pizarnik’s desire to write in French and Spanish seems to have stemmed from a desire to create in language a world for herself, one that she felt eluded her in life. Her constant shuttling between languages reflected her feelings of exile, both geographically and metaphorically. In 1972, in her Buenos Aires home, she took her life.

José Olivarez’s poetry reflects both a desire to reject self-alienation and to use language as a form to challenge the monolingual hegemony of the dominant white American culture. As the child of Mexican immigrants to the United States, Olivarez grew up at the intersection of two languages: English and Spanish. Unlike Adnan and Pizarnik, Olivarez does not choose one of the two when writing, but chooses both, recreating the poet’s own bilingualism on the page. In his poem, “now i’m bologna,” we enter the poem as the speaker introduces their family’s immigration story to the reader, all in English: “my parents were born from a car. they climbed out/& kissed the car on its cheek. my grandmother./to be a first generation person.” What follows is a slow descent into linguistic variety as the speaker tries to piece together an identity constructed out of this story. The poem ends with a mixture of English and Spanish, delving into colloquial phrases that assert the speaker’s multicultural identity in a country that rejects it: “the answer is no comment. the answer is quién sabe./the answer is yo no sé, pero no es abogado.” Like Adnan and Pizarnik, Olivarez’s linguistic choices are formal and intrinsic to the questions of his poetry. Multilingual poets may approach questions of language differently, but they cannot altogether avoid the question.

I’m learning to be comfortable with the idea that some poems are better served by one language over another, and that in making this formal choice, I may alienate the parts of myself that do not serve a poem’s message. That sometimes that alienation can serve the poem, and sometimes it needs to be further examined. I’m learning that to let poetry exist in two languages, just as much as I exist in two languages, is to continue to assert my existence, and to produce art that is able to straddle multiple truths at once.