The Mother Tongue in Foreign Lands
Nuria Ano
It’s a great honor for me to be here in Shanghai. Let me express my sincere gratitude for all your help and kindness accepting my application.
Before this trip I was writing a biography of screenwriter Salka Viertel. She was an exiled Jewish woman well-known in Hollywood in the thirties as a specialist on Greta Garbo scripts.When she first arrived in the United States of America, her communication with the English-speaking Americans was like a silent film: shehad to gesture with hands or spoke simply with the gaze, smiling and pulling a long face to be understood. Like her, most of the European artists who emigrated to the U.S. due to the Nazismwere socreative in their mother tongues thatto confine themselves in America to smallwords in English was a constant torment.
Also in this text,she was impelled by the foreign land to learn English as an adult in order to find a job. But her mother tongue was always very close to her life as a salonnière. On Sunday afternoons her home in California welcomed many composers, film and theater directors, actors, physicians and writers. Salka’s salon was a place to speak with others in their native language. Her house was a shelter and a refuge for the intellectual freedom of those removed from their homeland. Her guest of honor, the German writer Thomas Mann, who sought refuge in Switzerland before being exiled in the U.S., wrote in 1941: “When the homeland becomes foreign, the foreign becomes the homeland.”
Languages constitute my job as a writer, a translator, even as a reader.
French writer Marguerite Duras wrote in La vie matérielle the following sentence: “A writer is a foreign country.”When I was young her books made me feel many things while reading. It was not only due toher stories andcharacters, but the language with short sentences and the depth of her writing! I felt this through a translation, it wasn’t her own words. It happened again with the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek. The importance of her voices in novels and plays are so extraordinary that I had to learn German to read her work in her native language to find many witty wordplays that usually are not translated.
Even so, literary translations construct cultural bridges and enlarge our horizons. It’s a must that today the editors and agents offer more than just bestseller authors. Readers and writers around the world have a cultural commitment with our time.
The city I come from isLleida, located in the autonomous community of Catalonia, innortheastern Spain.
My mother tongue is Catalan, a Romance language known by its cultural richness since the 13th century. It was banned in the early 18th century and again in the 20th century with the Francoist dictatorship. Later on,withthe Transition,the Catalan language has been recognized as aco-official language. In this environment Catalan people have the peculiarity to be bilingual in Catalan and Spanish.
All my books focus on the characters' psychology. Frequently, the core of my stories remains unexplained. I ask the reader to discover the "deeper meaning" and to become involved in the events presented.
Writing means to me a need to feel alive. To speak loudly and plainly. Everything I want to say about a topic, I say it bluntly. If I had to write with restraint, it would make no sense to me. This job has to do with courage.
I use my writing as a tool to inform and condemn those things that I don’t like, such as injustices or poor communication between people. Then I make a kind of parody.
I love to create characters, but what I like most is to put them in a tense situation, because I get a layer of human behavior that is being uncovered.
I prefer the weak characters and to be on the side of thelosers, misunderstood or lonely people thanto write about the strong and powerful who succeed.
Most of my characters are female. Female readers appreciate what other women write about women issues. Because we are able to identify with a character, with a sentence, even with a silence. Because we are all women and at least once have suffered discrimination for this reason. It makes us more open-minded and reasonable.
I write my novels and short stories in Catalan, because as a native I feel more comfortable selecting words and discerning a musical flow. But I use to write in Spanish for other specific texts like articles, essays or biographies.
Earlier this year I won a grant in Finland to translate my third novel into Spanish to reach more readers and new target languages for translation. But I believe it is more difficult for me to translate my own work than for other professional translators.As a writer I am looking again for each meaning and musicality in the new language. Sometimes the original words are free in my mind, but then flit away, with all the beauty. In turn, the new words fill the white spaces slowly, one by one, like birds appearing on a power line.
So, let the air above Shanghai resound with the character of Gabriele, an actress who is near the end of her career, she is sixty-two years old, she married twice and is bisexual.
“De vegades voldria no haver arribat tan lluny, ni haver conegut tant, perquè a hores d’ara encara quedarien somnis per complir, al seu lloc voldria comprar més flors i fer un jardí de debò, un indret on poder passejar cada tarda sense pressa, fins a veure en la vida més minúscula d’on partia, voldria haver vist menys i tenir encara ganes de sortir de casa però, en lloc d’això, tancar-me i que algú jove s’ocupi de mi, algú que s’enamori de mi bojament, algú a qui dir-li cada dia que perd el temps amb una vella, el que encara no he decidit és si serà home o dona.”
Queen Christina, The Painted Veil, Anna Karenina, Maria Walewska or Two-Faced Woman.
On Heinrich Mann’s 70th birthday, during a gathering at SalkaViertel’s.
DURAS, M. (1990). Practicalities. New York: Grove Press.