MY BILINGUAL NEW YORK

(First two entries to the book in progress, to be published in .pdf, My Bilingual New York)

LINGUISTIC RELATIONSHIPS

If the past becomes the present, one is not able to reflect upon it and judge its qualities, benefits or hindrances, love and pain, values and standards: social and linguistic. 

The following pages are not written is what it is called the native language or the first language. They are written in a language I did not learn voluntarily or because it was considered the language to be studied due to elitist or economic reasons. It was an imposed language by a colonial power, a more powerful country that had taken over the island of Puerto Rico and forced the study of their version of its language: American English, Dick and Jane included. 

The following pages are not written for the purpose of demonstrating how well the colonials learned and master the English language. Some Puerto Rican authors have achieved such a difficult task. Not me. Those are not the intentions of these pages, They are written in a second language that reflects the intricacies that had shaped my voice, which includes Spanish, Puerto Rican culture and history, New York’s bilingualism, racism, sexualities and how I sound and wants to sound. I am not writing to protect the language of Shakespeare or to meet the standards of academia, the New Yorker or the New York Times. These are my pages, not theirs; much less the words of some Puerto Rican who have the need to impress the colonials and prove to them they can write in English just like them. Not me. These are my pages.

These written pages are not to defend the particular qualities or rules of the English language, but my version of it. 

The process began when I started very early to see the relationship of the English language with class -closely related to skin color and race in Puerto Rico- and the attitude towards learning the language of the USA. It became a concrete reality when two friends and I left Puerto Rico for different reasons, but most of all, because we were young and wanted to experience the world beyond the island’s conservative and provincial life styles. We had college degrees and jobs as teachers in the island schools, but  spoke English with all the limitations caused by the public school system’s education, but were very well educated in terms of other areas of study. 

We found jobs in the social services and educational sectors, and an apartment on 14th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, next to Casa Moneo, Aspira of New York, Macondo Book Store, the Guadalupe Church. La Taza de Oro, La Nacional Spanish Society, a Puerto Rican domino club and right on the border between Chelsea and the West Village. 

Chelsea had a large Puerto Rican and Spaniards’ population, and all kinds of shops serving their interests, providing a feeling of community that served as the bridge between one world and another. The West Village had the hippies, some left-over beatniks, Julius, the Bon Soir, and the one bar that not much was to become an icon of liberation, The Stone Wall. It was perfect. 

As time went by, the past was no longer going to be seen as the present; including how we view ourselves and how we -in some many ways and values- related with both languages. 

ON TRANSLATION FROM ENGLISH TO ENGLISH

A British critic once said that whenever he read American authors, he felt like he was reading a foreign language. When I gave my doctoral dissertation proposal to be corrected by a USA monolingual speaker, he rewrote my material to the point that my advisor -he had read my original, and had suggested an editor- said, “these are not the same ideas we spoke about”. I then found a second editor who knew Spanish and he edited the text without losing the substance of my thesis. I never finished the dissertation for reasons beyond, but including, translations. Gabriel García Márquez's edition in Barcelona of his novel La Mala Hora made him so angry that he self-published the novel in México. The editor had rewritten his text to the point that it eliminated all particular Colombian idioms from the novel. The Mambo Kings sounded more Cuban in the USA edition in English than its Spanish translation. It was as if characters based on the likes of Celia Cruz spoke Spanish like Sara Montiel. “Joder”.  When editing a text written in a second language, by a bilingual writer, the editor must know the native language of the author. Translation demands a fierce loyalty to the original text, and when it is from the same language -from English to English, written by a bilingual in his second language, the first language has to be present as if talking to him. How readers will respond is a different story.