The challenge of writing in another language

Leaving the mother tongue is like trying to live better, as a child, outside the home. It is harsh and inconvenient.

In the history of universal literature, according, of course, to the established canon, very few authors changed their mother tongue and, in most cases, this change was due to an exile - voluntary or imposed - that led to use the language of the country in which they lived. They started, we can say, 'speaking' that other language and then they wrote in it.

This is the case, for example, of Conrad, Nabokov, Kundera.

1. From Polish to English.

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) is currently considered a Polish-British writer who, despite not having been fluent in the English language until his twenties, wrote with extraordinary prose in which he mastered his own style full of irony and sensitivity. It is enough to read Heart of Darkness or the story "An Outpost of Progress", both set in the Congo, to delight in his acid criticism of colonialism.

The city where Conrad was born is Berdychiv, which was part of the Russian empire, the kingdom of Poland, and is currently Ukraine. Perhaps in his case, it helped the fact that his father was a translator, which surely led him, since he was a child, to be familiar with other foreign languages, like French.

2. From Russian to English.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899 - 1977), the Russian-American novelist is known worldwide for being the author of the controversial Lolita, the novel in which a literature teacher is obsessed with the protagonist, a twelve-year-old girl.

Nabokov's life is marked by numerous exiles, from his native Saint Petersburg to Cambridge, Paris, Berlin, then to the USA - where he begins to write in English - and finally to Montreux, in Switzerland.

From his time in North America are, in addition to extraordinary books like Pnin, his classes on European literature taught at Cornell University.

3. From Czech to French.

Milan Kundera (1929), the Czech writer who went into exile in France in 1975, is still alive. My credibility in the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded by the discredited Swedish Academy would greatly improve if it were given to the author of the insurmountable The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Written in 1982 and set in the Prague Spring in 1968, it was translated into French and published in France. The original written in Czech was published later.

Now a French citizen, Kundera wrote his following novels in the language of Voltaire, among them, Immortality in which he reflects how everything we do, to some extent, we do, many times, only thinking of posterity.

4. From Spanish to English.

All this introduction, in homage to three of my great literary teachers, is to excuse myself for my poor English that I was learning poorly and little by little, with effort and almost always alone. And to encourage them, those who have it as their mother tongue or who, as is becoming increasingly common, are bilingual, not to be afraid to mark my mistakes because I learn from them.

Surely the fact that I exiled myself to Madrid helps a lot because from a distance it seems more difficult for my Argentine friends, who speak English, to give me a look of compassion.

Thank you Read.Cash for giving me this extraordinary opportunity to express myself in the language of so many admired writers such as Stevenson, Chesterton, and Henry James.