Bilingual Blues, Bilingual Bliss: El caso Casey

In a letter written toward the end of his life, Ivan Turgenev remarked that a writer who did not write only in his mother tongue was a thief and a pig (Turgenev 147). Although Turgenev did not explain the epithets, it's not difficult to figure out what he meant. Since a language is a form of cultural property, a writer who uses words that don't belong to him is a thief; since his theft of the words of others entails the neglect of his own, he is a pig. As it happens, Turgenev wrote his letter in German, so that for him the use of other languages in correspondence did not count as an infraction did against his mother tongue. Indeed, it is revealing that Turgenev, in spite of his mastery of several European languages and of many years of residence outside Russia, never took advantage of the opportunity, or yielded to the temptation, of writing fiction in a language other than Russian. Once, when a reviewer incorrectly stated that Turgenev had written one of his novellas originally in French, an offended Turgenev pointed out—in flawless French of course—that he would never stoop to something so base.

Turgenev's attitude toward the Russian language offers an instance of the phenomenon that Uriel Weinrich has termed language loyalty, that powerful, deep-seated attachment that many of us feel toward our mother tongue (Weinrich 99-102). Although in Western culture this sentiment goes back to the ancient Greeks, who regarded other languages as gibberish, it's only much more recently that individual languages have acquired the pull and prestige that they now enjoy. As Leonard Forster has pointed out, for several centuries multilingualism was the norm rather than the exception among European writers. A sixteenth-century Neolatin poet felt few qualms about not using his mother tongue for literary composition. Even writers who worked primarily in the vernacular also wrote, without apparent damage to their self-esteem, in other languages: Milton composed Italian sonnets, Garcilaso wrote Latin odes. It was not until the rise of modern nationalism that native languages became national languages, and thus a privileged cultural possession.² This has remained true to this day. For most of us, as for Turgenev, the language that we speak is a fundamental component of our nationality, and hence of our sense of who we are. That is why, when we want to question someone's claims about his nationality, we often take aim at his language habits: Funny, you don't sound like an American. In a profound sense, we are what we speak. As Andrée Tabouret-Keller puts it, language acts are acts of identity (316).

In my own case I have always felt a mixture of regret and remorse that I have not done more of my writing, and my living, in Spanish. Sometimes I have even thought that every single one of my English sentences—including this one—hides the absence of the Spanish sentence that I wasn't willing or able to write. And if I handle English well, it's because I want to write such clear, clean prose that no one will miss the Spanish that it replaces. Why I haven't tried to work more in Spanish is something that I've wondered about, but that I don't entirely understand. I know of course the practical reasons for my use of English, but I also suspect that there may be other, more murky motives of which I'm only half-aware: anger, fear of failure, maybe even a little self-hatred. If I say "tomato" and you say tu madre, the code-switching expletive may be a symptom of the speaker's unhappiness with his mother tongue, with his other tongue, and most of all perhaps, with himself. And if you say "latino" and I say la tuya, this expletive may reflect his unwillingness to accept his switch in loyalties. [End...