The Long Crossing

I grew up hearing Spanish spoken by my parents’ friends, many of whom were, like my father, exiles from the Spanish Civil War, but who enjoyed a complicity and understanding as the freedom and pleasure of speaking, relaxing into, their own language burst from them whenever they gathered in a room. My father would play Spanish folk songs on the piano so everyone could sing. A Spanish accent permeated everyone’s English. My father could not say ‘Spain’, but es-Spain; Spanish doesn’t have the English soft ‘g or j’ sound so he would say yust instead of just; the soft, round ‘h’ in the word ‘home’ was more guttural, harsher; and those rolled r’s of course. To me, the mother-tongue accent is a positive affirmation of identity and brings another dimension and musicality into English. It says ‘I’m from there’.

The intonations of Spanish were part of my life from the very beginning, but at home when I was a child we spoke English. My mother was American, she was a great reader, and passed on her passionate knowledge and love of poetry to me. One of the ways she learned Spanish was by avidly reading Spanish literature: she avoided looking up every unfamiliar word but learned new words by their context. My father was a linguist, he knew several languages and his English was excellent. He was rigorous about syntax and fascinated with word derivations. If I made the mistake of asking him the meaning of a word when I was in the middle of doing my homework, he would embark on ...