This editorial comes to you from Oaxaca, where I spent six weeks over Christmas and New Year among Mexican friends and relations. I spoke almost exclusively Spanish, at public occasions, in conversation, and found my English deprivation growing daily more acute. My ability to remember words (in conversations with myself, my only Anglophone companion) weakened. Wanting to use it in an email, I spent half an hour recovering the word ‘superflux’ from the tucks and folds of memory. My emails themselves became overlong, and my style reverted to that of the young Thomas Babington Macaulay. As a boy I loved Macaulay’s elaborated sentences, the affectation yet vigour of his syntax, and his abundant vocabulary which wore its etymologies on its sleeve. The History of England was my Whiggish bible, and it took many years to recover from it. In the end Philip French, who produced some of my radio work, told me that my style was ‘unspeakable’ in at least one sense, perhaps two, at which point I began to write a less unnatural, a more sayable English.

In Oaxaca I also found that my Spanish, the first language in which I was fluent, has started to become uncertain. My vocabulary has lost so many words through disuse that every complex sentence becomes a series of inventive periphrases.
I gave a long formal interview in Spanish, first in public at the University and then in private to a journalist, on my third day there. After that I started to lose my footing. I can’t translate between my languages because each one speaks differently. When one acquires a new language, translation is natural, but when one inhabits two languages as a birthright the exercise is different. They are not interchangeable, there are no dependable equivalences and the approximations one achieves at some level falsify or compromise. One never quite says what one means in the first in the second, and vice versa.

Jorge Luis Borges suggests that forgetting Latin is part of one’s knowledge of the language, a kind of inevitable refinement, like panning for gold where the dross is shed and only what memory regards as the pay dirt survives. Forgetting as a mode of learning. Older people have a lot of learning to get through. It’s not unlike downsizing. You get to know which of your books really matter.

While I was in Mexico the ex-president of the United States Jimmy Carter died in Georgia at the age of a hundred. The Guardian (29 December) reported that this benign, kindly and evidently good man ‘read the Bible in Spanish as part of his daily devotions’. In an interview he said,

For more than forty years, my wife and I have read the Bible aloud every night. One night, she reads; the next night, I read. We go all the way through the Bible, then we go back and start over again. In the last fifteen or twenty years, we have read the Bible aloud in Spanish, just to practice our second language.

I’ve been musing on this form of spiritual activity. Carter knew the Bible well, from infancy, he had long chunks of scripture by heart, was a kind of Christian hafiz. In him religion was a renewable, creative force, whether he was teaching Sunday school or being commander in chief. At what age did he start reading the familiar words in Spanish, making them unfamiliar and new again, leavening his understanding?

I also wondered which translations he used. We know he received the New Marked Reference Bible in 1975 as a gift from his brother Billy. This may have been his Bible of preference, the King James (Authorised) Version of both Testaments with thematic colour coding, centre-column references, Bible readers ‘Helps’ with pictures and descriptions, 5,500 questions and answers on the scriptures, a full concordance and maps. The edition shapes and directs the way readers approach the text. It may be that the American Bible Society edition of the Bible in modern Spanish, Dios Habla Hoy, presented by visiting clergy to Mr Carter in 1980, his penultimate year in the White House, gave him a new purchase on the familiar texts, a new ear for what he knew by heart. It enhanced also his understanding of the many Americans with Spanish as their first language and their language of worship after the Second Vatican Council (1962–5). Some refer to his command of Spanish as ‘rudimentary’, yet sometimes teaching Sunday school (we are told) he would use the Spanish Bible, translating fluently into English as we went. Dios Habla Hoy is remarkably plain and direct, assuming this is the version he read. Moving between languages was a freedom he insisted on exercising. Aloud. It is a freedom that requires cultivation, it thrives on dialogue (‘my wife and I’) and can perish without it. It is easy to surrender it in a monoglot world. One can lose it without sensing the loss, until some trip into the past, among the now unfamiliar familiarities, brings the pain into focus. ‘I can remember much forgetfulness’, says Hart Crane. ‘Forgetfulness is white.’

One moves eventually, inevitably, into the company of the old fools, straying between languages, finding and then losing meanings, bearings. Words. Philip Larkin’s poem insinuates itself. Moving between lighted rooms, among people I almost recognise ‘but can’t quite name’:

                                                                each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning…

It would seem that Jimmy Carter, who lived a hundred years, never took up lodging in that hotel.