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The Facts of Life on theHyphenGustavo Pérez FirmatPublished online: 24 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Gustavo Pérez Firmat (1997) The Facts of Life on the Hyphen,ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 10:3, 17-18, DOI:10.1080/08957699709602291

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Summer 1997, Vol. 10, No. 3 17

The Facts of Life on the Hyphen A few months ago I was translating into Spanish something that I had writ- ten originally in English when I ran into the phrase, “the facts of life.” After scrolling my mental Spanish-English dictionary and not coming up with anything that sounded even remotely Castilian, I turned to my reference shelf and, after ruffling around for a while, finally located the phrase in a book of idioms. As it turns out, in Spanish the facts of life are called 10s misterios de la vida. Yes, the same biological drives and imperatives that for the English-speaking world are facts, for us in the Spanish-speaking world are nothing less than mysteries.

This curious cultural difference certainly helps to explain a few of the facts-and mysteries-of my upbringing. (It explains, for instance, why I was never told the reason that my aunt kept an empty can of Libby pears under the toilet in her house in Miami.) But I want to use this anecdote here for another purpose: to introduce a few remarks regarding what, to me, is one of the central facts of my life as a Cuban-American writer-the varia- tions in the way Spanish and English treat pronouns.

Even if we are not always aware of it, we spend most of our lives among pronouns. For every time that I refer to myself as Gustavo, there are ten times that I call myself I. The same thing applies to my dealings with other people: Most often I allude to them as they, or address you as you. Only rarely, in fact, do we call each other by our given names. That is why it is so annoying to come across those people who cannot speak to you without mentioning your name in every other sentence. And that is why children sometimes tell each other: Yes, that’s my name, don’t wear it out.

Now the life of pronouns differs greatly depending on the language. For one thing, some languages have many more pronouns than others, and sometimes they vary not only according to grammatical function, but also by gender, social status, and nationality. In English, for example, you is always you, whereas in Spanish, you can be tli or te or ti, or lo or la or le, and even usted or vos.

But the most significant difference, in my view, involves the use of the first-person, subject pronouns. In Spanish, subject pronouns are usually omitted, because they are implied by the verb ending-as if the pronomi- nal subject did not exist apart from the action of which it is the agent. For this reason, English speakers say “I” much more frequently than Spanish- speakers say yo. This is by no means a trivial matter. The piece of writing that I referred to above is a memoir entitled Next Year in Cuba, which I wrote first in English and then translated into Spanish. Many things about the translation gave me trouble, but the single most difficult part was fig- uring out what to do with my “1’s.” Every time I translated a first-person sentence, my impulse was to stick the first-person pronoun into the Span-

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ish version. But when I did so, my yo became obtrusive, less an “I” than an “ego,” an advertisement for myself that my mother tongue seems to frown upon. To say “I” in English is a normal form of self-expression, a habit of thought and speech; but in Spanish, the iteration of yo quickly turns into an exercise in narcissism.

It is a commonplace of Spanish and Spanish American literary history that autobiographies are relatively rare in our literature. Undoubtedly there are many and complex reasons for this, but I’m certain that one of them is the Spanish language’s inhospitableness to the first-person, subject pro- noun. When the language itself makes the writer’s “I” grammatically redundant, autobiography verges on barbarism, and self-disclosure risks becoming a string of slips of the tongue.

A couple of years ago, Esmeralda Santiago published a moving account of her childhood in Puerto Rico, entitled When I Was Puerto Rican. When the Spanish version came out, the title became Cuando era puertorriqueiia. If one compares the two titles, one realizes that every word in the original English has a matching word in the Spanish translation-every word except for one, that is, the pronoun “I.” Indeed, the Spanish title does not even make clear that the sentence is in the first person, for the subject of era could just as well be usted or ella. And yet, without Esmeralda’s “I” there would be no story. My point is that whatever else one may lose when translating an autobiography, the one thing that shouldn’t disappear is the first-person pronoun. But that is precisely what has happened here. Where- as the English gives Esmeralda top billing, the Spanish erases her, turning the matter-of-fact English title into something of a conundrum, another of the mysteries of life.

As someone who was born a yo and will probably die an “I,” I find that my negotiations with the two languages often occur in those awkward spaces between mystery and fact. If I’m grateful to Spanish for not letting me forget the intense, intricate, sometimes baffling and often nurturing web of relations that constitute me, I’m grateful to English for making my displays of individuality seem a little less barbaric. The English language has given me many things-but above all, it has given me the opportunity to call myself I.

GUSTAVO PEREZ FIRMAT CubuAJnited States

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