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    Bilingual Sestina: Julia Álvarez

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    María Laura Rodríguez Contreras
    This bilingual sestina poem explores the speaker's relationship with the Spanish and English languages. In three sentences: The speaker fondly remembers learning Spanish names for things from caregivers Gladys and Rosario as a child, before English turned those words into just vocabulary. She summons them by name, hoping to reopen the house of her childhood where Spanish words now feel dusty and awkward compared to English. The poem expresses a longing to return to the time when the world felt simple, intact, and close through the Spanish names and words that evoked colors, light, dreams, and an intimacy of language the speaker now seeks in English.

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    Bilingual Sestina: Julia Álvarez

    Uploaded by

    María Laura Rodríguez Contreras
    585 views2 pages
    This bilingual sestina poem explores the speaker's relationship with the Spanish and English languages. In three sentences: The speaker fondly remembers learning Spanish names for things from caregivers Gladys and Rosario as a child, before English turned those words into just vocabulary. She summons them by name, hoping to reopen the house of her childhood where Spanish words now feel dusty and awkward compared to English. The poem expresses a longing to return to the time when the world felt simple, intact, and close through the Spanish names and words that evoked colors, light, dreams, and an intimacy of language the speaker now seeks in English.

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    Bilingual Sestina

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    This bilingual sestina poem explores the speaker's relationship with the Spanish and English languages. In three sentences: The speaker fondly remembers learning Spanish names for things from caregivers Gladys and Rosario as a child, before English turned those words into just vocabulary. She summons them by name, hoping to reopen the house of her childhood where Spanish words now feel dusty and awkward compared to English. The poem expresses a longing to return to the time when the world felt simple, intact, and close through the Spanish names and words that evoked colors, light, dreams, and an intimacy of language the speaker now seeks in English.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as doc, pdf, or txt
    585 views2 pages

    Bilingual Sestina: Julia Álvarez

    Uploaded by

    María Laura Rodríguez Contreras
    This bilingual sestina poem explores the speaker's relationship with the Spanish and English languages. In three sentences: The speaker fondly remembers learning Spanish names for things from caregivers Gladys and Rosario as a child, before English turned those words into just vocabulary. She summons them by name, hoping to reopen the house of her childhood where Spanish words now feel dusty and awkward compared to English. The poem expresses a longing to return to the time when the world felt simple, intact, and close through the Spanish names and words that evoked colors, light, dreams, and an intimacy of language the speaker now seeks in English.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    Bilingual Sestina

    Julia Álvarez
    The Other Side: El Otro Lado
    Boston: E. P. Dutton, 1995. 3

    1 Some things I have to say aren't getting said


    in this snowy, blonde, blue-eyed, gum chewing English,
    dawn's early light sifting through the persianas closed
    the night before by dark-skinned girls whose words
    5 evoke cama, aposento, suenos in nombres
    from that first word I can't translate from Spanish.

    Gladys, Rosario, Altagracia--the sounds of Spanish


    wash over me like warm island waters as I say
    your soothing names: a child again learning the nombres
    10 of things you point to in the world before English
    turned sol, tierra, cielo, luna to vocabulary words--
    sun, earth, sky, moon--language closed

    like the touch-sensitive morivivir. whose leaves closed


    when we kids poked them, astonished. Even Spanish
    15 failed us when we realized how frail a word
    is when faced with the thing it names. How saying
    its name won't always summon up in Spanish or English
    the full blown genii from the bottled nombre.

    Gladys, I summon you back with your given nombre


    20 to open up again the house of slatted windows closed
    since childhood, where palabras left behind for English
    stand dusty and awkward in neglected Spanish.
    Rosario, muse of el patio, sing in me and through me say
    that world again, begin first with those first words

    25 you put in my mouth as you pointed to the world--


    not Adam, not God, but a country girl numbering
    the stars, the blades of grass, warming the sun by saying
    el sol as the dawn's light fell through the closed
    persianas from the gardens where you sang in Spanish,
    30 Esta son las mananitas, and listening, in bed, no English
    yet in my head to confuse me with translations, no English

    doubling the world with synonyms, no dizzying array of words,


    --the world was simple and intact in Spanish
    awash with colores, luz, suenos, as if the nombres
    35 were the outer skin of things, as if words were so close
    to the world one left a mist of breath on things by saying
    their names, an intimacy I now yearn for in English--
    words so close to what I meant that I almost hear my Spanish
    blood beating, beating inside what I say en ingles.

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