We Don’t Love in the Same Tongue
I don’t know when the day was I began to think
That I could only love some who would tell me
Te amo
When the day was that I closed the door to foreign love
When I myself step on strange land
No longer dark like coffee
And soft like rice
But gray and hard like ice
I don’t know when the day was that an I love you
Began to weight me like a sleeping arm
The Jesus’ own chest under the cross
When everyone throws it around like an Olympian
Throwing a disc
I love you this I love you that
So easy those words float
Without weight and lighter than air
It hurts you that I don’t saying it back
But to me, it’s not the same thing
And you’ll have to forgive me
But even with desire my mouth won’t work
An I love you
Let it not be and I love you
Nor and I love you
No Amamos en el Mismo Idioma
No se cuándo fue el día que comencé a pensar
Que solamente pudiera amar a alguien que me dijera
Te amo
Cuando fue el día que le cerré la puerta al amor extranjero
Cuando soy yo quien pisa tierra extraña
Ya no oscura como el tinto
Y blandita como el arroz
Si no gris y dura como el hielo
No se cuándo fue el día que un I love you
Empezó a pesar más que un brazo dormido
O el pecho de Jesucristo bajo la cruz
Ya que todos lo mandan al aire como un olímpico
Tirando un disco
I love you this I love you that
Tan fácilmente flotan las palabras
Sin peso y más livianitas que el aire
Te duele que no te lo repita
Pero pa’ mí no es la misma
Y me perdona
Pero ni con esfuerzos me
De la boca
Un I love you
Que no sea un te amo
No un te quiero
I think my creative pieces heavy leans on pathos as a rhetorical tool. The poem talks about how showing emotion can be difficult if both parties speak different languages. There are ways to say certain things that don’t exist in English and in this poem, I talk about the internal friction I experience regarding the words “I love you”. The audience of this pieces is anyone that has every felt that they don’t have the proper way to communicate the way they feel to someone else in their common language. Even though this is not how I feel now, in the poem I try to highlight a sense of jadedness when it comes to dating some that is outside your own culture. Another aspect is ethos. Because I am talking in my poem about things lost in translation in English and Spanish, as a bilingual speaker I am a credible source for how it is to experience this duality.
I chose poetry to be the medium because of its free form when it comes to laying down ideas and emotions. I found that it was easier to convey emotions when I wasn’t bogged down by grammatical rules and writing complete sentences. The fact that I can put down ideas as they come, the way that they come is very freeing. I also find the through poetry, like writing in a journal or dairy, you can convey the way that you felt in the moment more easily. You don’t always have to agree with the way your thoughts came out, but there are still valid emotions to what was written that deserved to be validated and discussed. For example, I write about not know if I could be in an intimate relationship with someone outside my language culture. I don’t agree with that, however when I was writing the poem I thought back to times where I couldn’t say the words, I love you in English simply because it felt like it had a way bigger impact that in should.
I chose to write in poetry because it gives tempo to what you have written. It is very easy to see that when read in Spanish, the poem follows one cadence and when read in English it follows another. This may just be me, but I believe that people are obsessed with one-to-one equivalence. What I mean from that is that it is human nature to try to translate things one-to-one and—almost letter to letter. This obviously doesn’t make sense. This is why people say things are lost in translation and that doesn’t end in text. It is our everyday life.
