opinion

Translating a people
by Silvio Sirias

One of the best things that happened to me upon my parents moving back to Nicaragua --- when I was eleven years old --- was that I ceased being the translator. My mother's English-language skills were limited. Because of this, whenever we'd brave the streets of Los Angeles without my bilingual father, the moment my mother encountered a linguistic puzzle beyond her capacity to solve, she'd gently nudge me before the interlocutor to act as her interpreter. Although I found the experience interesting at first, after a few years stuck at the job, translating became a chore.

Thus, once we moved to her homeland, where she didn't require my services any longer, the freedom was exhilarating.

Yet, ironically, today, as a novelist --- and I suspect it's also the case with other Latino and Latina writers --- I'm once again fully engaged in a variant of the act of translation.

From the moment I took my first trip to my parents' homeland --- at the age of seven --- I became acutely aware that Nicaragua and Nicaraguans were a land and a people vastly different from the United States and its populace. I found the landscape of Nicaragua --- physical and human --- mesmerizing. Nicaraguans were open to an extent I'd never experience, and their joy toward life was contagious. But at the same time there was an underlying sadness --- manifested in an acceptance of their lot that to this day I find baffling --- brought on by poverty and by centuries of never-ending political turmoil.

During my Nicaraguan adolescence, I grew to adore the country and its people. I gladly shed my American skin and embraced a new identity as a full-fledged Nicaraguan. I fit in perfectly, and loved almost every minute of the seven years I lived in my ancestral homeland.

When I returned to Los Angeles, at age eighteen, to attend college, I soon learned what I wanted to do, more than anything: it was to explain the sights, sounds, tastes, relationships, and experiences I had in Nicaragua to anyone who was willing to listen. Of course, conveying these things over lunch was impossible --- I could only produce the distant echo George Borrow spoke of when referring to everything that is lost in translation.

Yet I always knew, instinctively, that the best way to inform Americans about their Nicaraguan brethren --- we do share a continent, after all --- would be through the written word. The problem was that I had no idea what I needed to do to become a writer. Blindly, I plunged into the study of literature --- in Spanish --- and eventually earned a doctorate. But that was of little help at the time in bringing the Nicaraguan experience to an American audience.

The turning point, though, was waiting for me right around the corner: I was introduced to US Latino and Latina literature --- a literature written primarily in English by authors with backgrounds similar to mine. Their work struck me like a bolt of lightning, and I started to read their production voraciously.

The climax of this odyssey, the moment where a light descended upon my thirsty soul to reveal the key to rendering my love for Nicaragua onto the blank page, came after I read Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies. Through that example, as well as others penned by equally talented Latino and Latina writers, I learned how to retrieve stories from my parents' homeland --- originally experienced in Spanish --- and reinterpret them for an English-language readership.

This is what I did in my first novel, Bernardo and the Virgin, and I've done it again in Meet Me under the Ceiba. I lifted events and wrote them in a manner that English-speaking readers can hopefully make their own.

Now the circle feels complete. I am back where I started: translating other people's experiences. Admittedly, it's a different type of translation than what I did for my mother. But it's a kind of interpreting I truly love.

Silvio Sirias resides and writes in Panama. For more information, visit his website at www.silviosirias.com