The world around my pen: languages and creative writing

This post was written by our guest blogger Jimena Ferraris. Hailing from Argentina, Jimena is a neuroscientist and teacher at Stockholm University and a creative writer in Spanish and Swedish, as she explains in her post.

My entire life I have loved studying languages

When I was young It felt like spying into a world I thought I would hardly reach. I come from Argentina. From there, the very south of the planet, everywhere else appeared so far away. So unreachable.

When I was six years old, I wrote my first short story. It was about the moon and the sun, who were in love and could never be together for obvious reasons. I don’t remember how I solved this, but in the end they get married and have children: seven suns and seven moons, which would be up every day of the week. That story was, of course, in Spanish. My other early attempts to write included a detective story set in an abandoned hotel in the mountains when I was twelve, and Sci-fi stories in my twenties. A warning: that does not mean that any of it was good literature or anything close. But my pen wrote in Spanish, my mother tongue, my language, and my soul. Yet I didn’t appreciate this until I moved to Sweden, a country in the very north of the world.

My journey with languages started when, at the age of nine, I asked my mother if I could study English. It wasn’t the language that fascinated me so much as the teacher at my school who taught with coloured cards on a green chalkboard. After that I got to go to an ‘English Institute’ after school. At the age of sixteen, a map of the UK hung among rock stars on my bedroom wall, with a note that stated: ‘I will live in London.’ (That never happened!) Still, English has been crucial to my career and is the language of my scientific work.

Some years later, I studied Portuguese, which brought new literature and music into my life, but it was mostly another way to see the world from a South American perspective.

While pursuing my PhD, I moved to France. Before travelling there, I studied French to prepare myself. But when I arrived, I found I could not build a sentence and nobody understood my pronunciation. I dissolved into tears whenever I wanted to buy a cup of tea. Furthermore, all the work I did had to be done in French. However (after a couple of months of crying), I discovered I could after all live a life ‘in French’. I continued to write creatively, but still always in Spanish.

All those years of writing were accompanied by years of reading. I read authors from all over the world, but mainly in Spanish. Although I could read other languages, reading in Spanish felt comfortable, enjoyable, and pleasant. I never considered reading a book in its original language if a good translation existed.

However, some years ago, that changed completely when I moved indefinitely to Sweden.

The world around me looked different and sounded different, and would do so for an indefinite period of time. Having sorted out the challenge of learning yet another language, I started to use it. I found I could use it to buy a coffee, talk to a colleague about the weather, and potentially work. But could I use it for my own writing? Could I use it to be creative?

When moving abroad into a different linguistic bubble, there are many things to grieve, and language is one of them. The books accumulated throughout the years are another. So many times, I would instinctively get up from the sofa and head to a phantom library no longer in my living room, to pick up a book that was no longer there. There were also notes, experiences, and memories left behind.

Thus, my first step to feeling at home in Sweden was rebuilding my library. With a limited budget and a mother tongue spoken by half of the world, I still found it a challenge to find books in my preferred language here. I realised that the easiest way was to embrace reading in other languages since Sweden has great public libraries and other sources of free classics, modern titles, best sellers, and so on. With the need to understand the unfamiliar world around me, reading local authors in their mother tongue became a good idea. A must, I would say.

That is how I became used to reading literature in other languages. And something happened. I could understand everything that I was reading! I was proud of myself. However, it felt different. It felt like reading through a veil.

Comprehending a language is not only about understanding the meaning of words and sentences. It also embraces everything that is not said, whatever lies behind the words. I could understand the definition of a word. But why did the author choose just that word and not a synonym? Is she showing me something else about the character, the situation, or the mood of the scene? Of course she is! Reading as an outsider, some things would escape me. Still, as time passed, more and more of those words and phrases would get second and third meanings, and the veil would start to lift for me. Nevertheless, reading in your mother tongue is not comparable to anything else, no matter how much you know that second, third or fourth language.

In the meantime, I could not write creatively in any language. I could not find the time or the mood. In truth, it was grief hitting me hard. My mind was a mess of languages. I could write in my mother tongue and feel at home, but immediately realised how far away I was. Then I tried to write in English. But it smelled like work. Finally, in a crisis of identity, I found myself writing poems in Swedish. It was so far from my soul but so imprinted in my heart now. Everything those poems expressed related to my life here. Apparently, my mind had found a language to voice things I had never experienced before.

There are many decisions related to writing that one has to make. Let’s say I would like to write literary fiction. And I want people to read it. Being far from the countries where my mother tongue is the standard literary language, should I write in English as a ‘universal’ language? (English is, of course, not a universal language.) I was advised to write in a language I knew better and eventually get it translated. But what if what I want to say is already a ‘thought’ in another language? What if what I want to say can only be said in one specific language?

Once you have changed countries, learnt other languages, and a world that once seemed barred to you has opened its doors, all that will come into your writing. And I don’t mean just in terms of experiences and stories; I mean that it will enter into your writing, word after word, into how you build sentences. It will give different meaning to what you write

I learned that writing (besides mistakes, being clearly non-native, and probably sounding weird to a native speaker) and reading in different languages will establish me in a different perspective, in a different scenario. ‘Listening’ to words in Spanish, French or Swedish, will immediately put me in Buenos Aires, Paris, or Stockholm, regardless of whether I am reading about China, India, or the USA.

I still feel different when reading in languages other than Spanish. Writing poems in Swedish or even this article in English still feels bizarre. But that is fine. Sometimes, you need that veil; you need to see the world around your pen differently, feel the strangeness of its grammar, listen to it spoken with a different tongue, and only then, get closer to what once was unreachable.