Caught up in the, "He said, she said"

(Written Feb 13)

“You will be tired; you will be very tired.” A friend advised me when speaking of her first month in Chile.  She warned me that there would be days that I would go back to my house in the evenings and simply want to shut myself in my room.

I hit this phase and I hit it hard, but it was a lot easier for me to hide it as I was still with my grandma Sherian and Paulina, so I was sill in between English and Spanish, but there were days that I woke up an understood neither English nor Spanish. I felt like I was loosing grip on two worlds.  Paulina and I spent a lot of time translating like I mentioned in the beginning, and even sometimes, I hear the Spanish and just not register the words even though they were simple words I hac known almost my whole Spanish career.  For the first time, I wanted to withdraw into myself, to do absolutely nothing, but I knew I was growing every day I applied myself, every day that I tried.

            I watched four movies in Spanish with Paulina: Megamente (Megamind), Comer, Rezar, Amar (Eat, Pray, Love), Dia de los Enamorados (Valentine’s Day), and Endreados (Tangled).  I felt so lost watching Megamind and questioned weather I even knew Spanish at all.  Again, I learned like a child watching Disney movies with his parents, watching the cartoon, listening to the ride and fall of the characters’ voices and trying to figure out who were the “good guys” and who were the “bad guys.”  The next two went much better as I had already seen both of them in English, but like movies in English, I fell asleep for parts of them.  By the third movie, however, I finally understood the characters, laughed at the jokes, laughed at the subtitles for being wrong (they were also in Spanish), and understood the story. What a rich experience it was to understand!

            By the time we got to Santiago, then I was able to talk to the chicas of ISA in Spanish and to really understand and be understood!  What a fulfilling experience it is to understand literature, feelings, and people in their native language.  I have run in to so many words that just don’t translate well.  There are feelings, experiences, and ways of saying everyday things that you just can’t get if you only speak one language.  Even in watching those movies, or even watching movies that are subtitled in “my two languages,” there are things that are lost in translation; there are things that are just more beautiful to hear in their original language.