Explore & Practice Mod 4

Bilingual Sestina by Julia Alvarez

Some things I have to say ain’t getting said

in this snowy, blond, blue-eyed, gum-chewing English

dawn’s early light sifting through persianas closed

the night before by dark-skinned girls whose words

evoke cama, aposento, suenos in nombres

from that first world 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

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 morivivi whose leaves closed

when we kids poked them, astonished. Even Spanish

failed us back then when we saw 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 genie from the bottled nombre.

Gladys, I summon you back by saying your nombre.

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 to me and through me say

that world again, begin first with those first words

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,

Que calor! As you opened up the morning closed

inside the night until you sang in Spanish,

estas 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—

luna, sol, casa, luz, flor, as if the nombres

were the outer skin of things, as if the words were so close

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 mean that I almost hear my Spanish

heart beating, beating inside what I say en ingles.