1. I am putting off writing an essay on why sometimes bilingualism causes more conflict than polyglotism
2. The essay is a composition I am writing for my Catalan language course, in which I continue my quest to speak as many languages as can fit into my brain, which I am starting to feel is filling to the point of utter confusion. I grow more and more astonished at the mental capacity of people who can speak, say, seven or nine languages.
So, I will procrastinate by writing this blog in English. First of all, I will throw you a bone and keep (somewhat) good on my promise to begin each post with a list of random things I did today.
Today in my everyday I:
1. Felt sick and tired (actually) and therefore stayed in in the morning.
2. After the sick-and-tiredness wore off, did some cleaning/ironing stuff. Not because I'm a wife. Just because it needed to be done.
3. Read about poetry.
4. Went to my evening class.
5. Talked to someone about marriage, religious ceremonies and related issues/complications.
6. Walked on a treadmill.
7. Ate chips.
8. Procrastinated on Facebook.
9. Continually checked email.
Bet you were expecting a number 10, weren't you?
Now, in the spirit of bilingualism, and by request, here is one translation of the essay "Borges y Yo" (see previous blog) by Jorge Luis Borges.
"Borges and I"
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page.
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, New York: New Directions, 1964, pp. 246-47.
