I imagine that the first language I learned in infancy was touch, then music and spoken English. I’m not sure which of those came first. I never learned Finnish but grew up hearing my grandmother and her sisters use it in conversations not meant for the ears of children. I did not consider this out of the ordinary, only intriguing.
I took Latin in high school for two reasons: first, because I was considering a career in health care and had heard that you needed Latin to understand the arcane medical terms derived from it; second, because the academically inclined kids gravitated to Latin while the cool kids went for French and the ones who really didn’t care went for Spanish. (Back then, there were no other options.)
In college I took French to meet the language requirement, not because I was a cool kid but because it was a modern language that I might one day actually speak. I was right about that.
After graduation, in my early 20s, I studied German because I was drawn to its poetry and music. I was also planning an extended trip to Europe with the vague hope of landing a nursing job in Germany that would allow me to live there. This did not happen but German did serve me well in passing the graduate language exam for my Master’s degree.
Then came Portuguese, the one language in which I attained and maintained fluency for several years. I’d accepted a job in Northeast Brazil where few people spoke English—and I would be living and working with counterpart nurses at various educational levels. I arrived with three weeks of tutoring but am pleased to say that my first ever publication was in that beautiful language. I left Brazil with a vow never to lose my hard won proficiency.
The linguistic undercurrent through all these years has been Spanish. Possibly the most important and useful of them all, it is the language I’d heard since my teen years in California, my job on the Mexican border in Texas, my work travels in Latin America and all my years with my husband Frank who had been born in Mexico. Though it is the language I wasn’t attracted to in high school, it is the one I now dedicate myself to perfecting. In the past couple of years, I’ve especially enjoyed reading the novels of Spanish historian Maria Dueñas in the original and rummaging through the countless Spanish language videos and websites available online.
Yes, I could live a rich life in my native language, especially because it has become the lingua franca worldwide. But for me at least, studying other languages has been transformational, akin to pulling back the curtain that separates me from other peoples and cultures, the curtain that translation alone can’t breach. To quote from the Bible, it’s like seeing through a glass darkly and then face to face. And what poet wouldn’t be full of gratitude for such an opportunity to enlarge her vision.