15 abr 2008

There is an almost physical pleasure in writing in Spanish that I don't get from English prose. In my personal economy of pleasures, my neurology, English is work and Spanish is play. The rhythmic flow, the rhetorical flourishes, allow a different authorial personality. I particularly enjoy the more variable sentence length, from very long to very, very short. I wrote 20 pages on my Feria lecture, finishing today, and it was all enjoyable. My entire approach to composition would have been very different in English.

You should get a native speaker of the language look over whatever you write--even what you write in your own native language. But it must be a native speaker whose writing you admire, in the ideal case a better writer than you in that language.

So the lesson for today is, take pleasure in the foreignness of your prose, but still have someone look it over.

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