I do all my writings in two languages. I don’t just mean the words I use. At the same time, I write with the different feelings of two different cultural perspectives.
Translating words is easy if you have the same feelings in the language you’re translating into. But what if there aren’t? This is exactly the problem I am experiencing.
A reader can tell at once whether a writing is in my mother tongue or the immigrant language, regardless of grammar or the quality of the words.
Everything I write in my mother tongue is rebellious, sad or searching for self-identity, whereas in my immigrant language, my writing is funnier, more cheerful and hopeful, and has somehow found itself. This is why I can’t translate my long, complex and melancholy sentences from my native language into my immigrant one, both grammatically and emotionally, exactly as I want. If the language to be translated does not deeply convey feelings such as anxiety, fear or hopelessness, how can these feelings be translated correctly? More precisely, how understandable are the feelings being expressed?
The opposite is also true. When I translate my hopeful and cheerful thoughts into the language of my country, all my sentences end up either bland or hanging in the air. In the beautiful language of my beautiful country, even the most beautiful words are sometimes insufficient or insincere to describe ‘hope’ in my thoughts about life.
The “foreignness” I am talking about is not a matter of words, because the issue here is not just cultural difference. It is actually a deeper, more difficult issue. This is the foreignness of feelings and thoughts. It is as if the heart is homeless. I know that no matter what I do, I will never be able to overcome this.
But I want to carry all my feelings with me, like a tourist exploring foreign lands, and share with others the feelings of my own geography.
Similarly, I want to carry the entirely new feelings that I have experienced in my host country back to my homeland, and share them there in my own language.
I’m not even sure if I have been able to express all my feelings relating to this matter.
