Love in Translation: On Navigating a Bilingual Relationship

My soon-to-be husband is not in love with me. A Spanish speaker, he tells me que está enamorado de mí—he is in love of me. By its own grammatical logic, love in Spanish is not an act that you do with someone; rather, it seems to come from the other, as though drawn from an internal fountainhead.

In his book Estudios Sobre El Amor, originally published in 1939, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset seems to explain this misalignment of prepositions in almost scientific terms: “Amor es gravitación hacia lo amado.” Love is gravitation toward the beloved. Ortega describes loving as a centrifugal act, the movement of one person infinitely toward the other.

It seems natural, then, that upon falling in love with Atza, I felt a sense of vertigo. We’d met in a writing workshop in Mexico City (he was the instructor; I was the timid foreigner, terrified that my writing in Spanish would make no sense). After over a year of close friendship, philosophical conversations, outings to salsa clubs, and group trips with friends, I realized that Atza and I had been slowly, almost imperceptibly, gravitating toward each other. When we finally started dating, the emotional rush of our budding romance destabilized me completely. “I feel like I’m flying inside of my body,” I wrote in my journal. Then I literally began falling down all the time: slipping in my apartment, banging my head on the edge of his fridge. I was constantly bruising my elbows, my knees. I was at once in love with and of him, and it was positively dizzying.

Love in any language is hard. Even in my relationships with native English speakers, I found it challenging, at times, to say what I really felt.

In a truly bilingual relationship, though, the act of self-translation is especially complex. When I first met Atza’s parents, I was terrified they wouldn’t understand my gringa accent, on top of the usual nerves such a situation calls for. I worried about how I would come across—not as Rachel, but as a translated version of her. Although I managed just fine—and have built a strong relationship with his family since—I still have to contend with the occasional misinterpretation. (At a recent party with his extended family, for example, when Atza’s cousin told me that he and Atza used to leave school “de pinta,” I responded in Spanish, “And what would you paint?” The crowd around me burst into laughter; Atza explained that to go “de pinta” means to play hooky.) At other times I find myself reaching for a word that should be commonplace (I recently forgot the Spanish word for whisk, “batidor de globo,” when I asked for help in the kitchen), or I confuse vowels in words like equivocar (“equiv-y-car,” I say, much to Atza’s amusement). The extra step I have to take between what I mean and what I say, or what I can’t say, often feels like a break in my ability to express myself.