PrintFor Holy Week (Semana Santa, in Spanish) most of Spain headed south to enjoy the good weather and the week of spectacular street processions that begin on Palm Sunday. Since Granada was abandoned by people I knew and overrun by people I didn’t, I left the sun and festivities to go as far north as I could get. And though I didn’t walk the Camino de Santiago, I made my own, backward pilgrimage of sorts to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia— a land of rolling hills, bagpipes, seafood, and lots of rain.
My solo adventure generated anxiety from my parents and a look of surprise from my friends. But it provided time to reflect, alone with my thoughts, a book, and, as it turned out, some newly made French and Galician friends. And during the slightly odd week, in which only my thoughts existed in English while the rest of the world carried on in Castilian and Galician, I came to some realizations about language.
In my class on English-to-Spanish translation, there is a lot of talk about registers—formal, colloquial, professional, or vulgar. While it’s all well and good to choose the audience of a text and proceed accordingly, in reality I find my Spanish developing lopsidedly—in various directions and all at once.
I volunteer Fridays at a school for children with special needs. Only two of the seven students in the class communicate verbally, so I spend an outsized amount of time hearing myself talk. Certain phrases echo in my head throughout the week: “We do not hit one another.” “Put the desk down.” “Very good!” I speak quickly and without hesitation: Children can sense weakness and are generally merciless upon discovering it. They respect their old teacher immensely, and being a newcomer is difficult. So I try to be self-assured and straightforward.
There are moments, however, when I long to explain myself, to set things in the context of my own native tongue.
And then there are the moments in my university class, when I find myself spinning in circles in seemingly endless debates on religion in Spain and individuality in the United States. At some point after the third or fourth Foucault reference, I want to make use of my freshly honed imperatives: “Stop it.” “Make a point.” Instead, I throw in something about fundamentalism or Obama and express my frustration with some dismissive eye movements.
The most comfortable register of language develops in the cracks around these more formal situations. When I discuss music preferences with one of the assistants at the school while we scroll YouTube videos for a student’s birthday party. When two Spanish students in my semiotics class explain that they couldn’t do the reading because they were on vacation. When a hamantaschen-baking experiment with my exchange partner becomes an all-night outing to celebrate her friend’s birthday. These are the times when I talk quickly, ask questions, make mistakes, scoff, laugh, and rant. Probably Foucault comes up. Probably there are some polite imperatives (“Ooh, tell me”). And it all starts to come together.
But as important as language is, it is in the moments apart from linguistics that I see my experience here forming around me.
One of the students in the special needs class is autistic, and except while eating she sits apart from the class. She wanders around the room, tries to leave, or lies on a mat in the corner. Sometimes she looks out the window. Sometimes she tries to pull out your hair. Frequently she wails inconsolably. Talking to her and saying her name will calm her for a while, but generally music works far better than talking—a cycle of cheery children’s songs plays continuously in the background.
One particularly difficult day before Semana Santa, when the class was painting penitents on sticks and I was cleaning up after a can of water had been hurled across the room, the teacher sat with the girl and sang with her. She uttered the only words I have heard from her so far—a song about rain falling that was stuck in my head for days. As I walked through the perpetually rainy streets of Santiago, I hummed it under my breath, making Spanish onomatopoeia sounds for rain, and I was comforted.
What I have been developing along with my various registers of Spanish is a life here, with all of its integrated, quirky, linguistically challenging parts. And having returned to Granada, where it is—of course—raining, I can say that by coming back to this odd accumulation of experiences, people, sounds, songs, and words, I’m starting to understand.
Tess Rankin is a Columbia College junior studying abroad in Spain.