On Bilingual Voice & Cuban Identity
There are things I can say in Spanish that I have never been able to say in English. Not because English lacks the words—English is a vast and generous language, and I love it. But because some truths were formed in Spanish. They live in the cadence of a certain kind of sentence, in a sound that carries the memory of where it came from. To translate them would be to betray them.
This is why Una Mujer en el Camino—my Spanish-language poetry collection—is not a translation of any other book I have written. It is its own world. The woman on the road in those poems could not exist in English. She walks differently. She carries different things.
“Some truths refuse to cross the border of language.”
The Gift and the Grief of Living Between Cultures
I grew up shaped by Cuban roots and South Florida light—a particular mix of cultures that gives you access to two ways of seeing everything. Two sets of idioms for love. Two calendars of grief. Two languages for the divine.
This is a gift that sometimes feels like a wound. You are never entirely inside one world or the other. You translate yourself constantly, across the dinner table, across the page, across the years.
But writing has always been the place where I don’t have to choose. On the page, both languages are available. Both ways of being in the world are available. The poem can hold the contradiction without resolving it, because that’s what poems can do that conversations often can’t.
For Aspiring Writers: Writing the Self You Brought with You
Whether or not you write in two languages, many of us carry more than one world inside us. Here is what I have learned about how to bring that richness onto the page:
Don’t explain your culture—inhabit it. The temptation, especially when writing for an audience that doesn’t share your background, is to translate everything. To footnote your life. But the best writing trusts the reader to follow. Use the specific word, the specific smell, the specific sound. Let the reader come to you.
Write what only you can write. Your particular crossing—of cultures, of languages, of geographies—is not a limitation. It is the most original thing about your voice. The intersection you occupy is yours alone.
Let the untranslatable stay untranslatable. In Una Mujer en el Camino, there are images and feelings that resist English equivalents. I let them stay in Spanish. There is power in refusing to fully cross over. It reminds the reader that some experiences remain irreducibly themselves.
Honor your mother tongue—even if you write in another. The rhythms of a first language stay in the body. They shape the music of what you write, even in a second language. Trust that music.
Readers, I invite you—whether or not you speak Spanish—to pick up Una Mujer en el Camino and let the sounds of the poems arrive before the meanings do. Poetry in another language is still an experience. Let it be one.
Una Mujer en el Camino is available on Amazon through Anna’s website. For readings, book clubs, or speaking engagements, visit annamfigueroa.com/contact.