On Borrowed Words

Ilan Stavans's On Borrowed Word: A Memoir of Languages turned up here, though I don't quite remember buying it. I must have bought it, and that was the right decision. Stavans is tremendously interesting. I have little or no first-hand knowledge of most of what he writes about: the lives of Mexican Jews (of the generation about to turn 60 and their parents), Mexico in general, or life in Israel. But Stavans gives an interesting picture of his worlds, and of his parents' worlds.

The languages he writes of are Spanish,

I never learned to love Mexico. Instead, adoro the Spanish language. It is far easier for me to think of my birth as having occurred in the tongue of Quevedo, Cervantes, Borges, and Octavio Paz than to perceive myself as un mexicano hecho y derecho.

 Yiddish, a language for which

the number of speakers, whose average age was around fifty, made it a less used language than Serbo-Croatian .... [but] the mother tongue, whereas Spanish, the street language, the one I most often used, was the father tongue. The duality was not artificial; Jewishness (though not Judaism, at least not then) was in my heart and soul.

English, in which at first

 I could, indeed, make myself comfortable in English, but I could not dispel the sense of inhabiting a rented house, of bothering another person's suit.

 Hebrew,

Hebrew enchanted me. .. But language alone does not make the man, and when I exhausted my curiosity toward Israel, I also let go of the Holy Tongue and gravitated toward Europe.

By the time of writing the book, 2002, he had been resident in the US for a dozen or so years, as student and then as professor, and as journalist explaining the US to Latin America and vice-versa. He was quite at home in the rented house. Few enough born to the tongue write so well.

There are oddities in the book. Stavans's description of his Mexican passport seems to be badly copied from Robert Graves's description of his own in Goodbye to All That. Stavans says that the passport gives his height as 1.58 meters. This is about 5'4", but one can transpose the last two digits to get 1.85 meters, which matches Graves's 6'2". Stavans gives his weight as 170 kg., where Graves stated that he weighed 170 lb. Now 170 lb. is a lean 6'2" and a hefty 5'4". But 170 kg. is a weight for the occasional NFL lineman (generally 1.9 meters tall) or the morbidly obese.