It had been a while since I wrote in my own native tongue. I don't normally, not anymore, because it doesn't sell. And because whenever I do, it sounds like love and long-ago promises. I'm a different writer when I take up the pen in Romanian. You wouldn't know me if you read me, unless you were perhaps particularly attentive and intimate. I sound like someone else.
But it's not all my credit. Romanian is a sensual language in ways English never knows how to be. It's a mish-mash language that's a little bit Germanic, Latin, Turkish, Russian and a small host of other dialects and influences that come together to create... something. Or who knows, maybe I'm just biased. It is, after all, mine.
Romanian/Moldavian traditional outfit. Random beauty on a street gallery. I forgot the artist's name.
When I was a small, thumb-sized writer, I hated it. I never used to write in Romanian. I thought I had nothing to say and no words of true worth to say it in. How wrong was I. I eventually started writing in Romanian short bits and snippets to impress somebody I liked who also wrote in Romanian (actual proper books!) and who made me think Romanian was pretty damn cool. To read him, it certainly is. I don't know if it worked. Sometimes. It impressed a bunch of other people who I didn't care about but who wheedled their way into my heart like only faces of the same tribe can.
After a while, I quit Romanian again. Because writers don't make no money anywhere, but they make even less here. So, I figured, why try?
I still don't know why you should try. I don't think being a writer in Romania makes any sense, so why write in it if you can't dance in it? Still, I missed it. I missed the language.
It surprised me how hard it was, coming back to it now. I decided to write a small text to try out for a creative writing workshop at a local theater. We'll see how that goes. But it was strange. The words tasted wrong in my mouth, like a familiar dish you haven't had in ages. The little hats and lines and apostrophes took time to be inked back into the language (since English strips them). English is clean. Germanic. Utilitarian. It has no room for pointy inflections.
Searching for words, I found a great gaping hole where my thesaurus used to be. I had a lot of them once. Too many, even. And as many as they were, I still didn't manage to prove how smart I was. Didn't help that I thought I was proving it outward, when the arrow actually was pointing inward. Ha ha. Oh well.
I wrote the text and I liked the text. In Romanian, I get to be bare in a way that English never showed me how. In English, I turn poetic, I seduce myself with my own words. I trick myself into thinking I sound like somebody else. In Romanian, before the eyes of nobody, only an actor I'd never heard of, I got to play myself.
It allowed me to write about the matters most pressing on my soul at just this minute. It let me be cruel to myself about myself in a way that English can't. Because English, as much as I love it, is borrowed and ill-fitting in my pocket. It lacks the corners and crannies of my native tongue. The space for duality in which I can tease and love myself both at the same time.
I missed this.
It made me wonder and pay heed. Wonder if I don't write another word in Romanian for ten years, will I forget it entirely? Pay heed that I owe it much, and so, the occasional short fiction is the least I can do.
My Romanian texts belong to nobody and are shown to nobody (well, strange actors don't count, do they?). But that's okay. I write so much for other people's ears, I almost forgot what it's like to be bare in your own language.
