I immigrated to the United States in January 2012. The first thing I bought when I arrived in the U.S was an English grammar book. For many years, the English language had been a prison to me. The hardest part was that it was my prison. Countless of embarrassing mistakes on email communications, essays and pronunciations forced me to adopt a policy that I could only speak in English. Ironically, only by immersing myself in the English language I was able to walk out of that prison. The pain of denying myself speaking in my native language gave me certain impressions of the nature of the English language. I came to the conclusion that Spanish was significantly a more beautiful language.
Translating positively impacted my understanding of the English language. In order to translate the three poems of Dario that I chose, I would have to look for a degree of beauty in the English language that according to me was not there. At times, I felt like I was asked to do the impossible. I was frustrated many hours until slowly I was able to familiarize myself better with the musicality of the English language. It was through this practice that I came to change my opinion about it. I understood how limited was my vocabulary in both languages. I would constantly run out of words to choose from. Prior to this I had always been really proud of how I never used a dictionary. In my class called One Hundred Years of Solitude, I actually made jokes of how I never used dictionaries, but no sooner said than when I had to sorrow myself with both English and Spanish dictionaries in order to produce a satisfactory translation.
Overall, I do not regret one second my decision to translate from Spanish to English. It would have probably been easier would I have chosen to translate from English to Spanish, but then I wouldn’t have connected to English probing it the way I did. Prior to this experience, English was only an obstacle that I needed to bypass. Now I can see the depth of the English language with a greater degree of clarity and this for me made the course much more rewarding than what I had anticipated.