The Aura of Aura

I was planning on finishing Aura before writing this blog post, but then I decided now was the time. My junior year of high school I read Aura in a Spanish literature class. When I began this book in English, two conflicting emotions hit me. The first was satisfaction, at how quickly the book flew by, reassuring me that yes, I am fluent in English. The second one, though was disappointment. The unbroken darkness of the house was less haunting. The 2^nd person you notes in English Aura’s that“eyes are sea green and that they surge, break to foam, grow calm again, then surge like a wave.” (Fuentes, 27) But when her eyes open slowly, “se hacen espuma, vuelven a inflamarse como un ola” (Fuentes, 26) they are a whole new set of eyes. The words may be as close to a direct translation as possible, but because of the variation of sound, because of the increased beauty reading what Fuentes wrote in the language he learned to express himself in, those same words have a whole different feel. We have discussed a lot in class about the dependence between author and character. The author does not have the identity of author without the character, but the character too would not exist without the author. I believe there is a similar co-dependence between language and literature. Books could not exist without language, but similarly without literature and speech putting words together, language would have no significance. To me, the “meaning” of a word stems from a combination of its sound and it’s written, or known definition. Last year Li-Young Lee, a poet, visited my creative writing class. He spoke about how man didn’t invent language. He used the example of a tree, saying that the essence of the tree produced the word itself and man spoke it to spread all that is confined in “tree.” I am now in first term German, and the more languages I dabble in, the more I realize the infinite possibilities of language. I feel that to be able to articulate myself fully, I would have to be fluent in every languages, plus the million more that may never exist. This could sound depressing, but I in fact mean it in an exciting way. There are so many combinations of words we have yet to discover, and this, in itself, is a reason to keep writing, keep reading, keep speaking, keep dancing with the language as the song.