If America is a grandiose melting pot and multicultural society, then it is also a place that has not fully welcomed its immigrants, especially those… - Marjorie Agosín

how to become someone else-that's perhaps the greatest challenge for a translator because to become someone else is to become compassionate. To become someone else, you have to be in love with someone else. And in that sense I strongly believe that translations are acts of love

The words, such ample, respectable ladies, were fraught with the possibility of love beyond diminutives. I never stopped writing in Spanish because I could not abandon my essence, the fragile, divine core of my being. It would have meant becoming someone else, frequenting sadness, losing a soul and all the butterflies. I always spoke Spanish, even in my most solemn dreams. I did not want to translate myself.

In the house where I grew up in Santiago de Chile I heard a Babel of whispers, songs, prayers, and languages. Spanish was my language, my mother tongue spoken in the fiestas, in the schools, and in the poetry books I loved and read out loud as poetry should be read. My maternal grandparents spoke German and Yiddish. My paternal grandparents spoke Russian and often sang to the music of a balalaika bought in a flea market at the outskirts of the city. At school I learned Hebrew and songs in Ladino. At first I seemed to be confused with too many languages, but as the years progressed all of these languages were and continue to be a part of my inheritance as a Jew, as a poet, and as a woman. It was truly enchanting to hear and feel the depth of these many languages that embedded the narratives of the Jewish people throughout our history-an ancient people carrying their prayers and their legacy across the earth.