Finished, the speech of Maria Teresa Andruetto for the closing of the Congress of the language

There is a crack in everything / that is as well as the light between, says Leonard Cohen, and then it's there, in the cracks, where I'd like to look.

It has not been easy for me to accept the invitation to close this congress, for the diverse dissidence that has for him, for equally different reasons, the community to which I belong and my own differences.

Two questions rebadure me, the first is that before accepting, I made known my position and the invitation was supported – with a democratic spirit and a magnitude that I greatly appreciate -; the other is that I am here as a writer and that the place of the writer is, in terms of language, a place of disobedience, dissent. In the name of both, I pronounce these words.

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The first question relates to the very name of the Congress, called here – and it is at least curious that its national counterpart has come to this denomination – Congress of the Spanish language, because for us, for our educational system, the academy, high culture and popular culture, this language in which I speak here has always been the Castilian language.

So came America, with the conquest and with the church, the language of Castile and it was this language and not others that were spoken or spoken in Spain as that which prevailed – not without pain, not without struggle, not without resistance – the languages ​​of origin.

This leads us to ask who is the language, who gave the name and who recognized their language under that name. Although, in the previous meetings of this Congress, we insist on the idea that the language is that of all its speakers, in the vast geographical origin of the speakers and in the strong presence of women in the paintings, I wonder if so speaks. everything is the same language; if so, who owns it and in view of the fact that a language with many speakers, in addition to a symbolic capital, is an economic capital, making use of it. From Madrid, the Minister of Education of the Province, to the question of a journalist on certain contents, acknowledged that neither the Argentine nor the Cordoba part intervened in the election of the agenda.

It's the Royal Academy, he says. In his turn, the director of the Royal Academy stressed the importance of these congresses in these terms: "For a few days, we will try to express in Spanish the problems that concern us all, without perhaps having a dimension of what the expression "Spanish voice" means here, for us.

Then we should not ignore some questions, even if they are uncomfortable. Questions such as: Why a congress in these pampas without local intervention on its content? Is the Spanish language the same as that spoken in America? Is the very diverse Castilian of each of our countries the same Spanish language that Congress speaks? And finally, since we are in Argentina, is it the same language as the one spoken here?

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Yes and no. The same and another. For the speakers of my country, it is an issue that is more than one hundred years old, an issue that has been rejected or minimized by the Spanish language institutions, its spaces of formation , its editors …, as stated in the director's recent statement, white on black The Mexican Alfonso Cuarón, who said at the end of a series of films in New York, that it was shocking for the audience (and I probably imagine that for himself) that his film Rome was subtitled in Spain.

"It seems very, very ridiculous, I like to see, as a Mexican, Almodóvar cinema and I do not need Mexican subtitles to understand Almodóvar." It looks ridiculous, he says, that it is necessary to say to a Spaniard: "Do not approach the edge instead of Nomás, do not go to the coast.I understand very well what Cuarón says.I happened that Spanish editor has tried to change the peaches with the strange foundation that in Spain, no one would understand the word peach, but it happens that fishing is an artificial word for an Argentinian who will never come back again.I could use it .

In short, a certain claim of uniformity, of homogenization that destroys the singular or invisibilise, illuminates the way in which its own language is illuminated by seeing how it follows different paths.

All that has been erased, says Cordoba Eugenia Almeida, because the Castilian of this America is a set of mixed variables by the indigenous peoples, Arab, African, European and Asian contributions that – enslaved, submitted, accepted or welcomed – have impregnated our ways of saying and talking. He spoke Russian in fifteen languages, says Julia Kristeva somewhere.

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The second problem arises when we notice that it is not reciprocal. Nearly 600 million people in 22 countries speak the same language. Are these nations linguistically sovereign? And if so, why should their expressions be translated into a better, a good one?

In the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights, signed in Barcelona in 1996, it is stated that speakers can use the language according to the needs of each place of origin, thus guaranteeing "the principles of a global linguistic peace. fair and equitable, decisive factor for well-being, social and cultural coexistence ".

More than 90% of Spanish speakers live in American countries and less than 10% in Spain. However, American idiomatic varieties do not have as many opportunities to be recognized by the Academy and, where they are, they go through folk forms, Americanisms.

On the other hand, in the Panhispanic Dictionary of Doubts, about 70% of the "misuses of the language" are of Latin American origin, which is not only related to the idea of ​​purism and the claim of uniformity, but especially with the conviction that good speech is decided outside of us.

These are the policies of language control, tension between the words of a community and the norms that it dictates or accepts and the struggle between transformation and preservation. The grammatical warning does not limit me, but reminds me that I am in the language and gives me a mobility inside. It reminds me that the language is mine and that it is not only mine … it reminds me that the link is the shared vehicle.

The interest in grammar reflects the interest in the conservation of public space, says Colombian Carolina Sanín. Without laws, would we be freer? We need regulatory institutions, but we also need these institutions to represent us more equitably, because a language – which is actually much more than its rules – lives in the mouths of its speakers and it It is astonishing to see how quickly I see it in terms of words, dead words, and cliches.

A language is an entity in permanent movement, an immensity, a river, in its interior many languages ​​correspond to as many peoples. Argentina, to give the example that I have most in hand, was not made with Spanish-speaking descendants, it is a country that has mixed the population of origin to that which invaded it and who has received migratory alluvia from Italians, Galicians, Arabs, Aymaras, Basques, Poles, Guarani, Armenians, Koreans, Germans … it's a country that has never experienced idiomatic purism, the need to preserve the "casticidad", a word so close to chastity.

In short, whether we are impure or mixed race (often ethnic Métis and always cultural mestizo), that our language is impure and that impurity is our wealth. The Colombian Fernando Vallejo says that it is absurd to ask who is speaking well because Spanish is spoken as he can in all areas of the language, a language of 22 countries among which we have the same language. Spain.

In short, for the wealth of speakers, writers and readers, and for the wealth of our literatures, Peninsular, Latin American and Equatorial Guinean, we should take great care of a language that submits to the official language a writing who puts each modality of withdrawal be careful not to confuse the living language with the cemeteries of the language, welcome, says Fernando Vallejo, the language of life, which is local.

Here, a little distracted, one might think that it is about differences of speech, the singular which moves away from some rules, some corrals, some laws that come and go from one region to another, but of course this is not the case. a round-trip between different ways of using language, but a current that goes or pretends to go from the old metropolis to its domains of yesteryear and never the other way around.

This stream of unidirectional linguistic power comes to our countries with the ways of saying and writing that Spain considers correct without understanding that many expressions of Spanish Castilian are understood by testing our ears, because the music, the speech, taste, are not the same for everyone and because, paraphrasing a Christian story, there are sheep that come from this corral and others that come from another corral but that is everything from the language universe.

It was not so long ago, a Madrilenian researcher said she was very surprised and I was more surprised by her reflection: "I do not understand why the Argentineans have to translate Dante (to the Following an edition of The divine comedy, with translation of the poet Jorge Aulicino) if it is already translated into Spanish, but it may not even be noticed how many translations of Spanish publishers we are listening to, especially when it comes to writers who work with spoken language; but I do not extend much on the subject because of all this, the tables on the translation of the Congress will have reported, since it is usually a debate between our translators .

This is not a minor issue, nor simply rhetoric. During the last dictatorship, Argentine writers in Spanish exile wondered what to do with our language. I have chosen two answers to this question: the writer and critic David Viñas, in July 1980, states that in a letter, it is the thing that is taught, it is the Agayega, starch is put on and ironed? In another letter dated August 1980, writer Antonio Di Benedetto states: I have tried to clarify a little vocabulary of the Spanish reader without turning my back on my potential Argentine or Latin American reader . With such criteria, I have replaced some voices. Example: not "bag", which suggests here "bag", but jacket, diction that is not foreign to Argentina, right? Truth?

We hear a muffled cry in this, a gesture of despair, because the choice of language (and within it, that of its infinite nuances) indicates in which literary system a writer can or wants to be inserted, indicates by whom and how he wants be read and also reveals the cost that the writer is willing to pay to meet his readers.

When I started to publish and shyly open some possibilities of publishing my books outside of Argentina, the language, the subject in which a writer works, began to present itself as a obstacle. It's not the book, it's not the story, it's the language … so Argentina, I've been told many times.

In 1876, Juan María Gutiérrez, concerned about the language of River Plate (as Esteban Echeverría and Juan Bautista Alberdi, his colleagues from the Mayo Association), publicly rejected the proposal to integrate the Royal Academy Spanish, which led to a series of letters with Spanish journalist who also debated on this subject with Sarmiento.

The question of whether to speak Spanish or one of the languages ​​of origin of the territory occupied by our country and, in the case of Castilian, which Spanish to speak and write, in in short, the question of whether it was convenient to follow the Royal Academy to walk the country from which we became independent or if we were to let the language, even identical, identical and of course, become independent and operate at his rhythm, accepting us, his speakers, the transformations we gave him We discussed here in the second half of the 19th century, a discussion that our leaders gave more than 150 years ago.

This question, which in our literary careers is studied as a controversy over the language, a controversy of course linguistic and aesthetic but above all political, has been solved within the framework of the aesthetic / political romantic movement Gutiérrez, Echeverría, Sarmiento and Alberdi, the four great Argentinian romantic writers, at the same time, form four central politicians, which is almost tantamount to saying the founders of our literature and the nation.

From all this was born the belief that Spoken Spanish did not need to be subject to the dictates of its central home. Therefore, to be an Argentine speaker or writer, it is also to be a disobedient language user facing the requirement of casticity.

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The third question arises when we repair the language as capital, not only symbolic, but also when we understand its economic face. Then we ask who benefits from the dividends this language gives to the world? The governor of the province said: "We know that it is a huge natural resource, a renewable good that is multiplying with use, that is gaining value every day and that is today. desirable, even for those born and raised in other languages, placing it at the forefront of this aspect of language as economic capital.

In terms of international certification of learning courses as a foreign language, the international conferences of Spanish teachers, as they are called, who certifies? Who derives the dividends from these shares? Are these dividends distributed among the different countries in which Spanish is spoken or is it a resource that belongs mainly to Spanish institutions?

All human relations are mediatized by politics, crossed by differences of power, and this power is materialized by the language which, citing Bakhtin, is the product of a collective human activity and reflects in all its elements the elements of human life. economic and sociopolitical organization of the society that generated it.

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The search for uniformity, the adoption of a norm reflecting the peculiarities of our Castilian is consistent with the search for increased economic performance, with which books, films and series, paper or digital publications, teaching courses and Literature Children and young people serve as many users as possible.

That is why the persistent search for a Castilian Spaniard or a neutral Latin American allowing these products to circulate on the continent, traveling more and better, penetrating faster, whatever, is at the expense of our singularities and -How it is actually against the richness of the language. In our country, just listen to students, children or grandchildren who talk about logs, cars and refrigerators to understand what I'm saying.

Why do they talk about how the characters speak in canned kids programs? Why a film subtitled from one Castilian to another, how did it go with the aforementioned Rome and with so many others? Is it because the Spaniards do not understand the word edge and have to be translated by edge? Or is it simplifying and normalizing to attract as many viewers as possible to a film or series that can generate a lot of money?

Companies and multinational capitals favor the expansion of the Castilian market, in its Spanish modality or in what they call a neutral American, in order to reinforce, in a uniform and hegemonic way, the monopoly of the language as a whole. commercial enterprise; they are looking for a language of a unique modality (for many speak of so different cultures), at the cost of their depredation, in the same way that the monoculture, in its excessive search for money, goes to the same. against the richness of the soil and the diversity that nature offers us.

Víctor Klemplerer, in his book on the transformations of the German language during the Third Reich, detailed in his diary the falsification of this language, loses its uniqueness and its truth, which will be the most powerful dissemination of Nazism in Europe . all layers of the population.

The life of a language, if it resides somewhere, is in the particular, in its instability; Uniformity as an economic strategy, mono-language, neutrality, what it produces is destruction, depredation. In this arc, enter the language industries, linguistic tourism, politically correct, which includes ongoing debates on whether or not language is inclusive, and to what extent, and including includes diversity of all kinds, not just gender. .

But back to our resistance to the demand for uniformity in words, since thought is built in and with the language through which it manifests itself, we could step forward in our reasoning and say that it is not possible. it is a demand for uniformity not only in the ways of saying but also in the ways of thinking.

For this reason, although many access these requirements, others condemn us to scorn, discomfort, rejection of a language suitable for all audiences. This is not a whim, it's an identity search that is reflected in the way of speaking and writing, deviations from a certain stranger must be found in the The deepest individual, where refracts the social, the echoes of the language of a people, of a region, of a community, of a social sector, looking for of a counter-power against the hegemonic.

It is said that the language is not that of the institutions but that of the speakers. And although this is what it does for everyday use, it does not seem to be the same in the economic use that a language provides, because, undoubtedly, it is not primarily the Castilian Argentine, nor the Mexican, neither Peruvian nor Bolivian. The one who is marketed in the international language teaching.

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The fourth question, inclusive language.

The Congress of the Spanish Language will deal with the present of Spanish, but will not discuss an inclusive language, said the Academy authorities to the press with complete firmness.

We will have equal participation between men and women, he tells himself, and I can not help but wonder if there have been women and in what proportion in the content decisions. I do not know if the Academy and the Institute have women in their repertoires, but if they do, they have not given their opinions to the press. It was said that there were 250 speakers from 32 countries, 250 speakers and not a single discussion board on an issue such as gender inclusion, vividly in the current program, in Latin America and Spain.

Inclusive language places us before the ideological charge of language, which is generally invisible to us. Of course, we share language and it does not belong to anyone, not even to good causes.

Of course, we risk that inclusive language becomes purely politically correct. Of course, we do not know what will happen to the literature, or whether it is possible to write in inclusive language in a sufficiently ambiguous manner to preserve the poetic function of the language, in a way that, in addition to making us think, move us, excite us, make us more complex

Of course, we do not know what will happen in the long term, if this language that has just broken down will be stabilized in the language and, in such a case, how will it enter and how our literatures, but we know its use and expansion in some cases. the social sectors (especially city dwellers) and young people, regardless of their bad, and see how it permeates and permeates public, journalistic and political uses, and then it is surprising that even a discussion table was included on something that shakes the foundations of our society.

Battles are conducted in the language, meanings are discussed, what is gained is consolidated and new ways of naming – those that appear with such virulence – make models of social behavior visible. Words or phrases that come to say something new or say something old, because the language is not neutral, it reflects the society to which we belong and defends itself by marking, highlighting the fact that the values ​​of certain geographical or gender or age …) are not the values ​​of all.

Something that did not exist begins to be named, something that already existed wants to be named in another way, a revolution of which we do not know the extent, nor until there will not, nor will it ever encompbad the larger part of society, its various regions, the less urban forms of our language and all its social sectors.

We can not predict the point of arrival, but we know that it is among us in a way that we can not ignore. What is clear, which is inevitable, is that it is a political problem, that language takes into account society. the one who lives, up to the historical moment that his speakers live, because, as also says Victor Klemperer, "the spirit of an era is defined by his language".

The question then is how will the language be managed so as to preserve a territory common to its speakers, to remain in its diversity, its differences and its richness, its meeting place, to use the name of a poem of our Alejandro Nicotra.

The language is mine, but not only mine, so each of us owns it as long as we are aware of its social component.

This shared code, this contract between speakers, this freedom is always intended to limit the desire to be understood, because we do not speak alone or for ourselves but to communicate with others. Given this complexity, only diversity and flexibility are appropriate; On the other hand, language gives us all the time examples of how to transform without destroying ourselves and finally, shaking the language, it is – according to the terms of Althusser – a form among others , of political practice.

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Another problem, Castilian as a language of science and knowledge.

The positioning of Castilian as a scientific and philosophical language brings us to controversy before English as a dominant language engages in dialogue and tension with other languages ​​and against the imposition of a single language. the scientific universe.

In summary, the same reasoning was used to defend the American variables of Castilian, before its official variant applied in this field of dispute in which our language is in a minority condition compared to the official language of the science, English is the only language.

The recovery of Spanish as a language of knowledge is a paramount task, which does not mean promoting a self-clbadified and sterile provincialism, but a universalism in Spanish that accompanies it. learning many other languages ​​to access all cultures and enter the country. in dialogue with them against the composition of a single language.

The development of Castilian as a language of knowledge, thought and academic knowledge would postulate an internationalism of another order, babel and not monolithic, and bring about a radical change in our culture of self. – academic and scientific evaluation, says Diego Tatian and Argentina / Mexican Enrique Dussel. In his book Philosophies of the South, he asks that different traditions be available for an authentic and symmetrical dialogue, through which each one would learn many unknown aspects, more developed by other traditions. It would be a mutual enrichment.

The threat of a single language of communication is very real. Faced with this threat, it is necessary that everyone speaks their language and several languages, says Barbara Cbadin. Common place of language and thought, where the common does not aspire to the uniform, accepted of all or of what has already been given, but to a territory which, harboring singularities, allows to find in a treasure accumulated by generations of writers and speakers, the words that allow us to open the story, to say new things and at the same time to recognize the radical equality of human beings.

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Go close

The language welcomes the experience of men, it promises us that the lived experience will not go away completely, says John Berger. A novel, a story, a poem, he says, use the same materials as the annual report of a multinational company.

The fact that they are built with almost the same words and a similar syntax does not mean that a lighthouse and a prison cell can be built with stones from the same quarry, united with the same cement.

In short, almost everything depends on how the words are articulated, the way each of us is connected to the language as a meeting place, convinced that it is – besides a practical instrument – a vehicle of expression of the subjectivity of an individual and of a society, a treasure fertilized by multiple deviations and innovations, carried by generations of speakers and scribes as the engine of creation, a factor of mutation and transformation, to witness to the experience and the imaginary, the link with the sacred, the celebration of what happened and the complaint for the lost. In short, to build memory and history.

Between the personal and the political, the private and the public, the individual and the collective, this language develops. In order for her energy not to be lost, for that which inhabits it and which is easily corruptible, not to lose its music, its nerve or its soul – the diversity that will settle in our mouths – it away from the official, from the abstract, the general, the conventional, looking for what is buried under layers of artifice, conditionings and conventions, because when it is lying down, muddy, muddy or inaccurate, excessive, bloated, swollen or snobbish, grandiloquent, cryptic or rude, the relationship is corrupted between words and things, all this delicate balance, all this mysterious artifact, s & rsquo; # 39; collapses.

Homogenization across a language, the search for a person's language produced by capitalism, says Barbara Cbadin, warns us against the threat of a single language for communication. We need the diversity of languages, in the context of the diversity of citizens.

Each word is the result of a story and a series of representations, but acquires only its meaning, which designates one thing and not another, unlike other words of the same language. Each language has its way of inventing, inventing, describing, conceiving, understanding. A language is an energy and invents all the time.

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We know that laws are needed to systematize the language and teach it to future generations. We also know that a language is in perpetual movement and that without these movements, deviations, dissidences and transformations we would speak today of Romance or Latin languages. vulgar … in fact, the Castilian began to disobey, as shown in the glossaries of Emilianenses, these annotations at the margin in a codex written in Latin, that in the tenth or eleventh century, a monk had clarified certain pbadages, notes in some way in which the people have already spoken but which had not yet pbaded to its written form. In short, a world inscribed in one language and in this world, there is room for disagreements and struggles.

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Je dis cela en connaissant l'endroit où je suis, souhaitant profondément que l'un et l'autre, d'ici ou là, nous puissions devenir de plus en plus conscients que l'uniformité n'est pas le moyen de maintenir en vie le langage que nous partageons; Je pense alors aux congrès de la langue où le pays hôte participe activement au contenu, à un congrès qui révise son nom, congrès où l’on discute des avantages économiques de l’enseignement de l’espagnol dans le monde et où il n’est pas habituel de traduire en pays le castillan d’un autre pays, car s’il ya richesse dans notre langue, cette richesse n’est pas dans la rigidité mais dans la possibilité d’accepter le pouvoir du multiple et du multiple, la richesse du mouvement permanent, sans aller plus loin Les locuteurs anglophones – là où la normalisation découle de la littérature, des médias et de l’utilisation – ont adopté différentes manières de la parler et de l’écrire.

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Nous devons nous entendre nous-mêmes dans nos similitudes et nos différences, dans les multiples significations offertes par notre langage dans lequel Cervantes et Rulfo, Sor Juana, García Márquez, Gabriela Mistral et Roa Bastos, Teresa de Ávila, Luis de Góngora, Elvira Orphée et José Donoso , César Vallejo, Quevedo, Borges, Blanca Varela et Juana Castro, Gil de Biedma, Lemebel, Lugones, Arguedas, Watanabe, Sara Gallardo et Onetti, Humberto Akabal, Arlt, Saer et Rosario Castellanos, entre autres … ouvert avec une main en soie et repbader les interstices de la langue qui leur avaient été imposés de mille manières, pour dire ce qui n'avait pas encore été dit.

En alphabétisant la population de chiriguanes à la frontière de Salta, notre éducatrice María Saleme a compris que les apprêts réalisés à Buenos Aires ne fonctionnaient pas, qu'elle devait commencer par le mot eau, car le chiriguano est un homme de rivière et qu'elle l'a fait dans les vallées de Calchaquí qu'elle a découvertes. que le mot nœud n'était pas d'eau, mais de terre.

Adrian Bravi, escritor argentino de la lengua italiana, en un libreo que se llama La gelosia della lingua cuenta acerca de una tía que emigró a Argentina en un barco en el que faltó agua potable y donde murieron casi todos los niños de brazos, una tía que podía contar lo vivido en castellano pero al intentar decirlo en italiano, se quebraba porque al evocarlo sus recuerdos tomaba vida propia.

¿Es borde la palabra? ¿O es orilla? ¿O es canto, o línea, o costa, o ribera, o margen? Cada uno tiene sus razones para decir de uno u otro modo porque la lengua es mía, pero no solamente mía.

Esa lengua en la que nuestros recuerdos toman vida propia, en la que podemos razonar y conmovernos, conocer y cuestionarnos, aprender e imaginar, hasta que lo nombrado adquiera vida propia. Porque, como en la parábola que relata Gershom Scholem, aunque no sepamos encender el fuego ni encontrar aquel lugar en el bosque, ni seamos ya capaces de rezar, podemos seguir contándonos unos a otros nuestras historias y la Historia. Perder eso sería perdernos, sería una nueva forma de barbarie.