The Blessing of a Hybrid Brain: On the Joy of Writing in Two Languages

As a child, I thought most people lived in two languages. My father is French, my mother, British, and for as long as I can remember, I spoke both languages at home. To this day, I’m not sure which language I dream in. And when I meet a fully bilingual person like me, we never know whether to choose English or French and end up annoying the people who are with us by using both.

I must admit, however, that I do have a preference for swearing in English. What does that say about me, I wonder?

I began to write diaries, poems, short stories when I was eight, inspired by Anne Frank, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde. All those early works were in English, probably because I was living in Boston at the time. I was an avid bookworm (and I still am) and I loved losing myself in the worlds of Jules Verne, Le Petit Prince, Perrault’s fairy tales, as well as Alice in Wonderland, Roald Dahl, or Grimm.

When I was published for the first time in the early 90s, I had switched back to French. I had settled in Paris with my French husband, and  we were raising our children there. Until 2007, all the books I published were in French.

But something shifted when I began writing Sarah’s Key. That story “came” to me naturally in English. My heroine, Julia Jarmond, was an American, from Boston. There was  simply no way she could express herself in French.

Writing about such a painful and dark chapter of French history—the abominable Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, which took place in Paris in July 1942—felt somehow more bearable if I approached it in English. That language gave me a kind of emotional buffer. I had to inhabit my English side to write about that black page of my country’s history.

Later, I was told by my publishers that I could not translate myself into French, that I had to leave it to a professional translator. I meekly complied. When I discovered the French translation, I felt estranged from it. Somehow, it no longer  felt like me.

Since 2007, I’ve written some books directly in French and others in English. Each time, I feel a familiar pang of regret of having to choose one language over the other.

I had never translated my own work until a couple of years ago, when I decided to experiment: I would write a book  simultaneously in both languages. I opened two documents on my screen—one in English, one in French—and began switching back and forth  between them.

I would continue in whatever language the words came, no longer paying attention to it and immediately translating. The boundaries between the two faded.

It was bewildering at first, like my brain was on fire. (My husband joked that he could see the smoke coming out of my ears.) Then all of a sudden, something changed. It was as if I had stepped off a quiet country path onto a roaring highway.

I wrote my novel by skipping from one document to the other, continuing in French or in English indifferently, no longer paying heed to the language. I simply wrote.

Language no longer mattered. Or rather, both languages now had their significance, because each of them gave me the sentences or the words I was looking for; I then had to transpose them with care, perfecting them with the patient and meticulous fine-tuning used on an antiquated receiver, so that the frequency I obtained was the same in English and French. I pictured myself as a voracious foraging bee harvesting pollen from two separate hives.

When I found myself adapting to the other language, I sometimes realized that the adjective or expression I had originally chosen was not the right one. If I had been translating someone else’s manuscript, I would not have been allowed to change. But since this was my own work, I could. It gave me a curious sense of power.

The book came along like a two-headed monster, thriving homogenously. I didn’t favor one language over the other, and wanted above all for both texts to end up identical. At times, as I labored over a description, I switched directly to the other language, which instantly gave me a new lift. This also proved to be very efficient method when I was stuck in  a dialogue scene  that lacked spark.

It was playing out Jekyll and Hyde. Who was Dr. Hyde? Who was Jekyll? English or French? It didn’t  really matter.

This is how I wrote Blonde Dust. My heroine, Pauline, is French, so is her mother, Marcelle. They move to Nevada after Marcelle remarries an American GI from Reno.

And then of course, there’s Marilyn Monroe. I paid close attention to how Marilyn might express herself, what words she’d choose when interacting with the young chambermaid, Pauline, assigned to her suite at the Mapes Hotel.

I had read in my research that “Mrs. Miller,” (as she was known during the filming of the ill-fated The Misfits, her last complete movie), frequently called others “honey.” I wanted to get that term exactly right in French. And I ended up choosing “mon chou,” (literally, “my cabbage”) a sweet, old-fashioned expression that my husband’s grandmother used and which conveys the same gentle affection.

Most of the time, when I tell my writer friends about my unusual writing process, they stare at me in astonishment. Translators also seem perturbed when I describe my dual language craft. But don’t you have a favorite language, deep down, they ask. Isn’t French supposed to be more beautiful, with its exquisite musicality? Isn’t English more concise, less convoluted?

They also want to know if certain scenes come to me more easily in English or in French. And  if so, which ones, and why.

I find I impossible to answer them. I try to point out that what I’m doing is not really, in my eyes, a translation. I see it more as a constant conversation between my two mother tongues.

I’m certainly not the first author to write in different languages. Canadian writer Nancy Huston navigates between French and English, and Samuel Beckett wrote in those two languages as well. As did American author Julien Green who spent most of his life in France. Romain Gary also translated himself, like Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov.

Does having two writing languages give a bilingual author more freedom? More scope for the imagination? I’m guessing it does. And what a blessing it is to have a hybrid brain.

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Blonde Dust by Tatiana de Rosnay is available via Grand Central.