Writing in a another mother tongue: three poems by Fabio Morábito

Jun 17, 2025

Today I am posting three poems from Invisible Dog, my translations of the Mexican poet Fabio Morábito, published last November by Carcanet in the UK.

The son of Italians, Fabio Morábito was born in Alexandria, Egypt, but spent much of his childhood in Milan before migrating to Mexico with his family at the age of fifteen, and learning Spanish as a second language. He had already, by then, acquired all the characteristics of the budding literary nomad.

The opening lines of one of his best-known poems sets out the core of the matter. In my translation, the poem begins: ‘Because I write in a language / that I learned, / I have to be awake / while others sleep . . . I write before daybreak, / when I am almost the only one awake, / and can make mistakes / in a language that I learned.’

‘To those who inquire,’ writes Morábito, in a short essay revealingly titled ‘Writing in Someone Else’s House’, ‘I always have the answer that, with regard to Spanish, I have the sensation of having caught the last train, and I add that the train had already started moving, and I had to run so as not to miss it.’ ‘Perhaps I’m wrong’, he continues, ‘and the train did in fact leave without me. It is a doubt I can’t stop thinking about and perhaps the one that underlies much or all of what I write.’

In the same article, Morábito claims that after including this poem in his collection Alguien de Lava (2002) his publisher called him to question the accuracy of the phrase ‘in a language that I learned’. All languages are learned, the publisher told him, including one’s own. This remark provoked Morábito into a debate with himself about the different ways by which we acquire our mother tongue and any languages that might follow: while it is incontestable that we all ‘learn’ our mother tongue, we do not learn it in the same way that we subsequently learn other languages.

Such is the extent of Morábito’s preoccupation with his own linguistic formation that three of the poems included in Invisible Dog, written at different stages in the poet’s evolution, address, respectively, his complex and sometimes precarious relationship with Spanish (‘Because I write’); the apparent desertion of (or his fear of losing) his Italian (‘Now, after almost twenty years’); and a sort of threnody (‘I am the last person’), which worries at the thought that the Italian that the poet continues to speak to himself in middle age ‘has ceased to be a language and is only a heritage’.

In the second of these poems, the poet considers how the language of his childhood now ‘slips through his hands’, ‘becomes cold’ and ‘breaks away in fragments’. Perplexed, he wonders ‘With what words / will I recall my childhood, / with what will I reconstruct / the way and its wonders? / How will I complete the circle of my years?’ And that final question, which in Spanish reads '¿Cómo completaré mi edad?’ — caused me to undergo one of those translation crises with which all translators are familiar. The phrase literally means: ‘how will I complete my age’, and after lengthy consultations with the poet and a fellow translator, I arrived at the formulation in the text, but not without some misgivings, and not without the poet having to explain to me, in granular detail, the exact texture and resonance that the phrase held for him. Although I frequently communicate with the poets I translate, it is sometimes the case that they have a command of English: not so with Fabio, which led to an even more interesting than usual discussion about the temperature or microclimate generated by particular words or phrases in Spanish. I wonder whether I would have had such a probing conversation with a poet who had never written in anything but his native tongue. It is a question Fabio raises in the essay already cited, when he claims that: ‘no one like the writer who comes from another language is as sensitive to the voracious and demanding nature of writing. Experiencing in the first person writing’s ability to disfigure a lived experience, reinventing it from the root, their awareness of style will be in principle much sharper than that of the native writer.’

For the parvenu writer, he tells us, ‘style is everything.’ This immediately raises questions about the concern with style shown by other writers who wrote in their second (or third) languages, such as Conrad, Beckett, and perhaps most vividly, given his extraordinary devotion to style, Nabokov.

Discussing his own relationship to Spanish, and of his desire for ‘total identification’ with that language, he writes:

I wonder if a dilemma like this is not something inherent to all who write; I wonder, therefore, if we who write are not all native speakers of another language and we write to cauterise a wound that separates us from the language and, thus, to feel again as if a language were our mother tongue, and a reality, which at some moment were revealed to us as foreign.

Incidentally, the current issue of PN Review, the most interesting of British poetry magazines, is dedicated specifically to those who, in one way or another, live between languages. Within its pages, amidst other wonderful stuff by the likes of Gabriel Josipovici and Stav Poleg, you will find my translations of two micro-essays by Morábito, along with seven poems by Piedad Bonnett.