A love letter to the bilingual book

My love affair with the bilingual book began with a volume of poems by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, which I bought as a teenager from Carousell.

- Shawn Hoo

"Puedo escribir los versos mas tristes esta noche," reads one of the Nobel Prize laureate's most famous opening lines. In the American poet W.S. Merwin's translation, the line reads: "Tonight I can write the saddest lines." I am illiterate in Spanish, but seeing the original text run in parallel with the English translation sparked a moment of frisson. I would read the poem aloud - first in English, then, perhaps foolishly, in phonetically garbled Spanish, pretending to know the language as I retained the memory of the translation.

Of course, my delusions of multilingualism were helped by the fact that Romance languages of which Spanish is oneinfluenced English. "Escribir", one might guess, is related to "scribe", and "versos" to "verse". It was my first education in the relations of language families.