I wish I could tell you that my love of language—of transferring the sense and heft and lushness of one tongue to another—rose unbidden, ripe, and startling, like a Botticelli goddess emerging from a sea. ¡Ay, cuanto lo deseo! A better storyteller than I would fashion all manner of fables out of my passion—habla claro, mija, es pasión—for the English language.
The truth, however, is pedestrian, cobbled together of necessity in supermarkets, schools, and Social Security offices. A child of a Spanish journalist and a Cuban law school graduate who fled Cuba after Fidel.
