Bilingual Poetry Writing: When to Translate, When to Trust
Should you italicize, translate, or leave the second language alone? A judge who reads entries from fifty countries breaks down three strategies for code-switching poems, with a worked stanza.
The poem that stopped me cold last spring switched into Spanish exactly once. Twenty lines of English about clearing out a grandmother's kitchen, and then, holding the chipped blue cup, the speaker heard her: sientate, mija. No italics. No translation. No footnote apologizing for the intrusion. The judge next to me on the panel does not speak Spanish and scored it just as high, which tells you everything about how bilingual poetry writing actually works when it works. The second language was not information to be decoded. It was the grandmother's voice, arriving in the only sounds she ever used, and any reader alive could feel that.
Stop Italicizing Your Mother Tongue
Let us clear the biggest question first, because it is the one poets ask me most. Should the non-English words be italicized? For decades the publishing default said yes, and for decades that default quietly said something else too: this language is a visitor here, please show its passport. A growing number of working poets now set both languages in the same roman type, and I think they are right. Italics frame the second language as exotic material, an artifact under glass. Plain type frames it as speech, which is what it is.
There is a practical argument underneath the political one. Italics tell the reader to brace for foreignness, so the switch lands as a speed bump. Plain type lets the switch land as a turn in the poem's own voice, which is smoother and, strangely, more startling. The exception is a poem that deliberately stages the two languages as opposed worlds, a courtroom of tongues. If the estrangement is the subject, italics can be the costume. Otherwise, dress both languages the same and let the sounds do the differentiating.
Three Honest Strategies: Gloss, Echo, Silence
Every code-switching poem has to answer one question: what does the reader who lacks the second language get? There are three honest answers.
- Gloss. The poem translates itself nearby, in apposition or in the next line. Generous, but risky: done clumsily it turns the poem into a phrasebook.
- Echo. The poem never translates, but the surrounding images carry the meaning, so the monolingual reader understands emotionally what they cannot understand lexically.
- Silence. The poem refuses to explain at all. The non-speaking reader experiences exclusion, and that exclusion is the point: they stand where the immigrant child stood at the school gate, or where the grandchild stands who lost the language.
None of these is the correct one. The correct one is whichever matches what the poem is about. A poem about inheritance might gloss, because passing meaning across is its whole gesture. A poem about losing a language might choose silence, so the reader feels the locked door. What sinks entries is not the strategy but the drift between strategies: translating one phrase, abandoning the next, italicizing a third, so the reader can never learn the rules of the house.
A second language in a poem is not seasoning. It is a second heart, and the poem has to let it beat.
Bilingual Poetry Writing Is Structure, Not Decoration
Here is the judgment I will defend at any panel: the weakest bilingual poems use the second language as garnish, a sprig of abuela here, a habibi there, sprinkled over lines that would read identically without it. The strongest use the switch as a structural event, the way a sonnet uses its volta. The language changes because something in the poem changes: a speaker enters, a memory takes over, the register drops from public to intimate, the poem crosses a border it has been approaching for ten lines.
Test your draft with one question per switch: what just happened in the poem to cause this? If the answer is nothing, the switch is decoration, and a judge feels the difference within a line or two. Code-switching in life is never random; linguists will tell you people switch at moments of intimacy, quotation, taboo, or heightened feeling. Your poem should be at least as motivated as an ordinary kitchen conversation. If you want the craft vocabulary for this, our glossary entry on code-switching maps the terms, and the theme runs through half the entries on our identity theme page for good reason.
One Stanza, Three Ways
Here is an original stanza of mine, worked through each strategy so you can feel the differences. First, the gloss version:
My father counted stairs in Urdu,
ek, do, teen, one two three,
as if the house might answer him in either tongue.
The translation sits in apposition, and the poem makes the doubling its subject. Now the echo version:
My father counted stairs in Urdu,
ek, do, teen,
each step a coin dropped in a well back home.
No translation, but the image of counting and coins carries the sense; the monolingual reader loses nothing but the dictionary. Finally, silence:
My father counted stairs,
ek, do, teen, chaar,
and I climbed behind him, holding the numbers I could not spend.
Here the non-speaking reader is locked out of the count on purpose, and the last line tells them the speaker is locked out too. Same stairs, same father, three different poems. That is the craft decision in miniature, and you should make it on purpose, not by mood.
The Reader You Are Actually Writing For
Poets ask me, worried, whether judges penalize poems they cannot fully translate. I can only speak for panels I have sat on, but the answer is no, with a condition. We score what the poem makes us feel and how inevitably it is built. A poem I scored last winter arrived from Dhaka with a refrain in Bangla I could not read. But the poem taught me the refrain: it returned at the end of each stanza like weather, first over a wedding, then over a flooded street, then over a hospital bed, and by the third arrival I knew in my chest what the words held even though I could not say them. It took second place that month. Writory draws poets from more than fifty countries into the same monthly window, entries from the 1st to the 25th, and every entrant gets a five-part score across creativity, emotion, structure, language, and theme, so a bilingual poet can see precisely whether the switching read as music or as static when they send a poem in.
The reader to write for, in other words, is not the one who speaks both languages, and not the one who speaks only English. It is the one willing to be taught. Every strong bilingual poem is secretly a tiny language lesson, and the tuition is emotion.
A Five-Step Checklist for Your Next Draft
- Choose your strategy out loud. Write gloss, echo, or silence at the top of the draft, and hold every switch to it.
- Motivate each switch. Next to every language change, note the trigger: a voice, a memory, an intimacy, a wound. No trigger, no switch.
- Unitalicize and reread. Set both languages in the same type. If the poem loses something, ask honestly whether what it lost was meaning or costume.
- Read it to a monolingual friend. Do not translate afterward. Ask what they felt at the switched lines, not what they understood. Feeling without comprehension means the echo is working; blankness means it is not.
- Check the sonic seams. Read the whole poem aloud and listen to the joints where languages meet. The best switches rhyme across the border, a vowel in one tongue answering a vowel in the other.
The Border Is the Poem
I keep coming back to that blue cup and sientate, mija, because of what the poet did not do. She did not apologize, explain, or perform her heritage for an imagined monolingual gatekeeper. She built an English poem sturdy enough that when the Spanish arrived, it arrived as the poem's beating center, and every reader on the panel, whatever languages they carried, leaned toward it.
If you grew up between languages, you already own material most poets would trade years for: two sound systems, two grammars of feeling, and a lifetime of standing at the checkpoint between them. The page is one of the few places where you control that border completely. Decide who crosses, decide what gets declared, decide what stays gloriously undeclared. Then hold the line with the confidence of someone writing in their own house, in both of their own tongues.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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