Whatever he had been he was no more. He said that like every man who comes to the end of something there was nothing to be done but to begin again. No puedo recordar el mundo de luz, he said. Hace muchos años. Else mundo es un mundo frágil. Ultimamente lo que vine a ver era más durable. Más verdadero.

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This passage is from Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Crossing. The protagonist, Billy Parham, is an American teenager from a small ranch in New Mexico. Here he has ventured across the Mexican border and is talking to a blind man. It is a significant moment in the book, and at least half of it is written in untranslated Spanish.

I was reading The Crossing recently and realized I hadn’t bothered to pick up a dictionary once. I relied on my poor knowledge of Spanish to avoid losing any immersion in the text. I recognized half of the words and understood the basic grammar, thanks to speaking French and Italian. But I was still guessing a lot of the meaning.

Some bilingual readers will understand every word in The Crossing and simply enjoy the cadences of both languages. Other won’t understand a single word of the Spanish. Some will respond by picking up a dictionary or using Google Translate. Some will skip the Spanish passages altogether, resigned to a loss of understanding.

Cormac McCarthy uses a lot of Spanish. He learned the language in Ibiza and became an “exophone”—someone who writes in a language that is not their mother tongue. The Crossing is ostensibly an English-language novel by an American author. Yet almost half of the book is written in Spanish. There is no glossary, no in-text translation from the characters or the author.

When we think about McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, particularly a book entitled The Crossing, we contemplate places and spaces. A border is not simply an artificial line on a map. It is a place of melding. Languages aren’t confined to administrative borders; they spill over on either side.

Billy and his brother Boyd are raised by English-speaking American parents on a ranch near the border. Billy also learned Spanish from his Mexican grandmother. As a child, he rode horseback with Boyd and “named to him features of the landscape and birds and animals in both spanish and english.” Billy visits several American neighbours and addresses them in English or Spanish as required: “Buenas tardes, he said. El señor está? She bit crisply into the apple with her big white teeth. She looked at him. El señor? she said.” In the borderlands, switching between languages is normal. Here Mexicans and Americans work together, marry, have families.

Language also helps us get under the skin of a place, to hear the unique intonations and rhythms of its people, even if we don’t understand the words. Throughout Billy’s travels in Mexico, certain phrases appear time and again: “Ándale pues” “Quién sabe?” My personal favorite was “claro” which many Mexican characters and Billy use regularly (I guessed, more or less correctly, that it meant “evidently”).

Spanish dialogue is used so often that Billy and Boyd’s American-English conversations are relegated to one side. They regularly assess situations once other (Spanish-speaking) characters have departed:

Why do you reckon he let us have the horses?
Cause he knowed they was ours.
How did he know it?
He just knew it.

But their dialogue feels foreign in a Spanish-speaking land. This foreignness will be particularly felt by English-speaking readers who don’t understand the Spanish text.

Interestingly, Boyd himself speaks little Spanish. In one scene, some Mexicans confiscate the brothers’ documents and take their horses. After the men leave, Boyd asks “What about the papers?” An irritated Billy replies: “What the hell good are the papers without the horse? Anyway you just got done seein what papers are worth in this country.”

Using Spanish and English together portrays the particular culture of people living around a geographic border in a powerful way. Language-switching says something about Billy Parham’s ancestry, upbringing and his ability to survive.

Boyd has to “see” what happened because he can’t understand the language. Non-Spanish speaking readers also have to “see” by reading McCarthy’s English description of the action, rather than following the Spanish dialogue. If a reader isn’t satisfied with this, they may use Google Translate or the dictionary function on an e-reader. The Cormac McCarthy Society have made PDFs of all the Spanish passages in McCarthy’s work available online. But in all of these cases, the reader’s attention is diverted from the act of reading as they type into a search engine or rifle through a dictionary.

Not every author who writes in a second language is so unyielding. Walter Scott’s narrative is written in English, but he employs Scots dialogue in most of his books. In The Bride of Lammermoor, Scots and English denote social class. Edgar Ravenswood, a Scottish nobleman, speaks in Standard English throughout the text. By comparison, his faithful servant Caleb Balderstone speaks in Scots, as in the following exchange between the pair:

“I hope you are not sorry to see me sooner than you expected?”

“Sorry to see the Lord of Ravenswood at ane o’ his ain castles!”

Caleb’s language marks him out as lower-class. He employs a dialect that Edgar and the other noblemen never use, despite being Scottish themselves and understanding Caleb’s language:

“I’se warrant I wad cast about brawl for the morn; or if, stead o’ that, ye wad but dine wi’ them at the change-house, ye might mak your shift for the lawing.”

“Or any other lie that came uppermost, I suppose?” Said his master. “Good by, Caleb; I commend your care for the honour of the family.”

How does Scott’s decision to employ two different languages affect the reader’s experience? Like Modern English, Scots evolved from Old English, so there are similarities between the two which render it naturally more accessible for English speakers. But Scott knew that even English readers would struggle to fully understand Scots, as evidenced in an exchange from The Heart of Midlothian:

“How far can you walk in a day?”

“Five-and-twenty miles and a bittock.”

“And a what?” said the Queen, looking towards the Duke of Argyle.

“And about fives miles more,” replied the Duke.

Words like “bittock” still require translation. But unlike McCarthy, Scott included Scots glossaries for his readers, making it that bit easier to translate. And it’s likely that Scott wanted his readers to translate for themselves, perhaps fostering an appreciation of Scots in the process. After the 1707 Act of Union, Scott was reminding British readers that Scotland was a land of linguistic diversity where Scots and Gaelic flowed freely. Writing in Scots, a sister-language to English, speaks to the special relationship between two countries which share a deeply intertwined history. English readers in particular will recognize many of the Scots vocabulary and grammar as being related to their mother tongue, while also acknowledging stark differences.

It’s worth noting, too, that some authors leave languages untranslated which are only understood by a tiny percentage of the world’s population. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie uses untranslated Igbo in her writing. Although Igbo features far less frequently in her work than McCarthy and Scott’s use of multiple languages, it is still a notable inclusion. Particularly when we consider that only 44 million people (mainly Nigerians) speak Igbo as their mother tongue.

In Americanah, Adichie sometimes provides in-text English translations to the Igbo she includes: ““Darling, kedu ebe I no?” His wife, Kofi, always began her calls to him with those words: Where are you?” In Half of a Yellow Sun, some Igbo phrases are repeated in English by the characters, but still more are left completely untranslated: “‘Safe journey, ije oma,’ he said.” The monolingual reader may feel some frustration at not understanding a particular Igbo phrase, but as the majority of the text is in English, they will hardly feel undeterred enough to stop reading altogether. Including Igbo in this way—through snippets and shorter phrases, rather than long passages of untranslated text—is an invitation, rather than a complete obstruction to understanding. While some African authors have expressed concern that italicizing automatically “others” African languages like Igbo, writers such as Jumoke Verissimo argue that italicizing is an expression of linguistic power in which the author introduces the reader to another cultural world.

It is a pointed encouragement to reflect on the existence of Igbo and its status. Why do some Nigerians speak Igbo and English? What does Igbo express that English cannot?

Adichie once revealed that her editor expressed concern over the use of “African words” in her debut novel Purple Hibiscus. But Adichie insisted on using Igbo alongside English because she considers Igbo to be a powerful and vibrant tongue in its own right. And as Adichie reminds us, her American readers “clearly did not have a problem with Igbo words.”

Using Spanish and English together portrays the particular culture of people living around a geographic border in a powerful way. Language-switching says something about Billy Parham’s ancestry, upbringing and his ability to survive. It says something about the identity of every character that Billy meets. It becomes a vital characteristic of the places that Billy journeys through. Perhaps one day I will seek out the translated passages of McCarthy’s Spanish online. But right now it doesn’t seem necessary. Like Boyd, I was happy to “watch” Billy converse in Spanish. Which is what the question of reading books in two languages really boils down to. Are you happy to watch, or do you need to hear and understand every single word? The answer to this question will direct your own response, whether that involves typing into Google Translate or simply letting the words wash over you.