Second-language authors
by Anthony Gardner
In 1878, a 21-year-old Polish seaman came ashore at Lowestoft in Suffolk. His name was Józef Teodor Konrad Korzienowski, and he spoke only a few words of English. Yet within ten years he was ready to start work on Almayer's Folly, the first of the novels which would make him - as Joseph Conrad - one of the most respected writers in the language.
For those who have struggled to master another tongue - or, indeed, to express themselves in their own - this seems a phenomenal achievement, demanding enormous effort and willpower. (All the more so since English was actually Conrad's third language, after French.) But according to Conrad's autobiography A Personal Record, his ability to write in English was 'as natural as any other aptitude with which I might have been born. I have a strange and overpowering feeling that it had always been an inherent part of myself.' Rather than choosing English, he continues, 'it was I who was adopted by the genius of the language…if I had not written in English, I would not have written at all.'
Conrad is not the only eminent author to have written in a borrowed tongue: other notable examples include Samuel Beckett, Vladmir Nabokov and Andrei Makine; but he is unusual in denying that it was a deliberate choice. For most, adopting another language is a conscious response to the possibilities it offers as a means of expression, and a way of redefining their relationship with their own country. Sybille Bedford, born into a partly Jewish family in Berlin and given a cosmopolitan upbringing, settled in England and embraced English - according to her book Jigsaw - 'as a rope to save me from drifting awash in the fluidities of multi-lingualism that surround me'. Samuel Beckett chose to write in French, he said, 'Parce qu'en français il est plus facile d'écrire sans style', but also (the critic Brian T. Fisher argues in his study Beckett and Babel) 'to put as much distance as possible between himself and his native land in general and his mother in particular'.
For Beckett's fellow Irishman Oscar Wilde, the writing of Salomé in French seems to have been a bid both to reinvent himself and to obtain wider recognition. 'Oscar told us he was writing a play in French to be acted at the Français,' Wilfred Blunt recorded in his diary on 27th October 1891. 'He is ambitious of becoming a French academician.' One of Wilde's biographers, Barbara Bedford, argues that he was keen to make Paris 'his second city now that Dublin was in the past', and another - Richard Ellman - that he dreamed of beating Mallarmé on his own ground.
In other cases, the decision to switch languages is purely pragmatic. Asked recently why he chose to write in French, Andrei Makine, the Russian writer who astonished the literary Establishment by winning the Prix Goncourt, replied simply, 'I live and publish in France: the choice of writing in French is therefore quite logical.' Vladmir Nabokov turned his back on Russian when it became clear that there was no prospect of his finding a sympathetic audience in his homeland under Communism, though it took him some time to settle on an alternative. 'I could have been a great French writer,' he once declared - but while his command of that language was excellent, he felt uncomfortable in Parisian literary circles, and came down in favour of English instead.
Hugo Tucker, Professor of French Studies at Reading University, identifies writing in another language as 'one of the topoi of exile', and offers as an early example the fifteenth-century French poet Charles, Duc d'Orléans, who spent 25 years as a prisoner in England after the Battle of Agincourt, and has a large number of English poems attributed to him. But, Tucker points out, there have also been many societies in which it was de rigueur for anyone with literary ambitions to acquire a second, more refined language in addition to the local vernacular: 'Spinoza [who was Dutch] had to write his Tractatus in Latin, otherwise no one would have understood him; and parts of War and Peace are written in French, because that was the language spoken by educated Russians.'
'Once you step out of monolingual innocence, it begins to affect the way you express yourself in your own language. Mallarmé was an English teacher, and some of his syntactical structure is very odd; while Hölderlin in Germany studied the classics and derived some of his word order from Pindar. A second language can also contaminate your vocabulary.' Conrad went so far as to claim that English 'had a direct action' on his temperament and helped to mould his character.
Curiously, however, when speaking English Conrad never lost his Polish accent (indeed, according to his wife, it became stronger as he grew older); and the question remains as to how far a writer can assimilate a language other than his or her own. The critic A.C. Ward observed of Conrad that 'he never wrote quite as a born Englishman' (though, he added, 'he wrote the language incomparably better than most educated Englishmen do'); while the French poet Adolphe Retté, who was asked by Wilde for his comments on the manuscript of Salomé, claimed that his main task was to remove 'les anglicismes trop formels'.
But lack of complete familiarity with a language can have its advantages. In an essay on Beckett, Harry Cockerham writes that 'What seems to attract him to French is the very fact that it is less second nature to him than is English, that his relationship to it is different and makes him more able to manipulate it consciously…One is constantly aware of Beckett…as a student of the French language, and thence of language itself.' As a result, he argues, the playwright was able to bring a new naturalism to French theatre.
Contemporary authors trying to get to grips with a new language should take heart. You will inevitably make mistakes, but don't be deterred - one man's syntactical error is another's literary revolution.
© Anthony Gardner. All views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to the European Commission.
source: http://www.europe.org.uk/index/-/id/219/
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