Me, Yo, Ich, Moi, Eu, Ana
I finshed translating my story "Growing Pains in the Womb" into Spanish about an hour ago, and (like every time I do something useful), it spurred me into a bout of strategic thinking (this is corporate lingo forwhen your boss catches you staring out the window).
What it got me thinking about is that I should have written it in Spanish in the first place.
Now, don't get me wrong. I love this story, and it sold relatively quickly, and is also reprinted in Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places, which meant that two separate English-speaking editors thought it was good enough to risk their publisher's money on.
But it seems much more the kind of story that might pop up in a Spanish-language publication than an English-language one. It is nearly pure concept, a knot of explicit historical forces (narrated at length), speculative human psychology and interior monologue coming together at a certain moment. For a reader who likes to think about things, it might be an interesting diversion for a few minutes. Ideally, it is the kind of story that would stick with you and make you wonder "what would happen if..."
Sounds ideal, right? Well, stop for a minute. You see, there is, literally, NO action in the story. None. Everything of note that happens in the story's present happens in an unnarrated and supremely irritating break in the middle of the tale. There is a lot of telling, and no showing at all. And the word infodump is insufficient to even begin describing the history lesson that makes up a large chunk of the piece. About the only thing I did "right" was to start the tale right at the crisis point, a solution which would have been applauded much more strongly by the critics had I actually then narrated what happened next. This is my only story ever in which a critic wrote a scholarly essay about it longer than the tale (and it's a long story). Let's just say he found the above points not to his liking.
So the story isn't exactly on the shortlist to be adapted by Hollywood for US audiences (I'm assuming that whoever thought Solaris would make a good Hollywood movie has been fired by now). But Spanish-language readers seem to enjoy very different types of tales for some reason. They like the history and the psychology and the interior monologue - but mainly, a lot of work in Spanish seems to have a strong narrative "tell". I suspect some of it has to do with the structure of written Spanish itself - stiffer and a bit less ductile than English, especially when used in prose fiction.
So I think this particular version of the story will work much better than the original - and all I changed was the audience!
What it got me thinking about is that I should have written it in Spanish in the first place.
Now, don't get me wrong. I love this story, and it sold relatively quickly, and is also reprinted in Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places, which meant that two separate English-speaking editors thought it was good enough to risk their publisher's money on.
But it seems much more the kind of story that might pop up in a Spanish-language publication than an English-language one. It is nearly pure concept, a knot of explicit historical forces (narrated at length), speculative human psychology and interior monologue coming together at a certain moment. For a reader who likes to think about things, it might be an interesting diversion for a few minutes. Ideally, it is the kind of story that would stick with you and make you wonder "what would happen if..."
Sounds ideal, right? Well, stop for a minute. You see, there is, literally, NO action in the story. None. Everything of note that happens in the story's present happens in an unnarrated and supremely irritating break in the middle of the tale. There is a lot of telling, and no showing at all. And the word infodump is insufficient to even begin describing the history lesson that makes up a large chunk of the piece. About the only thing I did "right" was to start the tale right at the crisis point, a solution which would have been applauded much more strongly by the critics had I actually then narrated what happened next. This is my only story ever in which a critic wrote a scholarly essay about it longer than the tale (and it's a long story). Let's just say he found the above points not to his liking.
So the story isn't exactly on the shortlist to be adapted by Hollywood for US audiences (I'm assuming that whoever thought Solaris would make a good Hollywood movie has been fired by now). But Spanish-language readers seem to enjoy very different types of tales for some reason. They like the history and the psychology and the interior monologue - but mainly, a lot of work in Spanish seems to have a strong narrative "tell". I suspect some of it has to do with the structure of written Spanish itself - stiffer and a bit less ductile than English, especially when used in prose fiction.
So I think this particular version of the story will work much better than the original - and all I changed was the audience!