Red Seas Under Red Skies; and a thought about writing

[loneraven]

I can't write, I'm too hot and have a banging headache, so let me write about writing.

First of all, I just finished Red Seas Under Red Skies, and I loved it. It's Scott Lynch's second novel, the sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I liked and didn't love. With Red Skies, though,

Comments

[loneraven]

That's often just colonialism at work, surely? Writers can be "real" writers if they write in English, so they do! I'm thinking of A Suitable Boy again - it seems to be a good example for this sort of thing.

[jacinthsong]

There's a difference between being able to speak a language (plus, ESL teachers often don't speak the language of the country they're in that well) and being able to write in it, though. Tangent: The person I find most curious in this respect is Nabokov, whose literary language wasn't his mother tongue, but then he was fluent in English from a very young age. Conrad is similar but I haven't read any.

[loneraven]

Ah, marvellous! That is very clever, but it takes such skill to do. Have you ever read/seen Translations, by Brian Friel? He does the same thing to really devastating effect, it's one of my favourite plays.

Does it help, though, that you know enough Irish to find the syntax familiar? I mean, maybe Preeti could say, instead of "Komal was angry", "Komal's anger rose in her" - but I don't know if the non-Hindi-speaking reader would think, aha, syntax, or just, Preeti talks funny why.

[fyrdrakken]

I am completely unfamiliar with Irish, and didn't necessarily pick up when Stephen was supposed to be actually speaking Irish unless the text specifically pointed that out (or, say, he was having a conversation with Padeen), but had the sense that his syntax and word choice (even if he was in fact speaking in English) were shaped by his upbringing and linguistic background. I interpreted it as an "accent" (or other linguistic traits signifying the same things) rather than as "talking funny."

[jacinthsong]

Ooo, that is really interesting. /pointless comment

[snowballjane]

I wrote Warai no daigaku fic a while ago. My dodge for the entire language issue was to use a framing device in which the story consisted of documents translated by an Australian intelligence officer.

I don't actually recall thinking it out in the detail you've done here, but I was conscious that I'd only understood the characters' voices through subtitles and their limitations.

[BTW, if you haven't seen Warai no daigaku, you really, really must.]

[loneraven]

Thank you, that is interesting, and thank you for the rec, too! I think I'm reaching the conclusion that there is no right or easy way to do this, and if you have to use such things as framing devices, then, well, that's much better than giving the matter no thought.

[ladymercury_10]

Hello! I stumbled upon your journal from a Star Trek comm--I noticed your Amy avatar and thought, Oh, another Doctor Who fan!

That's a really fascinating question. I would say if you're writing in English, then just write as normal--but I have Hindi-speaking cousins, and being aware of how Hindi speakers speak English, I can see having trouble just writing Hindi speakers as English native speakers. I guess the difference would be if you want to write something that reads as if translated, or if you want to just write in English and pretend English is Hindi and Hindi is English, the way they do when they write movies set in foreign countries with English subbing for the "common tongue" as it were.

I'm not sure if that makes sense. By the by, I'm quite jealous that you can speak Hindi well enough to have such problems--my dad never taught me, and I always feel like my cousins have one-up on me, somehow.