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Tag: languages

  • You speak such good German

    Alina Bronsky, Russian-born but writing in German, charts the challenges and opportunities faced by the multilingual author, and how well-meaning condescension can get in the way of literary appraisal.

    Translated from the German by Tim Mohr

    It’s not exactly the height of elegance to quote from your own book. But I will do it here anyway.

    ‘You speak such good German,’ said a boy to Sascha, the heroine of my first novel, Broken Glass Park, whom he had just met. ‘Thanks,’ she answered angrily, ‘so do you.’ She was born in Russia and lives in a Russian ghetto in a German city. The boy she’s talking to is German by birth and lives in a fancy villa; he’s actually trying to say something nice to her.

    This little exchange isn’t made up. It happened to me in reality on many occasions, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Like my protagonist I moved from Russia to Germany at thirteen. Ever since I was fourteen I’ve been congratulated on my German. I can no longer remember the moment when I stopped feeling pleased by the compliments.

    I belong to the subset of authors who write books in a language that is not their native tongue.  Not long ago that still made me quite exotic in Germany. Now it is hearteningly common – every year you read about gifted debut authors who were born abroad, emigrated as young children or teens, and who published in the language of their new country and are already dusting off all their literary prizes. And yet, the compliments about how well I speak German are still the first thing I hear from audiences at my readings. At 36, I’m still treated as some kind of language wunderkind.

    Unfortunately I’m not one, and never have been. I’m not even particularly good at languages. It’s just that I, like hundreds of thousands of others, emigrated with my family at an age when the infamous ‘language window’ had yet to close. Which is why I sound like a native speaker – with the exception of the occasional linguistic slip-up that only very alert listeners notice, and which those people like to point out to me. The assumption that I must be exceptionally musical – as a result of how well I speak German – is also not true. And how I would love to be able to speak better English than I do, not to mention French and Italian.

    I don’t want my books to be assessed like compositions in a foreign language class. It makes me feel like a dancer with a wooden leg: as if the applauding room isn’t captivated by the show of artistic prowess but rather by the supposed handicap. So I ask you, dear readers and reviewers, please judge the contents and the word choices, the plot and characters, the metaphors and punch-lines. Complain about inconsistencies and slips of the pen that escaped the eyes of the editor and proofreader. But please don’t be any more merciful in those judgments and complaints with an immigrant author than you would be with an author writing in his or her native language. You’re not really anyway, and we wouldn’t have deserved the leniency.

    No reader falls in love with a book out of political correctness or as a sop to a linguistic minority. I’m happy about that. If something in one of my novels doesn’t look right to you, then you can in good conscience toss it in the corner. And if on the other hand my writing intrigues you, it has nothing to do with the fact that I learned the Cyrillic alphabet before I learned the Latin alphabet. All authors want to be valued based on their imagination, their talent, and their perseverance, not because of school vocabulary lessons from some distant past.

    After more than twenty years, I can say that German has become my natural writing language. Even though I love my native language of Russian, I speak a version that’s probably already somewhat outdated and anachronistic. I’m asked time and time again whether I also write in Russian. No, I don’t, at least not beyond emails. I don’t translate my own books, either. I’d prefer to write new ones – in German.

     

     

    Alina Bronsky is the author of Broken Glass Park, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, which was named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and just published Just Call me Superhero.  The Daily Beast calls Bronsky ‘an exciting new voice in the literary world.’

    Born in Yekaterinburg, an industrial town at the foot of the Ural Mountains in central Russia, Bronsky now lives in Berlin.

    You can buy Alina Bronsky’s Just Call Me Superhero via our book partner Foyles.

    Read more about Alina Bronsky at her author profile at Europa Editions.

  • But why do you write your books in English and Turkish?

    It is a question I hear often. Each time, I need to pause for a split second, the briefest hesitation within the span of a breathing space… How can I explain? How much can I tell? I try to offer a compact, rational answer that would do. Yet, I also know, deep down inside, that my urge to write stories in a language other than my mother tongue was an irrational choice, if it was a choice at all. I did not exactly decide to write in English. It didn’t quite happen like that. Rather than a logical resolution, it was an animal instinct that brought me to the shores of the English language. Perhaps I escaped into this new continent. I sent myself into perpetual exile, carving an additional space for myself, building a new home, brick by brick, in this other land. Being a stranger and an outsider in the English language intimidates me sometimes. It is a challenge, both intellectually and spiritually. Yet the joy and the pleasure I derive from the experience are so much bigger. And whatever pain there is, it is certainly less than the pain of feeling like a stranger and an outsider in my motherland. Somehow, that is heavier.

    I started learning English at the age of ten as I became a student at a British School in Madrid, Spain. At the time, Spanish was my second language. Yet as much as I loved the sound of Spanish, my passion for and pull towards the English language was something else altogether. It was the flexibility of its anatomy and the openness of its vocabulary that struck me, most of all.

    I started writing poems in English, keeping them to myself. When I took the step of writing and publishing my novels in English first, about 13-14 years ago, I was already an established author in Turkey. Immediately there was a negative reaction in my motherland. They accused me of betraying my nation, an allegation I had certainly heard before. They claimed I was ‘forsaking’ my mother tongue for the language of Western Imperialism.

    But I never felt I was abandoning anything. I never thought I had to make a choice between my two loved ones: English and Turkish. In truth, perhaps even more than writing in English or writing in Turkish, it is the very commute back and forth that fascinates me to this day. I pay extra attention to those words that cannot be ferried from one continent to the other. I become more aware of not only meanings and nuances but also of gaps and silences. And I observe myself and others. Our voices change, even our body language alters as we move from one language to another. At the end of the day, languages shape us while we are busy thinking we control them.

    I write my novels in English first. Then they are translated into Turkish by professional translators, whose works I admire and respect. Next I take the Turkish translations and rewrite them, giving them my rhythm, my energy, my vocabulary, which is full of old Ottoman words. Many of those words came from Arabic and Persian, and they have been plucked out of the Turkish language by modernist nationalists in the name of purity. Critical of this linguistic racism, I use both old and new words while writing in Turkish.

    Over the years I have learned that separation, too, is a connection. Writing in English, putting an existential distance between me and the culture where I come from, strangely and paradoxically, enables me to take a closer look at Turkey and Turkishness. Just to give an example, had I written The Bastard of Istanbul –a novel that concentrates on an Armenian and a Turkish family, and the unspoken atrocities of the past- in Turkish, it would have been a different book. I might have been more cautious, more apprehensive even. But writing the story in English first set me at liberty; it freed me from all cultural and psychological constraints, many of which I might have internalized without even being aware of it. The same goes for all my novels written in English first. Sometimes, the presence of absence strengthens a bond and distance brings you closer.

    In my heart, I am a commuter. This means I have to work twice as hard, spend twice as much time on each book. It is a completely irrational, illogical thing to do. Yet I do it because I love it and love, for me, is the key word.

    Like a child who plays with Lego bricks, I play with alphabets. It amazes me to see how a limited number of letters can create endless meanings, infinite stories. I am in love with words and they are never enough. We keep moving, expanding, travelling together. By nature, I am always aspiring to go beyond the boundary drawn in front of me, curious to know what lies beyond.

    That said, there are things I find easier to express in Turkish, such as sorrow and melancholy. There are things I find easier to write in English, such as humour, irony and satire. It is less a linguistic difference than a cultural one.

    ‘But if you are writing in English first, how can we call you a Turkish writer anymore? You are now one of them, not one of us,’ a critic said to me in Turkey last year.

    The truth is, I don’t believe in this artificial duality between ‘us’ and ‘them’.  As much as I respect writers and poets, such as Mahmoud Darwish, who claimed their mother tongue was their homeland, I also sincerely believe that there can be, and are, other paths in the world of creativity and storytelling. Some writers are just nomads. I happen to be one of them.

    I wish I could write in Spanish as well. And in Russian. Or Japanese. But I have no such talents. What I have is two wonderful, beautiful and magical companions of the road. The English language with its grammatical suppleness and immense and ever-green vocabulary and the Turkish language with its agglutinated masses of microparticles and inverted sentences, like the serpentine streets of Istanbul. I love them both and in very different ways and for very different reasons.

    Today, as more and more people are becoming displaced and replaced all around the world, our need to question static identity politics is also growing per day. Rather than a pre-given, fixed, monolithic identity, we can have multiple and fluid belongings. We can even love more than one person. Our hearts are wide and deep enough to do so. And yes, we can also dream in more than one language.

  • Writing in the Language of ‘the Other’

    In another fascinating piece for PEN Atlas, Gazmend Kapllani recounts his journey through languages, the difficulties and opportunities of being a multi-lingual author and how the language of the Other goes back to Homer and the birth of storytelling

    The “encounter” with your mother tongue is always prearranged, while an encounter with a foreign language is usually a matter of chance or choice. My encounter with the Greek language meant both: chance and choice.

    I was born in Albania, under totalitarianism, when the country was one of the most isolated in Europe, similar to today’s North Korea. Learning foreign languages in such an atmosphere had no practical use. It was impossible to talk to the few visitors who ever managed to enter Albania. They were strictly monitored by plainclothes agents of the secret police. We restricted ourselves to observing them and trying to catch words of their languages from a safe distance. The truth is we watched them as if they were some sort of extraterrestrials.

    However, by adolescence I had already learned two foreign languages: Italian and French. I learned Italian when I was a child, thanks to an older cousin who had studied in Italy in the 1930s. Then, I learned French on my own. Italian and French were not just “foreign languages” for me. They became like underground tunnels or small windows which, suddenly, I could open in the wall of our totalitarian jail. Because of these openings, I could reach the world-beyond-the-border. 

    I could listen to Italian and French radio stations, secretly of course, thanks to a Chinese radio, which further broadened my world-beyond-the-border. All of the ‘forbidden books’, which were banned by the regime, and were so essential in stimulating my creative imagination, I read secretly in Italian and French. I still maintain a special relationship with both languages. In the memoirs of former prisoners of the Albanian gulags, I read how some of them developed a secret code, a secret language, in order to communicate between their cells. They used to form sentences by knocking and scratching on the walls of the cell. The character “A” was one knock on the wall and two short lines. “B” two knocks and two circles and so on. They say that they still maintain a special relationship with this private language. Sometimes, I have the impression I have maintained the same relationship with French and Italian.

    ***

    When totalitarian borders were collapsing in Albania and Eastern Europe, toward the end of the 80s, I was learning English.  But I did not have any more time to study languages. It was time to escape. I was in a hurry to cross the monstrous border – after so many years of closed borders, we couldn’t believe that they would remain open for long. I crossed carrying an English grammar book in my hands.

    I went to Greece though I didn’t know a word of Greek. In my naïve imagination I planned to stay in Greece for 21 days at most and then continue my trip further west, to Italy, France or some English-speaking country. Last January, in 2012, I reached the 21-year mark of living in Greece. Life, often, does not follow schedules and plans. Unpredictable events and coincidences, often, change your travel plans and seduce you the way Circe seduced Ulysses.

    I have written and published three novels in Greek: I decided to write in the language of the country I was living in. I don’t regard the Greek language as my ‘adopted’ mother tongue anymore. Our relationship, I’d say, is that of a man and his lover. It has the passion, the devotion, the element of surprise and small gifts that tend to mark a courtship. At the same time, it carries all the pitfalls, the vacillations, the hints of suspicion and betrayal, the uncertainties and mistrust that are typical of such a romance. Looking back at it now from some distance, I can say it was an ardent yet arduous affair.  I fell in love with a language spoken by people who considered me undesirable, due to my immigrant status. I wasn’t some Western, French or English or German anthropologist in Greece: I was an Albanian immigrant; I was the scapegoat of the time; my mother tongue was the tongue of the scapegoat.

    An Albanian is modern Greece’s country bumpkin. Except that this country bumpkin doesn’t speak the local vernacular; he speaks Albanian; he is the embodiment of the unbearable likeness of the “Other’.  Ironically many of the ancestors of today’s modern Greeks, who show contempt for modern Albanian immigrants, used to speak Albanian themselves.

    It was back then that I fell in love with the Greek language and mastered it. That’s most likely to be the reason that my relationship with Greek became so special. Faced with rejection, many retreat into their shell like turtles. There are also those who face rejection by digging in their heels and developing an appetite for “conquest”. Instead of countering with rejection, they respond to it with a desire to charm. Perhaps they are not comfortable with the status of victim. So the Greek language gave me this ability to conquer, to charm, to amaze, despite a climate of rejection, and my relationship to it became so special because it offered me the means to evolve from “scapegoat” and “undesirable” to interlocutor and storyteller. I wanted to be heard. I wanted to tell stories, mine and those of others.

    My books, written in Greek, are translated into several languages. But they are not available in Albanian. This is a sort of Balkan linguistic nationalism I guess – some of the Albanian publishers feel vexed and can’t forgive me for having written my books and building my career as a writer in a Balkan language other than Albanian. They treat me as a traitor to my mother tongue…

    ***

    When you write in a language that is not your native tongue, you recreate and refresh your identity – your cultural identity, but mainly, the identity of the narrator. Immigration means starting from scratch. To write a narrative in a language that is not your native tongue, is like starting the narration of your life from the beginning. That is why I felt as if the Greek language was a new pair of shoes which gave me the desire to run. Narrating in a “foreign” language, I felt not only like a participant, but like an observer of my own experiences. Greek offered my narration a different style and pace. But mostly, Greek offered me the distance I needed to reshape and re-read my previous and current experiences. And sometimes, this distance is like a savior for the narrator. Probably, because it transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar. The “foreign” language does not carry the historical weight of your native language. When writing in a foreign language, especially about your own life, you feel as if you have acquired a layer of protection from the dangerous weight of your own experiences.

    ***

    I now have read many novelists, of the current and last century, who write in languages which are not their mother tongue, like Conrad or Nabokov. But in the matter of writing in another language I often think about Homer – the archetype of all storytellers*. Who was Homer? Maybe he was a myth. In the imagination of the people he was more of an archetype. A man without a name, a foreigner – Greeks may have found his foreign name difficult or unworthy to utter.  He was, according to legend, a hostage of war, a slave without a past and without rights. It seems that he had a talent for learning languages and telling stories. That’s how he gained his freedom.  The natives were charmed not only by his stories but also by the fact that he could tell the stories so well in their own language.

    Many times, he must have heard compliments such as “you speak our language so well!” I imagine, hearing him telling stories in their own language, the natives must have felt the caress of their own narcissism. By mastering their language, the language of the Other, Homer remained in their history. But we will never learn his personal history. Maybe the no-named “Outis” (“Nobody”) the pseudonym of Odysseus when he fought Polyphemus the Cyclops was a sarcastic comment that Homer made about himself?

    ***

    Currently I live in America – as a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. An ideal place to write a new novel. That’s exactly what I am doing.  I don’t know whether I will extend my stay in America or return to Greece. I don’t feel that I have many good reasons for returning to Athens at the moment. For years now, I have been blacklisted by the neo-Nazi gangs of Golden Dawn and fascists, which unfortunately are gaining support and having a huge impact in Greece. Moreover, after 21 years of living, writing and paying taxes in Greece, the Greek state has repeatedly refused to grant me Greek citizenship.

    On the other hand, being in the US has caused a “language crisis” for me. Will I continue to write in Greek or will I start writing my novels in Albanian? My books have been translated from Greek into several languages and it’s important to me to know and work with the translators. If, from now on, I write my books in Albanian, where will I find translators?In the meantime I feel more and more tempted to write in English. Since childhood I’ve been drawn to the languages of the Other. Above all, I like writing in the language of my everyday life. So, living in a kind of linguistic suspension, the new book I am writing is becoming a patchwork of three languages: the largest part of it is in Greek, interrupted by big paragraphs in Albanian and English.

    Every time I write something I don’t like I blame my English. When this happens, I regard my latest language as a scapegoat. I feel frustrated and I swear to give up writing in English, once and for all. But after an hour or so my frustration is replaced by stubbornness and a desire to make it work. Then I sit down again in front of the blank page, filling it with English phrases and words. How does it feel? Fascinating like discovering a new continent, and at the same time insecure like running barefoot on a minefield.  

    Ultimately, what does it mean to write in the language of the Other?  It means many things at once, I guess. It makes you travel through sounds and words that you would never have had the chance to discover otherwise. The most precious gift that the new language gives you is the fact that you never take it for granted. You will never consider it your own in the same manner that natives do. That’s why your relationship with the foreign words will never become unequivocally familiar. That’s why it will also never become routine. I often feel like a debutant in face of foreign words. Then, when I begin writing, I forget what language I’m in. Because, the most important thing when writing, is what you say and not the language in which you say it.

     

    About the Author

    Gazmend Kapllani teaches History and Creative Writing at Emerson College in Boston. He has published two poetry collection in Albanian and three novels in Greek. His first book – A Short Border Handbook – has been published by Portobello in the UK and has been translated also into French, Polish and Danish. His second book – My name is Europe – has been published recently in French and will be published in English in the fall.