On writing in a foreign language

[Eric]

Amoxcalli, I agree with Peter D on this one. Dutch people mostly delude themselves when they think they know English very well. Very few writers indeed can write successfully in a foreign language. English seems to mesmerise some people into thinking that once you've done some at school and couple of years at university, your English is as good as that of a native-speaker. This very rarely happens.

Dutch is just as subtle as English. But the "klein handelslandje" mentality of Dutch people has unfortunately meant that they often delude themselves that their English is better than it is. They want to sell themselves and their wares abroad - and English gives you the most "customers".

Amoxcalli says:

...every educated Dutch person speaks English at least to decent level.

Yes, sure, speaks. But speaking is not writing at a sophisticated level. I'm the other way round - an Englishman living in Holland. I can chat in Dutch with friends and in the pub, make little jokes in shops, and my pronunciation is good. But Dutch will never become the language in which I feel most comfortable.

I think that because English (more so in its American version) is the most widespread language in the world, people want to possess it as their best language too. They want to be with the majority. It very rarely works that way once you start writing.

Omo writes a lot of common sense on this issue.

With regard to emotional attachment, Amoxcalli runs the risk of ending up with none. If you reject Dutch, you may find that native-speakers of English won't accept you as "the real thing" either. Then where will you be? In limbo.

The accomplished Flemish author Kristien Hemmerechts also wrote her first few stories in English. But I'm glad she saw the light and didn't carry on writing in a foreign language. She realised that her Dutch was better than her English, although she is in fact a lecturer in English literature.

[Clarissa]

Mulisch writes in Dutch - and he is as good as anyone (even if I have to read him in German)

[Amoxcalli]

First things first, I don't think Dutch authors should start writing English because of the wider potential audience. It's a personal choice.

I wouldn't overestimate the English of Dutch people either. At my school, where at least half of the students in my year have passed the CPE exams (Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English, C2 level English at a pass), it's still difficult to find someone with a good enough grasp of the language to fully understand, say, Lord of the Flies in all its allegorical glory. I'm pretty sure most educated Dutch (with at least HBO, for instance) are able to read Dan Brown untranslated, however.

In fact, I'd like to stress that I'm not speaking for anyone here. I, myself, prefer English over Dutch. If I had to motivate that choice, I would say it's because I feel "emotionally attached" to the language. Dutch is the language of my parents, English is the language of the societies I grew up in (expatriate societies in Egypt, Malaysia and Thailand that is).

I've only spent five years of my life in the Netherlands, out of a total of seventeen. I just don't identify with the Dutch country, language or culture. Maybe that's a shame, maybe it will harm my writing, but maybe it won't. I feel a foreigner in every country anyway.

Which reminds me, has anyone ever come across a novel written in two languages? It may not be very marketable, but I'm sure it'd open the window to a vast area of new literary techniques.


@Clarissa. Don't get me wrong, I didn't mean to say authors aren't any good. I'm personally not so fond of Mulisch, but I think Claus is brilliant and younger novelists like Verhulst are definitely worth translating, so that a wider audience may enjoy their writing.

[Clarissa]

I agree re. Hugo Claus - he died too soon. He wrote in Dutch (Flemish?) but I have always thought of him as Belgian. Belgian writing in a foreign language or was Dutch his native tongue?

I have never been able to read Finnegan's Wake but I know that James Joyce used a number of languages in the writing of it. I believe he even learned Norwegian to be able to incorporate it in the text. Way too high above my poor head!

[Amoxcalli]

The relationship between Flemish and Dutch is similar to that between British English and American. The Flemish use some words and phrases the Dutch don't use and vice versa. Curious thing is that the Flemish language has considerably more French loanwords, while the Dutch language has more German loanwords.

Come to think of it, I'm not sure Flemish is even an official language, it may just be a Dutch dialect. Wiki isn't too clear on it either.

Claus' native tongue definitely was Flemish/Dutch.

[hdw]

from a review in the Scotsman by Allan Massie of Atiq Rahimi The Patience Stone -

"This novel won the Prix Goncourt in 2008. Atiq Rahimi, Afghan himself, wrote it in French rather than Dari because, he says, "a kind of involuntary self-censorship has come into play" whenever he has written in his native language. "My acquired language, the one I have chosen, gives me a kind of freedom to express myself, away from this self-censorship and an unconscious shame that dwells in us from childhood." Writing in French has enabled him to present the woman as a sexual being, thus breaching a powerful Afghan taboo ..."

Harry

[Eric]

I think that Amoxcalli writes a lot of common sense in #23. A language is more than a convenient Esperanto to write bestsellers in. It is part of your identity.

I'm not a fan of Mulisch either. In his young days he wrote interesting Modernist short-stories. But in recent years he has written a rather odd book of philosophy and a variety of things that just don't make me want to read him.

As for Hugo Claus, he surely killed himself by euthanasia when he realised that his mind was going, as he had Alzheimer's. He wrote in Dutch, with Flemish expressions no doubt. But standard Dutch and the standard Flemish version of Dutch are almost identical, bar a number idioms and local expressions, as Amoxcalli has already pointed out.

Joyce was a bit of a show-off in "Finnegans Wake". Why on Earth was it necessary to sprinkle the numbers one to ten in Finnish through one page and drop phrases in Norwegian elsewhere? I don't really think this attracted readers, simply maintained his guru status and the exclusivity of using expressions that the average reader (does that book have any average readers?) will not understand. As I can read both Norwegian and Finnish, I don't feel left out or impressed. I just think the whole exercise was garrulously pointless. And I find the book utterly unreadable, unless you want to puzzle out every reference with a concordance.

Maybe Atiq Rahimi is making too much of his sensitivities and self-censorship. As he was educated at a French Lycée, maybe his command of written French is as good as that of his Persian (which I presume to be a minority language in Afghanistan).

Here is an Indian discussion of his works:

Bonjour India Festival - Why atiq rahimi chose french

Finally, books written in two languages. Do you mean the same text on parallel pages or, for instance, a macaronic novel where, for example, the dialogue is in English and the prose parts in between in French? Or any other combination of languages. Macaronic texts interest me. But obviously the readership is very small, as the reader must have a good knowledge of both languages.