/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13605900]

>non-native English speakers
>mastered the English language better than almost any writers in history
Did Conrad and Nabokov actually have a kind of advantage in their writing as people who didn’t grow up as English speakers?
Their grasp of the English in a technical sense far surpasses any Anglo writer. I always found this fascinating.

[Anonymous No.13606121]

I'll give you Nabokov but Conrad's prose is clunky as shit

[Anonymous No.13606153]

>not taking the day off work to suck a dildo while thinking of :3face

She knows she is lucky, to be able to have a reason not to work. Good for you. You need to do a little better job of sucking though :3

[Anonymous No.13606156]

>>13605900
Hm!
I never even knew Conrad was an ESL.
I guess people who had to learn a language as adults do pay more attention to the technical and grammatical parts of and are more insistent on "getting it right", yes.
English is my third language and I definitely worry more about accurate grammar than your average American.

>>13606121
I disagree. Parts of Nostromo were gorgeously written. Better than Heart of Darkness certainly.

[Anonymous No.13606157]

Slav languages, Russian included (and probably many other languages) are much richer - think shakespearan neologisms, but also unusual play with ad-hoc grammar, and such constructs are frequent occurrence in evolving vernacular. Whereas english, being lingua franca, is under a lot of pressure towards lowest common denominator and simplification. When an author has good command of native "richer" language, they attempt to carry it over into english as is the case with Nabokov.

[Anonymous No.13606239]

>>13606157
That’s an interesting point and it makes good sense.
I really wish I could read Russian. French too. I want to read my favorite classics in their original form :(

[Anonymous No.13606250]

>>13606156
Yeah, Joseph Conrad was born in Poland as Józef Konrad Koniezowski.
I actually just looked up some info about him and his Wikipedia page says he wasn’t fluent in English until his twenties. Pretty amazing

[Anonymous No.13606328]

>>13605900
Wasn’t Nabokov's first language English

[Anonymous No.13606337]

>>13605900
They were highly intelligent and linguistic prodigies. Particularly Nabokov

[Anonymous No.13606340]

>>13606328
lolno, he was born in St. Petersburg

[Anonymous No.13606341]

>>13606239
It also goes opposite way, when translating an author from english into slav language. Because english is simple and one needs to use long winded phrasing to make up for constrained degrees of freedom, it tends to sound "woody" and baby-like when translated into richer languages literally.

For example T. Pratchett heavily relies on puns and british style of wordplay. Such things are pretty much untranslatable literally in order to sound as good. In Czechia, many translators refused to translate Pratchett for this reason, until one picked it up and just yolo'd it as semi-pirated translation. Pratchett was cool with it and even gave the translator permission to make substantial changes to the humor if the original is impossible to translate, so later translations are even more "daring" compared to original.

When doing translation like this, translator has to drop out all the playful prose and plug in all the local language equivalent which only generally conveys the idea, but in drastically different form (both culturally, and linguistically - condense and utilize "richness"). Nabokov did this in opposite way when translating from russian into english, "expand" the richness of russian, so as to keep the intent unchanged in english.

[Anonymous No.13606411]

>>13606328
>>13606340
He was trilingual already as a child, but exactly how early he learned english is debated, I’ve heard. He himself claimed he learned english before russian.

[Anonymous No.13606423]

>>13605900
>Their grasp of the English in a technical sense far surpasses any Anglo writer
pathetic ESL cope.

[Anonymous No.13606497]

>Nabakov used to box

What a legend

[Anonymous No.13606522]

>>13606341
I can sort of attest to this - I'm Hungarian, and works translated from English sound so fucking wooden, it hurts. I'm still not sure if we can pin that on "linguistic superiority", as you say, but this is a phenomenon that I definitely experienced myself for sure across several dozen translators in my youth when I didn't have a good grasp of English yet.

[Anonymous No.13606529]

>>13606522
And I'm aware that Hungarian is not a slavic language, but for all intents and purposes it's just as removed from English, if not even more so.

[Anonymous No.13606564]

>>13606522
>>13606529
Agreed. Ugro-finnic is near free-form insanity, definitely more expressive than slavspeak.

As for how to deal with woody translations - I explicitly look for the backstory of translation. Good translations are often art in their own right, and come from people who are intimately familiar with the work, the author gave explicit permission to make substantial changes to the prose if the situation warrants that. The latter is not common, authors/publishers often don't trust the translators near as much.

When no good translation exists, just stick with english.

[Anonymous No.13606939]

>>13605900
if you were multilingual you would be writting like them too
Joseph Conrad spoke Russian,French,German, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Malay and English
http://aliciapousada.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/0/2/10020146/the_multilingualism_of_joseph_conrad.pdf
multilingualism is the final litpill