{"id":9961,"date":"2022-08-23T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-08-23T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9961"},"modified":"2022-08-23T08:01:08","modified_gmt":"2022-08-23T12:01:08","slug":"writing-tips-lingua-franca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9961","title":{"rendered":"Writing Tips: Lingua Franca"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I read (and liked!) Daniel Mason\u2019s debut novel The Piano Tuner<\/em><\/a> several years after he was interviewed in the late, lamented short story magazine Glimmer Train<\/em>, and only now rediscovered what he\u2019d said about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Piano Tuner<\/em> takes place in Myanmar, and Mason faced a dilemma that all of us who write stories set in other countries and cultures face: how much do you express in English, and how much in the language of the people speaking? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The interviewer pointed out that Mason used a lot of Burmese words and phrases in his book, and Mason explained why. He said he usually kept the Burmese word when there was no English equivalent, or at least not a good one. Some of the words he could have explained, but then the novel becomes a dictionary, so he didn\u2019t. Following that decision-rule, he used the word thanaka<\/em>, rather than \u201cthe women whose faces were painted with sandalwood paste.\u201d Good call.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my upcoming novel set in Rome, the main character is American, but speaks Italian, and except when she\u2019s talking with her brother, all the conversation is in Italian. I make the point about her language skills early (it\u2019s even a plot point), and then drop in an Italian word, here or there to remind the reader that it\u2019s not English being spoken. Certo<\/em> (sure), Bene<\/em> (fine), Cara<\/em> (dear\u2014oddly, a word I\u2019d never use in English, unless the speakers were elderly!) are all words I use as reminder words. I also make sure to use the Italian name of the hospital where my character is taken: Ospidale Fatebenefratelli<\/em> (Isn’t that great!?) Word order and speech rhythms can serve as reminders readers are in foreign territory too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I especially admire the way Cormac McCarthy handled Spanish in The Crossing<\/em><\/a>, set in Mexico. There was a lot of Spanish conversation, but he managed to reiterate the thought, not verbatim, but sufficiently, so that I always understood what he meant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mason said he used Burmese words for specific jobs, to avoid English connotations that don\u2019t fit the Myanmar context, and, sometimes, just because of the way the word sounds. For example, the Portuguese word caatinga <\/em>refers to scrubby brush-land, but to Mason simply sounds much more evocative and he used it in another book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just in case readers are uncomfortable encountering such an unfamiliar word, Mason put little instructions on how to say it in front of the word\u2014just once, I hope. I don\u2019t remember this, so it must not have been intrusive (and I don\u2019t find any examples of this using Amazon\u2019s \u201clook inside\u201d function). I suppose if an author used a great many foreign words, the pronunciation advice might become tiresome, but there might be other ways to handle it too\u2014for example, including a glossary, correcting a \u201cnewbie\u201d to the country, or having a character take language lessons. Readers figure out their own pronunciations for names of characters, for example, and go right on reading, so it isn\u2019t a huge dilemma. But the occasional culture-specific reminder through language helps maintain a sense of the exotic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mason\u2019s first collection of short stories, A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth<\/em><\/a>was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In the Glimmer Train<\/em> interview, he said he had a lot of ideas that weren\u2019t 300-page ideas, but might make good short stories. \u201cI\u2019d love to try to do that again,\u201d he said. He did. And was right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read (and liked!) Daniel Mason\u2019s debut novel The Piano Tuner several years after he was interviewed in the late, lamented short story magazine Glimmer Train, and only now rediscovered what he\u2019d said about it. The Piano Tuner takes place … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"When speakers of different languages are in your story, balancing reader understanding and verisimilitude can be a challenge.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[174,185,51,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-draft-blog","category-language","category-words","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2AF","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9961"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9963,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9961\/revisions\/9963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}