Re: words, words, words

       "Although I've just mentioned Conrad admiringly I have to
        say that he & Nabokov reveal their fundamental uneasiness
        with their second language by their very pyrotechnical skill
        in it. I can admire them - but never really love them.

        Scottie B."

    Perhaps that is the prevalent feeling for acomplished writers and
    masters of their mother tongue. I don't presume to speak for all
    foreign subscribers to this list, but out here in the colonies, as far
    as this finisterrean speaking is concerned, some of us still share
    an outmoded devotion for Conrad. He is, in a way, our man.

    Frankly, I don't see how you English-speaking people can read
    him. No kidding. I mean, how on earth can you 'get it'? Sorry,
    it just can't be. That pleasure is preserved for us foreigners. For
    us dilapidated dagos above all, being our brutish ancestors also
    onetime rulers of the sea :)

    Just fancy for a moment that you are in our shoes. When you
    read in a foreign language, you necessarily slow down. You have
    to move carefully. You are trying to keep afloat, so to speak, in a
    strange element. Its surface allows for little direct touch with the
    undercurrents, and most of the time you only see your frowning
    self mirrored in the waves.

    But if the writer is any good, he can make you (yes, you too) feel
    the sea bottom. In those precious moments, reading is no longer
    painful deciphering, nor feeling a subsidiary activity of reading.
    And when a gush of conradian rhythmic prose tingles first at your
    feet and then carries you away, there is but gratitude for this
    captain's commanding skills.

    The staggering beauty of it lies, I think, in the fact that the words
    are, even then, still alien to you. They touch you, but they remain
    aloof in their own world. When Marlow gets entangled in his yarn,
    you thank him for all his stumbling and indirection, which reflects
    directly your own reading process and, at the same time,
    miraculously gets ahead with the story with irrepresible strength.

    Don't put your English shoes back on yet. Now try to imagine
    what it feels like for us, slugging word-by-word along the text, to
    hear, during the funeral service in *The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'*,
    such things like

        "The words, missing the unsteady hearts of men, rolled out
          to wander without a home upon the heartless sea".

    And Conrad does it all the time. He kills you. He knew exactly
    how it felt, and made a whole style out of it.

    Hemingway's iceberg thingie was alright for you people, who at
    some point needed to be reminded of the sheer potency of English
    stripped to its bare bones. Don't get me wrong, it is great for us,
    too. Only that our reading experience couples much more fittingly
    with the opacity of Conrad's meandering, intricate prose. When he
    wants to let you know of an iceberg, you hear somebody manning
    the weather braces, or deftly letting go the foretack while you see
    swarms of shadows, only you don't know if these belong to men
    or toppling masts. And then, just as in real life, you know that the
    darned chunk of ice hit you exactly when you were humbly
    beginning to understand.

    Moreover, the opacity of the language he uses matches perfectly
    his opaque universe, an indiferent and morally devious emptiness
    where you constantly have the disturbing feeling of arriving at the
    shore to see

       "the frank, audacious faces of men barefooted, well armed and
        noiseless."

    What may very well be pyrotechnics for others, is in our light the
    most effective, bullseye prose. As a foreign reader, you follow
    his characters through estranged environments. You are not at
    all certain what the situation is, but you know, as well as they do,
    that it is going to get hairy. In that jungle, in that prose, the sense
    of shared fate and the solidary gestures shine so terribly bright.
    Just like his well-crafted, sincere phrasing.

    I open at random a volume of his. It says

        "The hurricane, with its power to madden the seas, to sink
         ships, to uproot trees, to overturn strong walls and dash the
         very birds of the air to the ground, had found this taciturn
         man in its path, and, doing its utmost, had managed to wring
         out a few words."

    Sometimes it is impossible for me to interpret these and other
    lines as anything other than the experience of being immersed
    in another language while exploring some corner of the heart
    and surviving it in the most genuine and dignified way, maybe
    bringing back a couple of obscure words to be hammered
    until they fit. It is then that I wish I could ring this chap. We
    would chat in our awkwardly accented English about this and
    that, and at some point he would attempt to explain just how
    the hell he did it.

    Saludos,
    Diego D.

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Received on Wed Aug 6 09:26:23 2003