Re: words, words, words

Incredibly well spoken & articulate, Diego, thanks.
tina

> "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 14:11:48 2003