Writing fic in my native language.

[noracharles]

I wouldn't write a fic about an English language canon in Danish. I used to read a lot of books in translation before it was possible to buy books online, and the stilted Danish of the translations never gave me the same intimate feeling as reading a book in its original language can.

I think the biggest advantage for me to writing in Danish would be the registers I have in that language. I speak English in very specific circumstances: At home I speak about family stuff with my family, but we code switch and mix and match a lot, and our private language would be difficult to understand for others as well as completely out of character for any canon character I can think of.

And then I write more or less formal academic English for school, and a weird mixture of more or less formal academic English and fandom dialect on LJ/DW, and again, I don't think that suits any of the canon characters I would like to write about. I do work hard not to write fic in fandom dialect, because it grates on me when I read it, but it's the only English casual dialect I'm fluent in :-|

I once made up a long story in my head about characters from a Danish movie, but I didn't bother writing it down. I couldn't imagine who would read it. The movie was Lille Soldat, a fantastic movie which I highly recommend.

It was not the point of the movie, but one of the things I particularly appreciated was the code switching: the main characters are Kimmie from Nigeria, who only speaks very little Danish and does not like to talk about emotional or important things in Danish, and Lotte who has English as a foreign language/working language. She's used to using English for important subjects that you have to get right, being an Iraq vet, and also has a broad knowledge of colloquial English from popular culture, but her English is stilted and dry compared to the emotional complexity she can express in Danish.

And as I was making up the story about those characters, it felt so good to be able to use that entire range that combining English and Danish gives me, and the control over nuance that code switching gives me, and the power to use dialog for characterization, which I normally suck at.

But then I remembered bringing friends to my parents' house, and the look they get on their face when we suddenly switch to English, and the way they also switch to English and it sounds so weird and kind of grating to me. They don't sound like themselves at all, because they're suddenly using a much more formal register and they have less nuance and humor in what they're saying.

And I thought to myself, no one could read that fic. No one in fandom understands my native language. (Except possibly aquaeri?)

Comments

[verasteine]

I get this completely. Not having English as your first language can make fandom a whole different world, but in turn, I learned my writing in English, and so writing in my native Dutch never expresses wholly what I want to say (unless the characters are Dutch.) English is like this writing language to me, this other option in my head. I can't really write well in Dutch at all, at least not fiction. It wouldn't flow.

[lakrids404]

Hey still here!
:)

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I find this very interesting. Disclosure:I'm basically English monolingual, but my English is a melange of different kinds, American, BBC, high and low brow, and littered with pilfered vocabulary. The normal prescription for writing is to read a lot, and that this builds a buffer to push your writing through. However. English has a Huge body to select from, deep and wide. I don't know how one improves writing in a language with (from your description) few suitable models. I suppose you might try 'exercises' where you set a desired effect and try different approaches.

Perhaps trying to write the Danish you use when the audience doesn't know English?

[aquaeri]

I'd certainly be willing to try reading Danglish! I think my Danish is a little weak, childish, because I haven't consumed much Danish media since I was 12. And I think I've even noticed that awkwardness you're describing, because when I do read Danish, I like to go back to older stuff, 1970 or older - I think it's thereabouts that English really starts to affect Danish. Some of the modern stuff is really badly written, and people are using English words when even I can remember the Danish word!

But I think you'd have more talk about with my mother - I can remember, after we'd lived in Australia some years and even her and my dad's Danish had English in it (possibly after my brother and sister had given up speaking Danish altogether, they are younger than I am) - we saw some Shakespeare on TV, and it was like a lightbulb went off over her head. She'd studied Shakespeare in Danish translation at school, had been unimpressed, but she was now so comfortable in English she was 'getting it' in a way that hadn't been possible for her before.

I will say some English translations of Danish stuff are really poor too - when Frøken Smilla was big, even I read the English because that's what we could get hold of in Australia, and I so wanted to read the Danish instead because I could tell certain awkwardnesses would have been fine in Danish and so I was left wondering what else I might be missing.

In fact the only thing that ever satisfied me was Out of Africa/Afrikanske Farm, because Blixen wrote both versions herself. There was a way both versions were the same I've never experienced with anything else.