The Peculiar Fascination Of Imperfection

1 The Peculiar Fascination of Imperfection: Daniel Soukup Talks to Margaret Anne Clarke Rukopis, Vol. 1, Issue 3, 49 - 57 (Originally published in Czech) 1) Could you share some details about the practical side of your creative writing competition (the origin of the idea, the difficulties you encountered, prospects of future development…)?

The idea for a formal competition in Creative Writing in a Modern Language sprung from a couple of exceptionally good pieces that two advanced students in Spanish produced from specific composition and story-building exercises in the classroom. Thus the idea originated naturally from mainstream course provision at the university, which also includes workshops on poetry, film and book review writing. But, since creative writing activities as such lie outside formal course requirements, we decided to give all advanced language students an outlet for their personal expression in the form of this competition. Once the structure of the competition had been set up, the difficulty lay in establishing common criteria and a methodology for judging what were, predictably, very wide varieties of works at different levels of language competence and in seven different languages. Now that the project is established within the institution, we are currently developing ways of disseminating the project on a national level and establishing this idea, not just as an extra-curricular student activity, but as a sub-discipline in its own right in modern foreign languages. To begin with, we are constructing our dedicated web site, www.port.ac.uk/creativewriting which already illustrates all the students’ works in text and audio; we are developing a structured set of task types and exercise, from beginners’ level to advanced, for teachers to integrate into their classroom practice. We are establishing collaborative links with other interested universities in order to establish the project as a national competition; planning a published annotated anthology of the best of the students’ works, and an edited collection of articles by other experts with an interest in this field.

2 2) Quite understandably, the competition entries which you quote in your article are all in English. Could you give me an idea about the actual range of the languages used by the participants, and also of their nationalities? Were there any differences between the languages and/or participants' nationalities in terms of quality, themes treated etc.? You mention the specifically advantageous position of learning a language “while in the country of its origin”. Did the English-speaking setting of your competition play a role: were the contributions in English any better or more confident than texts in other languages?

Apart from English, the entries for the competition were in all the languages that the School offered to advanced level: French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian and Portuguese. The School’s student cohort is highly cosmopolitan and has an intake of students from Scandinavia and Central Europe; these nationalities are represented in the project, as well as native residents in the United Kingdom and students writing in English from the Far East. Although the students who were learning English as a Foreign Language, and those resident in the UK had the advantage of intensive exposure to the language through media outlets and so on, and thus possibly had the advantage of exposure to a wider range of registers and a greater range of stylistic devices to choose from, the students from central Europe and Scandinavia were also fluent in several languages, and thus had a very high degree of interlanguage and were able to code switch very easily, facilitating their abilities at composition. The English natives were also at an advanced stage in their degree programmes; they had spent a year abroad as part of their degree programme, and so the standard of fluency and competence was reasonably high in most cases, irrespective of nationality.

4) In your interpretations of some of the students' texts, you describe their struggle to express their meaning very much as a cognitive quest, an effort to reach out for “some unifying vision between their private selves and the public arena of which they do

3 not yet feel quite a part”. What you do not consider in such detail is the linguistic side, even though, for many of the students, finding the right words must have been at least as difficult as constructing a new identity. Could you briefly comment on the stylistic features of the contributions?

The second language becomes an instrument of mediation between the students’ familiar meanings of their native culture and the potential meanings of their target language. The students will adopt various tactics to overcome the difficulties they have in expressing themselves; as the Wall poem shows, different registers of language are put together as a sort of bricolage, the mixing and transfer of stylistic devices. The learners employ bricolage in order to bridge stylistically those gaps which cannot be side-stepped by avoidance. Thus we found that the students adopted a number of intriguing tactics to find a way round their necessarily more limited stock of vocabulary. They will convert the vocabulary they do know into keywords and arrange it into anaphora: for example, ‘Every day he was there’ etc.’ and then repeat phrases for rhythmic effect, and also the repetition of key terms such as ‘wooden bollard’ and so on. So what might be considered disadvantages for the non-native language learner are converted into poetic devices for structural and phonetic effect. On the other hand, the students, having passed through a process of explicit engagement and learning about their target language, may try to incorporate into their works what they have learned about in the formal classroom setting, and this may point up certain stylistic features, or unwittingly point up differences and frequent antagonisms between two idioms and two cultural traditions. There was a marked mixture of stylistic devices: isolated expressions, calques or direct translations from the students’ native language suddenly turned up in the first language, and it was made clear what these meant from the context of the text. There are inevitably imperfections in the students’ work, but they may lead to different perspectives and points of emphasis: they do not supplant ‘received’ English, French or Spanish, but may hold a fascination or a contribution of their own.

4 5) I feel a bit uneasy about doing away with the concept of the “native speaker” entirely, in spite of its desperate vagueness, implicit cultural imperialism and other problems. The main reason for this is the issue of accuracy. Texts written by non-native speakers, even quite advanced ones, usually contain numerous grammatical mistakes, lexical misuses, and stylistic idiosyncrasies. Should they be seen, in your opinion, as genuine “new meanings” springing from their authors' creative potential, or may we still attribute them to lack of competence and/or care, as we traditionally did? What level of accuracy did the competition entries reach?

There are clearly morphological traces of the students’ native language in the works: the Far Eastern students tend to omit the definite article and indefinite article when writing in English, for example, ‘I realised the Tower would be a good place for wedding ceremony’, and all the foreign learners of English had difficulties with prepositions. The students misuse or misunderstand the peculiarly English busyness of prepositions, which express the consciousness of, or the dynamic of, our relations with time and space, and with each other. On the other hand, English natives had difficulties when abandoning the all-embracing verb ‘to be’ in English which covers all states of being and location, of people and things, animate and inanimate. For example, in a text about the First World War produced by an English native in the German language this verb appeared throughout:

‘Es gibt Leichen….’

when ‘da sind’ would have been more appropriate; similar to the difference between ser and estar in Spanish. I do not think, however, that this is simply a question of students transferring one lexical item or phrase from one language to another, and doing it somewhat incorrectly, because composition in any language does not just consist of that. Another notable feature of these narratives and poems is the scant regard they show for generic convention. The purpose of the narrative or poetic composition is evidently to provide the students with a fixed base, a site from where they are able to combine heterogeneous elements, picked up from whatever different sorts of

5 registers in the foreign language that they have been exposed to in the course of their studies.

The imperfections and idiosyncrasies of the

students’ writing can lead to unique perspectives and points of emphasis, although, in order to make some of the works fit for publication, we did have to clean up misspellings and grammatical errors which were just plain wrong, and would not have added anything to the meaning or stylistic expression of the text.

6) Intercultural contact and communication are usually depicted in spatial terms (as in your central metaphor of the border), whereas their diachronic aspects do not seem to receive as much attention. Could you say something about the competition participants' attitudes towards (their own and other) linguistic, literary and cultural traditions? In the texts, was there evidence of a conscious will to come to terms with these various traditions, signs of their unconscious influence, or did they tend to stay in a tradition-free vacuum?

In this particular project, advanced degree-programme students of the sort who entered this competition, have learned area studies, literature, culture, politics and society along with the language; they have not simply learned the language for purely transactional purposes. Thus these students will not try to transfer (on a linguistic level) their own cultural assumptions, but will try to effect some imaginative recreation of their target culture, creating an imaginary Spanish or German protagonist and writing in the first person. Or the students will attempt a conceptual discourse about something that interests them, or construct a personal polemic, concerning something they feel strongly about, using the resources native language by means of the linguistic repertoire of the second language – for example, double exclamation marks, which are a linguistic feature in Spanish, were used by one student to write a protest poem. On a linguistic level, however, the students may transfer their aesthetic codes and linguistic expectations to their target language; there are some poems for example, where the Far Eastern students have

6 written in sparse elliptical forms, using tripartite arrangements of adjectives which are familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of Chinese poetic traditions. The pieces written by the students show many examples of what the German cultural theorist Ludger Hoffmann (1989) defined as ‘transfer’, that is, a reproduction or imitation of expressions in the native language by means of the linguistic repertoire of the second language. The student may be capable, wittingly or unwittingly, of wrenching those words out of their ‘normal’ associations and transposing them to another cultural context altogether – being, of necessity, slightly alienated from the language.

7) How (if at all) would you relate the texts produced by the participants to the works of great writers who wrote in two or more languages and/or in a foreign language (Milton, Conrad, Nabokov…) ?

Nabokov was doubly exiled, first as a Russian émigré in Europe and transplanted to the United States in 1940, although he defined himself as trilingual – a fluent speaker of French and English, and was uniquely equipped to engage with Western modernity in his émigré phase and was a translator of many works from French and English. Thus the imminent prospect of a change of language and a change of country was reflected in the themes of transition and metamorphosis that ran through his works, and which also show up in the works of the students. In common with the students’ writings, Nabokov will also take a symbol from the environment and work it into a more general theme of cross-cultural transplantation, identity and change. In Nabokov’s English writing in America, the motifs of the water-sprite and the mermaid evolve into a productive and positive image, a paradigm of cultural accommodation, plus the symbol of metamorphosis more customarily associated with Nabokov, the butterfly. In the water-sprite he had found an image which could convey the idea of communication between different states of being – not just because of the conjoining of elements of land and water found in the legend itself, but because of the relating of literary traditions and archetypes, myths and traditions which went beyond the confines of one nation. The protagonists

7 of Nabokov’s works also illustrate or embody the theme of exile: Kinbote in Pale Fire, Humbert Humbert in Lolita. Nabokov’s English novels are all positive minefields of literary subtexts and multi-lingual allusions. Joseph Conrad defined himself as a ‘homo duplex’ (Nadjer, 1964). Novels such as Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim remind us that the degree to which a reader actively participates in the world, and exploits potentialities presented to him or her by the sociolinguistic community to which he or she belongs (Hawthorn, 1979: 55). There are many ostensibly unidiomatic and literal phrases and direct translations from the French, although these are more consciously worked and crafted into his texts. Thus, looking at languages always as an outsider, Conrad had a more than commonly developed consciousness of language, a more awakened philosophical curiosity about language, more easily developed when one speaks and thinks in more than one language. Metalinguistic questions, the relationship between thought and language, about the difference between writing and speech, and the oddity of language, constituting both a means to communication and also the medium of knowledge should also be an integral component of language learning for advanced students.

9) Do you think the outcomes of your competition could enrich the theory of Creative Writing and/or Literary Translation? In what ways?

I think creative writing activities undertaken by students, undergraduate and post-graduate, learning in this field could greatly enrich the theory and learning of literary translation as a discipline. Even if one looks on translation as a mimetic activity of the target text of a work of literature, the translation still cannot be envisaged solely as a replica of the source text; it must, at some level, be a question of re-writing, or re-enacting, the source text. Literary translation always entails a high degree of artistic and personal engagement with the source text. The translator must find some way of creating corresponding image-fields, prosody, sound-play and possibly rhyme as an organic whole whose coherence derives from deep semiotic structures in literary texts. Thus it is possible to envisage translation as invention, rather than replication. Indeed, literary

8 translations are often carried out by people who are established poets and creative writers themselves. The point is, the ultimate aim in establishing creative writing as a sub-discipline in its own right will help to more explicitly establish links between the practice of language learning, translation and the creative disciplines. And it is this sort of concerted and intensive linguistic activity, and intralingual approach, which is most likely to train us out of instrumental attitudes towards language. Nor is there any reason why creative writing, as a practice and discipline, should be seen as a purely monolingual affair. As I said in the article, creative writing, like literary translation, is also very much a process – a process of the writer coming into being as much as producing a written artefact. Creative writing, which itself as a discipline is still undergoing a process of self-definition, should, as a heterogeneous discipline, consist of a multiplicity of contemporary voices and viewpoints and world-views and dictions and attitudes towards form, a myriad of highly distinctive textualities, an intralingual and intercultural process.