Living Between Languages

Editing a writer who works in a second language, or a language other than their native tongue, means knowing what to smooth out and what to protect – polishing away anything that could pull the reader out of a story, while preserving the unexpected phrasing that makes the voice distinctive. I call this working with ‘the magical and the illogical’.

I’m a native English speaker living in Spain. And, although I’ve never dared to write in Spanish, I have enough experience living between languages to know what it’s like when you reach for a word and the word vanishes – simply escapes your grasp.

Often, when that happens, we make a grab for the next best thing. A literal translation from our first or other languages, or an amalgam of different words and structures. A common one for native Spanish speakers translating themselves to English is to mix up ‘say’ and ‘tell’, for example: ‘She said me the truth’.

An example from my own life is the tendency to end words with ‘o’ in Spanish that actually end in ‘a’. So that instead of saying, ‘I’m on the final stretch’ – la recta final, I’ll say, ‘I’m in the final rectum’ – el recto final. Not good!

As an editor working with authors who write in English as a second language, those are the kinds of things I will fix to avoid pulling the reader out of the story – you want to kidnap your reader, right from the very first line and keep them with you inside the story until you decide to release them.

There are also many advantages to having access to more than one language that multilingual writers can lean into, and that, as an editor, I will encourage.

Why Multilingual Writers Often Produce Unexpectedly Beautiful Language

‘Say it wrong to say it right’ is also known as the ‘burnt tongue’ technique. A phrase – it is believed – first coined by Tom Spaunbauer and later used and discussed by his pupils and followers, most notably Chuck Palahniuk in his part-memoir, part-craft book Consider This. Where he defines it thus:

A way of saying something, but saying it wrong, in an awkward and interesting way, twisting it to slow down the reader. Forcing the reader to read close, maybe read twice, not just skim along a surface.

It is used, as Palahniuk says, to decelerate the reader and make them think, just a little, about the words they have absorbed. But the other reason to ‘say it wrong to say it right’ is the one that I love best, and that reason is: to say it unusually and intriguingly. This is something that multilingual writers do naturally and brilliantly.

Before Spaunbauer and Palahniuk, Nabokov was a prime example of ‘say it wrong to say it right’. His multilingual upbringing, along with exile from his homeland, necessitating his integration into other countries and languages, shaped his unique use of English, so that, as Maria Kager has written: ‘… one can see the manner in which Nabokov develops characters in a way that mines linguistic complexities, and that would have been unthinkable had Nabokov not experienced a language switch himself.’ 

Nabokov also had a precursor, describing his jumping ship from writing in Russian to English as his ‘Conradical switch’. Conrad – appropriately described by Salman Rushdie as the ‘trans-lingual creator of wanderers’ – was fluent in Polish, French and English, and was, like Nabokov, a consummate stylist, acting as a figurehead for multilingual writers and predating a range of current thought in literary criticism, as well as writing trends.

By way of a more modern example, I recently finished reading André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name. Aciman was born in Egypt to parents of Turkish and Italian origin, raised in a French-speaking home, where family members also spoke Italian, Greek, Ladino and Arabic, and attended British schools in Alexandria. Therefore, Call Me by Your Name is full of delicious examples of ‘say it wrong to say it right’. For instance:

After weeks of wanting and waiting and – let’s face it – begging and being made to hope and fight every access of hope, I’d be devastated.

Did you read ‘every access of hope’ and change it in your mind to ‘every aspect of hope’? And then go back and realise, no – ‘every access of hope’ is beautiful and perfect. A touch weird-sounding, perhaps. Beautiful and perfect, definitely. Because this description isn’t only about hope as a thing; about the elements that comprise it, but also how you arrive there: how hope infiltrates you. Or in this case, how to resist that infiltration of it into your heart.

Knowing What to Keep and What to Fix

To my mind, those are a few examples of the magic, the extra special touch available to the multilingual writer that will slow the reader down, make them think about and enjoy the word choices, without being confused or suddenly expelled from the world they are immersed in.

However, not every unusual phrase creates the effect Nabokov or Aciman achieve. Sometimes a reader pauses because a sentence is intriguing and sometimes they pause because they think they have come across an error. The need to avoid pulling the reader out of the story applies to all writers, mono- or multilingual. Anything that gives them a glimpse of the world outside of the story is going to be a bump in the road.

As I said, this happens to all writers in many different ways, but the way it can occur specifically in a multilingual writer’s work is when the inconsistencies are such that instead of the reader thinking, ‘that line is deliciously strange and I love it’, they think ‘hang on, I’ve found a mistake’. For example, in grammar or sentence structure. Or it’s just a step too far in the ‘say it wrong to say it right’ stakes.

Returning to my experience of living in Spain as a native English speaker and editing second-language manuscripts, here are some common examples from native Spanish speakers writing in English:

• making direct translations from Spanish, resulting in examples like using actually to mean currently
• using persons instead of people
• describing an enjoyable event as funny rather than fun
• adding redundant articles, and treating uncountable nouns as countable

So, for instance, ‘Actually, I live in Madrid and the persons are very friendly’, when ‘Currently, I live in Madrid and people are very friendly’ would be more natural.

These examples reflect differences between Spanish and English vocabulary and grammar rather than a lack of skill and can result in some extraordinary and striking language choices. But, as an editor for multilingual writers, or non-native English writers, the examples above are the kind of bumps in the road I would polish out rather than keep.

When Breaking the Rules Is the Right Choice: Xiaolu Guo

There are – of course – as many ways to write as there are writers and some might disagree with the idea of polishing out these inconsistencies.

The novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers follows a young Chinese woman, Zhuang, who moves to London to study English and falls in love with an Englishman. The novel begins in deliberately broken English and gradually becomes more linguistically sophisticated as Zhuang’s language skills develop.

Here she describes the disorientating experience of arriving at Heathrow Airport in London:

Looking outside the massive sky. Thinking air staffs need to set a special time-zone for long-distance airplanes, or passengers like me very confusing about time. When a body floating in the air, which country she belonging to?

The language is clearly “incorrect”, but it’s also perfect for allowing the reader to really inhabit Zhuang’s mind and her feelings of complete bewilderment in that moment of touchdown in a strange country.

The author, Xiaolu Guo, is a Chinese-British writer. She employs language as a device for exploring themes of migration, language, identity, cultural displacement and belonging. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is especially poignant in this regard as it demonstrates how language learning shapes thought, relationships, and self-expression. Zhuang’s evolving English mirrors her changing understanding of both herself and the world around her.

Smooth, But Not Too Smooth: What I Look for as an Editor of Non-Native English Writers

What I bring to the writers I work with is deciding, together, how much strangeness stays and how much goes. My role is not to remove every trace of a writer’s linguistic background. Instead, it is to preserve the language that makes the voice distinctive, while smoothing away the moments that might pull a reader out of the story.

Xiaolu Guo is brilliant at really putting language to use on many levels, not only on a line-by-line basis of description, but by using “mistakes” and inconsistencies to explore wider themes, while simultaneously developing her characters and her central message. I think that is a brilliant way to use language.

However, as an editor, I take each writer and each manuscript on a case-by-case basis. Every story is its own world and what works for one may not work for another. There might be manuscripts where it is best to avoid Guo’s level of experimentation and give your reader a smoother ride.

But not too smooth – just enough that we keep the reader fully captured and immersed by the unique tale you have to tell and, at the same time, preserving the magic that comes from your multilingual pen.

How Might I Help You?

This is the work I love most: protecting what makes your voice yours while clearing the path for the reader to have the most enjoyable experience they can. If you’re looking for an editor who understands both the magic and the need to be attentive to inconsistencies, then you’ve found the right person! You can reach me on my contact page.