12

Bilingual Writers

A ll groups of people have exceptional members, and

it is with pleasure that I mention some of “our” exceptional people
in the next two chapters. Few of us bilinguals will become like them
(and we don’t need to) but they are, in a linguistic sense, our
Edmund Hillarys or Tenzing Norgays, and they have their place in
our story.
In this chapter I will concentrate on bilingual writers, since writ-
ing is a specific area of language and probably one of the hardest
cognitive skills that humans acquire. The language in which we
learn to read and write fluently in our youth will normally remain
the language we will use to write in for the rest of our lives. Of
course, some people do write in another language, or several others,
but they may not feel totally at ease doing so. However, in the small
world of professional literary writing, one finds marked exceptions
involving bilinguals. There are some bilingual authors who write
books in their second (or third) language—an incredible feat when
one thinks about how hard it is to write literature in one’s own na-
tive language. And, even more exceptional, there are those who
write literature in both of their languages. This chapter will be
about these outstanding writers.

134
 bilingual writers

Writing in Your Second (or Third) Language

Many writers are bi- or multilingual, but they decide, despite this,
to stick to one language for writing—usually their first language.
Hence, Isaac B. Singer, for example, the Polish American writer and
Nobel Prize winner, always wrote in his native language, Yiddish,
even though he knew many other languages, notably Polish and
Hebrew. Czesáaw Miáosz, also a Nobel laureate, was fluent in Polish,
Russian, English, Lithuanian, and French, but wrote only in Polish.
A subgroup of these writers are those who choose to author their
books in their most proficient writing language, even though it
may not be their first language. Two examples come to mind. The
first is Richard Rodriguez, the author of the best seller Hunger of
Memory, whose very first language was Spanish but whose family
switched over to English when he started going to school. Hence,
English became his dominant language during his adolescence and
definitely his writing language. The other example is Eva Hoffman,
who moved to Canada from Poland when she was thirteen. She
wrote her Lost in Translation in English, the language of her high
school and university studies. Her book, like Rodriguez’s, is a mas-
terly account of her intellectual and human journey into main-
stream American society and culture. Both authors have chosen to
use English as their written language and have developed strong,
sometimes unique, literary voices. Of course, as bilinguals them-
selves, they have the advantage of being able to oversee some of the
translations that are done of their works, but they do not venture
into literary creation in their less dominant language.
There are authors, however, who decide to write in their second
or even their third language even though they have good writing
proficiency in their first language. Probably the most famous is

135
 b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s

Joseph Conrad, the early twentieth-century author of such classics

as Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent. Conrad
was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Poland, where he
lived until the age of sixteen. He then lived in France for four years
and became fluent in French. He joined the English merchant navy
and learned to speak and write English. When he ended his sailing
career at the age of thirty-five, he had already written some prose in
English, and after that he became a full-time novelist. What is espe-
cially interesting is that he did not write his books in Polish, his
first language, or in French, a language he wrote fluently, but in En-
glish, his third language.
According to Conrad’s biographer Frederick Karl, his decision
not to write in Polish was a way of separating himself from his fa-
ther and his culture and country. Unfortunately, neither the British
nor the Poles understood his situation; the British said that he was
a Pole in disguise and the Poles said the reverse (a typical bicultural
quandary). Conrad’s English prose was superlative and required al-
most no editing, but in speaking he did retain a strong accent,
which prevented him from lecturing publicly. Here, according to
Karl, is what Conrad told a Belgian critic some twenty years after
having settled down in England:

My pronunciation [in English] is rather defective to this

day. Having unluckily no ear, my accentuation is uncer-
tain, especially when in the course of a conversation I be-
come self-conscious. In writing I wrestle painfully with
that language which I feel I do not possess but which
possesses me—alas.1

Conrad retained complete fluency in Polish and French, and at

home he would often carry on conversations in all three languages.

136
 bilingual writers

He also gave advice to translators who were translating his books

into French and Polish.
Agota Kristof, a Hungarian-French bilingual, is a contemporary
author who writes novels only in her second language. Kristof fled
Hungary with her husband and their four-month-old baby during
the 1956 uprising (she was twenty-one at the time) and came to set-
tle down in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. She knew no other language
than Hungarian when they first arrived, and she worked for a num-
ber of years in a local watchmaking factory. She then went back to
school and studied French, thanks to a grant from the local univer-
sity, and started on her literary career some twelve years after hav-
ing moved to Switzerland. Her books, such as The Notebook (1986), a
story of twin brothers lost in a country torn apart, have been trans-
lated into numerous languages. Her autobiography, The Illiterate
(2004), recounts her forced emigration to Western Europe.2

Writing in Both Languages

As I have said, writing is a difficult skill, in whatever language, and
writing literature is an art that only a handful of people ever mas-
ter. And yet there is a group of exceptional bilinguals who write
their works in two languages, not just one. I wish to examine those
authors who went from writing in their first language to writing in
their second language, those writers, even fewer, who started with
their second language and then “moved back,” as it were, to writing
in their first, and authors who write bilingual works, using both
languages in the same piece.
Some bilingual writers who immigrated at one or more points in
their lives moved from writing in their first language to writing in
their second or third language. Three such authors come to mind.

137
 b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1899 and

was brought up trilingual in Russian, French, and English. At the
age of twenty, he went to Cambridge, where he read French and
Slavic literature. Nabokov became well known as an émigré writer
in Russian, publishing such works as Mashenka, The Gift, and The
Eye in that language. But later he wrote in English and became fa-
mous in the English-speaking world for such novels as The Real Life
of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, Ada, and Lolita. Nabokov also trans-
lated Russian works into English and English works into Russian
(such as Alice in Wonderland).
The second author in this group is Samuel Beckett. Born in Ire-
land, a native speaker of English, he learned French at school and
obtained a bachelor’s degree in Romance languages and English.
He never really used French in his daily life, however, until he be-
came an instructor at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris when
he was twenty-two. His first works—tales and poems—were in En-
glish. In 1937, at the age of thirty-one, he moved to Paris perma-
nently but continued to write in English; Murphy, for instance, was
published in 1938. During World War II he took part in the Resis-
tance in France and then went into hiding in the Vaucluse region.
In 1951 his first French novel, Molloy, appeared, and from then on he
wrote in both French and English. At that point, according to Eliz-
abeth Beaujour, he stated that he didn’t know in advance what lan-
guage he would use for his next work.3 Beckett received the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1969 for his contribution to the literature of
two languages.
The third author is Elsa Triolet, born Elsa Kagan, a Russian
French novelist of the twentieth century. She spent her early years
in Russia and moved to France when she was twenty-two, after hav-
ing met her first husband, André Triolet. Her early works were in
Russian (In Tahiti, Camouflage). After divorcing Triolet, she married
138
 bilingual writers

the French poet and novelist Louis Aragon, and the two had par-
allel literary careers. Her first book in French was Good Evening,
Theresa, in 1938. It was followed by many other works, including A
Fine of Two Hundred Francs, which was awarded the prestigious Prix
Goncourt.
Elizabeth Beaujour has analyzed the reasons that led such au-
thors to shift over to writing in their second (or third) language.
One obvious reason is to be able to write for a wider audience. If
you live in a country other than the one in whose language you are
writing (you live in France and are writing in Russian, for example),
you simply don’t have that many readers for your works, even if the
émigré community is quite large (as it happened to be for Nabokov
and Triolet).
A second reason has to do with how the works are translated into
the author’s other language (Triolet’s books in Russian, for exam-
ple, were translated into French). Bilingual authors are rarely happy
with the job that outside translators do with their work and they
often edit the translations extensively. In the end, they frequently
resort to translating their own works into their other language.
But the process of self-translation turns out to be particularly tor-
menting for many (Beaujour talks of “the hell of self-translation”),
and many bilingual authors express dissatisfaction with their own
translations. Beaujour talks of Triolet’s perception of the act of
translating as the “terrifying spectre of noncoincidence with her-
self.”4 More recently, Ariel Dorfman wrote the following about his
translation/adaptation of his book Heading South, Looking North: A
Bilingual Journey.

My rewriting of the memoir in Spanish after I completed

it in English followed the structure, story, explorations of
history and the mind which its rival language had set
139
 b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s

out. Spanish had to overflow its words inside the house

that English built. And yet, how changed was that house
as it filled with Spanish. It was not the same book.5

A third reason that some bilingual writers move from writing

in their first to writing in their second language relates to the
complementarity principle: bilinguals use their languages for dif-
ferent purposes, in different domains of life, with different people.
Different aspects of life often require different languages. Beaujour
relates that Elsa Triolet realized that her Russian novel, Camouflage,
had been written in the “wrong” language, since it takes place in
France amid characters who speak, think, and feel French. Beau-
jour also tells us that when Nabokov Russianized his English best
seller Lolita, he had real problems finding appropriate terms for
descriptions dealing with cars, clothing, items of furniture, and
so on.6
Even though bilingual authors have good reasons for starting to
write in their second or third language, it is nonetheless difficult.
Triolet talks about the actual physical pain of writing her first book
in French (Good Evening, Theresa), and Nabokov says the same thing
in a more evocative way: he said it was like learning how to handle
things again after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion!7
As I stated at the beginning of this section, there is another
group of bilingual writers, a far smaller group, who start writing in
their second language and then revert to writing in their first lan-
guage, something they had not done before. I had the pleasure of
meeting such a writer in Paris when I was preparing this book.
Nancy Huston was born in Canada and she lived there for a num-
ber of years before moving to the United States, where she went to
college. She left for Paris in 1973, where she did her master’s thesis
with semiologist Roland Barthes. She stayed on in France, and
140
 bilingual writers

when she started to write, she decided to do so in her second lan-

guage, French. Her first book, Les Variations Goldberg, came out in
1981 (The Goldberg Variations appeared in English many years later).
She gives the following explanation for her decision to write in
French:

I suppose it was to do with the fact that my mother

tongue was too emotionally fraught at the time. I pre-
ferred something more distant, more intellectual . . . I
was in denial of my roots. No childhood, no mother, no
problems. That worked for a number of years and then it
stopped.8

Huston pursued her career as a French-language author for a num-

ber of years before deciding to write a novel in English, Plainsong,
which came out some twelve years after her first book in French.
She says of her return to English after her “first efforts” in French:

My first efforts at fiction . . . tried to be savvy . . . I was

starved for theoretical innocence. I longed to write long,
free, wild, gorgeous sentences that explored all the regis-
ters of emotion, including—why not?—the pathetic. I
wanted to tell stories wholeheartedly, fervently, passion-
ately—and to believe in them, without dreading the deri-
sive comments of the theoreticians.9

In a newspaper interview in 2008, she explained that French had

become the language of exchange with her tax advisor and her chil-
dren’s teachers. Her return to English coincided with her return to
the piano (from playing the harpsichord), “because,” she said, “I’m
strong enough to accept emotions.”10
Nancy Huston now writes in both her languages and translates
her works both ways. She states that translation is hard, tedious
141
 b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s

work, and that once she has finished translating a work, she sud-
denly feels that she could never have written the work in the other
language!11 In 2005 Huston won the prestigious Prix Femina for
Ligne de faille, which she had in fact first written in English (Fault
Lines) and then translated into French.
While bilingual authors generally choose one language in which
to write, writing in their first language only, or their second (or
third), or alternating from one to the other, depending on the cir-
cumstance, a few decide to write bilingual works in which both lan-
guages are present on the same page (see Chapter 5 for a presenta-
tion of the bilingual language mode). Elizabeth Beaujour finds that
in the twilight of their career, most bilingual writers are not satis-
fied keeping their two languages separate. They are in search of
unity and wish their writing to exist in both languages. They can
achieve this by making sure that all of their works are published in
both languages (something that Beckett did, and Huston is cur-
rently doing), and they can have their characters act as bilinguals
do, in a monolingual and also a bilingual way. Beaujour mentions
Nabokov who, in Ada, had his characters speak three languages and
shift from one language to another quite freely.12
Today, one does not need to be so advanced in one’s literary ca-
reer to write bilingually, as can be seen in the prose of two Hispanic
American contemporary writers. Junot Díaz, a professor of writing
at MIT and winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his
book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, brings a lot of Spanish
into his English prose (this particular code-switching style is often
known as Spanglish). Here is a very short extract:

[They] shrieked and called him gordo asqueroso! He for-

got the perrito, forgot the pride he felt when the women
in the family had called him hombre.13
142
 bilingual writers

Susana Chávez-Silverman is a Hispanic American author who has

traveled in the Americas and holds a position at Pomona College
in California. Her book Killer Crónicas: Bilingual Memories (2004) is
based on the e-mails that she sent to colleagues and friends when
she spent thirteen months in Buenos Aires. She too uses a blend
of English and Spanish, but with a frequency of switches that is
higher than normal, at least in the written mode. Here are a few
lines from the beginning of one of her chapters:

Como northern Califas girl, of course, había visto mucho

nature espectacular; the Pacific Ocean como yarda de
enfrente, for starters, y los sequoia giant redwoods. Yes,
especially los redwoods. Pero también esa enredadera,
don’t know its name, the one with the huge, velvety deep
purple blossoms y las fragile, hairy leaves and stems
como patas de tarántula.14

Chávez-Silverman says that she remains bilingual in her writing so

as to resist having to choose between the two languages; she hopes
that her book will help establish a new trend for bilingual minority
writing.
The list of bilingual writers working in their two languages, sepa-
rately (usually) or together, is not long. As Elizabeth Beaujour says,
the phenomenon remains rare:

While it is not unusual for a writer to be a bilingual, it is

still rare for a major modern writer to be bilingual or
polyglot as a writer and to create a body of work of more
or less equal weight in more than one language.15

As time goes by and bilingualism in all its aspects is more widely

accepted, we may discover other writers, themselves bilingual, who
never dared show their work in their other language (either the
143
 b i l i n g u a l a d u l t s

first or the second, or both), or who never managed to get it pub-

lished. A fine example of one such writer is the much-acclaimed
Jack Kerouac, the internationally known American novelist of the
Beat generation. His On the Road, published in 1957 and translated
into twenty-seven languages, remains a favorite among many for its
anti-establishment, cross-country tale. What few people know is
that Kerouac came from a French Canadian family established in
Lowell, Massachusetts, and that he spoke French with his parents
until the age of six; it was only then that he acquired English.
Still fewer people realize that Kerouac wrote at least two books in
French (the Quebec French variety known as joual): La nuit est ma
femme and, discovered only in 2008, Sur le chemin. The latter (despite
its title) is a different book from On the Road and was written
shortly after the 1951 version of Kerouac’s best seller. It was never
published in French but Kerouac did translate it into English as
Old Bull in the Bowery. Let us hope that many other Sur le chemins,
stored away in filing cabinets or in archives, will one day be pub-
lished so that we can admire the bilingual creativity of their au-
thors.

144