Speaking Swenglish
Aluminumfoiled Abba
I’m writing from the motherland this week. In preparation for the long flights required to get here, I loaded my netbook with works in progress to work on during my gadget’s long battery life. I then spent the longest plane ride catching up on movies and TV shows through the video on demand system and slept on the shorter legs because I’d watched too much crap instead of calibrating my bio-clock to minimize jetlag. I told myself there would be plenty of downtime at my parents’ house and I would get lots of writing done there. I’m very good at lying to myself.
There has been loads of time during my first week here that could be used for writing, but the same thing that always happens when I visit happened again. Spending my days speaking Swedish means I can’t put English worth a crap on the page. My sentences are all wrong. I reverse the noun-verb order and can’t find a synonym to save my soul. My sentence structure becomes super simple and my work read like a first graders’ “What I did this Summer” essay.
This visit, I have writing deadlines for paying gigs. So to keep my brain in English mode, I’m consciously only reading books in English , instead of cruising my mother’s well stocked library for Scandinavian mysteries. This is a trick I use in the U.S. when I sit down to write letters and emails home. I read a passage in Swedish or catch up on Swedish online news sites. I also play Swedish music. It works fairly well, although my mother says my spelling has become atrocious. I think she’s just forgotten that it’s always been that way—a trait that carries over into any language in which I attempt to write.
The problem with my method is that my brain has never fully entered Swedish mode this time, so I search for words during conversations and use a lot of “uhm” and “what do you call that thing that….” To add to the confusion, there are a lot of words that sound the same in English and Swedish, but have completely different meanings. For example, the word karl means “man”, but is pronounced just like the English word “car” if you speak my Swedish dialect. This made for some hilarious misunderstandings the other day when I told my friends about the new models I’d been test driving at a dealership.
I need to find a quick and reliable way of switching and calibrating my brain to the language I need/want to currently use. I don’t think this is much different from switching voice when working on more than one piece of writing at a time. I have to do that when working on articles, essays, and fiction at the same time. It’s probably also similar to switching between characters’ voices. Laura posted before on how she uses her drama training to accomplish just that and during Get Lit! earlier this year, Janet Fitch shared how she reads poetry before sitting down to write. She said it helps her find her voice and pay better attention to her sentences on the word level.
How about you? What tips and tricks can you share that will help me pop my brain into correct language/voice/character mode?
Tags: calibration, characters, Janet Fitch, language, voice
Asa I love how wild you are with all of your “test driving.”
It sounds like reading in English since you have to write in English while you’re in Sweden is a good tactic to keep your mind where it needs to be for paying gigs. I usually try to read something similar (at least in the same genre) to what I’m attempting to try to inspire myself. The years I was in graduate school and had to come up with poems on a weekly basis, I could hardly read anything but poetry. That’s why I had to switch to writing fiction when I graduated–I wanted to read some again.
Do you find that you only read fiction now that you’re writing that genre, or does poetry help with this as well. I’m always amazed at how tight control of language poets who write prose have. For this reason, I try to study poetry, but it’s not working out very well.
These days I’m am not reading much poetry. Except very occasionally, such as when I wrote about my mentor/friend’s translations of _The Dragonfly_ and when I go to a poetry reading group occasionally. I just needed a break from it. I think I’ll get hungry for it again someday.
Maybe this is the culprit: language may shape how you think. “…if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.”
So, maybe the secret is in prepping your brain to think about the kinds of things that the language itself insists upon.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?_r=1
AWESOME ARTICLE! Thanks for sharing Amaris. You knew I would love the gender stuff, didn’t you? The spacial expressions were also fascinating. The guy who wrote it is from Manchester and I’m heading that way tomorrow. Don’t think I’ll have a chance to stop by for a chat, but hopefully I can find his book in the store.
Asa, you should chat with him. Just try to find him at least!
Yeah, there wasn’t enough time during the short visit to England. Didn’t even find his book, but have it on my Amazon wish list now.