Literature on Language 2 - Impressions of English

Jonathan Marks, UK/Poland

Jonathan Marks is the author of English Pronunciation in Use Elementary (CUP 2007). He contributed a language awareness article on word formation to the second edition of the Macmillan English Dictionary (2007) and has just finished work on a soon-to-be-published Polish-English dictionary. You can find a previous Literature on Language contribution in Humanising Language Teaching January 2007.

This time, two extracts from contemporary fiction in which authors convey subjective impressions of the sound of English, and the associations it evokes.

Mikael Niemi's Swedish novel Populärmusik från Vittula is set in and around Pajala in northern Sweden, in the Torne valley close to the Finnish border, to the north of the Gulf of Bothnia. The narrator grows up in the 1960s in a community which is bilingual, but with Finnish more deeply rooted than Swedish. At one point, we're introduced to the concept knapsu, a pejorative adjective in the local Finnish dialect which is used to label activities which are traditionally done, or should be done, by women rather than men. But what about activities which have only arisen recently? What about performing rock music, for instance? It's an ambiguous case - it's got a predominantly masculine image, but on the other hand it can hardly be considered proper work and, significantly, it's done in English:

"Singing of any kind was considered effeminate, at least around Pajala and in a state of sobriety. To say nothing of doing it in English, that language that gave tough Finnish jaws nothing to chew on, so flabby that only girls could get top marks in it - that damp, quavering, snail-like gibberish invented by shore-dwellers stomping around in the mud, who'd never had to fight, who'd never suffered from hunger or cold - a language for idlers, grass-eaters, farting on their sofas, and so completely devoid of vitality that the tongue sounded like a chopped-off foreskin flapping around in the mouth."

Olga Tokarczuk is a contemporary Polish writer. In her story Szkocki miesiąc, the narrator spends a month in the house of a Scottish woman:

"When I wanted to ask her something, I carefully translated the question into English in my head, but after this operation it seemed a mile away from the Polish original. It seemed as if translating into English was like turning a pair of binoculars round, using them not to bring something closer, but to distance it. That's why I enjoyed these conversations - starting sentences with "well", which puts a kind of question mark over everything you say, relativises every thought. In that "well", the germ of every revolution withers, the idea of every manifesto falls apart."

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