Problems with Inventing New Pidgins, Creoles, Dialects, Idioms

A number of modernist authors have written entire books in invented "languages" -- English, ornamented by neologisms, anachronisms, distorted grammar, and attempts to mimic accents and regional speech. "A Clockwork Orange" is probably the best known. Matthiessen's "Far Tortuga" is one of the best. I read this book as a point of comparison to recent attempts by Mike McCormack, Eimear McBride, and others, to create new forms of English grammar in fiction, and it seems to me that the idea of reworking grammar goes back to modernist experiments by Stein, Joyce, and others, that didn't always have to do with dialects.

The Scottish writer James Kelman was often spoken of as an heir to Kafka (in reviews as far back as 1994, and probably before); he has written a number of books experimenting with Scots and English, as a way of expressing power struggles. "Translated Accounts" may be his most radical attempt to have unconventional English represent colonial and institutional violence and injustice. The book is 54 short chapters of eyewitness accounts, which the reader is meant to take as a dossier of atrocities, each of them translated from unnamed languages. Most of the testimonials are in one of several kinds of nonstandard English:

1. Texts that seem to be translated with the help of a machine (these days that would be Google). As one critic puts it: "... commonly, sentences are ungrammatical, misleading, and feature strange pasted-in pieces of vocabulary, suggesting a misused dictionary or computing resource: ‘Our attention now may be drawn to situations inter as between owner of the vicious dog leaping the garden gate that has bitten the skinny little child.’" (Sally Mapstone, review titled "Common Sense," LRB)

2. Texts that seem to be recovered from corrupted digital files. All the reviews I've read mention one chapter in particular, in which a violent event is recorded in fragments, because the text keeps being interrupted by code fragments: "and its laughingand andto the guest in our country ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌Summaryinformationhatlanguageor@...." and so on (p. 30).

3. Texts where the "translations" "have been modified by someone of a more senior office," as Kelman says in his Preface.

4. Texts translated by persons not "native to the tongue" -- as he also says in the Preface.

I think it might be possible to add to this list, but these are the basic categories. The problem with the novel, I think, isn't its lack of direction or "plot" (as some reviewers said), or its hedging about actual histories, but its management of these "translations."

The fact that modes of "translation" (invented idioms) vary from one chapter to the next, while the number of witnesses also varies (readers cannot be sure how many people's accounts are transcribed in the book) means that readers will pay special attention to style in order to deduce the identities of the narrators. For that reason it matters that the strategies are not consistent, or consistently believable as translations.

Mapstone noted that sometimes Scots (specifically Glaswegian) sneaks in even though Kelman apparently didn't intend it. There are also chapters that fall into a literary style emulating translation, in which Kelman's own (literary) voice can be heard: "Yes she offered herself to me. I never heard her laughter. She was a girl. Her laughter. She would have laughed, who does not laugh. I would have walked with her and our lips could not meet." (p. 157)

Many other passages, however, register Kelman's inconsistent and, I think, inexperienced sense of what a bad translation is.

"Authoritys and other powers show ignorance of a crucial tautology that may be formulated if roughly, having sense as follows, we have been selected be virtue of our merits, these merits are worthy selection criteria. Further, that these merits, being specific, are of universal application. Upon selection power is/was taken from them [democratically-elected governments, dutiful-appointed]." (p. 154)

If I read this slowly and attentively, I have problems. Why is "authorities" misspelled? It is presumably a translator's error, or a transcriber's, and so I am on the alert for similar misspellings. If the translator is partly illiterate, that will have certain predictable consequences. The main portion of this paragraph is eloquent in an institutional mode, but under what circumstances could a long, well-formed sentence of this kind be interrupted by an ungrammatical phrase ("having sense as follows")? If the original text was competent institutional speech in its original language, and it was translated by a person who knew enough of about administrative speech to capture phrases such as "ignorance of a crucial tautology," then how could a phrase like "having sense as follows" end up in the transcript? The square-bracketed interpolation raises a similar question: it clarifies the antecedent ("them") in an elaborate and technical fashion, but it has a mistake ("dutiful-appointed"). What kind of speaker could have the competence to insert that bracketed correction but make a mistake as simple -- and as unusual -- as "dutiful-appointed"?

This is the problem with "Translated Accounts" and by extension any invented pidgin, creole, dialect, or idiom: it draws attention to itself, and so it needs to sustain very close reading. Kelman's writing here is not up to this: he's better when he mimics Glaswegian, Scottish English, and administrative or legal English. I can imagine a version of this book done exclusively by repeated use of Google Translate: it would be consistent and often much stranger than this book's voices. Or a version produced by actual translators, presumably partly incompetent ones, hired by the author.

Without strategies like those it is difficult to write with the precision and attention necessary to create, from nothing, an entirely new way of writing.