On Exophony

Or What Possesses a Writer to Write In a New Language?

By Mina Witteman

The Start of a Writing Career

My writing career started, in a way, before I could even write. Or read. My father was an architect, and he would often work on his designs at the kitchen table. I would join him at the table (on the table!) with my very own notebook. While he made his drawings and puzzled over windows and doors, rooms and walls, roofs and chimneys, and everything else an architect puzzles over, I would dream up stories of the people who were going to live in the home he was designing. I dream up what the inside of that home had to look like, what color the walls were, where the table and chairs had to go, what they needed in the kitchen, in the bedrooms, in the bathroom, and, most importantly, who these people were that were going to spend their lives in this new building. I would not only dream it all up, but I would also scribble it down in my notebook, the specs. It was my first foray in writing in a "new" language.

I never stopped writing. In high school, I'd grow bored quickly, but my school had the perfect antidote against (my!) boredom. If you were sent out of class, you had to report to the vice-principal and he would assign writing a two-page essay as punishment. When, after a few weeks of daily reporting to him, the vice-principal realized that what he thought was a corrective punishment, only delighted me to no end. He changed course and ordered me to write the essays in French, rather than Dutch, my native tongue. It didn't matter. I still loved it more than sitting in class and pretending to be engaged. Weeks later, he changed course again and ordered me to write the essays in German, then weeks after that I had to write them in English. That was my second foray in writing in a new language. I went on to have career at mostly English-speaking businesses. I studied the English language and obtained my proficiency in English at Cambridge University. 

So when, my career as a middle grade writer in The Netherlands, took off, I quickly realized that to break into US Publishing--ever the dreamer!--chances of having my work translated into English were very slim, because, you know, who speaks Dutch in the US publishing world? If I wanted this dream to come true, I had to write in English.

Writing In Not Your Native Tongue? 

Would that be too tall an order? I knew famous examples of exophonic writers. Kader Abdollah (pseudonym of Hossein Sadjadi Ghaemmaghami Farahani) was born in Iran in 1954, where he graduated in 1977 from the University of Tehran with a degree in physics. Along the way, he had become politically active and in 1985 he had to flee the country. In 1988, Mr. Abdollah settled in The Netherlands as a political refugee. He taught himself the Dutch language by reading children's books and poetry, and he started writing stories in Dutch. His 1993 debut, De adelaars (Eagles), was awarded one of the most prestigious Dutch literary prizes. 

Vladimir Nabokov grew up in Russia and learned French and English from his governesses. He relocated to Europe but with the rise of Hitler, he and his wife realized they had to move further away and in 1940, the family emigrated to the US. Before that move, he had already finished his first English-language novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Nabokov does use many Russian and French words in his English prose. he uses many literary devices to make it easier for monolingual readers to understand his stories, often preparing the reader for a foreign word with typography, verbal warnings, semantic explanations, or even translations. Except for the use foreign words in his English novels, Nabokov never wrote in Russian again. 

And then, of course, there was Samuel Beckett, who one day halfway into a story decided that from that moment on he would write in French only. Beckett considered his more limited knowledge of the French language an advantage. It forced him to go straight to the core of a story. It kept him from fluffing up his prose. Beckett too never wrote in his native tongue again. 

Learning the Ropes

Though I know that these writers are decidedly out of my league, it did tell me that it could be done. I immersed myself in the English-speaking world, moving to San Francisco and later to Berkeley, and started writing in English. It's not always easy. I sometimes miss the ease of wordplay that I so like in Dutch. I often compare it to an illustrator who decides to work with a different medium. I have to work harder to find the right words, like an illustrator has to work to find the right strokes. I do not yet have that fingerspitzengefühl for the language that I have in my native Dutch. To build my vocabulary, the thesaurus is my best friend. I read English dictionaries and encyclopedias for pleasure. If I don't know a word, I look it up in an English dictionary rather than an English-Dutch one. And I read and read and read and read: fiction, non-fiction, newspapers, magazines. Everything in English that I can get my hands on. I love the challenge. I love studying texts, dissect sentences, pore over grammar and syntax. I love seeing the progress I make. I love every time I realize that, slowly but surely, I am mastering the language, that I play with words again, that I am finally finding that fingerspitzengefühl. 

And You?

SCBWI is an international organization. We, its members, come from all corners of the world. We love writing in our native languages, but quite a few of us from outside the English-speaking world, dream of being published in the US too. No one can stop that dream but you. If you want to write in English, or in any other language that is not your native one, go for it. Kader Abdolah, Vladimir Nabokov and Samuel Beckett could do it. So can you! 

 

Mina Witteman is a Dutch published author, who writes in English and Dutch. She lives in Berkeley, California. In The Netherlands, she has seven middle grade novels out, a Little Golden Book, and some forty short stories in children's magazines and read-aloud anthologies. Her novel Boreas en de zeven zeeën (Boreas and the Seven Seas) was a focus title of the 2019 Dutch National Children's Book Week. An educational edition aimed at reluctant readers of the same book came out in 2022.