Marvelous! Learning a language is an act of bravery. You illustrate the abstract and sumptuous art of language learning very well here. And damn I didn’t know about any of that Lahiri news. Incredible. You’re a great writer and I thank you for writing these essays. Enjoy your ultimate inbetweenness. It’s really all we’ve got.
Interesting. I myself harbor a dream of writing a novel about North-South War St. Louis in Chinese. Probably won't happen because it would be a tremendous effort (Chinese not being my native language) and I doubt it would be publishable. At a minimum, it would require a heroic copyeditor. But I think writing fiction about the North-South War in Chinese for a Chinese-speaking audience who didn't necessarily spend much time studying the North-South War in school would open up new directions which are difficult to express in a purely American context. For example, in American English we call it 'the Civil War' yet in Chinese it's called the 'North-South War.' That already shifts the perspective (IIRC it's also called the 'North-South War' in Japanese).
Marvelous! Learning a language is an act of bravery. You illustrate the abstract and sumptuous art of language learning very well here. And damn I didn’t know about any of that Lahiri news. Incredible. You’re a great writer and I thank you for writing these essays. Enjoy your ultimate inbetweenness. It’s really all we’ve got.
Interesting. I myself harbor a dream of writing a novel about North-South War St. Louis in Chinese. Probably won't happen because it would be a tremendous effort (Chinese not being my native language) and I doubt it would be publishable. At a minimum, it would require a heroic copyeditor. But I think writing fiction about the North-South War in Chinese for a Chinese-speaking audience who didn't necessarily spend much time studying the North-South War in school would open up new directions which are difficult to express in a purely American context. For example, in American English we call it 'the Civil War' yet in Chinese it's called the 'North-South War.' That already shifts the perspective (IIRC it's also called the 'North-South War' in Japanese).