Over at LitHub, Ana Menéndez asks that age-old question ‘Are We Different People in Different Languages,’ and, by way of a partial answer, writes: For me, language was a kind of initiation into multiple realities. For if one language could be certain of a table’s gender and another couldn’t be bothered, then what was trueContinue reading “Bilinguality And Being ‘Different People In Different Languages’”
Tag Archives: Hindi
On First And Second Languages V – Nabokov’s Lament
In his famous Afterword to Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov closed with: My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammelled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses–the baffling mirror, the black velvetContinue reading “On First And Second Languages V – Nabokov’s Lament”
On First and Second Languages-IV: Bringing Up Baby
I am often asked, by well-meaning friends, “Are you going to teach your daughter how to speak [Hindi, Urdu]?” My answer, invariably, is “I’ll try.” So I’m trying. My efforts at teaching my daughter Hindi-Urdu consist primarily of speaking to her in it, with occasional lapses into English. These lapses have become more frequent. IContinue reading “On First and Second Languages-IV: Bringing Up Baby”
On First and Second Languages – III
In the first post of this series, I described my relationship with English and Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani; in the second, that with German. The story in today’s post–that of Spanish in my life–is similar to the German tale: partial fluency, a long-standing, constantly procastinated commitment to formal study. The distinctive contrast lies in the nature of theContinue reading “On First and Second Languages – III”
On First and Second Languages – II
In my first post in this series, I wrote of my relationship with English and Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani – my first and second languages. I claimed partial fluency in three other languages: German, Spanish and Punjabi. I aspire to mastery of all three and have varying levels of optimism about the plausibility of my success in thisContinue reading “On First and Second Languages – II”
Reflections on Translations – IV: Embedded, Untranslated Text, and Tintin
Louis Mackay has an interesting article at the London Review of Books Blog (‘Tintin in China’, 11 June 2012) , which continues an examination–commenced by Christopher Taylor (LRB, 7 June 2012)–of the Chinese artist Zhang Congren’s influence on Tintin‘s creator Hergé. (In particular his influence on one of Hergé’s earliest Tintin adventures, The Blue Lotus.) Zhang influencedContinue reading “Reflections on Translations – IV: Embedded, Untranslated Text, and Tintin”
Reflections on Translation – I: Accepting and Assessing Translations
Like any reader with a sufficiently long career, I have read many works in translation. In doing so, I have been aware of the distance between the author and myself, of being subject to the same constraints as any other reader of translated works is. Still, I have never ceased to be surprised when IContinue reading “Reflections on Translation – I: Accepting and Assessing Translations”
Samir Chopra 