All those words!

10 Thursday Nov 2022

Posted by la Clarina in Scribbling, Things

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Historical fiction, Historical Thesaurus of English, Language, University of Glasgow

Among the many wonders of the Internet, there is the huge abundance of dictionaries, glossaries, thesauruses, lexicons, and such-like beautiful things.

I’ve always loved dictionaries of all sorts, old and new, and own shelves of them, and since a young age I’ve been known to ask Saint Lucia for the occasional dictionary as a gift… Apart from the obvious use, I just love to get lost among those columns of words, to make discoveries, to go on treasure hunts, to chase the elusive nuance of a meaning… Continue reading →

Fourth Draft

04 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by la Clarina in Scribbling

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fourth draft, Language, non-native speaker, writing

untitled-13 So, October is here, a full month has passed – and here we go.

Fourth draft, bearing in mind what I learned in Oxford. Mostly, that I need to trim the language…

“I’m not saying you make it easy for the reader,” I was told. “Just don’t make it so hard that they’ll give up.”

Sound advice. Not that I was deliberately trying to make it hard, mind you – only it seems that my grasp of what is “too hard” may need some adjusting. Also, I may have let myself be carried away with Elizabethan English. A little.

So now that’s what I’m aiming for: Elizabethan colour – just not too much.

I’ll let you know.

Salva

The Iridescence of Vowels

28 Thursday May 2015

Posted by la Clarina in Eccentricities, Lostintranslation

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Arthur Rimbaud, Language, Myla Goldberg, Pronunciation, Synaesthesia, Translation

Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season I liked mostly for its use of the sound of language in imagery and as a narrative device. I meant, things like this are just beautiful:

Consonants are the camels of language, proudly carrying their lingual loads. Vowels, however, are a different species, the fish that flash and glisten in the watery depths. Vowels are elastic and inconstant, fickle, and unfaithful.

Having mild synaesthesia, I’ve always associated sounds with colour. The iridescence of vowels I first found in Goldberg’s novel, and I fell in love with it: it was a little revelation, of the finding-words-for-a-hazy-thought variety. It is an idea I always use when trying to teach someone the joys, sorrows and mysteries of English pronunciation. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Continue reading →

The Old Music of Words

20 Saturday Sep 2014

Posted by la Clarina in Books, History, Scribbling

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Farrar Straus and Giroux, Hild, Historical fiction, Language, Nicola Griffith, Work in Progress

I confess, I haven’t read Nicola Griffith’s Hild. But I most certainly will, after finding (in Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s blog Work In Progress) this excellent article about the research and thought process that went into crafting the novel’s language.

I greatly admire Ms. Griffith’s vivid depiction of her approach to… not so much recreating period language, as rendering its feel – and its social and psychological implications as well.

So much so that Hild’s time period may not be my favourite, but I just have to read a book written this way.

I’ll let you know.

With Nuanced Beauty, ‘Hild’ Destroys Myths Of Medieval Womanhood (npr.org)
We All Have Our Magical Thinking: An Interview with Nicola Griffith (theparisreview.org)

Talking Shakespeare

12 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by la Clarina in Lostintranslation

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Historical fiction, Language, theatre, William Shakespeare, writing

2941 I turned forty yesterday, and my mother threw a surprise party for me, with a crowd of theatre and non-theatre friends, and we laughed, and sang, and improvved well into the wee hours, and the wine was very good – so today I am slightly vague…

You won’t hold it against me, will you, if just link this article on The American Scholar, on How to Talk Shakespeare.

While mostly aimed at improvisers in need of convincing pseudo-Shakespearean dialogue, it is of interest for writers too, with a series of no-nonsense tips that could come in handy when trying to devise an Elizabethan-ish language for historical fiction.

And besides, it is fun to read.