I think Alvarez and Christie are a weird comparison, in this situation
It's not a weird comparison. I have the same reaction to spy novels that pepper the text with foreign words and don't explain them.
I want to understand what the writer is saying. Any writer. White, PoC, whatever. I just want to understand. I think that communicating with the audience is part of the point.
Whether the writer is being unclear because she expects the audience to be bilingual or because she DOESN'T expect the audience to be bilingual and WANTS to confuse them, the end result is still confusion. And I don't see that one kind of confusion is any better than the other because the writer's reasons for causing it differ.
And Googling isn't always as useful as all that. I do know this, because I've tried it with other writers who pull the same thing. Foreign words often shift form according to tense or declension. It isn't always possible to find the words online in a particular form that you're looking for. Or you can find and translate the words, but you're translating an idiom which, if you take it literally, is nonsensical. So I'm left with a translated phrase (probably badly translated, considering that I don't speak the language) and no concept of what it means.
That's happened to me a number of times. It doesn't add anything to my experience of the book. It just makes me feel that I'm missing a lot, because I'm pretty sure I'm not grasping all the meanings or connotations or idioms even when I look the words up.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2009-05-24 09:22 pm (UTC)It's not a weird comparison. I have the same reaction to spy novels that pepper the text with foreign words and don't explain them.
I want to understand what the writer is saying. Any writer. White, PoC, whatever. I just want to understand. I think that communicating with the audience is part of the point.
Whether the writer is being unclear because she expects the audience to be bilingual or because she DOESN'T expect the audience to be bilingual and WANTS to confuse them, the end result is still confusion. And I don't see that one kind of confusion is any better than the other because the writer's reasons for causing it differ.
And Googling isn't always as useful as all that. I do know this, because I've tried it with other writers who pull the same thing. Foreign words often shift form according to tense or declension. It isn't always possible to find the words online in a particular form that you're looking for. Or you can find and translate the words, but you're translating an idiom which, if you take it literally, is nonsensical. So I'm left with a translated phrase (probably badly translated, considering that I don't speak the language) and no concept of what it means.
That's happened to me a number of times. It doesn't add anything to my experience of the book. It just makes me feel that I'm missing a lot, because I'm pretty sure I'm not grasping all the meanings or connotations or idioms even when I look the words up.