NOTES ATT ÖVERS ÄT TA

Tittar på Linns övningar

Ur ethel adnans Att skriva på ett främmande språk

Jag förälskade mig i den amerikanska engelskan. Jag blev hänförd av det kaliforniska sättet

FÖR-ÄLSKELSE

HÄN-FÖRELSE

Jag lärde mig saker på amerikansk engelska, som jag inte förmådde uttrycka på något av de språk som jag kunde, eftersom mina erfarenheter inom de språken var begränsade, eller tycktes mig begränsade, eller var alltför vardagliga för mig för att kunna rymma känslan av upptäckt.

att vara i, upptäcka, utforska ett annat språk med en nyförälskad och hänförd, nyfiken och glupsk eller hänsynslös och naiv ingång

 Låtsas att du är nyförälskad i språket eller försök försätta dig själv i ett förälskat tillstånd. Låt dig hänföras av stilen, jargongen, slangen

de ”inhemska sporternas” särskilda språk.

matchreferat

transkribera en sportkommentators kommentarer

CHOCKEN ATT DÖ

uttrycka något på det språk du arbetar med som du inte kan uttrycka på de språk du kan bättre,

DEN BEGRÄNSNING OCKSÅ, SOM UPPSTÅR I ATT KUNNA

FÖR MYCKET

ATT HA FÖR MÅNGA ERFARENHETER

att du är en hänsynslös kolonialherre eller naiv upptäcktsresande som tar sig uppför Amazonas. Språket du upptäcker är en flod full av faror och mirakel. Närma dig farorna och miraklen. Samla på dig skatter längs vägen, ryck dem hänsynslöst och naivt ur sitt sammanhang, beröva dem dess meningar och ge dem nya

JAG KÄNNER SÅ MYCKET FÖR DESSA ÖVNINGAR

ATT ÖVA ANNORLUNDA

LIKT ETT HJÄRTA

ÖVA I ANTI-ÖVNING

ÖVA I HÄRMA

so I will start with the history of my involvement with many languages and with the way the use of languages which were not the ones I should have normally spoken or used in writing poetry and prose, affected me

married my mother who, much younger than him, also represented a different culture. This was

ATT BÄR EN RE-PRESENTATION

A TROUBLED SOUL

MARCO

POLO

MARCO

POLO

THE SPORT OF POLO ON HORSE-BACK

BACK TO BLACK

BACK TO BASICS

HIT AND RUN

HIT

HOME RUN

RUNNING HOME TO

HOME TO CHRISTMAS

GIVING THANKS TO TURKEY SANDWICH

KILLING ME SOFTLY WITH THEIR SONG

ATT JAG KAN INTE KAN SKRIVA ORDET

HIS

ATT HANS ÄGANDE INTE KAN RYMMAS I MIN TEXT

ATT JAG SKÄMS FÖR ATT SKRIVA HONOM FÖLJA HONOM ERKÄNNA HONOM SOM FINNANDES I EN KÄRLEKSFÖRKLARING

LOVE ME

My mother had gone to a convent school until she was twelve; the French had convents in all the major cities, and the "educated" people learned French. Some French, at least. So my parents understood French, knew how to read and write it. My mother spoke, but did not study,

ATT TALA ATT HÖRA ATT STUDERA

he wrote letters to her in French. His language was romantic, in the tone of the German, Austrian, or Russian novels of the time. Many years later, because these letters were carefully kept and

were my mother's pride and joy, I read them. They could have been written within a work like Tolstoi's "War and Peace": they spoke of love, of war, of life and of death. They were written under the sound of the cannons, in black ink and a handwriting that drew the letters of the alphabet very clearly. They are lost today, because of the too many moves I made in my life, and the carelessness of my younger days.

WRITING FRENCH IN RUSSIAN GERMAN ROMANCE WAR

which charged a few selected students to "spy" on the others: anybody heard in class or in recreation speaking Arabic was punished and a little stone was immediately put into the pocket of that child; speaking Arabic was equated with the notion of sin. Most of the students spoke Arabic at home, but when they themselves became parents they started talking in either French or Arabic to their own children, or a mixture of the two languages.

SPRÅKET SOM EN SYNDIG HANDLING

ITS A SIN

page after page: "copy these lessons, he told me, and you will learn Arabic." So I remember that once in a while (did it last one year, two years, a single season? I can't tell) I used to sit and copy — which means reproduce faithfully, words after words whose alphabet I understood, but seldom their meaning — never trying to understand what I was writing: I think that I loved the act of writing things I did not understand, and I pretended that I was learning a language without effort, just by writing it down.

KOPIERA

SPRÅKET SOM HYPNOS

Copying a language I didn't know did not make me learn Arabic; and living in a school where Arabic was the forbidden thing made me feel very alone and want to give it up.

ATT LÄRA SIG DET FÖRBJUDNA

I started writing poetry at the age of twenty: it was a long poem that I called "Le Livre de la Mer," "The Book of the Sea," a poem which sees the interrelation between the sun and the sea as a kind of cosmic eroticism. But even here, later on, the fact that the poem was written in French presented me with a problem. My work in poetry is generally translated into Arabic and published in the two or three most important Arab literary magazines. "The Book of the Sea" is not yet translated for the very reason that the sea, as a noun, in French, is feminine, and the sun is a masculine word. In Arabic it is the contrary: the whole poem is developed along the metaphor of the sea being a women and the sun a warrior, or a masculine principle. So the poem is not only not translatable, it is, in a genuine sense, unthinkable in Arabic.

JAG NÖJDE MIG MED DEN UNDERLIGA FÖRSTÅELSE SOM JAG REDAN HADE

TITTA GENOM ETT FLOR

JAG HOPPSS ATT SÖKANDET INTE ÄR ÖVER