lunes, 8 de julio de 2019

Is English better for literature?

Jorie Graham, a trilingual American poet, says that the English language is better for poetry than the Romance Languages. (watch her video on YouTube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5zEuks2DmI.) She is trilingual, having been brought up in Italian, then in French and finally came to the US, and writes her poetry in English.
Joseph Conrad said that he wrote in English because "it is so plastic." He spoke with a thick Polish accent but of all languages he spoke he preferred English.
Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian novelist, attained his success with Lolita, the novel he wrote in English. Read it and you will detect the artful arrangement of words he mastered in his English prose. I cannot judge his Russian.
Arthur Koestler spoke Hungarian, Russian, French, Spanish, German and English, the language he ended up using in his later writings.
And so many others. This is a fascinating subject and I have no answer as to why so many good writers chose English as the language to convey their thinking. Do you have an opinion?
  

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