LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

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 t...

Vladimir Nabokov tropieza con los sonidos ingleses. Vladimir Nabokov writes the begining words of his famous novel Lolita : “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” I have reread those words several times, out loud, and I cannot reproduce the trip the tongue takes to tap the teeth. What teeth? Was Na b okov teasing us phonetically? Was he making fun of us? How could he have written, by any stretch of phonological imagination, that the tip of the tongue taps at the teeth three times when pronouncing Lo-li-ta? If Mr. Nabokov had been Spanish, he would have been able to tap the tip of the tongue against the teeth once, and only once. In English not even once, least of all three times. This is fine, and he may pronounce the name any way he   likes, but he should not say that the tip of the tongue takes a trip down...

Vladimir Nabokov tropieza con los sonidos ingleses. Vladimir Nabokov writes the begining words of his famous novel Lolita : “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” I have reread those words several times, out loud, and I cannot reproduce the trip the tongue takes to tap the teeth. What teeth? Was Navokov teasing us phonetically? Was he making fun of us? How could he have written, by any stretch of phonological imagination, that the tip of the tongue taps at the teeth three times when pronouncing Lo-li-ta? If Mr. Nabokov had been Spanish, he would have been able to tap the tip of the tongue against the teeth once, and only once. In English not even once, least of all three times. This is fine, and he may pronounce the name any way he   likes, but he should not say that the tip of the tongue takes a trip down th...