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How Speaking Another Language Can Improve Your Writing

October 15, 2019

experience, experiencing, foreign, language, writing

Speaking another language has always been something I’m good at. My native language is not English; Greek isProblematically for the concept of "native language", I often feel unable to come up with a word in Greek that I know perfectly well in English—I had to look up Arrogant yesterday. Needless to say, the issue is far more pronounced with terminology. I feel entirely unable to express myself in Greek when it comes to, say, the Gothic (my academic field of expertise), or aviation (one of my interests). Put simply, I have no idea what Non-normative Uncanny Other or Compressor Stall are in Greek.. I am also fluent in Finnish and, having lived in Italy, I do understand Italian fairly well. I’m also currently learning Japanese, just for fun.

Or then again, maybe not.

Learning a new language can and should be fun, but if the expression “just for fun” implies only a casual process lacking any true significance, let me dispel that impression.

Speaking a new language, besides offering a great way to tickle your brain and expand your horizons, can be a vital tool for a writer. Writing is about experiencing the world, attempting to understand it, and offering an alternative reality; a new way of thinking. Speaking another language helps the writer by occupying each and every part of this chain.

Speaking another language can help you experience the world in ways your native language might not. This way, it can offer you additional tools for understanding your surrounding environment, at the same time providing you with inspiration to alter it.

How, you might ask. It’s a fair question. So, let’s take a closer look at the intricacies of speaking another language and, particularly, how speaking another language can help you become a better writer.

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Review of Interpreter of Maladies

October 8, 2019

Book Review, Criticism

book, fiction, India, Indian, literature, review

Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri, is a collection of short stories all featuring characters from the Indian subcontinent. However, this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Ultimately, Interpreter of Maladies is a story about humanity; what it means to be a stranger in a strange land or – more subtly – a stranger in your own soul.

Indeed, what Lahiri’s prose reveals is not the differences between the cultures of India and Britain or the Unites States. After all, most of the characters are Indian expats in the West. Rather, the true focus is the uncanny, outright disturbing degree of similarity between people with vastly different backgrounds.

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Time and Meaning in Only Lovers Left Alive

October 2, 2019

Criticism

academia, criticism, film, Gothic, symbolism, time

Note: the following article on time and meaning in Only Lovers Left Alive is a modified excerpt from my article “Reconfiguring the Garden of Eden: Suspended Temporality in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive”. The Eternal Return: Myth Updating In Contemporary Literature. Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics. 40.2 (2017): 123-134.

For a list of my other academic publications, see here.

Arguably one of the most pivotal moments of Only Lovers Left Alive comes when Adam, the male vampire protagonist, utters with despaired surrender that he feels as if “all the sand is at the bottom of the hourglass”.

Time and Meaning in Only Lovers Left Alive — The concept of time and meaning in *Only Lovers Left Alive* can be summarized by Adam’s key statement: ” all the sand is at the bottom of the hourglass”

He expresses his misery at the realization that every experience worth having has already been had and, as he believes, the future holds nothing better. Eve, his loyal partner who is much more of an optimist by nature, tells him to simply turn the hourglass over; to reset time.

In effect, the core problem of Only Lovers Left Alive is indeed related to time, particularly in the context of experience and progress: If perfection is already achieved (the archetypal paradise of the Garden of Eden), is the only way forward through loss and suffering? And, perhaps more importantly, to which extent is the human experience intrinsically connected with this grand paradox of time and progress?

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