15 Genre-Bending Magazines Looking for Experimental Writing (ft. Katya Kazbek)
plus an essay on bilingual writing and how language influences story telling (Sub Club List #21)
This week, bilingual author of Little Foxes Took Up Matches, Katya Kazbek, talks about the way language influences the text, gives examples from her novels, and shares a few techniques that will help even those who don’t speak a foreign language to use language playfully for inspiration and experiments.
Language is that vessel that gives our thoughts—unwieldy, messy, random, and half-formed—their shapes, their concrete incarnations, their material form. Writers, more than other humans, know how to use it to our advantage, and out of language, we weave new meanings and crystallize sense. The same thoughts expressed in different languages can become completely different, and this is something I’ve learned all too well lately.
I am a bilingual person with an unquenchable thirst for other languages. And even if I first conceived of it in Russian, I wrote my first novel entirely in English. Of course, it’s peppered through and through with Russian words, mostly slang, which immensely annoys some readers and brings joy to others, but was necessary, in my opinion to make my characters believable: I just couldn’t picture Moscow street boys swearing in English. Sometimes, I wonder what it could have been had I written the novel in Russian. Something else entirely, not only on the emotional scope but likely, even in terms of plot and development. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll try to rewrite it and see.
But for now, I am at work on a speculative picaresque novel that is set in a universe parallel to ours and quite like ours. In it, all our victories and failures and struggles as a humanity are replicated. My protagonists are rogues, trying to cheat each other against the backdrop of a corrupt society, just like the genre demands. They come, however, from different parts of the world, and the (in)ability to understand the other becomes central to the narrative. When I began writing it in English, something did not sit right with me. One of the characters was fleshed-out and nuanced and funny, but the other one—who was supposed to be the literal polar opposite—refused to open up. She was fascinating, complex, acerbic, and imaginative but could not express herself on the page, and I struggled to see the novel’s world through her eyes.And then I understood that if I want to imagine a completely different way of thinking for her—one that is the source of a massive cultural clash—I need to be writing her in a different language.
So, I rendered her in Russian, with a sprinkling of Pontic Greek and Ukrainian borrowings, which, due to my family’s ethnic composition, heavily informs the way I speak Russian, too. And even if, in some chapters, I was not writing anew but very liberally translating what I’d already produced, I witnessed how my character began changing dramatically. She became real, and her behavior emerged in stark contrast to that of the other characters. It was such a relief. And it made me think about all the contradictions that are inherent to the existence of all those who live on the periphery of cultures, states or languages.
While a firm believer in the universality of the human experience and in solidarity across borders, I can not deny that the way we process this experience or express this solidarity depends heavily on the language in which we do it. Much has been written on the issue of linguistic perspective, so I will not go there at this point. But what I think is not emphasized enough in the anglosphere, due to the English language’s unparalleled dominance, is that you can use other languages to expand your consciousness and the limits of what’s possible in your texts.
After all, language is also the one way in which we can defeat all the senses, distort material truths, escape the constraints of reason, and start treading on the irrational. Without language, we would never be able to lie, be sarcastic, or be tender with words that are usually meant to insult. Meanwhile, the modalities of different languages come with different interpretations of the same material reality we all share. In “A Clockwork Orange '', the “ultraviolence” is perfectly British, as inspired by the popular social concerns of the midcentury. But “nadsat,” the argot the lead character speaks—a mix of cockney slang, King James Bible and Russian, that the author, Anthony Burgess picked up on his trip to Leningrad,—is what makes the othering of the victims and the dehumanization of Alex so voluptuous. J.R.R. Tolkien and Star Trek’s Marc Okrand, both philologists, have massively expanded how we perceive fantasy and sci-fi worlds by equipping them with languages.
Whenever I learn something delightful about writing and language, I am instantly drawn to share it with my students and fellow writers. But how exactly do I do that, when not all of them have the ability to speak a different language? After all, in the US, only 20% of the students study a foreign language in the K-12 system. At college level, the number is even lower, at 7.5%.
Of course, I will argue that it’s never too late to study a new language—for this, I recommend the highly intuitive “Language Transfer” method that can be used for free to immerse yourself into a bunch of languages, like Greek, Arabic and Swahili (along with the usual suspects of German, Spanish and French). But while the app downloads, let’s try and see how to play around with language for those who only have English in their toolbox.
Essentially, what you want to do is to try and make English sound alien. Kind of like when you sit on your own hand, and it becomes numb, so when you touch yourself with it, it’s like being touched by a stranger. Or semantic satiation when you repeat a word too many times over and over again that it loses all meaning. Here are some tools that could really help with that:
Online translators are my absolute favorite for all sorts of language games. I am especially partial to DeepL, which does its job better than others at translating texts. Try to take your own text and start translating it from one language to another, to the next, using as many as possible, and then flipping to the original. Some things will survive, some will be rendered unrecognizable.
I also constantly use online translators to create names for characters and places, and develop new words for new languages. For instance, I named my magazine on world culture Supamodu because “modu'' means together in Korean, and seeing the world as “super together” is my vision and dream. When I play around with this in novels, it comes with added benefits: for instance, if I name a character a Greek word with a very particular meaning, Greek speakers will be in on the joke when they read, but others will not notice it. I try to put in easter eggs for speakers of different languages in my work now, hopefully, some will be decoded.
Oulipo, the French writers’ collective founded in the 1960s, was described by its co-founder and de-facto leader, Raymond Queneau, as the “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they seek to escape”. Queneau’s book “Exercises in Style” remains a brilliant guide to how to tell the same story through different forms of narration. He remembers the same incident on a bus in different slang, different genres, through the prism of disciplines, like maths or medicine, or just as a sum of parts of speech. Doing the same with a particular short story or scene can massively refresh your writing.
Thanks to technology, doing the various Oulipo exercises is also much easier. My favorite is the N+7, which translates all nouns in your text with words that are seven entries down from it in a dictionary. Doing it the old-fashioned way involved a lot of leafing through the pages of a dictionary. The spoonbill N-7 machine does this automatically for any text you insert and offers varieties (i.e., swaps for the next word, or three words down, in addition to seven). This makes the text scintillatingly absurd and also creates wonderful, inspiring phrases that you would not have been able to come up with. Try it out with some famous quotes or song lyrics. “Strawberry fields" will quickly turn into “streaker fiends forever”, and that’s a juicy story right there, right? Meanwhile, “Purple rain” leads to the following bangers of prompts: “purse rainforest”, “pushover ramification,” and “puss rampage”.
The anagram generator is another favorite, which I use to get inspiring prompts or create new words. There are different settings you can play around with: the longer the words you demand, the less options you’ll get. Their “hall of fame” also holds some fascinating examples of anagrams, such as that Salman Rushdie is “Read, shun Islam”, and William Shakespeare “Willie makes a phrase”.
Hopefully, like Willie, you will also make some phrases. And those phrases will become the much needed injection of unexpectedness that becomes rare in a language too familiar. What you will do with the results of all these exercises remains up to you. Perhaps, like me, you will weave them into your rather realistic texts for an extra flavoring. Or maybe you will experiment further, creating texts where language, while absurd, is the only thing that tethers the text to truth. Try these tricks, threads, thoughts, test them, tinker, toy, trifle. Thus, triumph. Thrive. Thank me later.
I think I need a nap from playing around with language too much.
If you want to learn more about language, specifically literature in translation, Katya is teaching a 7 week, 4 session workshop with Write or Die in October, Reading and Inspiration: Queer Books, a Journey Across the World! It will be October 10 - November 21 from 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM (EST). Participants will read and discuss a vibrant selection of translated queer and trans literature from various corners of the world! You can sign up here!