October 19, 2012 by Aidan
Every time I try to write something creative in English with a Dutch setting I find myself lost for words. It might be a personal thing but I find that it?s quite hard to use one language to describe events that have happened in another. There is an inevitable translation process at work but there is something more visceral at work too. To my mind using English to describe a Dutch existence feels fundamentally wrong, almost like a betrayal. Of course this would be different if I were to write something about an international situation but that?s not really what interests me anyway. There are many stories to be written about the expat bubble but I am not going to be their author in any case. What interests me here, as in most places, is how the Dutch live and think and so the filter of English has an automatic dampening effect. Unless you have lived life through a foreign language for a long time it is difficult to really be your true self in anything other than your mother tongue. It took me a long time to speak Dutch well enough to understand the humour, the cultural references and the puns. I do know some Dutch people who speak English at a near native speaker level but most people here are more transparent in Dutch as you would expect. When I think of putting words in the mouths of Dutch characters I can only think of using Dutch words or an affected Dutch English. I can?t create conversations between Dutch people talking about Dutch things in English. The only way I can envisage doing it is by writing a story in Dutch first and then translating it to English using the techniques that translators use to bridge the cultural gaps.
Beyond language alone I feel a sense of freedom when writing in Dutch. The very fact of abandoning my mother tongue, with all of the ambivalent feelings I have towards the language, is a liberation of sorts. I can write from other points of view without any complications, I can adopt a female voice if I wish; I can describe experiences that I might not feel comfortable addressing in English. I keep coming across the notion that to write is to be truly free but that is only valid if you are willing to hurt the people who might read something you wrote, even fictional, and project it onto themselves. In a way it is a kind of cowardice but writing in another language gives you the feeling of having a protective vest despite the omnipresence of Google Translate.
The danger of course is that my written Dutch will always betray my non-Dutch origins in subtle and less subtle ways. Naturally this can be overcome by getting a native speaker to proof read or edit. However, I feel that there is also a case for leaving my Dutch as it is because the Dutch that I think in is also valid, my word choices, my mistakes, my mispronunciations are all authentically mine. In some cases it?s best to leave well enough alone. If I am expressing my view of the world then my anglicized Dutch is just as valid as the voice of anybody else who chooses to use that tongue to say something about the world.
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Source: http://mooncountry.wordpress.com/2012/10/19/on-the-choosing-to-write-in-dutch-or-english/
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