There’s a story in my head that wants to be written. It reflects an experience made in an English-speaking context. Story snippets float by in English. Yet if I ever want to express the deep impression it made, I can only find true writing elegance in near-mother-tongue German.
Now here’s the problem. The majority of media I consume is in English. I cannot remember my last sci-fi or fantasy novel that was in any other language than English. On a daily basis, my news intake is English, peppered with some German and Chinese, where even the Chinese articles contain less typos (“kochen mit Stil” is fancy for sure, but sadly not edible) and more elegance. At work, I speak English. In private, Swiss German.
Long before my daily life was eaten up by English, I wrote stories, essays, articles in German. Writing sparks and word snippets came to me in German. I lay in my bed writing German texts in my head. And while German has always been kind of a foreign language to me as a Swiss, it was my preferred way to put my inner workings out there.
It was.
Now I catch myself experiencing the same sparks and snippets in English. In bed I think of stories that want to be written in English. Yet all I have is this European English, acquired through media and university studies, this clumsy not-mother-tongue English laced with errors, lacking the elegance and fluidity I always found when writing German.
It feels like my writing is neither a fish nor a bird, trapped in this intermediate space between two languages, where I feel close to both English and German, yet not grown up with one and estranged from the other. It’s writing “neither fish nor bird” instead of the correct “neither fish nor fowl”, feeling the wings but craving water. Feeling mute like a fish.
Except frustration, what else to do?
Again, English comes to the rescue: “Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart, and write.”
So bear with me, bear with my language struggles, and hopefully find some joy in my output.
Image source: “an animal that is half bird half fish, fish head and bird tail”, Nightcafe/Ghost Mix v2
Last modified on 2024-10-21
Comments Disabled.