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The Peculiar Fascination of Imperfection: Daniel Soukup Talks to

Margaret Anne Clarke
Rukopis, Vol. 1, Issue 3, 49 - 57
(Originally published in Czech)

1) Could you share some details about the practical side of your
creative writing competition (the origin of the idea, the difficulties
you encountered, prospects of future development…)?

The idea for a formal competition in Creative Writing in a Modern

Language sprung from a couple of exceptionally good pieces that two
advanced students in Spanish produced from specific composition and
story-building exercises in the classroom. Thus the idea originated
naturally from mainstream course provision at the university, which also
includes workshops on poetry, film and book review writing. But, since
creative writing activities as such lie outside formal course requirements,
we decided to give all advanced language students an outlet for their
personal expression in the form of this competition. Once the structure of
the competition had been set up, the difficulty lay in establishing common
criteria and a methodology for judging what were, predictably, very wide
varieties of works at different levels of language competence and in seven
different languages.
Now that the project is established within the institution, we are
currently developing ways of disseminating the project on a national level
and establishing this idea, not just as an extra-curricular student activity,
but as a sub-discipline in its own right in modern foreign languages. To
begin with, we are constructing our dedicated web site,
www.port.ac.uk/creativewriting which already illustrates all the students’
works in text and audio; we are developing a structured set of task types
and exercise, from beginners’ level to advanced, for teachers to integrate
into their classroom practice. We are establishing collaborative links with
other interested universities in order to establish the project as a national
competition; planning a published annotated anthology of the best of the
students’ works, and an edited collection of articles by other experts with
an interest in this field.
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2) Quite understandably, the competition entries which you quote

in your article are all in English. Could you give me an idea about
the actual range of the languages used by the participants, and
also of their nationalities? Were there any differences between the
languages and/or participants' nationalities in terms of quality,
themes treated etc.? You mention the specifically advantageous
position of learning a language “while in the country of its origin”.
Did the English-speaking setting of your competition play a role:
were the contributions in English any better or more confident
than texts in other languages?

Apart from English, the entries for the competition were in all the
languages that the School offered to advanced level: French, Spanish,
German, Italian, Russian and Portuguese. The School’s student cohort is
highly cosmopolitan and has an intake of students from Scandinavia and
Central Europe; these nationalities are represented in the project, as well
as native residents in the United Kingdom and students writing in English
from the Far East. Although the students who were learning English as a
Foreign Language, and those resident in the UK had the advantage of
intensive exposure to the language through media outlets and so on, and
thus possibly had the advantage of exposure to a wider range of registers
and a greater range of stylistic devices to choose from, the students from
central Europe and Scandinavia were also fluent in several languages,
and thus had a very high degree of interlanguage and were able to code
switch very easily, facilitating their abilities at composition. The English
natives were also at an advanced stage in their degree programmes; they
had spent a year abroad as part of their degree programme, and so the
standard of fluency and competence was reasonably high in most cases,
irrespective of nationality.

4) In your interpretations of some of the students' texts, you

describe their struggle to express their meaning very much as a
cognitive quest, an effort to reach out for “some unifying vision
between their private selves and the public arena of which they do
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not yet feel quite a part”. What you do not consider in such detail
is the linguistic side, even though, for many of the students,
finding the right words must have been at least as difficult as
constructing a new identity. Could you briefly comment on the
stylistic features of the contributions?

The second language becomes an instrument of mediation between

the students’ familiar meanings of their native culture and the potential
meanings of their target language. The students will adopt various tactics
to overcome the difficulties they have in expressing themselves; as the
Wall poem shows, different registers of language are put together as a
sort of bricolage, the mixing and transfer of stylistic devices. The learners
employ bricolage in order to bridge stylistically those gaps which cannot
be side-stepped by avoidance. Thus we found that the students adopted a
number of intriguing tactics to find a way round their necessarily more
limited stock of vocabulary. They will convert the vocabulary they do know
into keywords and arrange it into anaphora: for example, ‘Every day he
was there’ etc.’ and then repeat phrases for rhythmic effect, and also the
repetition of key terms such as ‘wooden bollard’ and so on. So what might
be considered disadvantages for the non-native language learner are
converted into poetic devices for structural and phonetic effect.
On the other hand, the students, having passed through a process
of explicit engagement and learning about their target language, may try
to incorporate into their works what they have learned about in the formal
classroom setting, and this may point up certain stylistic features, or
unwittingly point up differences and frequent antagonisms between two
idioms and two cultural traditions. There was a marked mixture of stylistic
devices: isolated expressions, calques or direct translations from the
students’ native language suddenly turned up in the first language, and it
was made clear what these meant from the context of the text. There are
inevitably imperfections in the students’ work, but they may lead to
different perspectives and points of emphasis: they do not supplant
‘received’ English, French or Spanish, but may hold a fascination or a
contribution of their own.
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5) I feel a bit uneasy about doing away with the concept of the
“native speaker” entirely, in spite of its desperate vagueness,
implicit cultural imperialism and other problems. The main reason
for this is the issue of accuracy. Texts written by non-native
speakers, even quite advanced ones, usually contain numerous
grammatical mistakes, lexical misuses, and stylistic
idiosyncrasies. Should they be seen, in your opinion, as genuine
“new meanings” springing from their authors' creative potential,
or may we still attribute them to lack of competence and/or care,
as we traditionally did? What level of accuracy did the competition
entries reach?

There are clearly morphological traces of the students’ native

language in the works: the Far Eastern students tend to omit the definite
article and indefinite article when writing in English, for example, ‘I
realised the Tower would be a good place for wedding ceremony’, and all
the foreign learners of English had difficulties with prepositions. The
students misuse or misunderstand the peculiarly English busyness of
prepositions, which express the consciousness of, or the dynamic of, our
relations with time and space, and with each other.
On the other hand, English natives had difficulties when abandoning
the all-embracing verb ‘to be’ in English which covers all states of being
and location, of people and things, animate and inanimate. For example,
in a text about the First World War produced by an English native in the
German language this verb appeared throughout: ‘Es gibt Leichen….’
when ‘da sind’ would have been more appropriate; similar to the
difference between ser and estar in Spanish.
I do not think, however, that this is simply a question of students
transferring one lexical item or phrase from one language to another, and
doing it somewhat incorrectly, because composition in any language does
not just consist of that. Another notable feature of these narratives and
poems is the scant regard they show for generic convention. The purpose
of the narrative or poetic composition is evidently to provide the students
with a fixed base, a site from where they are able to combine
heterogeneous elements, picked up from whatever different sorts of
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registers in the foreign language that they have been exposed to in the
course of their studies. The imperfections and idiosyncrasies of the
students’ writing can lead to unique perspectives and points of emphasis,
although, in order to make some of the works fit for publication, we did
have to clean up misspellings and grammatical errors which were just
plain wrong, and would not have added anything to the meaning or
stylistic expression of the text.

6) Intercultural contact and communication are usually depicted in

spatial terms (as in your central metaphor of the border), whereas
their diachronic aspects do not seem to receive as much attention.
Could you say something about the competition participants'
attitudes towards (their own and other) linguistic, literary and
cultural traditions? In the texts, was there evidence of a conscious
will to come to terms with these various traditions, signs of their
unconscious influence, or did they tend to stay in a tradition-free
vacuum?

In this particular project, advanced degree-programme students of

the sort who entered this competition, have learned area studies,
literature, culture, politics and society along with the language; they have
not simply learned the language for purely transactional purposes. Thus
these students will not try to transfer (on a linguistic level) their own
cultural assumptions, but will try to effect some imaginative recreation of
their target culture, creating an imaginary Spanish or German protagonist
and writing in the first person. Or the students will attempt a conceptual
discourse about something that interests them, or construct a personal
polemic, concerning something they feel strongly about, using the
resources native language by means of the linguistic repertoire of the
second language – for example, double exclamation marks, which are a
linguistic feature in Spanish, were used by one student to write a protest
poem.
On a linguistic level, however, the students may transfer their
aesthetic codes and linguistic expectations to their target language; there
are some poems for example, where the Far Eastern students have
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written in sparse elliptical forms, using tripartite arrangements of

adjectives which are familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of
Chinese poetic traditions. The pieces written by the students show many
examples of what the German cultural theorist Ludger Hoffmann (1989)
defined as ‘transfer’, that is, a reproduction or imitation of expressions in
the native language by means of the linguistic repertoire of the second
language. The student may be capable, wittingly or unwittingly, of
wrenching those words out of their ‘normal’ associations and transposing
them to another cultural context altogether – being, of necessity, slightly
alienated from the language.

7) How (if at all) would you relate the texts produced by the
participants to the works of great writers who wrote in two or
more languages and/or in a foreign language (Milton, Conrad,
Nabokov…) ?

Nabokov was doubly exiled, first as a Russian émigré in Europe and

transplanted to the United States in 1940, although he defined himself as
trilingual – a fluent speaker of French and English, and was uniquely
equipped to engage with Western modernity in his émigré phase and was
a translator of many works from French and English. Thus the imminent
prospect of a change of language and a change of country was reflected in
the themes of transition and metamorphosis that ran through his works,
and which also show up in the works of the students. In common with the
students’ writings, Nabokov will also take a symbol from the environment
and work it into a more general theme of cross-cultural transplantation,
identity and change. In Nabokov’s English writing in America, the motifs
of the water-sprite and the mermaid evolve into a productive and positive
image, a paradigm of cultural accommodation, plus the symbol of
metamorphosis more customarily associated with Nabokov, the butterfly.
In the water-sprite he had found an image which could convey the idea of
communication between different states of being – not just because of the
conjoining of elements of land and water found in the legend itself, but
because of the relating of literary traditions and archetypes, myths and
traditions which went beyond the confines of one nation. The protagonists
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of Nabokov’s works also illustrate or embody the theme of exile: Kinbote

in Pale Fire, Humbert Humbert in Lolita. Nabokov’s English novels are all
positive minefields of literary subtexts and multi-lingual allusions.
Joseph Conrad defined himself as a ‘homo duplex’ (Nadjer, 1964).
Novels such as Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim remind us that the degree
to which a reader actively participates in the world, and exploits
potentialities presented to him or her by the sociolinguistic community to
which he or she belongs (Hawthorn, 1979: 55). There are many ostensibly
unidiomatic and literal phrases and direct translations from the French,
although these are more consciously worked and crafted into his texts.
Thus, looking at languages always as an outsider, Conrad had a more
than commonly developed consciousness of language, a more awakened
philosophical curiosity about language, more easily developed when one
speaks and thinks in more than one language. Metalinguistic questions,
the relationship between thought and language, about the difference
between writing and speech, and the oddity of language, constituting both
a means to communication and also the medium of knowledge should also
be an integral component of language learning for advanced students.

9) Do you think the outcomes of your competition could enrich the

theory of Creative Writing and/or Literary Translation? In what
ways?

I think creative writing activities undertaken by students, undergraduate

and post-graduate, learning in this field could greatly enrich the theory
and learning of literary translation as a discipline. Even if one looks on
translation as a mimetic activity of the target text of a work of literature,
the translation still cannot be envisaged solely as a replica of the source
text; it must, at some level, be a question of re-writing, or re-enacting,
the source text. Literary translation always entails a high degree of artistic
and personal engagement with the source text. The translator must find
some way of creating corresponding image-fields, prosody, sound-play
and possibly rhyme as an organic whole whose coherence derives from
deep semiotic structures in literary texts. Thus it is possible to envisage
translation as invention, rather than replication. Indeed, literary
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translations are often carried out by people who are established poets and
creative writers themselves. The point is, the ultimate aim in establishing
creative writing as a sub-discipline in its own right will help to more
explicitly establish links between the practice of language learning,
translation and the creative disciplines. And it is this sort of concerted and
intensive linguistic activity, and intralingual approach, which is most likely
to train us out of instrumental attitudes towards language.
Nor is there any reason why creative writing, as a practice and
discipline, should be seen as a purely monolingual affair. As I said in the
article, creative writing, like literary translation, is also very much a
process – a process of the writer coming into being as much as producing
a written artefact. Creative writing, which itself as a discipline is still
undergoing a process of self-definition, should, as a heterogeneous
discipline, consist of a multiplicity of contemporary voices and viewpoints
and world-views and dictions and attitudes towards form, a myriad of
highly distinctive textualities, an intralingual and intercultural process.