Reading 2

Unit 4- Reading 2

Page 57

Fame in a Foreign Language: Joseph Conrad

Literary success is hard enough to achieve in one’s native language. Very few authors can sustain themselves on money earned through writing. For a nonnative speaker of a language, literary success in that language is extremely rare.

Yet the English-language novels of Joseph Conrad indicate that it is not impossible.

Conrad was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857, in an area of present-day Ukraine that was then a part of Poland. He was born into a noble family that owned a good deal of land . Russia ruled Poland at the time, and both of Conrad’s parents took part in the struggle for independence. Conrad’s father was arrested in 1861 for revolutionary activity, and the family was exiled to the remote city of Vologda, in northern Russia. The long winters and difficult living conditions there were too much for Conrad’s mother. She died of tuberculosis when Conrad was only seven years old. His father’s health suffered, too. The Russian government finally allowed the father and son to return to Poland, to the city of Krakow, but the father soon died. Conrad was eleven at the time.

Early language experiences

His early life with his parents almost certainly influenced his success with languages. His father was clearly good at them—skillful enough to translate written texts into Polish from French and English. Like many well-born Poles at the time, Conrad learned French early in life. Given Russia’s domination of Poland and his family’s exile in Russia, Conrad must have learned some Russian as well.

He lived with his grandmother after his father’s death. He did not invest much energy in his schoolwork, including his required classes in Latin and German. Restless and unhappy, he declared at the age of 14 that he wanted to be a sailor. In 1874, at the age of 16, Conrad traveled to France to learn commercial sailing and to avoid being drafted into the Russian army. His French language skills were more than adequate for his duties during the four years he spent in the French merchant marine. His career was interrupted by a suicide attempt, perhaps brought on by worry over debts from wild living in the south of France. Conrad recovered, but if he stayed in France the government would probably turn him over to the Russians for military service. He had to leave, so he went to England.

He signed on at the age of 20 as a seaman on an English steamship, but he did not need to speak very much English to get by. Ordinary seaman on vessels like his spoke many different languages and developed their own mixed language to communicate. However, protocol in the British merchant marine required ambitious sailors to pass through several levels before commanding a ship. Each level had its own test, in English. By reading in English as much as he could, he became good enough to pass the writing tests for second-class seaman, then first-class, then master. He sailed under the flag of Britain for a total of 16 years, and he became a British citizen in 1886.

Speaking and Writing

Throughout his life, Conrad was more inclined to read and write than to speak. He was often depressed and socially uncomfortable. This was probably one reason why, despite his excellent skills in English writing, he was very reluctant to speak English. A strong Polish accent persisted throughout his life. Even his wife and children said it made him hard to understand. French remained the language he was most comfortable speaking for the rest of his life.

By the time his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, was published in 1895, there was no doubt that English was the language in which he would write. He had accumulated an immense vocabulary. His style was intriguing but not foreign-sounding. In fact, he wrote with a directness and plain style that were about 30 years ahead of their time. Some of his works, especially Heart of Darkness (1902) and Nostromo (1904), still sound reasonably modern.

Why Conrad became such a master of written English will always be a matter of debate. He himself wrote that the rhythms of the language matched some inner sense that had been with him since birth. As he once wrote, “If I had not written in English, I would not have written at all.” He never wrote professionally in either of the languages that preceded English in his life, Polish and French.

Psychological explanation

Psychologists have guessed that Conrad associated these other languages with unpleasant experiences—his exile, his parents’ deaths, his attempted suicide. Also, the experiences that shaped Conrad’s earliest novels were lived in English. English might have been established in Conrad’s mind as the language of adult experience. These guesses make a lot of sense. A large volume of research indicates that multilingual people tend to link some aspects of life with one language and other aspects with another.

By the time he died in 1924, at the age of 67, Conrad had a secure place in 20th-century English literature. He was a personal friend of such greats as H.G. Wells and Ford Madox Ford. Some literary reviewers criticized him for not being “really English,” for using French-based vocabulary instead of Anglo-Saxon words (e.g. arrest instead of stop), or for letting some Polish influences show through his English. Almost no one now remembers who these critics were.