Das Dilemma eines Autors: (wie) lege ich meinen Figuren Dialekt oder Akzent in den Mund oder der Konflikt zwischen geschriebenem und gesprochenem Wort:
http://davidhewson.com/2015/07/writing- ... ble-ahead/Zitat:
Screen Shot 2015 07 21 At 08.16.08
Writing in an accent: trouble ahead
July 21, 2015Writing
Thanks Tommy, from that wonderfully-named US town Newport News, for the review of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: A Novel on Audible above. I know authors shouldn’t comment on reviews and I don’t intend to. You seem to have liked our work — for which I’m grateful. But you also raise an interesting point, especially for someone like me who sets stories in foreign locations.
How, exactly, should foreign characters speak when they’re talking in English?
This is not an easy or straightforward question to answer. Some fifteen years ago they were making the movie of my first book, Semana Santa, in Seville. I wasn’t invited along so being me I booked a plane ticket and a hotel then turned up on set and introduced myself as the author of the book on which the movie was — loosely as it turned out — based. The crew were very understanding, as were the cast, one of whom asked me straight out, ‘How do you think I should speak this part? In straight English? Or with a Spanish accent?’
The actor concerned wasn’t remotely Spanish so I immediately blurted out, ‘But the Spanish don’t speak Spanish with a Spanish accent. They speak Spanish.’
I’m still not quite sure how this went down but as it turned out… plain English was the way things went.
Around the same time I was writing the first of the Nic Costa series set in Rome, spending a lot of time there including some very intensive sessions at a language school. You can’t understand Italy properly if you can’t speak a little Italian I was soon to learn.
Now we think of Italian as an elegant language of beauty and poetry, with good reason too. But that’s not the language you hear on the street. In Rome and Florence vernacular Italian is peppered with slang and a lot of pretty strong curses too. I puzzled over how to translate that into modern English. For the first two books the answer seemed easy: write in a kind of American dialect, full of slang and swearing. Technically this approximates to vernacular city street Italian pretty well.
But here’s the problem with accents. However ‘real’ you make them they get in the way. Here’s Dickens putting words in the mouth of his Cockney servant Sam Weller.
Vich I call addin’ insult to injury, as the parrot said ven they not only took him from his native land, but made him talk the English langwidge arterwards.
Weller, according to his creator, swapped the letters ‘v’ and ‘w’ at will, using ‘wery’ for ‘very’ for example. Now I suspect Dickens made all this up. It certainly reflects no modern English accent. He had the excuse that this was for comic effect, of course. But invented or real… it’s horribly hard to read for most modern readers.
After a couple of books of my Romans speaking Manhattan — logically in my own mind — I switched their diction. From around book three they speak simple vernacular English, with very little swearing and not much slang. They have their own linguistic peculiarities. Falcone, the boss, is a touch pompous and displays it in his speech. Teresa Lupo, the pathologist, is a hothead and explodes easily — which is obvious from the way she talks too.
I hope you still get their character. What you don’t get is the possibility of a speed bump which makes the reader ask, ‘Why on earth are these people speaking this way?’
And that, in a nutshell, is my approach to writing accents and foreign dialogue as English. I don’t want anything in there that inhibits the flow of the narrative. I don’t feel the need to indicate someone is Italian, for example, by adding in the odd ‘per favore’ when they order a coffee. Nor would they call someone ‘Signore’ or ‘Signora’ unless they were trying to make a point.
The same goes for a Danish accent in Hamlet. Richard Armitage, doing such a splendid job as a narrator, uses accents very cleverly to denote class. So the royal family will speak as aristocrats while the foot soldiers have a northern working man’s drawl to them. But that’s not about accent. That’s about characterisation and they’re familiar English accents, so most of us will get the point without having to think about it.
If I were to try to write in a Danish accent I wouldn’t know where to start. But I do know that it would look odd on the page and probably make any narrator scratch their heads. Pretty soon afterwards readers and listeners would be doing the same too.
The point is the one I made in Seville all those years ago: the Spanish don’t speak Spanish with a Spanish accent. They speak Spanish. And yes that will have an accent, but it will be a local one. Which brings us back to Sam Weller and stuff like this…
All good feelin’, sir—the wery best intentions, as the gen’l’m’n said ven he run away from his wife ‘cos she seemed unhappy with him.
That’s why we wrote Hamlet straight. And while I can’t speak for Richard Armitage I suspect it’s why he played it straight too.
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