Alpha Males and Heroines Dressed Like Them

Book Cover Oh, the email inbox, it overfloweth with various things that are worth your inspection. Whee!

A graphic novel about women daring to dress as men and infiltrating male-only groups—based on legend, poems, letters and true stories?! Holy comic of awesome, Batgirl! (Thanks to Linsey Schmidt for the link.)

If you were wondering if your recent erotic romance might be considered for the Nobel in literature, and you’re an American writer, you’re shit out of luck. Why?

the top member of the award jury believes the United States is too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing….

Speaking generally about American literature, however, he said U.S. writers are “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” dragging down the quality of their work.

“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. “That ignorance is restraining.”

Dear Mr. Engdahl: I’m sure you’ll think I’m being isolated, insular and ignorant when I say this, but you suck wookie ass. I got your big dialogue right here.

And speaking of fresh, steamy wtf-ery, Teddy Pig send this article by India Knight from this weekend’s Times Online, regarding the alpha male and … well, um, yeah.

I’ve read it twice and I still can’t tie together the points Knight is making, except to furrow my brow some more and say, “Wait,” and then try to read it again. Somewhere in there confidence, asshattery, and sexism are being tossed together into a WTF salad and I can’t put my finger on the radicchio.

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  1. RfP says:

    While you might get impressions of other cultures via travel, I do not think that any significant understanding of another culture can come without language.

    I agree and I disagree.  Perhaps it’s simply that I wouldn’t state it so strongly.  I think two different travelers with the same foreign language skills can get very different experiences out of the same trip; that’s not about language but about comfort and adventurousness.  (Though I recognize that those attributes are not entirely separate from language.)

    I’ve found traveling in regions where I don’t speak the language just as eye-opening as traveling where I speak the language fluently or just enough to get around.  I’m aware I didn’t come to a “significant understanding” of those cultures, but I’m not sure I came to a “significant understanding” by traveling in a country after studying that country’s modern and medieval language and literature.

    Veering back toward Engdahl’s point, though: my local library has a good-size section of fiction translated into English, out front next to fantasy and romance.  I understand why it doesn’t have the same variety of originally-English fiction translated into other languages (those collections are heavily used by recent immigrant populations, so they include a lot of “useful” books), but there’s no mindbender quite like reading a familiar novel in translation.

    Orgueil et Préjugés de Jane Austen:

    C’est une vérité universellement reconnue qu’un célibataire pourvu d’une belle fortune doit avoir envie de se marier, et si peu que l’on sache de son sentiment à cet égard, lorsqu’il arrive dans une nouvelle résidence, cette idée est si bien fixée dans l’esprit de ses voisins qu’ils le considèrent sur le champ comme la propriété légitime de l’une ou l’autre de leurs filles

    Orgullo y prejuicio de Jane Austen:

    Es una verdad mundialmente reconocida que un hombre soltero, poseedor de una gran fortuna, necesita una esposa. Sin embargo, poco se sabe de los sentimientos u opiniones de un hombre de tales condiciones cuando entra a formar parte de un vecindario. Esta verdad está tan arraigada en las mentes de algunas de las familias que lo rodean, que algunas le consideran de su legítima propiedad y otras de la de sus hijas.

  2. Suze says:

    I got the first joke, Sarah (because I’ve heard it before in English), but I had to use an on-line translator to do the second, and it gave me:

    That is a maiden?  A woman who had taken Forty Christmas, and no good night

    I also got:

    That is a single woman?  A woman that had had quarenta Christmas time, and any good night!

    That she is a bachelor? A woman who had had quarenta Christmases, and no good night!

    Clearly, translation is a delicate process.

  3. I seem to have retained some of my French, and I think the Spanish translation isn’t quite as close to the original as the French one.

  4. Suze, I’m not sure if you worked this out or not, but although the online translators are right that “noche buena” means “good night,” “Nochebuena” is Christmas Eve, so it’s a pun.

  5. GrowlyCub says:

    I seem to have retained some of my French, and I think the Spanish translation isn’t quite as close to the original as the French one.

    I agree with Laura, but have to say that any time a translated text is very close in cadence and flow to the original, I get a bit suspicious about the quality of the translation as different languages do and should sound and flow differently.  Among my other sins I have a degree in Translation Sciences (I am a live long learner, what can I say :).  It’s a delicate balance between sticking close to the original and making it sound like the original just with the other language’s words stuck in it.  I’d love to read a German translation to see what my native tongue-meter would say about that.

    I’ve lived in the U.S. so long I’ve started to try to stick German words into English sentences which leads to much chagrin on my part and much hilarity on the part of my family when I talk to them on the phone.

    I think two different travelers with the same foreign language skills can get very different experiences out of the same trip; that’s not about language but about comfort and adventurousness.

    Oh, agreed. I was coming at this topic her from the cultural understanding/linguist/language teacher angle and think that for a non-native to feel very familiar, get a good grip what the other cultures is about, works only when you dig into the language as well.  One measurement I apply for language proficiency is when you start to understand jokes in the foreign language, since that goes way beyond word x = word y, but digs deeply into cultural beliefs, gender, hierarchy, etc.

    I lived in Scotland for a year, then went back home for 5 years and have lived in the U.S. since.  As immersed as I am in the language and the culture here, there are days when everything is just so alien it’s like being plunked down on a different planet.  That self-same feeling attacked me rather strongly the last time I was in Germany.  Hence, on good days I have two homes and on bad days I have none, because I don’t fit anywhere any longer which is one way to describe global nomads.

    I find language endlessly fascinating.  There are many concepts that I find I can express with more nuance in English, but there are some that just do not seem to have an equivalent.  Some of these have been adopted into the language (‘Schadenfreude’) and seem to mean the same thing, but for others there do not seem to be equivalents, not just word-for-word, but for the concept behind it (‘Anstandsstueck’).

    not26, no, I’m not 26, the same as I wasn’t almost 29 earlier.  The spaminator really wants to remind me of my age today… 😉

  6. RfP says:

    Laura, my French is better than my Spanish and I agree that the French translation captures it better.  Both are from printed editions that I picked up in France and Spain.

  7. RfP says:

    “Anstandsstueck” as in dining?

  8. AgTigress says:

    Reading a translation of a very familiar book into a foreign language is an excellent way of improving one’s fluency in the latter.  I remember that the first book I read in German, long ago, was a translation of Alice in Wonderland.  Actually knowing the book in English is like using a parallel text, but much faster and easier; language and meaning start to blend quickly and naturally.

    I agree with RfP that there are multiple levels and nuances of cultural and linguistic understanding, but there is no doubt that even moderate fluency in the local language opens doors and deepens understanding in ways that simply cannot be achieved by the traveller that knows only his/her own language.  I know this from my own experience, with many different levels of comprehension in many different countries.

  9. GrowlyCub says:

    RfP,

    it has to do with food, but not necessarily just with dining.  I just googled it and came across an intriguing (but unfortunately unavailable) reference on a German university website to leaving a bite on your plate.  I’d never heard of that and that’s certainly not what I mean by that word.  It refers to the last of any kind of food item offered.  One does not take the ‘Anstandsstueck’ when a guest in somebody’s home and most certainly when one is the host/ess.  Which can be lots of fun when the host/ess tries to get you to eat it and you try to behave properly and not do so. 🙂  It’s old-fashioned and probably not really a concept that younger folks would be familiar with, but it sticks in my mind as one of those untranslatable items.

  10. RfP says:

    My parents used that word, or something awfully similar, for leaving the last piece on your plate or the serving platter.  I always thought it was a familyism (which it may be: they may not have used it exactly as you define it).

  11. GrowlyCub says:

    It’s entirely possible that my definition is too narrow.  I tend to express myself in absolutes which I definitely ought not to.  It’s one of those tempting things when talking about something I’m very familiar with, which does not preclude error, that’s for sure.  🙂

  12. Suze says:

    understand jokes in the foreign language, since that goes way beyond word x = word y, but digs deeply into cultural beliefs, gender, hierarchy, etc.

    Yep.  Damn the puns!

    Thanks, Laura, I had been assuming it was something naughty involving sleeping with 40 men and maintaining the “maiden” status.  I guess that betrays my state of mind.

    Speaking of language, I read somewhere (again, I’d google it, but don’t feel like it) that your language shapes how adaptable you are to new concepts.  Native English speakers are allegedly much more comfortable appropriating new words and concepts, or making up new ones, because that’s what our language does, whereas other languages have more rules about creating new words, which allegedly limits their creativity in general.  And now that I’ve typed that all out, I’m kind of suspicious of it.

  13. Native English speakers are allegedly much more comfortable appropriating new words and concepts […] other languages have more rules about creating new words, which allegedly limits their creativity in general.  And now that I’ve typed that all out, I’m kind of suspicious of it.

    I’m suspicious of it too. If by “appropriating new words” they mean incorporating words from other languages into their own, then I know for certain that the Spanish have done this. Spanish has quite a lot of words which come from Arabic (almohada, alcalde, álgebra, alfombra, acequia, albañilería) and I’m sure it’s picking up some from English (mitin [i.e. a meeting], internet, fútbol [i.e. football]). There’s a pdf here (in Spanish) discussing words of French origin which have made their way into Spanish, and there are a lot of them. There’s a list here of words taken from Náhuatl (including aguacate and tomate). I’m sure there must be many, many more.

  14. Julia Sullivan says:

    To be honest, I don’t care so much about Engdahl looking down his nose at US literature—US writers get their works out there in the international marketplace without the imprimatur of the Nobel committee.

    But what bugs me is the overall Eurocentrism of his comments in that interview.  The Nobel Prize is supposed to be for achievements in WORLD literature, not EUROPEAN literature.  The Nobel Prize has brought works by Wole Soyinka and Naguib Mahfouz and Orhan Pamuk and other non-European-tradition writers to my shelves. 

    Also, re: “alpha males”:  in wolf packs, the alpha male has one mate, and that’s the alpha female.  This is what is wrong with many romances, because the alpha males are paired up with bumbling, fumbling TSTL heroines.  That’s not alpha behavior.

  15. OH says:

    SBSarah: My friend loved your second joke, BTW

    This conversation reminds me of the article by one of the translators for Harry Potter- I want to say the Portuguese one but not sure. But she was talking about how she chose words for the ones Rowling completely made up.

    Ok, can’t find that article, but I did find this, which compares the Chinese, Vietnamese and Japanese versions of chapters, book titles, character names, etc. (Ok, I mostly just have a bunch of question marks, but you may get something different):
    http://www.cjvlang.com/Hpotter/index.html#TOP

    Also, just because I truly believe translating is very hard work, I’m impressed (he did it in a few days) even though he stole intellectual property:
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6936979.stm

    french33: This thing is actually kind of scary

  16. Laura Vivanco said:

    If by “appropriating new words” they mean incorporating words from other languages into their own, then I know for certain that the Spanish have done this.

    This happens in all living languages. It’s called borrowing, and the borrowed words are called “loan words.”  English does this a lot, I must admit, and some countries go out of their way to limit borrowing. ie: France and the Academie Francaise

    I, too, find the claims of that article suspect. I think that every living language has a means of creativity, by which I mean creating new words and ideas. It’s what keeps languages vital.  Maybe one could make an argument that English employs borrowing as a major means of new word creation, but I have yet to run into a still spoken language that doesn’t employ some means of creating new words. After all, new technology, new ideas come into language all the time. If we don’t have a means of expressing those new thoughts in a language, that language will fall behind.

    Ah so much more I could write about all of this. Very good post today! I, too, am a language geek and all of this language talk has gotten me hot and bothered in the way that only language can. But! The WTF salad article got me pretty worked up, too. Clearly that writer needs to get out and meet some real alpha men. They are as diverse as any population. To sum them up in such a narrow way seems a crime.  Plus kudos to Tina C. for a very fine logical analysis of an article that made nearly no sense upon first reading. Tina, where were you when I took logic in college??

  17. Cora says:

    Mr Engdahl’s comments indeed smell of asshattery. However, I suspect that they are an ill-phrased (or ill-translated, since I don’t speak Swedish) preliminary rebuttal to the complaints by the US literary scene that regularly occur every single year when an American writer has not won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It usually goes something like this: “Who is author X? No one has heard of him or her. Why no prize for John Updike/Philip Roth/Joyce Carol Oates/Thomas Pynchon/insert other perpetual American candidate here? Wah, this decision is Anti-American, because Nobel Prize winning author X has criticized US politics in an article once or twice or is at least known to lean towards the left of the US political spectrum.” And frankly, it gets tiring after a while.

    I think the worst incidence of that sort of complaint from the anglophone world happened the year Elfriede Jelinek won and you had both American and British columnists complaining that an obscure author no one had ever heard of had won.  Ahem, sorry, but just cause Jelinek had only been very sparsely translated into English at the time does not mean that no one has ever heard of her. She is actually very well known in the German speaking world, and while I certainly would never have bet on her to win and don’t really care for her books, I was happy for her. Besides, there have been Nobel Prize for Literature winners I have never heard of, e.g. the Chinese winner of a few years ago or the Polish poet who won sometime in the 1990s. However, I always assumed that it was my unfamiliarity with Chinese or Polish literature that was at fault rather than that the Nobel committee had chosen a writer no one had ever heard of.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’d certain be happy if Thomas Pynchon or Joyce Carol Oates wins this year’s Nobel (but not Updike and Roth – sorry, don’t like them). But it’s a prize for world literature (and that’s where Engdahl is truly tragically wrong, though Orhan Parmuk will certainly be happy that Turkey counts as Europe now) and the world consists of more than the US. Besides, in terms of language, English is actually very well represented among the Nobel Prize winners of the last approx. 20 years with Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, Seamus Heaney, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, V.S. Naipaul, Harold Pinter, Doris Lessing. However, Morrison is the only one of those authors who happens to be American.

    As for being multilingual, people in the US and Britain are in the position that they don’t necessarily have to learn a second language to get by, unlike e.g. the Dutch (and I have met at least one Dutchwoman who didn’t speak anything other than Dutch and yet had traveled widely). However, knowing more than one language is useful in fields that go far beyond communication. For example, learning a foreign language, particularly Latin, enormously improves one’s grip on grammar. And the insistence of a certain type of American that everybody automatically has to understand them when traveling abroad can be very annoying indeed. Just as I get annoyed by monolingual Germans who cannot abide even the simplest English term in advertising or public life and yet assume that everyone speaks German when they are on holiday.

    BTW, I know what an “Anstandsstück” is, though both term and custom are somewhat outdated. My parents used to insist on it, though.

  18. Cora says:

    Ms. Knight’s article is indeed idiotic. And Gene Hunt from Life on Mars only became a (very unlikely) sex symbol in the sequel Ashes to Ashes, where he is paired up not with a more sensitive modern man but with a woman. Besides, the Gene Hunt from Ashes to Ashes is actually a different and softened character compared to the one in Life on Mars

  19. GrowlyCub says:

    I’m still boggling at the Heyer reference.  I wonder which book(s) she’s read and is referring to.  Certainly, Freddy doesn’t fall into the bad to bone alpha asshole category.  Actually, none of Heyer’s heroes do!  A few are more alpha, but even they are all brought to their knees by their heroines!

  20. RfP says:

    Native English speakers are allegedly much more comfortable appropriating new words and concepts, or making up new ones, because that’s what our language does, whereas other languages have more rules about creating new words, which allegedly limits their creativity in general.

    Suze, do you remember where you read it?  It sounds like it could be one of those incidents where a much narrower statement came out of a research study and was over-generalized in the press.  (I admit my skepticism is partly because I’m getting jaded by various forms of exceptionalism that are back in vogue these days.)

  21. Anabel says:

    I was going to post the link of the Nobel to my facebook and went looking out what else is out there.  I found the following link to the New Republic, and I’m sorry if someone else has already linked this, but the New Republic makes it sound like it’s more that they (the Nobel poeple) hate postmodernism than they think Americans are stupid.  It could go either way, but I’m not a big fan of postmodernism either.

    http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/10/02/the-real-reason-american-authors-don-t-win-nobels.aspx

  22. LizA says:

    re: Anstandsstück. I am familiar with this concept but for me it is a tiny little bit of food you profess you just can’t eat any more, thus leaving it. It is refered to as “elegantes Patzl” in my area of Austria…. and it was frowned upon (Waste!).

    I do love the way words make it into other languages, but I seriously doubt that the way language is structures enhances or limits creativity. From everything I know about neurolinguistics, that does not pan out because we do not really think in language. I’d be really interested to see the reference to this article, though!
    Some of my favourite German words in English are “rucksack” , “schadenfreude” and “zeitgeist”, as well as the particle uber/über that seems to be very popular these days!
    At the moment German is afloat with English words, to the point where we make them up ourselves. Famous example is “handy” (mobile phone), but I always have to laugh at the term “neckholder” that is used in German instead of “halterneck” – I think “halter” sounded too German! 😉

    As for Mr Enghdahl’s comments, I think Cora is absolutely right….

    “

    The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. “That ignorance is restraining.”

    It is a fact that very few international writers get translated into (American) English. It is, of course, a matter of opinion if that is good or not, but you can certainly see it as a problem – I do not see this statement as inherently evil or Anti-American. The reference to Europe is certainly unfortunate as literature should be about a dialogue of all cultures, but apart from that, I really don’t get the outrage. The idea that American culture is currently fairly insular is certainly not new and has been voiced by many people, including Americans!

  23. Tina C. says:

    It is a fact that very few international writers get translated into (American) English.

    I’ve been following this particular conversation and I think that the fact that few international writers get translated in American English is probably due to a few things.  I agree that we (Americans, in general) tend to be insular.  However, I also think that there is a perception among those publishing houses that would offer English translations that such works won’t sell here because we’re insular.  If they, as a rule, think that Americans won’t buy works by foreign authors, then they, as a rule, won’t offer them.  That gives you a bit of “the chicken or the egg” situation—are we generally insular because we’re not exposed to works translated from other languages or are we not exposed to works translated from other languages because we’re insular? 

    We should also consider something else that may or may not play a part in whether or not a translated work sells—the way it reads.  Because, grammatically, English is the opposite of most languages in word order and sentence structure, I have to admit that can pose a problem for me when I read some books that have been translated from another language.  I tried and tried but I simply could not get into Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  I can’t remember what book it was, possibly Love in the Time of Cholera, but the sentence structure was completely backwards to me, making it very hard to slog through.  (And it wasn’t just one sentence—it was every single one, so it was probably translated verbatim.)  Instead of being transported by the story, I was re-reading sentences over and over, because, for me, the word order was completely jumbled.  It’s probably shallow, but I don’t want to have to work that hard for my entertainment reading.  In contrast, whoever is translating Isabelle Allende’s works is wonderful!  The prose is usually beautiful and it feels like Allende’s voice, but stylistically, it’s definitely English grammar structure, so, for me, it flows.  (It doesn’t hurt that I find the stories pretty interesting, too.)  I love Allende’s work and have read a lot of it.  I’ve never picked up another Garcia Marquez book.

  24. Ziggy says:

    Tina C – try the Marquez translated by Gregory Rabassa – I can’t remember if he translated Love in the time of Cholera – but he’s definitely translated a few Marquez works, including my absolute favourite, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  25. Suze says:

    DAMN my post-forty memory!  My google-fu, she’s not up for much (danged new-fangled search-engines! Where’s my card catalogue?).  After way too long putzing around looking for the flipping article, I finally remembered where I read it (native English speakers being more adaptable), and now I suspect it even more.

    It’s from Holly Lisle’s Create a Language clinic.  She seems to be a pretty smart lady, but she also seems to be very vulnerable to that conservative mind-set thing that convinces her that she’s right and everybody else is wrong (and stupid).  I have no idea where she came up with the adaptability theory.

    I was going to provide a link to the excerpt I read, but I can’t find that either.  Sigh.

    feeling13?  No, much older than that…

  26. LizA says:

    the sentence structure was completely backwards to me

    Tina, that sounds like a terrible translation! If you translate into another language, it has to be grammatically correct. It is hard to do, of course – translations are difficult at the best of times. But sentence structure is such a vital part of a language that you cannot impose it from one to another…. there is obviously a fine line between giving the reader a taste for the style of the author and the rules of a foreign translation, but some people manage to do it…. luckily.  Of course it is always better to read in the original language but that is not possible in many cases, and it would be sad to miss out on a great many interestng books because you do not speak the language…

  27. Cora says:

    Regarding the “Anstandsstück” issue, it seems that we are seeing the sometimes considerable differences between German and Austrian German at work here.

    And I agree that the Marquez translation you read sounds like a really bad translation. Literary translation is a tightrope act anyway between preserving as much of the original author’s language as possible and yet producing something that’s readable for people of another language. Which begets another question? Is the reason that there is comparatively little translated fiction available in the US (and Britain for that matter) that there are comparatively few good literary translators in the US? Or are there few good literary translators because there is little demand for their services?

    As for the Nobel Academy disliking postmodernism, it’s an interesting idea, but in the end I’m not convinced. A hatred of postmodernism might account for the snubbing of Pynchon and DeLillo and Umberto Eco (though I suspect there are other factors at work regarding Salman Rushdie), but perennial Nobel losers Roth and Updike are not postmodernists. Whereas several of the winners of the past few years have dipped their toes in the postmodern pool.

  28. RfP says:

    A few people commented on how little international literature makes it to the US, and how little attention it receives.

    I keep meaning to post this resource—the Three Percent blog, “A resource for international literature at the University of Rochester”:

    Unfortunately, only about 3% of all books published in the United States are works in translation. That is why we have chosen the name Three Percent for this site.

    U of R offers an undergraduate certificate in translation, and they’ve started a new press for translated works:

    Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s new publishing house. A trade-oriented press, Open Letter will publish twelve works of international literature every year, beginning in the fall of 2008.

  29. redshoeson says:

    Thank you for the link to India’s article – quite an intriguing/frustrating read!

    french36: I’m a LADY, for goodness’ sake!  I won’t even french one! :X :X :X

  30. dashal says:

    I think that the radicchio may be the number of logical fallacies in her argument.

  31. dashal says:

    🙂

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