italicizing the exotic & exoticizing the everyday

[kaigou]

Current status:

Done Wrong — Eleanor Taylor Bland (mystery)
Dropped. Not really where my brain is at, right now, and this title is fourth in the series, I think it is. Going to try and find the one with the summary/case that was more interesting.

The Steel Remains — Richard K Morgan (fantasy)
Dropped... for now. Just not doing it for me. Story is okay, characters have potential, but it wasn't holding me.

Havemercy — Jaida Jones & Danielle Bennett (fantasy/steampunk)
Dropped. See this exchange for an uncharacteristically (for me) succinct review.

The Hero's Walk — Anita Rau Badami (literary)

GET THIS BOOK. READ IT. It's not slow, it's dense, but it's rich. Emotional without being melodramatic; introspective without drowning in navel-gazing. It's a story of mourning, grief, loss, and how even inside a family, we can still be strangers.

It's about an upper-caste (but hardly wealthy) man who disowned his daughter for marrying a Westerner and ditching her arranged marriage, who after nine years of distance learns his daughter and her husband have died in a car accident -- and his is the only family able and willing to take in the orphaned grand-child. It's about an eight-year-old girl who's lost her parents, her voice, her culture, and her moorings, in that order. It's about a grown woman who's lost repeated chances at marriage thanks to her mother's selfishness, but might not have lost her chance at love. It's about a life-long obedient daughter-then-wife who realizes she's had it up to here and it's time to start declaring, and chasing, what she wants. It's about a younger son, shadowed by his older sister and desperately wanting to make the world better but getting nowhere. It's a lot of people getting nowhere, but that's to be expected when you're not sure how to get there, or if you even have the courage to try. It's a gorgeous, thoughtful story, sometimes-sad, sometimes-wryly-humorous, always human and respectful and ambiguous towards its characters.

This is not a story to swallow whole, or even to chew up in large bites. It's a story to be savored, and a story that lets you in to be the observer in complex and burdened personal histories that make up this strange new land for an orphaned child. It is also not, I should note, saccharine, in any way at all: the grand-daughter is not some bubbly Westernized child who shows up and delights, charms, and changes everyone. The grand-daughter is suffering and struggling with her own grief for her lost parents that's just as deep as her grandparents' grief for their lost daughter.

Honestly, I can't speak highly enough of this story. The plot is simple, though the story gets right into it very quickly -- and then backs up, circles around, to give you a bigger picture to understand each character's reactions and fears -- so it's both slow and quick-moving at the same time. It's written without overly-purple pretensions at poetry; it's just deft and assured writing that carries you along, giving enough description to create the place and time. The craftsmanship in the writing is just that good, that you never stop to say, oh, how the author must have labored over this description! -- which is what I mean by 'pretentious'. The author trusts the power of her story and has the confidence in her own voice to give you the story as it needs to be given, at the pace that works, with the details that belong.

Really. Find a copy, read, and enjoy.

The Devil in the Dust — Chaz Brenchley
Currently reading. Figure it'll kill some time while I wait for the interlibrary loan books to come in, even if I'm less than crazy about the alternate-history/reality version of the Crusades. (The mention of 'Catari' in the first few pages as one of the heretical groups was slight giveaway; the next four pages' details confirmed it.)

---

Note: all three books are English-language originally (not translated).

Water Touching Stone, by Eliot Pattison, comes with a glossary in the back for Turkic, Tibetan, and Mandarin words. The first novel in Pattison's series, The Skull Mantra, did not have a glossary, and relied on contextual clues to explain non-English words. I've dropped the second book because the writing -- while still gorgeously rendering the Tibetan landscape -- seems to be somewhat lazier. The inclusion of a glossary seems to have given the author more reign to ignore the need for contextual placement. You can just check the glossary, eh? I do glossary checking in non-fiction, and for Fraser's footnotes in the Flashman series; anywhere else, it's intrusive and disrupting my reading, damn it.

I did finish A Companion to Wolves by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear, but mostly by skimming most of the second half of the book. To be honest, I was less than enthused at the inclusion of a dramatis personae before the book began. If a cast-list is the only way to recall which characters are which, then the author's doing something wrong (or more precisely, just leaving out something right).

This is not tangential, but it may be news to any of you who've never read fanfiction author notes. I'd never seen this in published fiction, and it was entirely new to me (and something I saw, and see, as entirely superfluous), but it's somewhat common in some fanfiction genres. At the start of a story, the author graciously inform you in a manner somewhat like the following, that:

"this indicates two people talking"
*this indicates someone's thoughts*
#this indicates people talking on the phone/radio/etc#
~this indicates people talking telepathically~

...and so on. (I have seen stories where the examples go up to six different styles.)

My theory's that a chunk of that comes from the days when email didn't have bold or italic, so you had to fake it in whatever way you could when posting your chapters for an email group. There were no hard-and-fast conventions; authors used different means -- some would underscore: look _at_ this! and some would slash it: look /at/ this! and some would asterisk: look *at* this! I can see how that's a hard habit to break, but I remain baffled as to why anyone would feel it necessary to point out that double-quotes indicate speech. This is pretty much a standard convention (and has been) for over a hundred-plus years of English-language publishing -- unless it's to help second-language fanfiction readers, but even then, wouldn't they have already been exposed to the conventions, in the course of their studies? Etc.

I've seen such treatments in fiction works (although never an explanation at the story's start). Things like telepathic speech getting tildes or carrots or some other rare-keyboard-symbol, but that's really something I've only seen in SFF stories. Most of the time, it's italics that do the work, and the work is going to be one, or more, or all four, of the following types:

Here we have italics to emphasize the point.
I use italics because it's my inner thoughts, she thought.
She'd borrowed Once Upon a Time from the library.
And italics are also for non-English terms like sari and kimono and gele.

Which is how you could possibly end up with a paragraph like this:

I'm not sure I trust that man, she thought darkly, checking the look of her gele in the mirror before tying off her ipele just like instructed in her grandmother's copy of How A Proper Lady Dresses. After all, if the butler hadn't done it, then who had?

I hate reading text like that, because I have to pause long enough to figure out the purpose behind each italicizing. Are the italics meant to indicate (silent) tone (of speech), or are they meant to highlight that it's a word that I should register as "foreign", or are they meant to act as a visual version of yelling or emphasis or just really strong insistence? (At least a book title is usually pretty obvious from context, though I'm not the only one who now bolds titles rather than italicizes, as a different manner of emphasis.)

[Note: these are decided by a house style, I'm told. If you're thinking of fussing, or expecting me to, the author may not deserve all the blame.]

In deep third-person POV, or first-person POV, interior thoughts are usually regular (non-italic) font, because the bulk of the narration (if not all) is the same as any interior thoughts. Either you italicize almost every line of narration, or you let the two become one and skip the fussy italics. That said, I've always felt somewhat stifled when I've been in a formatting (or loss-of-formatting) situation where I couldn't italicize at all. What other simple, non-intrusive, non-add-more-words method is there when a word or phrase needs extra-attention called to it, or when you want to show a character yelling but don't want to use all-caps?

Back to the list of possible uses. The first -- interior dialogue -- is saying, "this is not the same as the narration" (as in distant third-person voices, or omniscient). The third -- book/story titles -- is saying, "this is the Title Of Something" and should be taken as a discreet unit. The fourth -- emphasis -- is saying, "this word or phrase is more strident/emphatic than the text before and after." All are saying: give this part special attention.

Now, look at the second option: foreign words. We are trained to see patterns and expect consistency as humans reading text, ie, expecting words to be spelled the same way, for punctuation to mean the same thing every time, no surprise we'd expect special treatment like italics or bold to also have a consistent reason or meaning. If the connection between the first, third, and fourth is: "this part should stand out", then the pattern of italicizing non-English words is carrying the same message.

Notice this. It's not in English. It's foreign.

It's exotic.

Water Touching Stone, like its predecessor in its series, italicizes all four -- and it does have a boatload of foreign terms, enough to rate three pages' worth of glossary, and references a few books as well. Companion to Wolves uses only the last type (emphasis) as a reason for italics; then again, if you italicized every Norse or Norse-derived term on any given page, you'd be reading italics at least once every paragraph -- and some paragraphs would have every noun italicized. That's a bit much. The publishers would be over their italics-quota inside of the first chapter.

And then there's The Hero's Walk, which uses italics... uhm, almost never. Actually, the book has so few italics that when they are used -- when the protagonist finally loses his temper with his younger son; when the protagonist's sister finally loses her temper with their elderly mother -- that it's almost a shock.

Ah, found a passage with plenty of unfamiliar (to me) words. Not a lot, but what's there... well, read for yourself.

Now that the festival season had started, the temple was crowded with evening worshippers. Women swept by richly dressed in heavy silk saris, smelling of sandalwood, jasmine and incense. They, like Nirmala, carried platters of fruits and flowers. The men looked plain in comparison, as most of them wore white lungis wrapped around their waists and starched white cotton kurtas. There were rows of vendors outside the temple gates, shouting out their wares. More flowers, coconuts, fruit, betel leaves, piles of kum-kum powder in shades of crimson and pink, like mountains in a child's dream—every possible thing that one might need to placate, honour or flatter the gods inside that great stone building with its soaring pillars and dark womb where the chief deity resided in tranquil silence.

[...]

Krishnamurthy Acharye, the old priest who had presided over the ceremonies when Maya was born, during the annaprashna when she had her first mouthful of solid food, on her first birthday, and who had blessed her before she left Toturpuram, was waiting for them. He recited prayers for her soul and Alan's, the latter in spite of Ammayya's objections.

"You and I are old enough to know better than to make a fuss over all this nonsense, Janaki Amma," he had wheezed. The priest was one of the few people who had known Ammayya long enough to address her by her first name. "Our gods won't mind if we say a prayer for someone of another faith. I know, I have been talking to them for eighty-five years."

"But he doesn't have a gothra-nakshatra, nothing," quibbled Ammayya. "What was his family name? What stars was he born under?"

"We shall do it in God's name, that will be enough," said the priest. Ammayya had to content herself with eyeing the silver utensils that Nirmala had polished and brought along with the coconut, the flowers, the coins and the pieces of cloth that would be distributed to the poor after the rituals were observed.

Nothing's italicized, here or in the original, although my spell-checker certainly picks them out: lungis, kurtas, kum-kum, annaprashna, gothra-nakshatra... Entire passages can go by with nothing but English, but when the best word is one that's not in English, the author uses that best-word, and you gather it purely by context. And it works.

More importantly, the lack of italicizing says to the reader: these words, and the world they represent and are part of, are not something that require extra-special attention. They're not exotic. They're the proper words to use, so the author used them, but they don't need to be highlighted or bolded or get elevated attention to make sure you don't miss that they're something unusual, or out of the ordinary. Because, in the story, these words are not out-of-the-ordinary. They're not exotic. They just are.

Companion to Wolves is a reverse case of this, like I mentioned above, in that it also attempts to treat its non-English terms as just ordinary (for the story/characters) everyday words. The first problem is that English, itself, is dominated by its Teutonic/Norse roots. There are a large number of Norse terms that, when anglicized, are almost identical in spelling to existing English words -- but radically different in meaning. Do I read "threat" as the English -- statement of an intention to inflict pain, injury, damage, or other hostile action on someone or do I read it as "threat" in the Old English sense (per the book's intentions)? The 'th' would've been written as þ and the meaning was more varied: þréat -- crowd, host, troop, band, body of people, swarm, press, throng; violence, compulsion, force, oppression, punishment, ill-treatment, coercion, calamity.

Which means you end up with passages like the following, since "threat" is going to be ingrained in any English's speaker's mind as having the first-listed (modern) meaning. Only with some effort would we gather (solely from context) the second meaning. [Truncated to remove spoilers.]

That summer, as last, the threat of the trolls continued long past the spring equinox. Grimolfr's wolfheall was fortunate to lose only two wolves and a man; east of them, Thorsbaer lost an entire long patrol. Isolfr and Viradechtis were among the wolves and men sent to assist in hunting down the trellthreat responsible. The Thorsbaer wolfsprechend did not join the patrol, as his bitch was on the edge of season... The Thorsbaer werthreat eyed him and Viradechtis thoughtfully... Everyone knew a new konigenwolf meant a new wolfheall, and Eyjolfr was not the only wolfcarl who could plan ahead.

Vigdis' season came while Isolfr and Viradechtis were on patrol. By the time frost fell, man and wolf were as blooded as any of the Wolfmaegth...

So, sometimes it's "troll" and sometimes it's "trell". Threat is used, here and there, in its modern sense, but most often as the second half of a combo-word where it has its Old English meaning. "Haell" is used repeatedly and consistently, instead of the modern spelling, "hall," even though they fundamentally mean the same thing in context. And "konigenwolf" is only implied for most of the story (and then translated very near the end) as "queen-wolf"; the Old English would have been 'cyninge', but I can see making the 'c' into a 'k' to make clearer the correct pronunciation. Wolfcarl is really simply "wolf man", though I can see avoiding that because it has silly connotations for English readers. And I only got as much as I did because I've spent several years happily buried in Norse and Old English dictionaries in the pursuit of my own writing. I'm still fuzzy on some of the others.

Really, the entire book reads like it's fangirl Norselish. It needed someone with a firm hand to reel some of it back in; when the vast majority of the names are similar in suffix (-ulfr and -olfr being spelling-variants on 'wolf'), you need to draw the line somewhere. Havemercy may have been too clever by half, and too enamoured of its own cleverness, but Companion to Wolves was too freaking enamoured of its Old-to-Modern English dictionary. Its terminology -- even without the italicization -- gets in the way of making sense. Some stories, sure, slow down and enjoy the language, but there's a difference between enjoying gorgeously-written passages and just plain trying to understand what the passage is saying.

I mean, don't we warn new writers away from over-reliance on their thesauruses? Perhaps we should also start warning them away from over-reliance on their foreign terminology search results. Yes, it's commendable to treat foreign/unusual words as 'everyday', if such are everyday for the story or world or characters. But please, remember the readers: if an English word could suffice, we've got a million of them. Seems to me that perhaps the best approach is to remove all those non-English words, and then -- where a precise term is required and no English can satisfy as succinctly -- then use the non-English term.

Without italics.

Comments

[arkessian]

Disliked Havemercy, loved Companion to Wolves and had no difficulty with the language although I haven't the Old English context (and skipped the list of characters entirely and never chose to look back, but that's personal taste). Also enjoyed the Brenchley, but some years ago, and much of his subsequent work.

I shall look out of The Hero's Walk.

[kaigou]

Oh, I didn't actually read the damn list of characters. I'm just never impressed when such is included -- except when it's a script. Otherwise, I expect the book to do the introducing for me. A list is not acceptable.

It wasn't that I minded Companion all that much. It was adequate for an afternoon's passage, but the overuse of unfamiliar terms really started to bog. Not at all the same kind of slowing-down as for a story like The Hero's Walk, which took me off-and-on (with the second half setting aside everything else to focus on that one book) over three days. That's, like, three times as long as it normally takes me to read a book that speed -- but it wasn't because the story bogged. It was because I was busy, y'know, enjoying every bit of it.

[hollyberries]

I finished Havemercy with the distinct impression of having read a loosely-plotted fanfic (and slight annoyance at how a lot of things were all about the boys, and the white dudes win! Again). But I did manage to enjoy A Companion to Wolves when I realized it was Pern-with-dragons, and better characterized.

You just hit the nail on the head re: italics and works not in English, though. I ran away from Amy Tan for that reason (yeah, I'm Chinese, but I couldn't take it anymore), and in a lot of other books the authors tend to take diabolical pleasure in showing off their knowledge of other cultures - which is nice, until I realize I have a handwritten glossary for all the words they're using.

In the context of SFF and fantasy, though, what is your opinion on Game of Thrones and the ASIF series in general? (I ask because I feel like the only one in a circle of fantasy fans to not like the book...)

[kaigou]

It wasn't that I didn't like Havemercy -- I enjoy clever repartee myself, but that clever repartee still needs some kind of a plot. Or at least a conflict. I actually enjoyed Companion even less on the gender scale, not just because it was all about the boys -- as in, pretty much nothing but boys, for 95% of it -- but for another particular detail that I'll probably post about later.

the authors tend to take diabolical pleasure in showing off their knowledge of other cultures

Or, as the case may be, their handy reference guide to another culture's language, as in the case of Companion. In SFF, it's often a kind of showing off, but it's often also mixed up with a sort of "isn't this strange! isn't this wierd! isn't this fantastic!" (as in, fantastical or unbelievable)... when the same [publishing/house] style is used for non-SFF, then -- all those italics for non-English words -- it feels, bluntly, like the author is essentializing or orientalizing, by this constant emphasis on strange/wierd/fantastic. That it's not just "showing off knowledge" that's carrying the load of my annoyance, but also the "other" part (as adjective for "cultures").

Game of Thrones... ehhh, I thought it was okay. I like significant political intrigue, dislike people getting stupid (which is a lot of the first book, so it took a bit to get through that), but eventually grew to only like certain voices, so I'd skim the other POVs. I wouldn't take it on a deserted island with me, but I don't begrudge the weekend I spent reading the series. It sufficed. Can't say the same for the adaptation, though. Definitely so not of the impressed category, over here.

[soukup]

The only place where I would disagree with you about italicization is when an author uses it as a characterization tool -- when I find it in the dialogue or internal monologue of a character who's supposed to be read as pretentious/pedantic, or who is the kind of person to exoticize someone else's language. I love characters who are ridiculous, who fetishize and/or who like to put on airs, and I've written people saying and thinking things in italics which I would never italicize.

[kaigou]

I don't have an issue with that, at all. That's using italics for emphasis, and some characters are just all about the emphasis. The Hero's Walk just happens to be a great example of how, when you really scale back on the emphasis, that when it does show up, it's like suddenly yelling FIRE in a silent theater. It stands out, double-time.

That said, certainly there are plenty of characters who are lots of fun and emphasize every other word. But if the story is also getting italics for any non-English word [used by them, in narration, and by anyone else], then you can see how the messages can get mixed: is everyone going extra-heavy (emphasis) on the foreign words, or is that use of italics just to tell me that it's not English?

I've read my share of stories where I've actually taken a character (or several) to be ultra-emphatic with non-English words, only to realize belatedly that it was just house-style: emphasis gets it, and foreign words get it, and I wasn't supposed to read every single blipping non-English word as WOAH LISTEN TO ME. Talk about getting a completely different take on the characterization, there.

[sothcweden]

After that kind of praise, I have decided I will go see if the library has The Hero's Walk. Thanks for the rec!

[kaigou]

I hope you enjoy! I wasn't expecting to, myself -- most literary fiction bores me, when it doesn't put me off by having little plot and too much interior navel-gazing, or just plain unlikeable characters taking up the pages. The characters in The Hero's Walk aren't always likable, but they are definitely sympathetic, and I think that might even matter more to me.

[cyphomandra]

I've read a YA set in Karachi that italicised Urdu terms on first appearance (usually with enough context to give a definition), and then on all subsequent appearances they were unmarked. I liked this as an approach, actually, as it seemed to combine the best of both approaches (using words distinct to those characters while not marking them out as unusual).

I remember at least one fanfic that had special characters to announce noises made by machines, such as "beep!" or "ring ring". Otherwise, obviously, readers would have been baffled.

[kaigou]

The italicize-once routine is something I've seen in some philosophical & nonfiction works, where there's a lot of jargon that gets repeated. The first time, the word's called out in some way (italics, definition, bolding, whatever) and after that, it's assumed you now know the jargon. The problem with that is that in fiction, we do look for patterns -- we also read fiction in a very different way/mindset than nonfiction.

One method of italicizing used in Companion (and that I've seen elsewhere) is when a word or phrase is part of a recalled or past conversation. It's still emphasis, but it's a kind of "pay attention to me, I'm dialogue/sound" and it's not that common (among the fiction I've read). Plenty of authors will just use quotes, even for things like: he recalled she'd said "please". I guess you could class that -- along with machine-noises, which I also tend to italicize -- as sound-that-is-not-dialogue. As in, a recollection of sound, or an overhearing of sound.