Not that I would like to read them, I'm just curious to see how good one can become in a 2nd language. I'm looking for examples of writers who wrote texts that aren't their native language but even by native speakers would be considered very well written. The older they were when they started learning the language the better(I'm not interested in someone who moved to England when he was 5)
pic unrelated
who is this salami sucker?
lolita
Conrad learned English in his 20s on a boat
/thread
spbp
How the fuck? It's not even great, it's pure poetry. What an achievement.
Nabokov basically spoke English all the time.
to my knowledge, he was fluent in English since he was a young child and it was spoken in his household. I'm looking more for people who didn't start learning a language till they were in their teens or 20s
Heart of Darkness
>The family spoke Russian, English, and French in their household, and Nabokov was trilingual from an early age. In fact, much to his patriotic father's disappointment, Nabokov could read and write in English before he could in Russian.
Doesn't fit OP's criteria at all.
also extra bonus if their 1st language was English since they seem to have the hardest time learning other languages
shots fired, anglos
Beckett's trilogy and Strindberg's Inferno.
Austerlitz by Sebald.
Noelle Easton you fucking plep
Joseph Conrad is probably the best-known example
Milan Kundera (Czech) wrote in French
Kerouac learned English relatively late also
Beckett is a good example, an English speaker who didn't learn French until he was in college. how would his French writing seem to a French speaker? would it seem impressive like they're reading something by a native speaker or does it read it awkwardly and unnatural?
>Kerouac learned English relatively late also
age 6
>late
that's only a modern phenomenon because English speakers aren't exposed to other languages
two hundred years ago French was the more prestigious language and it would have been "easier" for Anglos to learn French than the other way around due to exposure - now that relation is flipped
even as late as WW1 French was still considered the more important language and every educated Englishman would have spoken it well
today English speakers never see French out of the class room while French speakers see English on the internet, in Hollywood movies, video games, etc. etc. so naturally they'll learn English much easier than English speakers will French
in general though becoming proficient enough in a language to write a novel is perfectly possible, it just takes many years of dedicated study and exposure
Yes Beckett is that very rare bird, someone moved AWAY from English, rather than TOWARDS it.
When asked why he did this, he said he had "a need to be ill-equipped", whatever that means.
Some writers that (sort of) qualify, but not really, are those who deliberately invent their own language.
>A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
Of course it's mostly English but there's a lot of Russian in there too
>Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban
Of course this is mostly English but he's trying to give it the flavour of a foreign language that we have to "decode".
>Finnegan's Wake, Joyce
"If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign tongue
That is forever Ireland."
Nabokov, Conrad, and Beckett.
Kader Abdolah would be a great example. Irianian poet/writer who moved to The Netherlands in 1988 and started writing in Dutch.
oscar milosz, Cioran, Kundera
>Hm. This one seems to have given up.
Basically everything written in Latin after the fall of the western roman empire, which is a staggering number of incredible poems and philosophical works
I'd say it doesn't count when it's nobody's first language.
I think the best examples would probably be religious texts written in a religious language. For example, Indians who wrote in Sanskrit or Jews who wrote in Hebrew or Christians who wrote in Latin.
^Also probably Muslims who wrote in Arabic.
Cioran i guess
READ THE FILENAME BEFORE YOU ASK FOR SAUCE NEWFAG
the poems i am composing in Russian desu
The Bible
Nabokov was a native speaker of English
this
Its not that Americans are flatly stupid. Our culture is just too insular.
The Book of Tea by Kakuzou Okakura
Notable for coming from another culture that, like Anglos, somewhat lends itself to being linguistically insular. Though there was probably a lot more western learning from western teachers in the Meiji.
I remember hearing somewhere that the book of Revelation has really weird, awkward grammar in its original Greek in contrast to most of the books.
Kerouac never learned English. Let's get real here.
>Nadsat is Russian
...
Why not both?
Heart of Darkness.
Shan Sa moved to France at the age of 18 and she is a well known writer over there
You didn't know?
Emil Cioran wrote a lot of his works in french, his second or third language.
>anglicized russian slang is Russian
ok. Let me guess, you're American?
Conrad is the only highly regarded example I can think of off the top of my head, and is especially impressive since he wasn't exposed to English from childhood. If you're already fluent in childhood don't get credit. Nabokov doesn't count for this reason, just like it's not impressive if Europeans can write a nice English sentence now.
Anyone know the specific scene
I dunno nigga, I'm not a native english speaker, but I can clearly ass wipe you god damn ass in english, nigga, you know what I mean?, god damn ass sizzy bitch ass dump fucks crackas who can't even study other language, less alone speak it good enough, you know what I mean?, practice, cracka, practice is what is called nigga.
my nigga, get gud nigga, just close the internet and go to some nigga online word hip hop star video of whatever shit you wanna learn and master that language cracka, maybe that way you can pound some teen pussy there with your nobel and all that shit nigga.
nigga, just close your eyes and get gud nigga.
In Praise of Older Women by Stephen Vizinczey
>why don’t you learn my irrelevant tongue
I'm still working on it. English native to Norwegian.
Kafka
Dubliners
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ulysses
basically everything he wrote but his last one
Salomé
Du kommer aldri til å klare det.
Norwegian is a great language, unfortunately it's been cursed with only being used by mediocre authors
Joseph Conrad
Prabhupāda wrote his commentaries on vedic lit on english. Though he started publishing relatively late, he was taught english since elementary school bc of the british occupation
cioran, eliade, ionesco
Feels late, but Conrad is the perfect example. English was his third language after Polish and French, and he only picked it up in his 20s or 30s. Despite that he still produced some of the best regarded works in English literature.
Atlas Shrugged
atlas was a passive aggressive twat
Kurt Vonnegut.
Salman Rushdie
Ionesco had a french mother and was raised in France for most of his childhood.
Kafka wrote all his literary works in German (dude was Czechoslovakia)
this is the correct answer in this thread
anyone saying lolita is literally indian
conrad is the goat
Konrad
I suspect this may be a joke of yours, but if not I do hope you know the Irish speak perfect English as long as they're well educated.
>The Book of Tea by Kakuzou Okakura
Any good?
It would probably read as "awkwardly and unnatural" as your English
>reddit spacing
Go back
Kazuo Ishiguro
Tao Lin
Cormac McCarthy
>unironically using the phrase "reddit spacing", only invented in the past couple of years, whereas the spacing to which the term refers, has been used long before reddit existed, particularly in longer posts, where it greatly enhances readability
I suspect you're the one with a place to go back to, so please, either go and stay there, or stop trying so hard to fit in
Thank u so much for unpacking the reddit spacing BS
been here since the fucking habbo hotel days and these here yungyuns dunno sheeit.
Are you interested in Japanese aesthetics? Then yes. It's non-fiction, but its prose remains very poetic.
Acktually, VN was trilingual since early childhood.
Joesph Conrad didn’t learn English until his 30s, so Heart of Darkness.
Didn't Lafcadio Hearn, the proto weaboo, publish fiction or essays in Japanese?
That's because our dear homeland is full of boring people, thinking boring thoughts, leading boring lives. I don't think Norway is even able to produce great people on any arena, really.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Die Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts is a masterpiece of erudition and the best book in German I've read