If you haven't heard of Eric Stone, yet... well, you probably don't read a lot of SF short stories.
Eric is a master of short stories, in a wide range of spec. fic. genres–sword & sorcery, space opera, alternate history, and more. He's been published in uncountable magazines and anthologies (well, technically, they are countable–finite, even!–but there's enough of them that I didn't feel like counting), and is a winner of the Writers of the Future and Nebula awards. He is currently serializing the epic fantasy novel Heir of the Line on Kindle Vella, and has two single-author short story collections: Rejiggering the Thingamajig and Other Stories and The Humans in the Walls and Other Stories.
We'll be looking at some of those stories, but my real reason for writing this review is Eric's near-future sci-fi thriller Unforgettable.
(As usual, all Amazon links in this article are Affiliate links–so if you feel like giving Eric some money, I'll get a small cut.)
Eric is trilingual in English, Spanish, and Italian, and has a great love for Russian techno/pop music (a fact that I discovered when we carpooled to WorldCon in 2011). With this background, I expected to see more secondary language representation in his stories when I started looking for it, but it's actually surprisingly sparse. His knowledge of Italian shows up on only one page of one story–"Tabloid Reporter to the Stars", which appears in Rejiggering the Thingamajig and Other Stories (to the best of my knowledge, anyway, though perhaps there is a story I missed; if it wasn't in one of those collections, it wasn't easily available on my bookshelf for perusal). And that is only three words!
"If they are gray humanoids with bulging heads, they greet you as an old friend, eh, paesano?"
There was Italian ancestry on my mother's side, so he'd taken to calling me paesano, countryman."
"Paesano" is initially introduced here in a syntactic position which makes it Obviously a term of address. However, in this case, the specific meaning is not Irrelevant, as it used to establish something about the main character's background. Thus, we get an immediate follow-up with semi-diegetic appositive translation. (The diegetic status of comments by a first-person character narrator made to the audience is somewhat unclear.)
He though a moment, then laughed. "Buffo. But what you think? [...]"
Here we have an interjection, which is the classic form of Making it Irrelevant. If you happen you know Italian, or just look it up, it turns out to be a semantically appropriate interjection, but if you don't, it just doesn't matter.
He nodded. "Interessante."
This usage I would class as a very specialized form of Making it Obvious; specifically, Eric is relying on the semantic and graphological similarity of the Italian "interessante" and the English "interesting" to allow the expected Anglophone reader to infer appropriate meaning. This is a dangerous thing to do, but note that he's got a metaphorical parachute here–the scene makes sense with no dialog on this line at all. He nodded, and we all know what that means. So, we could read this as an instance of Making it Irrelevant if we wanted to. This, we will see, becomes a pattern!
I particularly expected to encounter some Spanish in Eric's alternate history Argentinian Empire stories–"By the Hands of Juan Perón" and "A Member of the Peronista Party", both collected in The Humans in the Walls and Other Stories. But, well... I didn't! Most of the dialog in both of these stories would be in Spanish, necessitating a standard narrative translation convention to make it accessible to the Anglophone audience. As we saw in Graham Bradley's Kill the Beast, it is entirely possible to break the translation convention for short periods in order to Show the underlying diegetic language, which in that case is used to help better establish the setting and the cultural background of the characters. Is this perhaps a matter of what works better for a short story vs. a novel or novella? Probably not, but then, I haven't reviewed a lot of short stories yet, and unlike Eric, I am not a master of the form! I did ask Eric himself what was going on here, and he does not remember whether he thought about this issue or not when writing those stories–an unfortunately extremely common authorial response, and a large part of the reason for me writing these reviews!
Now, onto the juicy bits. Eric James Stone's only trilingual work, the novel Unforgettable, somewhat surprisingly makes use of the language that he is not actually fluent in, featuring a little bit of transliterated Russian in addition to Spanish (and a smidgen of Portuguese, which I guess actually makes it quadrilingual). The plot does meander through Rome for a bit, so there was opportunity for showing off some Italian, but that opportunity was not taken. A number of other languages are relevant (notably, Farsi), but not explicitly shown in the text.
Conveniently, Eric uses the typical convention of italicizing non-English text, so it was fairly easy to skim through for every example. (Whether or not this is a good convention in other respects is a whole other question–one which I may have to find a way to address at some point.) Our first exposure to not-English comes in this scene:
The warm scent of melted cheese escaped from the top box. "Sesenta y dos euros," I said.
The guard said something in rapid-fire Spanish.
With a shrug, I said, "No hablo bien. Americano."
"Who order pizzas?" asked the guard.
The first bit of Spanish is essentially Irrelevant (or perhaps, an Easter Egg); it's something that a pizza delivery guy would say, but if you don't get it, it won't impact the scene. The second bit is Made Obvious by the context of the surrounding two lines–the guard says something in Spanish, then switches to English in response. We are helped out by the similar-to-English word "Americano", but you can probably figure out that this says something like "I don't speak Spanish good" (or the moral equivalent thereof) even if you've never seen or heard a single bit of Spanish in your life.
Next, we get straight diegetic translation:
Then, pretending to remember something, I added, "Seventh floor. Piso siete."
Semi-diegetic explanation:
"¿Dónde está el baño?" I asked.
That was the most useful phrase in the world, for me at least. I could ask where the bathroom was in fifteen different languages.
And more semi-diegetic appositive translation:
The sign on the door read Criptografía Cuántica–Quantum Cryptography–so it looked like the CIA's source was right on the money.
Next, there's a bit of scene-based Making It Obvious:
"¡Alto!" said the guard, swinging the gun toward me.
I raised my hands.
What does a guard say while pointing a gun at you that makes you raise your hands? (It's not a literal word-for-word translation, but nothing ever is.)
And then we get something which looks a lot like relying on graphological familiarity again:
"I warned you not to trust her," I said.
"Silencio," said Carlos.
Now, the last bit of Spanish we encounter turns out to be fairly critical to the plot. If you actually speak Spanish, it could even constitute a spoiler–a pretty extreme case of Easter Egging:
We raced past a sign that read Laboratorio de Entrelazar. I stopped running, forcing Yelena to stop as well. Did that mean laboratory of something-lasers?
[...]
At the far end, a pencil-thick shaft of bright violet light hit a prism and split into two weaker beams that extended into holes in the wall.
"That must be the entrelazar," I said.
This is especially fascinating in light of the cases we have previously seen where Eric seems to rely on graphological similarity to English to get the reader to infer the correct meaning. In this case, the character, who also does not actually speak Spanish (as he explained to the guard when dropping off pizzas), is the one making the graphological/phonological inference, and presenting that "translation" to the reader. But in fact (spoiler alert! highlight to read):
"What did it say on the lab door? The exact words?"
"Laboratorio de Entrelazar."
"Entrelazar? You're sure about that?" His voice was excited.
"Yes. What does it mean?"
"Literally, it means to interlace. [...]"
And if you want the rest of that sentence, you'll have to go buy the book yourself!
I find myself absolutely fascinated by this repeated feature of Eric's secondary language use of relying at least partially on graphological similarity to prompt understanding–and its subversion! This is the first genuinely new technique I have encountered since This Darkness Light, reviewed in episode 3 of this series. It is somewhat dangerous, as it makes additional assumptions about the expectations and background knowledge of the reader than other techniques do, and thus I would never recommend trying it in isolation, but its a neat thing to do when you can back it up with a safety net of other techniques.
There is far less Russian representation. First, we have these repeated uses of diegetic translation:
I said, "Nye dvigat'sya," and added, "Don't move," in case he was bilingual.
[...]
I aimed the gun at him and said "Nye dvigat'sya. Don't move."
And then a bit of Making It Obvious:
"Then I will go and catch a plane. Do svidaniya." She walked to the door and opened it.
You're talking about leaving, opening a door, what's the most likely thing to say? (If you guessed "Goodbye"--or, more literally, "until meeting", give yourself a pat on the back. But not too many pats, because the whole point was to make it not that hard!)
And our last smidgen of secondary language is that bit of Portuguese:
I looked at Luiz. "Qual problema?" I asked in my limited Portuguese. He rose cautiously to look over the bar, then stood up all the way. "Sorry, senhor. I think I see gun. Maybe is camera?"
Again, we have some reliance on graphological similarity, but with the safety net of really being kind of Irrelevant--if the protagonist said nothing to Luiz, and if Luiz left out the vocative, no critical meaning would be lost.
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P. S. The title of this post is kind of a lie, but only because of my own technical terminology; a proper trilingual work would be one which does not need to put any work into integrating multiple secondary languages, because it is in fact written for a trilingual audience and has no "secondary" languages. This is, in fact, closely connected with the issue of whether or not it is a good idea to identify secondary-language content with italics.
It's been a while since my last post in this series, and I blame Ken Liu entirely for that. I had intended to do reviews of some of his short stories, but some of them are just so dang depressing that it kinda put me off the whole project for a while. However, I have thoughts on A Desolation Called Peace (the sequel to A Memory Called Empire), The Termite Queen, and a bunch of Ken Liu stories in the pipeline, so stay tuned!
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