Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Robert McCrum on Conrad:
Part of the work's strange hallucinatory atmosphere comes from the writer's struggle with a language that was not his mother tongue. He sometimes said he would have preferred to be a French novelist, and that English was a language without "clean edges". He once complained that "all English words are instruments for exciting blurred emotions". This, paradoxically, is perhaps what gives the book its famously enigmatic, and ambiguous, atmosphere.
I bring this up cos in the intro to my HEARTOFDARKNESS it mentioned Conrad's frustrations with English, and how the word 'Oaken' means more than one thing in English whereas in French the equivalent word simply means 'made of Oak'.
Part of the work's strange hallucinatory atmosphere comes from the writer's struggle with a language that was not his mother tongue. He sometimes said he would have preferred to be a French novelist, and that English was a language without "clean edges". He once complained that "all English words are instruments for exciting blurred emotions". This, paradoxically, is perhaps what gives the book its famously enigmatic, and ambiguous, atmosphere.
I bring this up cos in the intro to my HEARTOFDARKNESS it mentioned Conrad's frustrations with English, and how the word 'Oaken' means more than one thing in English whereas in French the equivalent word simply means 'made of Oak'.