He is not immersing himself completely, writing in French and translating himself back for the benefit of his American audience.īut Jhumpa Lahiri, whose 1999 debut short story collection Interpreter of Maladies won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, has gone even further than Beckett. (English was Joseph Conrad’s fourth language, acquired in adulthood, but he never produced a novel in Polish.) Writers who undertake to learn a new language tend to write about it in English: Lately, Ta-Nehisi Coates has decamped to Paris, but his writing, produced there, has still thus far concerned the United States. The language they become famous in may not be their first. It is unusual, for obvious reasons, for authors who have attained mastery in one language to begin writing in another. He did not, perhaps, succeed in writing "without style," but the effect of his experiment was at least a superior one. After Godot, Beckett produced new work in French as often as English. And while he would eventually translate that play back into his native language, the exercise stuck. In 1949, he produced a play, En attendant Godot. The year after that, he began translating his old work into the new language. The next year, Beckett would begin writing poetry in French.
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