Writing Without Style

WRITING WITHOUT STYLE

TRANSLINGUALISM AS SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE

By Steven G. Kellman

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The Montréal Review, August 2025

Language might seem an essential constituent of identity. It is hard to imagine Winston Churchill orating in anything but English, and Edith Piaf would not have been Edith Piaf in Urdu or Nahuatl. But language is in fact an accident of time and place. Not only are languages always in flux, but few of us determine or control the ones we speak. Pablo Neruda did not choose Spanish as his native language; a conjunction of factors chose it for him.

However, some stubborn writers, refusing to accept the happenstances of birth, challenge contingency by electing the language in which they compose. Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, and Vladimir Nabokov are the most famous modern examples of literary translingualism, the phenomenon of writing in an adopted language. But there are many more, and their motives are varied. Migration (Ha Jin, Andreï Makine, Emine Sevgi Özdamar) and colonialism (Chinua Achebe, Anita Desai, Léopold Sédar Senghor) explain why many writers have switched languages. For others, it has been a matter of economics; after the failure of her coffee farm in East Africa left her in need of cash, Karen Blixen, knowing the market for books in her native Danish was limited, adopted the nom de plume Isak Dinesen and wrote Seven Gothic Tales in English.

However, there is no practical reason to explain why some other writers voluntarily don the hair shirt of composing in an adopted language. Writing well is demanding enough in one’s first language without the added handicap of trying to do it in L2, L3, or even L4. Yet exophony has been practiced by some as a kind of artistic gymnastics, for no ulterior motive other than mastery of movement. Submission to the discipline of a language lacking immediate practical use is evident, for example, in the cult of post-classical Latin.

In quondam times, Latin was required for admission to college. Further study of Latin was demanded for graduation from college. In an article titled “The Case Against Compulsory Latin” published in The Atlantic in 1917, Charles W. Eliot noted with approval that the Latin mandate was in the process of disappearing: “Indeed, from an analysis of the requirements for admission in seventy-six of the leading American colleges and universities, it appears that in a decided majority Latin is no longer an essential for the degree of Bachelor Arts, and that four-ninths of the institutions whose practices have been examined make no demand on the secondary schools of the country that they teach Latin.”1 As president of Harvard University, Eliot himself had successfully pushed for the elimination of compulsory Latin during freshman year. The abandonment of classical mandates accelerated throughout the century, and, by 1960, even Oxford and Cambridge had done away with Latin requirements.

Nevertheless, Latin lives on among enthusiasts scattered across the world, and a Living Latin movement even attempts to revive the language of ancient Rome as a spoken medium. But, though commencement addresses at Harvard and Princeton are still delivered in Latin, the mandate has been abolished. At Princeton, even students majoring in classics are no longer obliged to study Latin or Greek. No longer is anyone forced to struggle with the ablative, the pluperfect subjunctive, and superlative adjective declensions in order to acquire knowledge cherished precisely because it lacks practical use. But those who choose to do so are affirming the principle of ars gratia artis – art for art’s sake. Vatican documents are still being published in Latin, but in the twenty-first century, anyone other than a Church functionary who studies the language is engaging in a mindful activity that, like sandpainting, serves no goal beyond itself. Just as the purpose of darye, the elaborate Korean tea ceremony, is not to quench thirst, no one takes up Latin for utilitarian reasons.

In her language memoir Living with a Dead Language: My Romance with Latin, Ann Patty, a retired book editor, recounts how taking up Latin provided her with the same kind of mindfulness she found in Zen. “My Latin study,” she writes, “is another form of meditation for me, another way of slowing down, of turning off the engine.”2 Devoting herself to the gratuitous labor of devising English equivalents for texts by Catullus, Petty writes: “Translating Latin poetry required much the same discipline as editing books” (Petty, p. 100). Petty confines herself to translating, not writing, Latin poetry, but there are enough contemporary poets writing in Latin to sustain Vates: The Journal of New Latin Poetry. To compose poetry in an ancient language accessible only to a happy few is to cultivate a demanding, self-sufficient discipline not unlike yoga or bonseki. The Australian John Lee, who publishes as Johannes Lyaeus, explains his attraction to Latin: “Nowadays I live agreeably at home in retirement, producing epigrams in autumn light. My Muse may be rough and my caesuras lame; however, like Horace [Odes IV.xi.35-6], I find in poetry the antidote for melancholy.”3 The concentration required to write metered verse in a language as complicated and demanding as Latin is surely an antidote to mental drift.

The situation is much the same with Sanskrit, the classical language of the Indian subcontinent. Supplanted by Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi, and other tongues, Sanskrit no longer claims any native speakers, though it survives in prayers and sacred texts. However, enough contemporary writers continue to compose in the old language to justify an annual award in Sanskrit literary composition bestowed by the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters. The recipient in 2005 of the Sahitya Akademi Award for Sanskrit was Śrībhārgavarāghavīyam, a complex epic consisting of 2121 verses. Blind since birth, its author, Jagadguru Rāmabhadrācārya, is a polyglot prodigy said to speak twenty-two languages. He composed his opus while observing an extended Payovrata, the religious regimen of a milk-only diet. While Payovrata is a Hindu ritual of penance designed to appease Lord Vishnu, undertaking the demanding task of writing poetry in Sanskrit in itself entails submission to an aesthetic, if not spiritual, discipline.

The ascesis of translingual composition is not exclusive to those submitting to the rigors of an ancient language. A kind of penance not entirely alien to Payovrata is apparent in the career of Helga Schneider, who grew up speaking German but does all her writing in Italian. Schneider’s mother was an unrepentant Nazi who committed war crimes while a prison guard at Ravensbrück and then Auschwitz-Birkenau. Rejecting her mother tongue and the tongue of her mother, Schneider, writing in Italian, struggles to exorcise the horror of her maternal monster, particularly in a 2001 novel she titled Lasciami andare, madre (Let me go, mother).

Robert Frost’s famous quip that: “I’d as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down”4 implies that impedence is an essential element in art. Friction is necessary to strike a creative spark. Since no one today is a native speaker of Latin or Sanskrit, all those who choose to write in either are literary translinguals – “authors who write in more than one language or at least in a language other their primary one.”5 It is hard enough to write well in one’s native tongue, but trying to write in an adopted language – L2, L3, or even L4 – requires the skill and mindfulness of playing tennis not only with the net up but also while wearing roller skates. Conrad, a major novelist in English, testified to the ordeal of struggling to take control of what was, after Polish and French, his third language: “I had to work like a coal-miner in his pit quarrying all my English sentences out of a black night.”6 Nabokov observed: “My complete switch from Russian prose to English prose was exceedingly painful -like learning anew to handle things after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion.”7 Nevertheless, not a few authors have deliberately chosen the handicap of laboring in an adopted language. The result is sometimes an unusually spare text, words assembled with extraordinary care.

The translingual discipline is evident not only in contemporary efforts to write in Latin and Sanskrit but also in what one of its leading Western scholars, Burton Watson, calls “one of the strangest [developments] in the history of world literature.”8 Kanshi was the practice by Japanese poets of writing verse in classical Chinese. Kanshi is often terse – a poem of four or eight lines adhering to intricate prosadic requirements. It is not farfetched to liken the intense concentration required of Japanese poets to compose in classical Chinese to other demanding practices such as breath control and ikebana. Richard Wilbur might have explained the effectiveness of such texts when he wrote, in his native English: “In general, I would say that limitation makes for power; the strength of the genie comes from his being confined in the bottle.”9 Because, working in short forms in an adopted language, their lexical palette is necessarily more limited, translingual writers possess a certain perverse advantage; they are forced to focus. It is hard to imagine Luis de Góngora and John Lyly indulging in their rococo sprawls if employing a less familiar language than Spanish and English, respectively. They would be forced to measure their words. “English makes me slow down,” explained Puerto Rican novelist Rosario Ferré. “I have to think over what I am going to say twice, maybe three times – which is often healthy because I can’t put my foot, or rather my pen, in my mouth so easily. I can’t be trigger-happy in English because words take too much effort.”10 Some translingual writers relish that struggle.

For the last four decades of his life, the Irishman Samuel Beckett sacrificed the commercial advantages of writing in his native tongue, English, in order to wrestle with French. Asked why, Beckett replied: “. . . parce qu’en français c’est plus facile d’écrire sans style”11 – in French, he claimed, it was easier to write without style. Of course, an unobtrusive style is still a style, but Beckett found in French a way to suppress the flamboyance apparent in early works such as Murphy and Watt. Under the influence of James Joyce, Beckett’s English prose was profuse with ostentatious verbal play. But since his command of and range in French was more limited, the constriction imposed by writing in it became a way to distinguish Beckett from the older master. He explained: “I realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one's material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.”12

Conducted in French, Beckett’s subtractions became increasingly radical as he deployed spare language to try to express what his narrator Jacques Moran calls “le silence dont l’univers est fait”13 – the silence of which the universe is made. Beckett’s books became shorter and shorter, verbiage disappearing almost completely from his 1965 film called Film, in which the only utterance is “shhh!”14 “Il me semblait que tout langage est un écart de langage,“ says Moran (Beckett Molloy, p. 179) – it seemed to me that all language is an excess of language. Choosing his words more fastidiously in French, a language that did not come as naturally to him as English, Beckett bears terse witness to the inadequacy of language.

Milan Kundera followed a similar trajectory of reduction – the novels he wrote in French, after ceasing to write in his native Czech, contain fewer characters and fewer pages. Their sentences are even shorter. In Kundera’s first French novel, La Lenteur (1975), the character Vera (Vera Hrabankova married Milan Kundera in 1967) says to the fictional Milan: “Tu m’a souvent dit vouloir écrire un jour un roman où aucun mot ne serait sérieux”15 [You often told me you wanted to write a novel one day in which not a single word would be serious]. Crafting every word in a book to be serious is a demanding task, especially in an acquired language. It is perhaps even more difficult to create frivolity word by word. Celebrating the freedom he enjoyed after moving to France in 1975, thereby escaping the Communist censors in Prague, Kundera quotes Vera Linhartova, another Czech exile who took up residence in Paris and French: “The writer is not a prisoner of any one language.”16 But many writers use their linguistic freedom to submit to the stringent demands of an acquired language.

Translingual writing as an exercise in contraction is also apparent in the case of Aharon Appelfeld, whose frugal Hebrew prose, like the French Beckett's, avoids emotional and stylistic excess. Most of his novels are set during or just before the Holocaust, but the atrocities themselves are implied, not portrayed. A survivor himself whose idyllic childhood was shattered when Nazis murdered his mother and his grandmother, Appelfeld escaped from a concentration camp when he was nine and spent much of the war in hiding. When he eventually made his way to Palestine, at age fourteen, he possessed a smattering of languages, including German, Yiddish, Ukrainian, Romanian, Russian, and Italian, but not yet a word of Hebrew, the language in which he would devise his fiction. German was Appelfeld’s mother tongue, or at least the language of his mother, but by adolescence he was not especially fluent in it and, besides, it now repelled him as “the language of those who murdered my mother.”17 Instead, as he explained, “Hebrew became my adopted mother tongue.”18 However, it was not without considerable resistance and struggle, as, thrust into an environment in which only Hebrew was spoken, he was initially mute. “I came to Israel without language,” he explained (Appelfeld K.).

In Appelfeld’s 2001 novel Laish, the fifteen-year-old narrator, tasked with recording the experiences of a motley band of refugees bound for Jerusalem, recounts his difficulties in learning Hebrew. It seems likely that Appelfeld’s own linguistic ordeal was at least as arduous. However, he was later able to exclaim: “You know, I’m lucky that I’m writing in Hebrew” (Appelfeld, K). And he credited that good fortune to a conception of Hebrew not very different from Beckett’s conception of French, as a language in which it is possible to “écrire sans style.” Appelfeld’s adopted Semitic tongue, he claimed, demanded terseness, a kind of minimalism that Beckett might appreciate. “Hebrew taught me that less is more. Use two words for a feeling, sometimes only one word, don’t hide the feelings behind words forever. Don’t be in love with words!” (Appelfeld, K.).

Writing in a language he had only begun to learn in adolescence demanded a kind of self-effacement. Hebrew forced Appelfeld to concentrate on the speech and not the speaker. Moreover, Hebrew seemed to him to exclude personal effusions. “Hebrew is a very precise language, you have to be very precise – no over-saying. This is because of your Bible tradition. In the Bible tradition, you have very small sentences, very concise and autonomic. Every sentence, in itself, has to have its own meaning.”19 Appelfeld’s selfless dedication to precision and concision in his adopted Biblical language has something in common with Rāmabhadrācārya’s spiritual commitment to writing in Sanskrit while subsisting on a diet of milk. “Really,” Appelfeld declared, “my devotion to writing is my religion.”20

A similarly ascetic aestheticism can be found in Jhumpa Lahiri’s renunciation of her primary language, English, to submit herself to the rigors of Italian, a foreign language she simply fell in love with. Born in London to Bengali-speaking parents, Lahiri grew up speaking English in Rhode Island. It was in English that she achieved spectacular commercial and critical success publishing two novels – The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013) – and two collections of short stories – Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008). Lahiri’s announcement, in her 2015 language memoir In Altre Parole (In Other Words, its English translation, by Ann Goldstein, was published in 2016) that she would henceforth write only in Italian was as startling as if Chopin had suddenly renounced the piano in favor of the flute. It was in English that her prose had earned a Pulitzer Prize, a PEN/Hemingway Award, a National Humanities Medal, and other honors. Abandoning the language that had brought her fame and fortune in favor of one with a much more limited market was a dramatic mortification of the ego.

Writing in Italian is for Lahiri an acte gratuit, an assertion of free will unsullied by motives other than the passion for the language that seized her when she first visited Florence at age twenty-five. “I write in Italian to feel free,” she explains in a book of essays called Translating Myself and Others.21 Lahiri’s discipline of writing in Italian has no ulterior motive other than exploration of the medium. She practices art for art’s sake, consistent with her belief that: “Once art weds itself to a social or political purpose it is bled of its true purpose, which is not to change the world but to explore the phenomenon and the consequences of change itself” (Translating Myself, p. 68). As both a translator and a translingual writer, she is especially well-positioned to scrutinize change itself.

Lahiri’s cherished freedom in Italian also constrains her, forcing her to write with a dictionary, concentrating on her word choices in a way that would not have been necessary had she continued writing in English. The rigorous minimalism of Lahiri’s Italian texts contrasts sharply with her more expansive English prose. In the first novel she published in Italian, Dove Mi Trovo (2018, translated by Lahiri herself as Whereabouts in 2021), an unnamed narrator reflects on her straitened existence as teacher of an unnamed subject in an unnamed city in Italy. The novel possesses an abstractness understandable for an author who is a stranger to the country and the language. Its style is appropriately austere. The studied plainness of the prose is only emphasized by a very occasional flamboyant simile. Sentences are terse iterations of subject and predicate arranged into short paragraphs that are in turn organized into brief chapters of two or three pages each. The entire novel (novella?) occupies a mere 163 pages (176 for the English translation). By contrast, The Namesake and The Lowland, the two novels that Lahiri published in English, a language she is much more comfortable with, occupy 291 and 340 pages, respectively. An “anguished soul”22 who can recall few happy memories from her childhood or beyond, the narrator reports that she saw a therapist for about a year. But, lacking continuity, her treatment never gained traction. “Every session was like the start of a novel abandoned after the first chapter” (Whereabouts, p. 33) she reports. Whereabouts itself assumes the staccato rhythms of those sessions.

The novel’s spareness and discontinuity might seem natural to an author writing in a language she is still studying. A neophyte in Italian is not likely to write with the manneristic extravagance of Giambattista Marino. Switching languages was an act of self-effacement by a writer who had become a celebrity with the publication of her first book. It enabled Lahiri to create a new writing self in bare Italian sentences. While her English prose never employed the recondite vocabulary and convoluted syntax of a Faulknerian sentence, the chapters in Whereabouts are less than half the length of those in The Namesake and The Lowland. Its sentences avoid subordinate clauses. She demonstrates the paradox that subjecting herself to the strictures of a new language both liberates and constrains.

However, like Ferré, who made a virtue out of plodding away at English because sacrificing the fluency of her native Spanish made her more careful with words, Lahiri relishes the struggle. Her rationale for submission to the discipline of exophony recalls Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of ostranenie, of how art defamiliarizes an automatized world and thereby brings it back to life. “Familiarity, dexterity, and ease with a language can confer another form of blindness,” Lahiri explains. “One tends to feel safe, and thus more passive, perhaps even lazy. I can write in English without straining as I must in Italian, without having to examine and double-check almost every word” (Lahiri Translating, p. 18). For Lahiri, as for Beckett and other willful translinguals, complacency is the enemy of literary art.

The historian Gerda Lerner, who wrote in English rather than her native German, emphasizes the athleticism demanded by translingualism. “Living in translation,” she contends, “is like skating on wobbly skates over thin ice. There is no sure footing; there are no clear-cut markers, no obvious signposts. It helps to trust in one’s balance, to swing free and make leaps of the imagination. I suppose what I am saying is that it is immensely strenuous.”23 Yet Lerner’s English prose is not notably ascetic, the way Lahiri’s Italian and Beckett’s French are. The difference is that she came to the United States as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Vienna and needed to switch languages to adapt to her new homeland, not as an acte gratuit and a minimalist practice.

It seems more than happenstance that Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus who formulated a system of spiritual exercises, was a translingual writer. The earliest edition of his influential Exercita spiritualia (1548) was published in Latin, and, though it is thought that he was responsible for that version, it was a rough translation from an autograph manuscript in Spanish. However, Ignatius’s first language was Basque, so both the Latin Exercita spiritualia and the Spanish Ejercicios espirituales are exophonic texts. In each case, the author was working in an adopted language, forced to concentrate in a way that would not have been necessary for him in Basque. Louis J. Puhl, who translated the work into English, calls attention to Ignatius’s “limping Spanish . . . . the Spanish of a Basque nobleman who had only the elements of an education when he wrote his book, and used an acquired language with little knowledge of its literary form.”24 Emphasizing humility and attentiveness, Ignatius’s famous and compact spiritual exercises systematize contraction. Secular translinguals are not especially drawn to the Catholic saint’s specific techniques, including seclusion, chastity, fasting, flagellation, and wearing a haircloth. Their practice is an aesthetic, if not a spiritual, exercise. But, embracing the hardship of writing in an adopted language, they share Ignatius’s laser focus and his impulse toward discomfort and austerity.

Of course, not all exophonic writers approach the challenge of crafting a text in an adopted language as a spiritual discipline. Rafael Sabatini was rather casual about writing thirty-one novels in English rather than the five other languages available to him – Italian, Portuguese, French, German, and Spanish. “All the best stories are written in English,”25 he explained, though the author of such crowd-pleasers as The Sea Hawk (1915), Scaramouche (1921), and Captain Blood (1922) was surely aware of the commercial advantages of catering to the extensive Anglophone market. William Auld was not casual about Esperanto, which he began learning at age thirteen in Glasgow. Like many of the other works he composed in Esperanto, a constructed language with few native speakers, his magnum opus, La infana raso (1956), hardly conforms to the concentrated terseness of other translingual texts. Sprawling across twenty-five chapters with a grandiosity that might embarrass Appelfeld, Beckett, or Kundera, Auld’s long poem examines, in his own words, “the role of the human race in time and in the cosmos.”26

Moreover, neither was Nabokov a literary eremite. Disparaging his own translingualism in a way that also calls attention to its brilliance, he declared: “My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English.”27 Few would dismiss the ingenious, playful prose of Lolita as “second-rate,” nor would anyone describe the convolutions of Ada or Pale Fire as reductive rather than expansive. However, Nabokov, a child of Russian privilege whose private tutors taught him English and French, was effectively trilingual from an early age. Lahiri, by contrast, took on her gratuitous Italian project only in middle age. Beckett and Kundera, too, began writing in an adopted language only as adults. Unlike those who write in a language learned while young and that serves some financial, political, or social purpose, adults who choose to write in a language that they acquired as adults and for no ulterior motive practice a distinctive discipline.

In 1930, twenty-four-year-old Beckett published a self-conscious – and self-indulgent – poem he called “Whoroscope.” Its narrator, René Descartes, would serve as the Muse for most of Beckett’s later texts, in English or French. Indeed, according to Hugh Kenner, the seventeenth-century French philosopher “invented the mode of speculation in which all Beckett’s personages specialize.”28 In his Meditationes de prima philosophia (1614), which he wrote in Latin, not his native French, Descartes sets out to devise a method that would enable him to distinguish between true and false thoughts. It is a solitary project, initiated by systematically paring away any ideas that are not clear and distinct. Beginning with radical skepticism about everything, the individual Cartesian consciousness proceeds methodically to restore those elements of the world that cannot be doubted. The result is a dramatic reduction from the jumble of opinions and false impressions that previously cluttered the mind.

The stringent Cartesian method is not only a model for understanding Molloy’s and Moran’s attempts to comprehend existence; it is also a fair account of how certain authors freely choose their languages and submit to its rigors. “The only thing in life is language,” proclaimed the mellifluous Welsh actor Richard Burton. “Not love. Not anything else.”29 Some writers fall so in love with a foreign language that, in order to employ it, they are willing to sacrifice everything else.

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Steven G. Kellman is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he has taught since 1976. He is the author of The Restless Ilan Stavans: Outsider on the Inside, The Translingual Imagination, Loving Reading: Erotics of the Text, and Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, which received the New York Society Library Award for Biography, as well as hundreds of essays and more than a thousand reviews. Among his other honors are the Gemini Ink Literary Excellence Award and the San Antonio Public Library Foundation’s Arts and Letters Award. He lives in San Antonio.