Language Or Narrative Style - What Determines The Understanding Of A Work?
I had a hard time comprehending a Booker Prize-winning piece
Someone bought Arundhathy Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’ for 7,900 lire years ago, and I bought it from a second-hand shop for just 1 euro. The change in the value of the lira and euro is another matter. Here, what I want to say is about language and narrative styles, about their boundaries.
When I picked up this book for the first time and started reading it, the word ‘Baby Kochamma’ immediately caught my eye. Later, it became more interesting when I saw Malayalam words like ‘Mundu’ and ‘Meenachil’ like islands surrounded by Italian words. But that didn’t make it any easier to read.
I blamed the Italian language and the moment I bought and read the Italian translation of the book. I thought that if I had waited a little longer and bought the Malayalam translation, which is my mother tongue, I would have had a better reading experience. Even after months of reading the entire book, many things in the novel still remain elusive.
It was with this memory in mind I sat down to read “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown, which was also an Italian translation. I was unsure if I could understand it entirely since it deals with an unfamiliar theme to me. But contrary to expectations, I finished reading the novel, which is more than five hundred pages, in barely a week. Not a single part is incomprehensible. Everything is clear! Obviously!
That being said, it doesn’t matter how much knowledge you have in a language, even if it’s your mother tongue. Mastering a piece of writing doesn’t depend on mastery of the language but on the writer’s narrative style.
