A follow up to yesterday’s post about “American English.”

A few people DMed me to the effect that various “high level” American prose writers existed in the past; that Edgar Poe’s English was substantially similar to the “British English” of the time, etc.

This is all true but we need to zoom out a bit and examine the general trend. The Americans are always moving towards a Ford, Hemingway sort of lopped-off language full of fragments and barely concealed cliches. It’s a pendulum process and often disguised, but over 80 or so years the drift is clear, whether it hides under the guise of New Journalism, K-Mart Realism, alt-lit or various other trends. We can see this even in relatively “high level” writers such as the excessively discussed Cowboy Cormac McCarthy, about half of whose work consists of clunking rhythms and polysyndeton-soporific moron sentences.

Now in claiming that “British English” is more supple and generally superior, I am of course invoking it at its best and perhaps idealizing it too much. In reality, the “dribbly” or buttoned-up quality of a lot of British writing of the past two or three decades has led to a lot of boredom. We also have writers like Martin Amis who were trying to "Americanize" fundamentally British prose. I don't think the results were very good. Amis Jr.’s books have the feel of a tuba player trying to play the drums; the effect is strained and obvious, particularly when he writes outside of his immediate experience.

Can there be an “MMA” or “mixed” English that combines the best qualities of American, British, Australian and even Singaporean, African etc. English prose styles? This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, particularly in the context of translation.

Now most translators are generally incompetent, but their failures highlight a number of the issues just mentioned.

On Facebook sometime in the 2010s, I raised the issue of how writers should represent the idioms of other languages in fiction, when the speaker-characters are depicted as speaking their own (non-English) language to other speakers. In other words, if I set a novel in Korea and depict Korean characters speaking to each in Korean, how can I accomplish this in English?

Nisi Shawl, the author of Writing the Other: A Practical Guide, responded to the effect that this was an “unsolved problem.” Well and good, but what about those of us who are regularly doing it in practice?

The unavoidable conclusion is that one must simply write the dialogue in Korean and then translate it to English.

But now we are confronted with the same problems confronting conventional translators: how to render culture-specific idioms, slang trends and the like in a language lacking their equivalents, namely English.

There are too many risible examples here to choose from, but the first that comes to mind is a 1981 translation of a Ryu Murakami novel that renders one character’s Kansai-ben dialect in American Southern tones. Shades of Rogue from X-Men. This makes the translation both inaccurate and absurd, but many more recent translations commit similar blunders, either by skewing too idiomatically British or too idiomatically American.

So we are brought back to “MMA English”: can be it be developed? How would it work?