Writing: Culture and sentence length · 11:52pm Dec 20th, 2013
Cold in Gardez recently blogged about sentence length. I commented that my renter, who translates between English, Italian, French, Spanish, and German, claimed that English speakers like short sentences, while continentals prefer long sentences.
Here’s a sentence from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time / Remembrances of Things Past, chosen almost at random:
It was one of those old townhouses, a few of which for all I know may still be found, in which the main courtyard was flanked — alluvial deposits washed there by the rising tide of democracy, perhaps, or a legacy from a more primitive time when the different trades were clustered around the overlord – by little shops and workrooms, a shoemaker’s, for instance, or a tailor’s, such as we see nestling between the buttresses of those cathedrals which the aesthetic zeal of the restorer has not swept clear of such accretions, and a porter who also did cobbling, kept hens, grew flowers – and, at the far end, in the main house, a “Countess” who, when she drove out in her old carriage and pair, flaunting on her hat a few nasturtiums which seemed to have escaped from the plot by the lodge (with, by the coachman’s side on the box, a footman who got down to leave cards at every aristocratic mansion in the neighborhood), dispensed smiles and little waves of the hand impartially to the porter’s children and to any portion of tenants who might happen to be passing and whom, in her disdainful affability and her egalitarian arrogance, she found indistinguishable from one another.
There are many such sentences in this book, which many people claim is the greatest novel ever written.
This sentence frustrated me because it didn’t let me slow down to think about anything in it. Perhaps the continental preference for long sentences results from a preference for style over content. Perhaps the reason for writing long sentences is to prevent the reader from thinking. The writer may wish the reader to bathe in the sounds and connotations of the words, as if they were poetry, rather than to be distracted by the details of what is said. I daresay you could throw out 9/10th of the words in this novel without losing any of the story or even the characters; what would be lost would be its scent and flavor.
Poetry, however, is extremely short rather than extremely long. I don’t respect Proust for being able to spend ten pages describing the feelings aroused in him by the name of an old estate. I respect the writer who can describe those feelings in one paragraph.
When translating Proust from French into English, should one chop the long sentences up into short ones in order to translate them into English cultural expectations, if doing so would be more likely to evoke feelings in English people similar to those that Proust wished to evoke in French people?
I have the strong impression that continentals don't write muscular prose (highly-correlated with short sentences, though not always). Americans own muscular prose: Hemingway, Hammett, Chandler, Ian McEwan, Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, Don DeLillo, Elmore Leonard, Cormac McCarthy. Old English and Norse poetry have that oomph too, as do some of Borges' stories about the Argentinian gauchos, and some African books. I'd think German could, but I haven't read any like that. Asian literature, as far as I know, completely lacks it outside of Dragon Ball Z. But I probably wouldn't know if it had it.
One theory of mine is that Continental literature was shaped so strongly by world wars one and two. The English-speaking world fought those wars on other people's soil, and were not as traumatized by them. Continental literature, as a result, must accommodate a readership that is more bruised, more in need of comfort, less enamored of force and physicality.
It's bothered me that the contenders for "greatest" novel always seem to be Ulysses or In Search of Lost Time, both of which have elevated abstrusity to an art form. I understand that literature abides by different rules than mere fiction, but at a certain point reading these things becomes an exercise in self-flagellation in which I have no desire to participate.
I'm still conflicted on the whole Style v. Content wars. I don't think it's possible (or desirable) to completely overlook style, but if the triumph of style is works like Ulysses and the triumph of content is the work of Hemmingway, then I know where my loyalties lie.
Bad Horse! What is this?! STOP MAKING SENSE, THE PEACHPOCALYPSE IS STILL UPON US AND EVERYONE IS BANNED FROM TALKING ABOUT ANYTHING OF ACTUAL INTEREST!
…
i don't actually know how to answer your question
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Out of curiosity, is this sentence a paragraph unto itself, or is it part of a larger wall of text? Because the shorter sentences, I think, might be a reflection of American tastes rather than English tastes — our paragraph divisions and their sentence divisions are similar, but we have to further chop it up for the same reason that film cuts have gotten more and more rapid over time. We're just too distractable to soak up that sort of style without glancing around in choppy little bursts.
mmmno I think it's more of a cultural thing. English is suited to shorter sentences because it's a much more information-dense language in general - English, especially British English, has absorbed a lot of foreign languages, and consequently has one of the largest vocabularies in the world, and as a result it has the opportunity to express concepts in a single word where most continental languages have to take a several to express the same idea.
... but that isn't the whole answer. On CiG's blog I think I pointed out that longer sentences tend to promote a more contemplative and introspective frame of mind in the reader. I think I was speaking in terms of Engliush reader, rather than readers in general at that point.
Anglo-saxon culture is very activity- and goal-oriented, where most continental cultures - especially peninsular and Mediterranean cultures - tend to be more experiential and contemplative in their focus. Such cultures are conducive to longer sentence structure as an artefact of their generally more contemplative and exploratory mindset, where anglo-saxon cultures are explicit and focussed on the conveyance of maximum information density with minimum wastage. The stereotype then becomes: More efficient. Less expressive.
Yet English is also often described as one of the most expressive languages in the world, largely because of its enormous vocabulary. Where a continental language might use a single word to express a large set of related ideas, English subdivides and splits and proscribes and boxes and compartmentalises, expressing subtle differences of an idea with almost entirely unique words gathered from a wide variety of cultural influences. That information density - the fact that a very specific subset of an idea can be expressed in a single word - allows for very concise expression, and leads to shorter sentence structures overall.
The result is that English speakers perceive long sentence structures as needlessly verbose, because they have access to a much broader means of expression of complex concepts in a concise format, whilst continental speakers perceive short sentence structures as restricted and almost childlike, because they tend to express ideas through a more exploratory means.
Congratulations: that paragraph right there is the first actual Proust I've ever read, and you got me to read it.
To tell the truth I kinda liked it, maybe because it immediately reminded me of the Dickens I quoted over on my own blog, that passage from Our Mutual Friend where he's describing the old tavern called The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters. It's three dense paragraphs of prose that is by turns quirky, snarky and tender, and it's thoroughly and shamelessly self-indulgent. I could wallow in it all day long and it makes me wish I could go there.
Twenty years ago I would have thrown up my hands at such writing, and in fact I did. I had no patience for Dickens until about ten years ago. Which is a pity--if they'd started me on Sketches by Boz when I was still in school I might have caught the bug, but no, every high school English teacher wants to make you read David Copperfield because every high school English teacher wants you to share their sorrow at having failed in life.
What changed? Well, basically, I failed at life. Not permanently, but enough to set me back and teach me patience...granted I wasn't the best student but I think I at least learned something. As well, I grew older, and started to have my own tales about the queer old places and the other things you wouldn't believe we used to have "before you were born," i.e., in a world as impossibly unknowable as Victorian London is to all of us here. That--and an abiding interest in the exotic and antique, both of which Victorian London now is--- gave me some intial sympathy with Dickens, who is basically doing a lot of reminiscing in his work.
I suppose now instead of making schoolboy jokes about madeleines and coffee, I'll have to get some Proust and read it. And here we are behind production schedule on Moonfall and I haven't even introduced you to the scriptwriter, one Poignant Device!
(By the way--madeleines are awful. Like butter-flavored hockey pucks).
I'd have to agree with 1629285 on both points:
- First, as an Italian mother-tongue-er, I sometimes end up finding myself baffled at the sheer variety of words that I encounter in English novels, and besides, I've more than once ran into the upsetting situation of knowing what an English words mean but not being able to find the appropriate translation back into your own mother language.
- Second, Continental Europe has seen the rise of the printed book, and of course the ones that were the most successful at the time were, almost by definition, the ones that appealed to the masses, and we know what the masses wanted: escapism.
And escapism in general, much like clop, is more an affair of quantity than quality. A book like Joyce's Ulysses would be one you'd keep at your bedside table for weeks and weeks, allowing yourself to tranquilly lose yourself in the day events and waxing rhetoric of an average (?) Dublineer.
The fact that those books are still famous now, in my opinion, is more about critics, historians and teachers echoing the judgments of the past amongst themselves in fear of losing the literature's roots rather than an actual public enjoyment ratio. And besides, here in Europe we're still a little philosophers at heart, and for one I can't say I don't enjoy this type of literature every now and then.
I dunno if it is even true that "continentals" prefer ridiculously long sentences, though.
I mean, that book is pretty archaic. If we look at other works in French, you don't really see the same thing.
Take L'Etranger: http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/camus_albert/etranger/camus_etranger.pdf
The sentences in it are not terribly long; if anything, they're actually short. And Le Monde's poll put it over Au Recherche De Temps Perdu. It is certainly more widely read.
Les Misrables: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17489/17489-h/17489-h.htm
Longer sentences than L'Etranger, but still not anything like Au Recherche De Temps Perdu. The same applies to Notre Dame De Paris, but that is also by Victor Hugo.
Le Petit Prince is not written like Au Recherche De Temps Perdu either, but it isn't really the same sort of thing.
I dunno. I'm trying to find some French novels online (I haven't read any in years) but it is surprisingly difficult (possibly because they suck and thus no one cares about them
). I mean, look at this: Le Monde's 100 books of the century for the 20th century had 28 books in English on the list - and note that this was a poll of French people, whose list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century only managed to make a list which was half-composed of French-novels (exactly, interestingly - there are 50 French novels on the list). That's a pretty poor showing.
1629631 Here are all the Three Musketeers sequels on Project Gutenberg, if you're still looking for French novels.
1629653
Admittedly I was looking for more recent works; I've read a fair bit of older French novels, but I don't think I've actually ever read a novel which was written in French and published after 1960 or so.
How does that explain In Search of Lost time, begun in 1909 and first published in 1913?
1629261
I much prefer mere fiction to literature. The greatest literature -- that which is still significantly read for pleasure by non-specialists -- was written as mere fiction.
Interesting. I'm not sure I can contribute to the discussion on Continental literature, but lately I've been encountering a lot of academic writing perpetrated by speakers of Romance languages. In their expository writing, too, they strive for floweriness, turgidity, passivity (much more so than even the stereotypes of English academic writing), grand poetic statements-- in short, style over content. I suspect it's either a trait inherent to these languages or one with cultural roots earlier than the World Wars.
1629631
The BBC recently had an article grappling with why so few foreigners (and French people!) read French novels:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25198154
1629799
What field of academics?
As for the BBC article:
Ouch.
Maybe they should try something different, eh?
1629839
International relations. I'm a writing tutor in my IR grad program, and I work mostly with non-native speakers. I've heard that Romance-language history writing is similar, though.
All that said, I much prefer turgid Romance prose over prose from Slavic- and Asian-language speakers in which the author has chosen to excise all unnecessary words, including prepositions and articles.
1629755 Heh. Not at all. It's a bit of a crackpot theory.
1629631 Yeah, it might just be wrong. The Stranger and the little prince both used simple sentences, at least in translation. Those were wonderful novels.
1629285 Your points sound plausible.
Faulkner on Hemingway: "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
Hemingway's response: "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"
I am Continental[1] and I do favor the longer sentence, it's true, but I don't consider it a particularly good trait to have.
As for translating Proust[1], the translator's duty is to try and recreate as faithfully as possible the impression of reading the original. If that requires chopping sentences up[2], so be it. Translations of the Odyssey, after all, don't put it in dactylic hexameter[3], but instead try to approximate the local traditions of heroic verse.
As for why the Continental tradition favors the longer sentence, my guess (I guess it's more impressive if I say 'hypothesis') is that it has to do with grammar as much as sheer style. English copes poorly with the long sentence because there's little congruence, little redundancy of information in the sentence. There isn't a panoply of cases and such that make sure we can identify, say, what a given word does in a sentence at a glance by just paying attention to the declension. Instead we are forced to remember the structure of the sentence as we read it. That means longer sentences fatigue the reader unreasonably.
[1] In Search of Lost Time is not the Best Novel Ever. There probably isn't a Best Novel Ever--not in any meaningful sense--but if there is, it's written by Dostoyevsky. Brothers Karamazov, say.
[2] I'm a fan of long-winded and convoluted, but the sentence above just makes me itch for some scissors. I wouldn't really cut much. It aims for a sprawling branching style, and that's fine. But it has to be separated into reasonable sentences so you can focus on the prose rather than on keeping track of what the verb you read half a page ago was.
[3] Some do, actually, but none of the famous ones do.
Once again, a most fascinating discourse fellows.
Normally I would not respond to blog posts, but this post in particular and 1629261's snipe at go-big-or-go-home literature made me wonder where Infinite Jest fits into this. I don't know what kind of sentences that Infinite Jest uses, because it's been a while since I read it, though I'm certain that it has some decently long sentences. Honestly, I just want an excuse to talk about Infinite Jest with people who seem likely to have actually heard of it.
1629477
Well damn. I've seen madeleines at my local grocery store and now I must try them.
1629589
I always thought that long-term critical consensus about which is the best ever is based first and foremost about how influential a work is. This is most definitely the case with music, and it kind of sucks because new works haven't gotten the time to be influential and thus getting that respect. They haven't gotten the chance to stand the test of time.
Also, as someone who has read, loved, and will viciously defend a book that may not have existed without taking cues from Ulysses, it is entirely possible that at least some of these critics just genuinely love that book. It bothers me sometimes when people claim that people only pretend to like so-and-so to make themselves look cool, with no (or very little) actual fans.
But even though I'm American, I also tend to think like a philosopher and whatever else you just said. It's way too bothersome to move, though.
1630067
Whenever I come across a word that I don't know the meaning of, I use the context of the rest of the sentence to guess at it. But now that I'm using Kindle a whole lot, I can just highlight a word and it'll tell me. Thanks, Kindle!
1630196
I have an issue or two with Brothers Karamazov, but that doesn't ruin the book for me. When I finally mustered the willpower to read it, I found myself surprised by how enjoyable the prose was to read. My main issue is that I'm not a Christian like Dostoevsky, so I'm not as invested as I could be otherwise.
1630196
I think Ghost nailed it: the grammar of Romance languages is better suited to long and convoluted sentences whereas English "...has to be separated into reasonable sentences so you can focus on the prose rather than on keeping track of what the verb you read half a page ago was." And really, that's what I found myself doing while trying to parse that sentence of Proust (it's as if the language centers of my brain were doing parkour: great fun so long as you don't slip, but it tires you out pretty quickly).
I'm sort of taking his word on this* because I don't speak any Romance languages, but I do know of a similar case with poetry. There are plenty of French and Italian poetic forms with very complex rhyme schemes** (the ballade, the lai and the virlai come to mind), and some which make extensive and demanding use of a single rhyme (the terza rima of the Divine Comedy). These are devilishly hard to translate into, or--as I've tried--to imitate in English because English is a rhyme-poor language. To be successful you either have to a) be extremely lucky in your choice of rhyme and topic, b) accept some compromise in one or both, or c) just hammer the form into something more suited to godam rosbifs, as Shakespeare (and Edmund Spenser*** before him, let's not forget!) did the with the sonnet.
So, to sum up: the grammar and vocabulary of English makes it possible to pause in the middle of your poem, rip off Grendel's arm, then pick up again right after without muffing a rhyme or splitting an infinitive.
*Okay, okay, that's exactly what I'm doing
**Welsh is the same, only worse and more of it.
***A man whose accomplishments were sadly overshadowed by those of his brother, Pezdi.
1629589
You...may want to rephrase that
1629839
Wait, how is this bad for France, exactly? I'm sure the BBC would be delighted to expound on how, say, Americans should be more curious about people of other nationalities and cultures*, yet here's France goes and does just that and somehow that's a problem? Balony! Also, Poppycock (which tastes better)! A broad engagement with the literature of other cultures indicates strength, not weakness.
I dunno, to me this story sounds more like the English pointing at the French and going...
fc07.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2013/271/0/5/profile_picture_by_theexhorsecist-d6oadmr.jpg
*Despite that fact that we have more people of other nationalities and cultures living in our country as citizens than most nations in Europe do even now, post-EU, and have had for a longer time, thank you. Dammit.
1629261
No, the triumph of content is Dean R. Koontz. Or Mercedes Lackey, or David Brin, or, outside the genre, what Harlan Ellison used to call "the latest Harold Robbins awfulness." Basically any one of a number of popular authors who "sell their novels like so many bales of wool." Not that the content is noteworthy but that it has to reach the reader without any help from the writer's style, which is not only bad, but bad in a completely uninteresting way.
Hemingway has a style, and a highly developed and distinct one:
There was a hole. In the ground. It was not wet and it was not slimy and the white ends of worms did not wriggle impotently in it. it was not dry and covered in the sand that waits to soak up the blood of the toros. It was a hole meant for comfort. A hobbit lived there.
--"Across the Misty Mountains and into the Mirkwood"
If Hemingway has no style, how could I parody it? Parody Mercedes Lackey. I dare you.
1631147 "Content" isn't the same as "action – adventure". Content is what things outside the story the story is about. Dean Koontz, as far as I know, has very little of it.
The claim that style trumps content can also be read as the claim that a story should be about itself.
1631223
Okay, maybe Dean R. Koontz is a bad example because, honestly...I can't remember a single thing about any of his books. Have I actually ever read any? Hmmm....
Oh wait: wasn't there one about a sentient teddy bear who had to defend children from toys with sharp edges and choking hazards?
(I'm not saying it was any good, but there was content).
1631237 Style and content are both judged on quality, not quantity. Both literary and genre books can emphasize style over content (Ulysses, Dunsany--sorry, couldn't resist) or content over style (The Stranger, The Little Prince). But genre books are more likely to have lots of exciting stuff happen that doesn't count to me, personally, as content (Tom Clancy, Robert Jordan).
1631250
I want to reply with something like Johnny Ringo: the Terrorists and the Critics but that'd just be me being a smartass
OK, it seems that "content" is being used here in a specific technical sense, of which I've now been made aware (and thank you). Then let's take that Koontz story I mentioned. The one with the sentient teddy bear. It came out around Christmastime as I recall, and the theme seemed to be that good old-fashioned toys made much better and, y'know, more moral presents than, say, robots that transformed into fighter jets.
This is obvious hyperbole, as nothing is better than robots that transform into fighter jets. But the theme here, the external subject on which we are insisting, seems to be that Christmas now is much diminished from what it was.
Which has simply got to be true, as people have been saying it for about 350 years:
To conclude, I'le tell you news that's right,
Christmas was kil'd at Naseby fight:
Charity was slain at that same time,
Jack Tell-troth, too, a friend of mine,
Likewise then did die, rost beef and shred pie,
Pig, Goose and Capon no quarter found.
Yet let's be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn'd upside down.
--"The World Turn'd Upside-Down"
1631265 that'd just be me being a smartass
...
... No, I'm not going to say it.
1630946
I'm experiencing the oddest feeling--I'm torn between wanting to buy you a drink and wanting to punch you. I guess I could compromise by buying you an absolutely terrible drink. Strawberry Surprise? Cement Mixer? American beer[1]?
[1] Sorry. I am terrible.
1631301
You could buy me some punch. A Christmas bowl of smoking bishop! And put another scuttle of coal on the fire before you dot another "I", Bob Cratchit!
Why yes, thank you: I have my own label...
theperfectlyhappyman.com/uploads/stone-arrogant-bastard-ale.jpg
Having experience with both American and Continental English, and the English, German, and Russian languages, I have some insight.
Americans do favor shorter sentences, or at least choppier ones. Britons, such as my father, prefer more sweeping diction, where the speaker clearly explains everything as they go from point to point. My mother is American, and tends to be much choppier. Here's an example:
Mother: I'm hungry. Wanna eat?
Father: I am getting hungry. Iff you are also hungry, then would you like to go eat?
I also notice that English likes shorter sentences. When trying to translate into German, I find that being too literal results in necessary works missing. However, German responses can be pretty sure. Germans love to say "genau" (exactly).
Russians like sentences to be closer to English length. However, they can make sentences go on as long as they like, and they are often within 25% of English sentence length. Russian answers also tend to be pretty short.
1631382
Oooh! Exquisite branding. Do they do tea blends as well?
Also, gods above, but that is one sweet and spicy bowl-o'-booze. That's hippocras level sweetness, it really is. Why not something a bit more neutral like a nice Punch Romaine? Or the fearful Cape Fear Punch?
I wonder if the style of literature in a country is somewhat kept separate from other countries by an intentional decision of the collective intelligentsia of that country, i.e. American purists attempt to differentiate their literature by focusing on elements that can be pointed out and isolated in a particular fashion as to be unique to their established meme, and therefore not like 'Them durned ferriners' in other countries, or if it is just a natural outgrowth of the language constructs embedded into each individual language.
Ok, that's all the insightful wisdom I've got for the day. I'm going to go back to trying to parody The Grinch Who Stole Christmas while I still can.
1630728 I always thought that long-term critical consensus about which is the best ever is based first and foremost about how influential a work is. This is most definitely the case with music,
Well...
I don't think Bach's work can have been very influential, since it was not highly regarded until more than 100 years after his death, by which time no one wrote anything remotely like anything that Bach had written.
Led Zeppelin is regarded as a great band, even though they had hardly any influence at all in terms of later bands trying to sound like them. I never listen to a band and say, "That sounds kind of like Led Zeppelin."
... or perhaps the cause of 80s rock was every band in the world simultaneously giving up on trying to sound like Led Zeppelin.
1632098 I think that the differences between literary and genre fiction are kept unnaturally large by just that process.
1631026
It indicates that their book industry is not terribly healthy - basically, imagine you've got a whole bunch of books available to you. A book originally written in French is optimized for that language and, presumably, that culture. When you see nearly half of your books NOT being originally French language, it means that you are unable to compete with foreign books, even though they're -not- optimized for France. It means your books are not very appealing - and the article notes that French authors have difficulty achieving the reverse, exporting their own works. They aren't even all that successful in their own country.
The French used to be major leaders in literature, but they haven't been since World War II; this is a symptom of that.
To be entirely fair, this isn't terribly surprising - English has been eating the world, after all, and there are 400 millionish first world primary English speakers, probably twice as many as for the next most popular first world language - but it isn't really healthy as far as French literature goes. The article goes into more depth about it.
1632916
1) The publishing industry in America is not healthy either--no place with decent broadband coverage is a healthy place for paper books nowadays, and even for-profit e-books are under threat simply because there's so much other material in the public domain and in for-profit micropublication available on the Web. For a fuller discussion I refer you to Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog.
2) France is overwhelmed with foreign books because French publishers can pick and choose from a literal world of non-francophone books, which ones will do best in the French market. Against this assembled might France has only its own national resources. Losing the battle? OF COURSE WE ARE MON COMPERE BUT RONCESVALLES SHALL LIVE FOREVER--MONTJOIE SAINT DENIS!
3) There is only one, true, original Titanium Dragon. "Hope that you may understand!" -- W. B. Yeats:
Yes, you really had to ring up the engine room for takeoff power: note the voice of Harry Morgan (Col. Potter from M*A*S*H) at 2:50
1629285
According to this well-know linguistics publication, Mandarin is even more information-dense than English. I'm wondering if your hypotheses about information density, vocabulary, and sentence length hold true for Mandarin, but I can't find the relevant data.
1631250
That's a bit generous of you, saying that exciting stuff happens in Jordan's books.
1631301
From my perspective, all drinks are terrible.
1632098
Whenever someone theorizes that there's a secret conspiracy or some such, I'd say that it's not a deliberate plan on anyone's part to screw people over, but a natural consequence of living in an insufficiently diverse bubble. This happens with absolutely everyone, not just literary critics. If you hang out with a group of people at the expense of all others, you will begin to think like they do, with the group's opinions and worldview being more homogenized over time. It'll never turn you into pod people or anything, but there is a subtle effect of that nature going on.
1632276
Alright, maybe I phrased that wrong. I was thinking of stuff like The Beatles. The Beatles are generally agreed to be the greatest band ever, and this is because they ended up popularizing a whole bunch of things that are generally considered ubiquitous in music now, like the psychedelia genre and the concept album. There's also the matter of My Bloody Valentine with shoegaze (even though that genre never really took off), Nirvana with grunge (even though most grunge is terrible), and Public Enemy with rap (even though modern rap sounds nothing like them). If you popularize a new genre of music, you're going to be much better remembered and acclaimed than if you just made a really good album or two.
But I am by no means an expert on music, since I only began to seriously study it about two years ago.
1634036 Like I tell my children, "You are a unique individual... just like everybody else." Sometimes it's funny to watch them attempt to show just how rad and independent thinking they are by doing exactly the same thing all of their peers are doing.