I'd like to welcome to my blog a guest who is a great writer and a great friend, Cyprus' own Chrystalla Thoma. I suggested that Chrystalla, who is a native speaker of Greek but now writes in English, tell us about being a bilingual writer. After the post I will put links to Chrystalla's books.

Here's Chrys:

“Me talk pretty one day” is the title of a collection of (quasi-fictional) essays by David Sedaris, who is American but also half Greek, and I thought it applied nicely to me.

Not that I’m half anything. I was born and raised in Cyprus, speaking Greek, and if that wasn’t bad enough, it was a Greek dialect.

Okay, so it wasn’t really bad. I love my language and the history behind it, the moments when I look at an ancient text and familiar words jump out at me, when the etymology of words is crystal clear and ancient place names have a meaning. It’s part of my identity, of my childhood, of my past.

But I’m also a writer of speculative fiction (fantasy and science fiction). Greeks, philosophical and cynical beings that they are, always looking back to their glorious past, don’t have much love for my genres of preference. They don’t write them, don’t read them, don’t buy them – don’t like them. “Children’s genres” they call them – often to my face.

I see things slowly starting to change, but it’s a long haul.

Gradually I realized that I should be writing in English. For a while I raged against my parents for not raising me bilingual (actually they’re both Greek speakers, so I don’t know why they would do that – but I needed to rage against something).

As it was, I starting learning English when I was ten, and managed to read my first unabridged novel at sixteen. I went on to study English language and literature (in France – no university fees!), but didn’t feel confident enough to write directly into English. Translating from Greek, though, didn’t quite do the trick. The text sounded contrived and the word associations were all wrong.

No way out.

So about ten years ago, I decided to give it a go. I was terrified. Major writer’s block. A wall.

Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself. How can you write in English? There are millions of native speakers of English, thousands of writers among them. How can you compete with them?

But I began nonetheless – scribbling in notebooks, writing down conversations in English. And one grand day, I opened a document on my computer and started writing in English.

I guess my mind works with language like photographic memory works with images: it stores phrases I heard or read and spits them out when I need them. I’m lucky, I guess – sort of a human parrot, or dictionary. That really helps when you’re trying to write in a language not your own.

I’ll always be at a disadvantage compared to native speakers. Yet I have wonderful friends who correct all those pesky “foreigner” errors (mismatched expressions, wrong words...) I make. Dictionaries and thesauruses are my gods.

Still, I always have this gut-clenching fear that someone will point a finger at me and declare me a fake – a non-native speaker daring to sneak among the thoroughbreds.

But it hasn’t happened so far, thank all the planets.

Maybe everyone is being very polite...


Chrystalla Thoma

Dioscuri
Smoke and Mirrors
The Angel Genome
Dreamwater
Rex Rising
Rex Cresting

Chrys interviewed on my website: http://schooloftheages.webs.com/apps/...-