Andrew:

I'm not sure I'm happy with the transcription in either version, and how
far the specificity comes across -- the speaker was supposed to be a
working class Protestant Glasgwegian in his seventies or eighties, with
personal memories of Maxton, McLean, Kirkwood and the rest, but talking in
the late nineties, with all the changes of idiom that implies.  Mostly
signaled by the last line.

And there's the problem with the glottal stop -- choking or cho'ing or
chokin or cho[glottal stop]in (ugh!)?  If you've heard it said, you know
how it sounds, otherwise ...  Exemplified by a joke told by a teacher when
I was at school: "How do you spell your name, boy?" --  "Pa'erson, sir,
with two 'ts'".

There's also the problem of writing from the inside or from the outside.
Writing from the outside as I was doing in Red Clyde Four (and you with
your
Anglo-Australian with a mid-European accent?) adds the problem of
transcription to mimesis.  The poem which rivals Tom Leonard's "Six Glasgow
Poems" as the first of the New Glasgow School (??), Stephen Mulrine's "The
Coming of the Wee Malkies", seems to me to hit this problem, and end up
more than a little sentimental, besides.

Also, maybe the 'solutions' for poetry and prose differ -- Jim Kelman in
his novels doesn't follow the density (linguistic and transcriptional, or
just transcriptional?) of Tom Leonard (and only, I think, in one
relatively early short story, "Nice tae be Nice").

But as both Candice and Mark said, some sort of preacquaintance with the
language used comes into play -- if you have it, then even a light
transliteration works.

There's a pretty thorough anthology of Glasgow poetry from the nineteenth
century till (just about) the present, not all in dialect, in Hamish
Whyte's
_Noise and Smoky Breath_.

Robin

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Burke" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 04 January 2001 23:56
Subject: Re: Conrad says


> Robin - I certainly preferred the first version. I read it without
> stumbling, and then found the second version too much a mixture of the
> plain and the dialect - Go for broke, and trust your reader.
>
> In my own case, I have unfortunately tried to change an Anglo-Australian
> into a mid-European immigrant in a short story, and ended with a
laughable
> parody of their accent. Robert Penn Warren had a really good way with
this:
> I think a lot of it goes into the careful listening first, then the
> integrity of the portrayal. I am listening closely these days to
Vietnamese
> English, Chinese English, and Indian English. Very different, I can
assure
> you! But writing it down successfully escapes me.
>
> Andrew
>
> ----------------------------------------
> Andrew Burke                 Copywriting
> [log in to unmask]     Creative Writing
> http://www.bam.com.au/andrew/    Editing
> ----------------------------------------
>