The Thammasat University Library has newly acquired a translation into Thai language of a book by one of the most praised 20th century novelists. Heart of Darkness is a short novel published in 1899 by the Polish English novelist Joseph Conrad. Copies of the Thai translation are available in the Fiction Stacks of Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus and Puey Ungphakorn Library, Rangsit Campus. The TU Library also owns English language editions of, and books about, Heart of Darkness as well as books by and about Joseph Conrad.
Heart of Darkness tells of a voyage (1899) up the Congo River into the Congo Free State in Africa, to ask which place is darker, the colony or the colonizing nation of England. Heart of Darkness is one of the most frequently analysed works of literature on university campuses around the world. Despite its critical view of colonization, Heart of Darkness has been criticized by some African writers, especially the noted Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. The TU Library owns books by and about Chinua Achebe. Chinua Achebe called Heart of Darkness an offensive and deplorable book that expressed xenophobia. He felt that the story depersonalises a portion of the human race. Other writers disagree.
The most celebrated adaptation of Heart of Darkness is the 1979 movie Apocalypse Now directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The TU Library owns copies of Apocalypse Now and Apocalypse Now Redux, which may be viewed at the Rewat Buddhinan Media Center at the Pridi Banomyong Library, U2 level, and the Audio Visual Materials center at Puey Ungphakorn Library, Rangsit Campus.
In his writing, Conrad often contrasted European views of Africa with what he saw as the reality for his characters:
- Lights of ships moved in the fairway — a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.
“And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.” - One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same.In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.
- Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances.
He also offers general observations about life, such as the value of creative and intellectual work:
- I don’t like work — no man does — but I like what is in work — the chance to find yourself. Your own reality — for yourself, not for others — what no other man can ever know.
- Anything, anything can be done in this country. that’s what I say; nobody here, you understand, here, can endanger your position, and why? You stand the climate — you out last them all. The real danger is in Europe.
- The mind of man is capable of anything — because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage — who can tell? — but truth — truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder — the man knows, and can look on without a wink.
Learning English
Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924) is an example for all Thai students who must write something in English, whether an academic research paper, thesis, or short novel. Born in Poland, Conrad’s native language was Polish, and he also learned to speak French in his childhood. Yet he only learned to speak English much later, and decided to write in that language. He once described English as
the speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long friendships, of the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of ease, and of solitary hours, too, of books read, of thoughts pursued, of remembered emotions—of my very dreams!
Even when he was in his late twenties, he wrote English in an exotic style that required editing and correcting by British literary friends. He married an Englishwoman, which must have increased his everyday usage of the language. He would often invent terms in fiction that were appreciated as creative approaches to English, even if they would not have been acceptable in standard academic English. In one novel, he wrote:
The second mate was lankily stalking the deck.
In standard English, the adjective lanky is described a person or hair that is ungracefully thin and tall. Yet the word lankily was not used before Conrad invented it, and it is not clear exactly what he meant. He might have meant to write that the man in question was lanky. Or that he moved the way that lanky people move. This kind of uncertainty, while it might be interesting and enjoyable for a reader of fiction, would confuse readers of theses or academic research who expect to find precise writing that always tells us exactly what the author means.
Novelist of globalization
Because he learned English as an adult, Conrad has been termed the first novelist of globalization. He learned the English language outside of any classroom, in a highly individual way, as he once wrote to a friend:
My first English reading was the Standard newspaper and my first acquaintance by the ear with it was in the speech of fishermen, shipwrights and sailors of the East Coast. But in 1880 I had mastered the language sufficiently to pass the first examination for officers in the merchant service, including a viva voce of more than two hours. But ‘mastered’ is not the right word; I should have said ‘acquired’. I’ve never opened an English grammar in my life.
This approach of not studying books of grammar worked for him, although it may not be the best approach for most students of English as a foreign language. Conrad is now classed among the few famous writers of fiction in English who were not native speakers of that language. The word used to describe people who do creative writing in a language that is not their native mode of expression is exophone. Another exophone is the Russian-born author Vladimir Nabokov. The TU Library owns several books by and about Nabokov. As a writer, Nabokov considered Conrad to be hopelessly juvenile, as he once noted:
I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist clichés.
This suggests that not all exophone writers enjoy the novels by other exophone authors. More recently, Eugen O. Chirovici, a Romanian author of suspense and crime, has had success writing fiction directly in English. Elif Shafak, born in Turkey, also writes novels in English, as does the Pakistani author Nadeem Aslam. The TU Library also owns books by Nadeem Aslam, shelved in the Pakistan Corner of the Pridi Banomyong Library, U1 level, and in the library’s General Stacks as well. The Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett, whose works are in the collection of the TU Library, had a great deal of success writing in the French language.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)