NAW
MUCH OF A TALKER
by
Pedro Lenz, translated by Donal McLaughlin
Freight
Books, 153 pp., £8.99, August 2013, 978 1 908754 22 6
As
the title suggests, Donal McLaughlin's book is written in
West-of-Scotland vernacular, a translation of Pedro Lenz's first
Swiss-German novel, Der Goalie bin ig.
Pedro Lenz himself, on his own
website, describes the language he wrote the original novel in as
Mundart, i.e.
vernacular. In doing so he avoids using the word Dialekt to
describe the language he writes in, just as McLaughlin has avoided
the word 'dialect' to describe the language of the translation.
The
question of whether we call McLaughlin's language dialect or
vernacular will hopefully not interest most of his readers in the
slightest; they might well just be hooked on and running through an
understated, charming, stoical story. The question will continue to
bother the minority of McLaughlin's readers who can speak -- and who
occasionally write -- a language which one person will term dialect,
another The Scots Language and a third 'demotic urban speech'.
McLaughlin seems to have a savvy strategy, in the interviews he's
given about the book: he's not limiting himself to a single, dominant
concept when discussing the book's language. In one online interview
however, he did distance himself from the word Scots, saying that he
never learnt Scots at school, and implying that it's a concept that
has little to do with him.