I was reading this interview with Vladimir Nabakov. This particular bit stuck out for me because English is a language that I think in and even feel in to a large extent but it’s not a ‘natural language’ for me… in the sense that it’s not a language I learnt from my mother or a language that I speak in with her or with my siblings. The language I did speak first (Konkani) is very limited for me because it is not a language which I read in, or learnt in, or spoke to with anyone outside of my immediate and extended family. It almost feels like there is a gap that exists for me in terms of language, that if I had to write a play with dialogue and things like that, I wouldn’t be able to have the characters speak naturally in English or in my mother tongue or any other language. Makes me think about how native English speakers—by that I do not mean people who have a better command of English or wider vocabulary than I do—but people who spoke English out of the womb, with their mothers and family and friends later, would have a massive advantage in this department. They would be able to write their characters and their speech ‘naturally’ in the way it is spoken by ordinary people even if in a small English or American town or wherever. One could always argue that people elsewhere could write in a natural way in their own language but that wouldn’t really be the case in countries where colonialism intervened. Our relationship with our own languages never remained the same I suppose, and we suffer from this liminal experience of language to this day…

Excerpts from the interview

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel you have any conspicuous or secret flaw as a writer?

NABOKOV

The absence of a natural vocabulary. An odd thing to confess, but true. Of the two instruments in my possession, one—my native tongue—I can no longer use, and this not only because I lack a Russian audience, but also because the excitement of verbal adventure in the Russian medium has faded away gradually after I turned to English in 1940. My English, this second instrument I have always had, is however a stiffish, artificial thing, which may be all right for describing a sunset or an insect, but which cannot conceal poverty of syntax and paucity of domestic diction when I need the shortest road between warehouse and shop. An old Rolls-Royce is not always preferable to a plain jeep.