# Authors who successfully published in two or more languages **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [September 17, 2013, 11:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039 "2013-09-17T11:54:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![jovan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/0ea827/32.png) [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 11:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039/1 "2013-09-17T11:54:19Z")
I was pondering how my writing style varies quite a lot depending on which language I write in and this lead me to think about authors who wrote, and published, works in more than one language. There is the “immigrant” writer, who switches from a native tongue to an adopted one and sticks with it, like Nabokov (Russian to English) and Kundera (Czech to French). On the other hand, there are the travelers, like Beckett, who switched between two languages throughout their career. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single author who has written in three (or more) languages. Can anyone else think of someone? Who are some other bilingual authors? If you’ve read their works in both languages, did you notice any differences? On edit: I’d like to limit this discussion to “literature.” It’s pretty much the norm for scholars to write academic works in their native tongue as well as English (or whatever the lingua franca of the day was). So let’s keep it to novels, theater, poetry and non-academic essays. ---
**Author:** ![Don\_t\_Panic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/don_t_panic/32/398_2.png) [@Don\_t\_Panic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Don_t_Panic)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 12:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039/2 "2013-09-17T12:05:22Z")
> [@jovan](#): > > Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single author who has written in three (or more) languages. Can anyone else think of someone? Nabokov himself was a trilingual author. He wrote and published a single short story in French: [Mademoiselle O](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mademoiselle_O). He was fluent in French (as well as Russian and English, obviously) from an early age. Beyond that, I couldn’t think of any off the top of my head, but a search throws up the Ethiopian author [Sahle Sellassie](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahle_Sellassie), who has written in Gurage, English, and Amharic. (Edit: Actually, he may not count as per the OP, as the work written in Amharic mentioned in the article is a work of history about the war with Italy.) ---
**Author:** ![obfusciatrist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/4af34b/32.png) [@obfusciatrist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/obfusciatrist)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 12:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039/3 "2013-09-17T12:19:03Z")
I heard an NPR interview with Isabel Allende recently where she was asked about writing in English. She said that for fiction she had to write in Spanish but she can write non-fiction in English. I don’t know, however, if she’s actually published any significant non-fiction in English. ---
**Author:** ![Floater](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/dc4da7/32.png) [@Floater](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Floater)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 12:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039/4 "2013-09-17T12:42:10Z")
The Norwegian writer [Beate Grimsrud](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beate_Grimsrud), living in Sweden, publishes her books in both languages at the same time. She has once explained the she first makes a story outline, writes the book in Norwegian, empties her mind and starts all over from the beginning in Swedish. However, I have read somewhere that she was busy translating her latest book into Swedish, so she might have changed method or the journalist who wrote it didn’t understand how she works. Swedish writer [August Strindberg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Strindberg) boasted about his proficiency in French and started writing in that language. It didn’t take more than one book or so until he realised that he was mistaken about the it. Then there’s [Theodor Kallifatides](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Kallifatides) who came to Sweden at the age of 26 and published his first book in Swedish five years later. He only writes in Swedish, never in Greek. He doesn’t even translate his own books into Greek. ---
**Author:** ![WordMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e8c25b/32.png) [@WordMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WordMan)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 12:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039/5 "2013-09-17T12:59:42Z")
**Joseph Conrad** - Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent, etc. - was a native Polish speaker… ---
**Author:** ![Flywheel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/eb8c5e/32.png) [@Flywheel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Flywheel)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039/6 "2013-09-17T16:32:24Z")
Norwegian playwright [Henrik Ibsen](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrik_Ibsen) wrote [Ghosts](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosts_%28play%29) in Danish. Danish scientist [Piet Hein](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Hein_%28scientist%29) wrote [Grooks](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooks) in Danish and English. ---
**Author:** ![obfusciatrist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/4af34b/32.png) [@obfusciatrist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/obfusciatrist)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039/7 "2013-09-17T17:28:02Z")
Obviously not quite the same thing but I wonder if Luc Besson writes his scripts for American movies in English. ---
**Author:** ![Don\_t\_Panic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/don_t_panic/32/398_2.png) [@Don\_t\_Panic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Don_t_Panic)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039/8 "2013-09-17T17:48:15Z")
> [@Flywheel](#): > > Norwegian playwright [Henrik Ibsen](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrik_Ibsen) wrote [Ghosts](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosts_%28play%29) in Danish. Well… it’s complicated. Ibsen always wrote in Danish, sort of. Danish was the common written standard in Denmark and Norway at the time, and there wasn’t a standardized Norwegian language at that point, even though there were (well, there still are) several distinct Norwegian dialects. Denmark and Norway were a union, ruled from Denmark, up until 1814, 14 years before Ibsen’s birth. (During Ibsen’s lifetime, Norway was actually in a union with Sweden, which lasted until 1905, the year before Ibsen died. However, this was a looser union and Swedish wasn’t the written language in Norway.) After the union ended, there was a growing sense of Norwegian national identity, and writers and language reformers started experimenting with “Norwegianized” written forms from around the 1840s. What followed was a bit of a lengthy linguistic clusterfuck involving a lot of language reforms and two different written standards. I won’t bore you with that, except to say that regarding Ibsen, his writings became gradually more “Norwegianized” during his life, but still always looked as much as Danish as modern Norwegian, and it certainly wasn’t a case of writing in two different languages. (Actually, written Danish and Norwegian still aren’t very different to this day, in any case. As a native Norwegian speaker, written Danish mostly just looks like funny Norwegian to me. Of course, spoken Danish sounds like someone with a mouth full of cotton who just hit their head against a lamppost, but that’s a different matter…) ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 6:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039/9 "2013-09-17T18:08:46Z")
Arthur Koestler wrote a trilogy in three languages. The first book, _The Gladiators_, was written in Hungarian; the second book, _Darkness at Noon_, was written in German; and the third book, _Arrival and Departure_, was written in English. And when he was living in Paris and needed some money, he wrote some pornographic novels in French. ---
**Author:** ![Morbo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/morbo/32/389_2.png) [@Morbo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Morbo)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 6:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039/10 "2013-09-17T18:11:49Z")
Junot Díaz switches between English and Spanish quite frequently in his books, also throwing in lots of slang and Caribbean patios. _The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao_ is some sort of code-switching masterpiece. The guy is two years older than me and his achievements are quite ridiculous. Take a [look](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junot_D%C3%ADaz), but if you’re feeling down about what you’ve accomplished in life you might not want to. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 6:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039/11 "2013-09-17T18:37:08Z")
Leo Tolstoy wrote _War and Peace_ partly in Russian and partly in French. William Hans van Gulik was multilingual, a Dutch Diplomat in China who published mostly in English, and his stated purpose in translating _The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee_ into English was to eventually translate it into Japanese. I don’t know if he ever did. His mystery novels were all published in English, but he himself was Dutch, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he also published some in his native languiage. _The Given Day_, for instance, is set in part in then-modern-day Holland, and you’d expect a Dutch edition. ---
**Author:** ![Don\_t\_Panic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/don_t_panic/32/398_2.png) [@Don\_t\_Panic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Don_t_Panic)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 6:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039/12 "2013-09-17T18:47:26Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Arthur Koestler wrote a trilogy in three languages. The first book, _The Gladiators_, was written in Hungarian; the second book, _Darkness at Noon_, was written in German; and the third book, _Arrival and Departure_, was written in English. And when he was living in Paris and needed some money, he wrote some pornographic novels in French. Oh, good one. ---
**Author:** ![astorian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ad7895/32.png) [@astorian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astorian)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 8:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039/13 "2013-09-17T20:23:29Z")
I have no idea how successful it will be, but Scottish author Angus Peter Campbell is publishing a novel this month that he wrote simultaneously in English and in Scottish Gaelic. > **[Scotsman Composes Novel Simultaneously in Two Languages - Publishing...](https://publishingperspectives.com/2013/09/scotsman-composes-novel-simultaneously-in-two-languages/)** > > Scotsman Angus Peter Campbell reflects on the zig-zag composition of his new novel which was written — and will be published —simultaneously in English and Gaelic. ---
**Author:** ![Bridget\_Burke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7cd45c/32.png) [@Bridget\_Burke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bridget_Burke)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 8:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039/14 "2013-09-17T20:58:44Z")
> [@WordMan](#): > > **Joseph Conrad** - Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent, etc. - was a native Polish speaker… His second language was French & he had a bit of Latin, Greek & German. But all his published works were in English… ---
**Author:** ![Flywheel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/eb8c5e/32.png) [@Flywheel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Flywheel)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039/15 "2013-09-17T21:24:31Z")
**Martian Bigfoot** , thanks for the clarification! I’m reminded of a [Grook](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooks) by the above-mentioned Hein: > [@](#): > > The Danish Tongue has of old en fait > been developing peu à peu > into one long vowel that waves between Æ > and Ø. > > But in those little narrow phonetic glades > of that hazily buzzing sound > such over and undertones, grades and shades, > dimensions and facets abound… > > …that everything written or said or sung > in the language Hans Andersen spoke > must be quoted with care in a foreign tongue > as an untranslatable joke. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039/16 "2013-09-17T21:39:07Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Arthur Koestler wrote a trilogy in three languages. The first book, _The Gladiators_, was written in Hungarian; the second book, _Darkness at Noon_, was written in German; and the third book, _Arrival and Departure_, was written in English. And when he was living in Paris and needed some money, he wrote some pornographic novels in French. > [@Martian Bigfoot](#): > > Oh, good one. Interesting note about _Darkness at Noon_; while Koestler wrote it in German, that’s not the version that was published. As Koestler was writing the book, his lover Daphne Hardy was translating the manuscript into English. When the Germans invaded France, the original German manuscript was destroyed and it was Hardy’s English translation that was published. When the book was later published in German it had to be translated back into its original language. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039/17 "2013-09-17T21:43:16Z")
Burton published in quite a few languages, often on the same page. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039/18 "2013-09-17T21:59:14Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Arthur Koestler wrote a trilogy in three languages. The first book, _The Gladiators_, was written in Hungarian; the second book, _Darkness at Noon_, was written in German; and the third book, _Arrival and Departure_, was written in English. And when he was living in Paris and needed some money, he wrote some pornographic novels in French. Obviously someone translated them, because I’ve read _Darkness at Noon_ and _The Gladiators_. I had no idea they hadn’t been written in english. Oddly, I’ve never read _Arrival and Departure_, which you say is the only one to be written in english. In fact, I’ve never heard of it. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2013, 11:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039/19 "2013-09-17T23:01:53Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > Obviously someone translated them, because I’ve read _Darkness at Noon_ and _The Gladiators_. I had no idea they hadn’t been written in english. Oddly, I’ve never read _Arrival and Departure_, which you say is the only one to be written in english. In fact, I’ve never heard of it. The consensus seems to be it’s the least of the three books. It suffers from covering issues Koestler had already addressed in his earlier books; from being written in 1943 about political events which were still occurring, which meant Koestler couldn’t put them in a historical context; and from being Koestler’s first novel written in English, which meant he probably didn’t handle the language as well as he did German or Hungarian. ---
**Author:** ![Floater](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/dc4da7/32.png) [@Floater](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Floater)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2013, 8:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/authors-who-successfully-published-in-two-or-more-languages/669039/20 "2013-09-18T08:18:47Z")
> [@Martian Bigfoot](#): > > (Actually, written Danish and Norwegian still aren’t very different to this day, in any case. As a native Norwegian speaker, written Danish mostly just looks like funny Norwegian to me. Of course, spoken Danish sounds like someone with a mouth full of cotton who just hit their head against a lamppost, but that’s a different matter…) From a Swedish point of view: I was once taught what to do if a library customer wants literature on a specific subject and the only available book you have is in Danish: Tell him it’s Norwegian.