The Pronoun Shift [spoiler?]

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seigezunt
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The Pronoun Shift [spoiler?]

Post by seigezunt » Fri Nov 07, 2014 5:05 pm

Note: I'm still unclear what the spoiler expectation is here, hence the subject heading. But this is for discussion if you've read the novel.

So I am of course fascinated with how Eli's gender or lack thereof is handled in the text, and I found it --interesting? jarring?-- that the author switches from referring to Eli as "she" to "he."

I went back to try to find exactly where it occurs, as it isn't obvious on first read. I think the first third person reference to Eli as a he. In the English translation:
‘You know, it’s been a long time since I was…just hanging out in someone’s home like this. I don’t really know…What should I do?’

‘I don’t know.’

Eli let her shoulders fall, pushed her hands into the pockets of the bathrobe and watched the LP’s dark hole in the middle as if hypnotised. Opened her mouth as if to say something, closed it again. Took her right hand out of the pocket, stretched it out towards the record and pushed her finger on it so it came to a stop.

‘Watch it. It can get…damaged.’

‘Sorry.’

Eli quickly pulled his hand back and the record sped up, kept turning. Oskar saw that his finger had left a damp imprint behind that could be seen every time the record spun through the strip reflected from the overhead light. Eli put his hand back in the robe’s pocket, watching the record as if trying to listen to the music by studying the tracks.

‘This sounds a bit…but…’ the corners of Eli’s mouth twitched, ‘…I haven’t had a…normal friendship with anyone in two hundred years.’
I'm just curious why you think JAL chose to do it there, or if he has said why. He could have done it earlier, just right after the revelation about the castration. Why here?

I'd be interested in what people think is the significance of that scene/moment to do that.

I'm also curious if it might be different in the Swedish.
"She can fly, she has amazing and horrifying powers, she isn’t exactly a boy or a girl, she can’t come inside unless she’s invited ... and she loves him. That’s enough."

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drakkar
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Re: The Pronoun Shift [spoiler?]

Post by drakkar » Fri Nov 07, 2014 7:54 pm

Hi, a belated welcome from me too! :D
seigezunt wrote:Note: I'm still unclear what the spoiler expectation is here, hence the subject heading. But this is for discussion if you've read the novel.
So I am of course fascinated with how Eli's gender or lack thereof is handled in the text, and I found it --interesting? jarring?-- that the author switches from referring to Eli as "she" to "he."
Swedish differ from English in that you can get away with it without using pronouns. JAL never uses "her" or "him" about Eli in the narrative; he gets away with it because he know exactly what to do.
Here is an old thread about the topic, explaining most of it:
In the Swedish novel, Eli is described as a 'she' from Oskar's POV only, all the passages from Håkan's and Eli's own POV before the flashback-scene are written without any references to Eli's gender: Håkan thinks of Eli only as 'his beloved one', and when we see things from Eli's perspective (with the Cancer Woman), there are no pronouns used at all. Even after Eli has hinted at his true gender (telling the Cancer Woman the story about the young boy), JAL continues to just use Eli's name, and not 'he/she' or 'his/her'.

I was very impressed that he could get away with that without intrerrupting the flow of the narrative, I didn't notice it at all the first time I read the book. When re-reading those passages, it's obvious once you know what to look for. Sometimes sentences start with the pronoun omitted, which is fine both in Swedish and English I suppose, although it sounds a bit 'clipped': ('NN came in. Sat down. Had a cup of coffe. Stood up again. Went out.' and so on). In Swedish however, the reflexive pronoun 'sin/sitt' is gender-neutral, whereas an English translation needs to use 'his' or 'her'. (For instance "NN tog sin hatt" would be 'NN took his hat').

Now, I don't have a printed copy of the translation, but there was a pdf floating around the net a while ago, I guess it's legit. I checked some random passages (the encounter with the Cancer Woman, for instance), and it seems like this subtle yet important nuance has been... well, lost in translation.

Is it too difficult to translate the story into English without using pronouns, or did the translator decide to make her own interpretation? I'd like to hear your thoughts on the matter!
seigezunt wrote: went back to try to find exactly where it occurs,
Iirc, it occurs when Eli has come clean, and he is "official" Elias.
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Re: The Pronoun Shift [spoiler?]

Post by dongregg » Fri Nov 07, 2014 9:08 pm

drakkar wrote:Hi, a belated welcome from me too! :D
seigezunt wrote:Note: I'm still unclear what the spoiler expectation is here, hence the subject heading. But this is for discussion if you've read the novel.
So I am of course fascinated with how Eli's gender or lack thereof is handled in the text, and I found it --interesting? jarring?-- that the author switches from referring to Eli as "she" to "he."
Swedish differs from English in that you can get away with it without using pronouns. JAL never uses "her" or "him" about Eli in the narrative; he gets away with it because he knows exactly what to do....Is it too difficult to translate the story into English without using pronouns, or did the translator decide to make her own interpretation? I'd like to hear your thoughts on the matter!
Sometimes a professor will have a class write a research assignment using nothing but nouns. That's possible (but still hard) because these assignments are always in the third person, and there is little of that. One can write, "This research will" instead of "I will," for example, or "The author stated" rather than "He or she stated."

But in nontechnical and nonformal writing, pronouns are necessary and ubiquitous, and singular third-person pronouns are just about always gender specific. An exception would be it, but it can't substitute for he or she.

So, in the novel, in Swedish, JAL was able to make a point of avoiding gender-specific pronouns. I like the idea of clipping them! "Went home. Petted cat. Opened WTI forum on computer..."

Comes now the film: No need for pronouns while watching it. But two problems arise. Eli says she's not a girl, but she is, and Lina is. And even Elif Ceylan is, who dubs Eli's voice. Second, how do you write a fan fiction in English without picking between he and she? I picked she for "When I Am With You," and that worked for me. It's just about Eli in the film. Only the names Håkan and Elias (mentioned once) are from the novel. All of the action is what you see on the screen.

But, in case I was missing something, I decided much later to rewrite the story using he and him for Eli. It was rather charming at first. I think attraction between two boys or two girls is just as precious as attraction between a boy and a girl. But it soon grew to be not only not charming, but it became a different story. Instead of a tweener romance between two kids, one of whom is a once-human vampire, gender became a very intrusive element. It became a different story.

And of course, I could no longer get away with only introducing Eli and Oskar's names until after they introduced, which is a nice touch the way I retold the story. Until then, I had used "the boy" and "the girl," with free use of he and she. Much had to change when converted sentences came out like, "The boy wondered if the boy would still play with him when he returned from the country." Context would be a clue, but which he is returning from the country?

In the end, you could be very clever and use some of JAL's tricks to hide gender, but it is considerably more difficult in English. If I tried it, I'm afraid it would make "When I Am With You" even more about gender and less about the tender affection that Oskar and Eli come to have for one another.

But you, seigezunt, are a writer. So, as drakkar wrote, I too would like to hear your thoughts on hiding gender in English. Or in German, for that matter. I see that German uses reflexive pronouns like the Swedish sig (Edit: and sin/sitt. Thanks drakkar), but grammar is so tied to gender in German that the same problem could arise.

In re: Eli/Elias. JAL was slick to use Eli. As you say, drakkar, it's mostly neutral (slight shift to male), but Elias is overwhelmingly male. In the U.S., Eli is male, as well. And in the U.K., I guess, which makes it interesting in the play when Eli says her name is EE-lie, as in "lie down." :)
Last edited by dongregg on Fri Nov 07, 2014 10:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Pronoun Shift [spoiler?]

Post by drakkar » Fri Nov 07, 2014 10:05 pm

dongregg wrote:So, in the novel, in Swedish, JAL was able to make a point of avoiding gender-specific pronouns. I like the idea of clipping them! "Went home. Petted cat. Opened WTI forum on computer..."
The most important difference is the reflexive pronoun "sin/sitt": "Eli tog sin hatt" (gender neutral) = "Eli took his hat" (not gender neutral). JAL also used the name; Eli went, Eli ran.
Just for the record: In Sweden, Eli is a gender neutral name, perhaps slight male bias.
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Re: The Pronoun Shift [spoiler?]

Post by drakkar » Sat Nov 08, 2014 8:59 am

dongregg wrote:But you, seigezunt, are a writer. So, as drakkar wrote, I too would like to hear your thoughts on hiding gender in English. Or in German, for that matter. I see that German uses reflexive pronouns like the Swedish sig (Edit: and sin/sitt. Thanks drakkar), but grammar is so tied to gender in German that the same problem could arise.
Interesting. I' haven't read So Finster die Nact, could be interesting to see how the Germans go about it. In the original, even if Eli is clearly a boy, (the pronoun shift at the turnable (?) ), I perceive the gender issue more like a twist, an extra turn of the screw, emphasising that Eli is, Eli, one of a kind, rather than a gender. In English you can't pull it off the same way, sooner or later you have to use him/her, so you are damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
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Re: The Pronoun Shift [spoiler?]

Post by dongregg » Sat Nov 08, 2014 8:55 pm

drakkar wrote:Interesting. I' haven't read So Finster die Nacht, could be interesting to see how the Germans go about it. In the original, even if Eli is clearly a boy, (the pronoun shift at the turnable (?) ), I perceive the gender issue more like a twist, an extra turn of the screw, emphasising that Eli is, Eli, one of a kind, rather than a gender. In English you can't pull it off the same way, sooner or later you have to use him/her, so you are damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
I agree that the gender issue is a kind of twist, a sort of "On top of being totally 'other', I should just mention that I'm not a girl." In the film, it really does come off that way. It isn't a central issue, although it gets a lot of attention. I'm glad I'm not the English translator of the novel. Impossible to not make more of gender than JAL intended. Still, I gather that gender is an issue in the novel for another reason: Håkan's likes young boys. In my fanfic, I call Eli she and frame it plausibly. She was a boy, still thinks of herself as a boy, but finds it easier to present as a girl rather than as a pretty, undersized boy. Because "When I Am With You" is a retelling of the film from Eli's point of view, that minimal amount of information is enough to make it plausible to use she and her. That really doesn't help, though, does it, when it comes to translations of the novel from Swedish into other languages (except for Norwegian, I imagine).

By the way, I have an srt file in side-by-side Swedish and German. I think I'll get some clues about my German question there. No. Probably not. It seems almost a translation of the theatrical subtitles rather than from the Swedish that is actually spoken. Now I remember me (as Falstaff said), there is only one time that a pronoun indicates Eli's gender. It's when Virginia says, "That kid, she (hon) must have infected me." Is that line in the novel? Either way, how would Virginia know Eli's gender just from being bitten (from behind) by her?

Okay, any way we slice and dice it, Eli is what she is. As we both wrote, "Eli is Eli."
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Re: The Pronoun Shift [spoiler?]

Post by drakkar » Sat Nov 08, 2014 11:54 pm

"On top of being totally 'other', [/quote]
This. It might be how JAL thought about it.
dongregg wrote: I'm glad I'm not the English translator of the novel.

I've read quite a lot of translations; JAL is one of very few times when I Immediately felt something was wrong when reading the (Norwegian) translation (Peter Handke is the most recent - I must read the German original). JAL is one of the great authors - he is very precise, and very difficult to translate.
dongregg wrote:Still, I gather that gender is an issue in the novel for another reason: Håkan's likes young boys
Its a lot of "Eli boy references" in both book and film, thing is we tend to disregard them, and when we at last learnt the truth, we (I...) felt tricked. And it was done soo elegantly, just like a magician would trick me at his table. And then I remembered JAL also is a magician... :)
dongregg wrote:Now I remember me (as Falstaff said), there is only one time that a pronoun indicates Eli's gender. It's when Virginia says, "That kid, she (hon) must have infected me." Is that line in the novel?
No, it in the film. In the novel this is gender neutral (a kid), both when Lacke watches Eli attack Virginia, and when Virginia tells Lacke about being infected in the hospital.
dongregg wrote:Either way, how would Virginia know Eli's gender just from being bitten (from behind) by her?
Good question. And, in the book, she didn't, and nor did Lacke.
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Re: The Pronoun Shift [spoiler?]

Post by EEA » Sun Nov 09, 2014 12:08 am

I have the Spanish translation and the beginning is bad. It almost feel as if Oskar was an adult and the story took place in Spain than in Blackeberg.

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Re: The Pronoun Shift [spoiler?]

Post by metoo » Sun Nov 09, 2014 6:41 am

drakkar wrote:Either way, how would Virginia know Eli's gender just from being bitten (from behind) by her?
She would have heard it from Lacke, who did see Eli.
But from the beginning Eli was just Eli. Nothing. Anything. And he is still a mystery to me. John Ajvide Lindqvist

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Re: The Pronoun Shift [spoiler?]

Post by BravoHotel » Sun Dec 14, 2014 7:26 pm

This didn't happen straight away with me, more in the next section with Eli, but after the pronoun change did the way any of you pictured Eli while reading the book change for you at all? Despite knowing before I read the book about Eli's true gender after the pronoun change he went from looking like a cross between Lina and this boy,
Image
To more of a young boy sized Brian molko.
Image
Did anyone else experience something like this?
"He's got a cracking smile but he can't dive for toffee."

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