In discussions of prose or style or anachronisms in works of fantasy, someone will inevitably claim that you should think about what you’re reading as translated fiction, because obviously the people in this fantasy world don’t speak English. Tolkien approached his work this way. So did Gene Wolfe in The Book of the New Sun. But does claiming that an author’s use of contemporary language is an act of translation allow us to avoid the question of style completely? I don’t think so.
Even if we think about fantasy in general as a work in translation, shouldn’t the “translator”/author make an attempt to preserve the texture of the “original work”? Modern American readers will be most familiar with the mile as a unit of distance, but league, mile, and kilometer all suggest very different relationships to measurement and standards. The word you choose will suggest something about the setting. Using units of the international system implies that there is indeed something like our international system of measurements in this world, which in turn suggests that modern nations exist, and these nations and their bureaucratic institutions need standardized measurements for some reason, such as scientific inquiry. Having characters measure length in meters would also suggest that the characters using them have access to standardized measurement tools.
When we encounter “modern” dialogue in our fantasy novels—which we assume to be taking place in “the past,” or at least “a past,” or in a culture that is progressively
“behind” ours, all terms fraught with their own issues I’m going to bracket here—we might say “that’s how the author chose to translate it.” That statement in itself is nonsensical because the novel is not actually a work in translation. It might be posing as one, in which case questions of translation are valid. But most works of fantasy do not explicitly introduce this “work in translation” metafiction.
Even if we decide to approach fantasy as translation, the way we communicate is a product of a particular social, historical, environmental, and linguistic context. I want to understand the context of the world I’m reading about. I want the author to render their “translation” in a way that lets me understand and experience the environment of these characters. I want to know how they relate to each other, how they relate to society, how they understand social status, formality and informality, what they consider sacred and profane, all of it.
This dialogue doesn’t have to be full of archaisms. The narrative voice doesn’t have to evoke “the past.” It just has to be true to the story being written. Kai Ashante Wilson’s use of AAVE in The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, for instance, works well in that novella via contrast with both the high-Vancian rhetoric that flavors the setting and the dialogue of other characters, such as that one pretentious European-coded merchant whose name escapes me at the moment. It’s done with intention, playing on reader prejudices concerning “low” and “high” (or “nonstandard” and “standard”) dialects. It’s thematic and intentional. The writing is of a different caliber, producing different effects, to the fantasy novels striving for epic scope and a sense of wonder yet rendered in a bland linguistic monochrome.
Fantasy shows us a world that is not our own so that we may reflect in new ways upon the world we live in. What is fantastic, wondrous, otherworldly, and sublime in fantasy is a product not of the concepts themselves (magic, monsters, and what have you) but of the way the concepts are rendered. Language itself is a spell. The “work in translation” argument fails to grasp what makes fantasy fantastic.
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