C1 Advanced Reading Multiple Choice – test 1. Tekst to fragment eseju pisarki, która tworzy powieści po angielsku, choć to nie jest jej pierwszy język. Pytania dotyczą jej doświadczeń, poglądów i znaczenia użytych przez nią porównań.
C1 Advanced Reading Multiple Choice – pisanie w drugim języku
Tekst znajdziesz poniżej, a pytania pod nim. W egzaminie Reading and Use of English Part 5 to jeden długi tekst i 6 pytań wielokrotnego wyboru. Tutaj jest tak samo: 6 pytań w kolejności tekstu, a ostatnie często dotyczy całości. Najczęściej sprawdzają:
- opinię i nastawienie autora (attitude, purpose),
- znaczenie wyrażeń i porównań w kontekście,
- szczegóły ukryte w parafrazie – poprawna odpowiedź rzadko powtarza słowa z tekstu.
To pierwszy test z serii C1 Advanced Reading Multiple Choice. Czytaj uważnie całe akapity – dystraktory często powtarzają słowa z tekstu, ale zmieniają sens.
Writing in a borrowed tongue
When I tell people that I write my novels in English, a language I did not begin learning until I was fourteen, the reaction is usually a mixture of admiration and faint suspicion. Admiration, because it sounds like a feat of endurance; suspicion, because there is a lingering belief that literature can only truly be written in the language one dreamed in as a child. For a long time I shared that belief, which is perhaps why it took me so long to admit, even to myself, what I was doing.
My first attempts were not so much stories as elaborate vocabulary exercises. I would come across a word I liked – 'crepuscular’, say, or 'lugubrious’ – and build a paragraph around it, like a jeweller setting a stone. The results were, I now realise, unreadable. Every sentence was straining to prove that its author belonged, and the effort showed. A native speaker reading them would have sensed not a voice but an audition.
What changed things was, of all things, a period of illness. Confined to bed for several weeks, too tired to reach for the dictionary, I started writing the way I spoke: in short, plain sentences, using the words that came first rather than the ones I thought I ought to use. When I reread those pages later, I was startled. For the first time, they sounded as if someone was actually there.
This taught me something that no writing manual had managed to convey. A second language offers a peculiar kind of freedom. Because I do not carry the full weight of English idiom in my bones, I notice things native speakers glide past. I find it strange that we 'fall’ in love but 'climb’ the career ladder, and that strangeness often finds its way into my prose. What my early readers took for clumsiness, later readers began to describe as freshness.
That is not to say the disadvantages are imaginary. There are still moments when I reach for an expression and find only a gap, or when an editor gently points out that a phrase I believed to be perfectly ordinary has not been used since the 1950s. I have learned to treat such corrections not as humiliations but as information. Pride, I have discovered, is a luxury that the second-language writer cannot really afford.
People often ask whether I translate from my mother tongue as I go. The honest answer is that I have no idea. Thought does not seem to arrive in any particular language; it arrives as a kind of pressure, and the words come afterwards to relieve it. Occasionally a Polish word will surface with no English equivalent, and I will spend a morning circling it, trying to smuggle its meaning across the border without its passport.
I am sometimes asked, too, whether I feel I have betrayed my first language. It is a question that tends to come from people who have never had to choose. I did not abandon Polish; I simply found that English gave me a certain distance from my own material, and distance, for a novelist, is not coldness but perspective. Writing about my grandmother’s village in the language of the village would have been like trying to paint a portrait with my nose pressed against the canvas.
If I have any advice for others in my position, it is this: stop trying to sound like somebody else. The ideal native speaker you are imitating does not exist, and the attempt to become him will only strip your writing of the one thing nobody else can offer – the particular angle from which you see the world. Your accent, on the page as in speech, is not a flaw to be corrected. It is, quite possibly, the point.