No glossary please!

A few weeks ago I posted a poll that asked “When reading an ‘ethnic’ novel (Indian, African, South American) do you prefer a glossary or do you like working out the meaning of the new words by yourself?”. No need to say that the word “ethnic” is misleading, tricky and ugly. What is ‘ethnic’ to me is not ethnic to you, if you’re a reader from across the ocean. I’ve recently learned that an Italian like me is ‘exotic’ to a (WASP) American. ‘Ethnic’ originally means something related to a population subgroup with a common national or cultural tradition, but we don’t consider our (read Western) culture as ‘ethnic’. This means that any ‘other’ literatures/cultures are ethnic. ‘Ethnic’ has thus become a synonym of ‘non Western’. I simply used the word ‘ethnic’ in my poll because I didn’t have much words to explain myself, the poll having a strict limit of words in this blog template.

The results of the poll: 57 % of voters opted for a glossary, 14 % think books are better without glossaries and 28 % are unsure. If I’d actually answered my own poll, my opinion would be the third, “Unsure”, but verging towards the second answer, “no glossary please”. I’ll try to explain why. Let’s pretend I’m writing a novel in English. I’m an Italian, so of course I’ll use some words related to my culture. I will not constantly think “Oh, wait, what would a Malaysian reader understand if I use the expression spaghetti alla carbonara, or commedia dell’arte?” I really need to say that to explain what I ate tonight or to define a certain action. I remember a French sports reporter commentating about an Italian footballer simulating a foul with “Voilà, de la commedia dell’arte”. How else would I write that if not using the Italian word?

Of course it’s something entirely different if I write about a mafioso who loves eating pizza while he’s playing on his mandolino and at the end of the meal he drinks a nice espresso while he’s sitting at a café and staring at the nice piazza in front of him and then he gets an invitation to an opera, but the azzurri are playing at the same time so he decides not to go. That’s spreading a thin layer of neo-exoticism on the book by using a lot of foreign words.
But let’s go back to ‘voilà de la commedia dell’arte’. Would I need a note or a glossary entry in my novel, which is going to be read by non-Italian speakers (since I wrote it in English it’s difficult to avoid)?
Jonathan Beckman in The Guardian’s Book Blog, writes about Howard Jacobson’s “The Finkler Question” (the book has won the Booker Prize this year):

Jacobson is not alone in his reliance on cliché. It occurs in so much fiction about ethnic cultures, whether set in South Asia, the Far East, North Africa or elsewhere: the sprawling, bickering families; the cooking smells; the riots of colour; mangoes, bloody mangoes. Publishers seem to encourage novelists to produce guidebooks (as long as they don't upset too many preconceptions) rather than works of literature. Such works are easily identified by the pile-up of italicised foreign words coupled to their translations. (Want to know what a feygeleh is? Turn to p160 of “The Finkler
Question”. How about a mamzer? It's on p174) It's a shame when a novel aspires to be a glossary. Critics – especially metropolitan ones – must be more sceptical when they find such books confirming what they think they already know.

I don’t quite agree with Jonathan Beckman, for all that matters. There are bloody mangoes in India, as they are bloody spaghetti alla carbonara in Italy. I think the book shouldn’t give explanations of what things are or give couple translations in the text, because that would indeed look like a guidebook (a guidebook to Jewishness, a guidebook to Indianness etc). It’s not much different for the paratext, especially for glossaries. They also give the idea that the book is a National-geographic reportage or a ‘Insert-culture-here-ness for Dummies’. In the case of ‘ethnic’ (here again, I can’t find a better term) novels, either the writer steps towards the reader, or the reader steps towards the writer, trying to understand a foreign culture, eventually looking up the words in the dictionary or googling them. Nonetheless, these novels need to use foreign words in order to be perceived as “authentic” (my novel with people eating Yorkshire pudding wouldn’t work). Personally, I don’t want my novels to be thought for us, Westerners. I don’t want to be fed with a spoon by an Indian writer because I’m not supposed to know what a bindi is (though, I know). I prefer to be lost in the labyrinths of literature. Eventually, I could use a foreword to the novel that explains relevant cultural background, but I am almost irritated by glossaries (almost inevitable in Italian, a bit passé in English I must say), which domesticate literature for the consumption of Western culture.

Not having glossaries keeps the thrill of exploring another culture, of trying to understand it without mediations. In my opinion, something can be gained also by not having glossaries.