When a group of people are about to be shot en masse, the women are sometimes spared and allowed to leave; they are then left without husbands without fathers, without brothers and even without adolescent let alone grown-up sons, but they are allowed to go on living, mad with grief like tormented ghosts, for whom, nevertheless, the years pass and thus they grow old, chained to the memory of the world they have lost.
Tomás Nevinson, by Javier Marias, translated by Margaret Jull Costas
Marias generates tension with not only the literal content of the sentence but also the syntax and repetition. What stays with me is the word “without.”
The style technique is anaphora, the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or sentences. Four times he uses the word “without,” drawing the reader’s attention to the word. Anaphora is a favorite style technique among speechwriters because it makes whatever is repeated so memorable. It’s the perfect word to repeat here, since the women who are allowed to live, will live a life that is defined by what they must do without.
The emotion is heightened by repeating “without” not two, not three, but four times. When you write the four-or-more part series, says Winston Weathers in his essay, The Rhetoric of Series, you “suggest the human, emotional, diffuse, and inexplicable.”
Punctuation, too, is a style technique to invoke meaning. The first two uses of anaphora blur together because there is no comma that separates the loss of husbands and fathers. It suggests that the mind can’t handle differentiating the two—it’s too much loss--and chooses instead to lump them together as one.
With anaphora, it’s easy for the reader to become lulled by the rhythm. To prevent that, Marias varies the rhythm on the fourth iteration of “without,” with the phrase, “even without adolescent let alone grown-up sons.”
Maria also uses antithesis, the pairing of opposites, to raise the tension. The women go on living, but it’s a life that might as well be death as they are mad with grief, and then the simile, “like tormented ghosts.” After the conjunction “but” the sentences trips and stutters along with the many commas (five), mimicking a life drowning in grief, moving reluctantly forward.
Your Turn:
Write a complex sentence with a subordinate clause followed by a base clause.
Add a semicolon and follow your second base clause that elaborates on something in the first base clause. Here, Marias describes how the women will live. In that second base clause, use anaphora and repeat a word or phrase at the beginning of four successive phrases. Pick a word that you want the reader to remember. Can the final use of the repetition vary the rhythm in some way?
Add the conjunction “but.” “But” turns the sentence in a different direction. Can you add antithesis? If you need a jagged feeling, can you add short phrases, separating them with commas?
Try it!
Let me know how it goes!
Margaret Jull Costas: “The most obvious hurdle for the translator is the sheer length and complexity of the sentences, which are sometimes a half a page, a page or even two pages long. When faced by such a sentence, I simply translate it as it stands and then go back over it again and again until every part is connecting as it should connect and the flow of thought and language is retained.” The Cahiers Series, Center for Writers & Translators
About Me
I’ve taught “Style in Fiction,” “Word for Word” and “Cultivating Your Prose” at the University of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies since 2007. In each of these classes, we spend 10 to 15 weeks drenched in the beauty of sentences, reading them and writing them. It’s such a pleasure! I’ve watched my writing and my students’ writing blossom with this practice of paying close attention to the sentence.
Please visit my website to find all of my books: ninaschuyler.com (including “How to Write Stunning Sentences” and “Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal).
I’m thrilled my new novel Afterword was chosen by Alta Journal as a top read for May! Bay City News, too, awarded it this honor.
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On May 31, 7:00 pm, I’ll be at Green Apple Books on 9th Avenue, in conversation with Katie Flynn, author of The Companions.
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Whenever I'm challenged to imitate the syntactical form of a long sentence, I look up grammatical terms online; I google jargon-y terms such as anaphora such as antithesis, such as polysynadon and sometimes even elementary terms such as subordinate clause, but I'm undeterred, rapt with glee like crazed word scientists everywhere, for whom the challenges of sentence construction are more than outweighed by the joys of sentence creation, implausibly building meaningful ideas -- and thus a meaningful life -- out of the nerdy instruments found in a grammarian's toolchest.
(Whew!)
When the Tijuana taco crawl tour guide placed an order for, inter alia, camerones al diablo and aguachile estilo Sinaloa, it occured to Steven Morris, Esq. that the south-of-the-border trouble his Tarot-happy nephew had foreseen would not come at the hands of prostitutes or carjacking banditos or even sociopathic organ smugglers but rather from so-called chefs; quick order cooks spooned incendiary sauces on enchiladas on quesadillas, on every variety of taco and even, our traveler was pretty sure, on the rims of honkin' huge margarita glasses, but the clueless tourists Steven had been thrown in with took no notice, eagerly gobbling down everything on offer with the stupid childlike joy of the gastrointestinally naive.