But then I sort of lost it, and said some extremely hurtful things. Not being used to radio shows at the time, I stayed quiet for a while, as a well-behaved, recently civilized savage should. The very fact that you write in English is a tribute to the British Empire. “Even you,” he said, turning to me imperiously, The other guest was an English historian who, in reply to a question from the interviewer, composed a paean to British imperialism. Only a few weeks after the mother tongue/masterpiece incident, I was on a live radio show in London. As the era that we know, and think we vaguely understand, comes to a close, perhaps we, even the most privileged among us, are just a group of redundant humans gathered here with an arcane interest in language generated by fellow redundants. The correct answer to that question today would of course be “algorithms.” Artificial Intelligence, we are told, can write masterpieces in any language and translate them into masterpieces in other languages. My answer to his question made him even angrier. I hadn’t claimed to have written a masterpiece (nor to be a “he”), but nevertheless I understood his anger toward a me, a writer who lived in India, wrote in English, and who had attracted an absurd amount of attention.
Has any writer ever written a masterpiece in an alien language? In a language other than his mother tongue?
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