IF YOU’RE A WRITER, YOU translate yourself. There’s an idea in your head, or an image, and it must find its way to words. There has always been a tension, a tension or an opposition, between writing that seeks to record life as experience, in the private language of experience, and writing that seeks to refine or winnow life into final statements, into fixities, with more-public vocabulary, syntax, grammar. On one hand, think of William Faulkner, who sends personal and so imperfect memories stumbling stuporously across Yoknapatawpha. Then, on the other hand, think of the safer, saner Saul Bellow, who tells us intellectually what Chicago means, clearly, even conclusively. This push/pull between inhabiting the self and experience, and making the self and experience intelligible to others, is especially pronounced among writers who write in second languages, and, to a lesser degree, among writers who write about a culture that is not the culture they are writing for or toward. Someone like Bellow, born to immigrants, born to Yiddish, beginning to write in post-WWII America under the sign of bestsellerdom, must have felt compelled to explain more, to explain his intentions, in a fancy Hyde Park version of the way my own relatives, when they spoke English, often spoke. very. slowly. and repeated themselves and repeatedly YELLED! to make themselves understood.