The finest teacher I ever worked with once said to me, “Use Standard English; dialect is a one-stringed lute.” The implication of Standard English as full-scale orchestra has intrigued and puzzled me ever since; certainly there are times when, forced to read bad writing （as all teachers must）, I would amend his statement to “Dialect is a one-stringed lute played by a one-handed player”; at best it seems capable of two notes, pathos and farce, at worst one: bathos. One monotonous, boring, unrhythmic sound.

So in my first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many （1962）, which concerned a people whose language was not English, I nevertheless used Standard English for both narration and conversation. But from the beginning I was uneasy about that. The language of the Oxbridge Greats seemed especially out of place in the mouths of Mennonite peasants who literally spoke a Low German dialect, and I tried to unsettle the reader by drastic and sometimes awkwardly-shaped images. Of course, many readers immediately assumed I was doing so because I didn't know/couldn't write any better （some have not bothered to reconsider their opinions to this day）; this simply angered me and in a later novel, The Blue Mountains of China （1970）, I decided to rub the reader's nose in every kind of necessary language, from one-stringed lute, if you will, to full orchestra.

As a result, the first chapter of that novel has a first person narrator who speaks English like a Mennonite:

I have lived long. So long, it takes me days to remember even parts of it, and some I can't remember at all until I've been thinking over it a little now and then for weeks. … But the Lord led me through so many deep ways and of the world I've see a little, both north and south. If your eyes stay open and He keeps your head clear you sometimes see so much more than you want of how it is with the world. …

The second chapter, however, has a central intelligence of clear male factuality, and others are omniscient, dialectal or standard as the character requires; each a voice of its own, a tone and a use of language beyond the obvious information it is dispensing. Certain reviewers/readers decided, of course, that the writer, if he knew what he was doing, was doing it to make the book more pretentiously “harder”. Well, the world provides us all with more than enough fools and there are also others, thanks be, who are more perceptive. To quote W. J. Keith: “Wiebe can move … from a characteristically female viewpoint to an indisputably male reaction … And this is achieved in the only way in which it can properly be achieved, by means of language.”

This achievement “by means of language” is particularly impressive, it seems to me, in the novel by André Brink, Kennis van die Aand （1973） which Brink himself translated into English as Looking on Darkness （1974）. His creation of a South Africa world by means of the Coloured English his characters speak is especially striking in Joseph's mother, Sophie; her range goes far beyond a lute, even one with four strings. She can move from statements like, “You his chile, awright. God knows. You his chile en' I don' know if I mus' be gled o' sed,” all the way to “You mustn' try to manure a whole land with one fart, Joseph.” Clearly in the first the Coloured voice is carried more by the contortions of the words, in the latter by the precise, and hilarious, image of folk imagination. At the same time, Joseph speaks the London English he has trained himself so diligently to perfect at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art; so tragically.

In a sense, my translating a non-English dialect into disturbed English word order and rhythmic patterns is an easier problem than that faced by Brink, or Jean D'Costa or Samuel Selvon; my very act of personal translation gives me control: I and I alone am making the translation. They, however, cannot really translate; they struggle not with a different language but with a different kind of English, one they cannot control because it is being spoken by living people who are creating it anew every day according to the living imagination in which they exist. And therein, of course, lies one of their enormous strengths as literary artists.

To change my image from music to food, I may go to England to eat good roast beef, but in Japan I will want sushi. Similarly, I am not looking for Greene or Golding when I read D'Costa or Brink or Rushdie or Selvon: I want Jamaica or South Africa or India or Trinidad, and the language these writers use to get me there is not just flavouring, spice if you please: it is both taste and substance, the way Yorkshire pudding in Liverpool tastes and is a different substance from the raw tuna of Osaka; though both are tasty and nourishing foods.

My professor was wrong. If we are going to have the full orchestra in our world of beautiful complexities, we need the lute very badly. Probably, much more than all those Oxbridge violins we've heard for centuries.