“They're Eating the Peacocks, the People Who Live There”

Unexpected Challenges of Writing In Your Second Language

Photo by Vivek Doshi on Unsplash

Last weekend, my family and I drove to the countryside for a little road trip (one of the perks of living in a country as small yet as geographically diverse as Croatia, is that it takes only an hour drive to get from our coastal region to the mountainous region, with its completely different climate, plant and wildlife. You drive through a 5,600 meter tunnel that winds through the gut of the Velebit mountain, et voila! You’re in a different areal altogether).

And as we were driving through some village there, I saw a coop.

And in it a rooster.

A beautiful one, with a proud red comb and beautiful autumn-colored feathers.

“Pivac,” I thought, the Croatian word for a rooster.

Its peers tend to end up on our Sunday lunch table on special occassions, like Christmases, birthdays, and anniversaries. My mother makes a mean roast, like you wouldn’t believe: the skin crisp and savory, the meat supple and succulent. It’s my favorite dish.

In fact, I love it so much that I even mention it in my novel, Slanting Towards the Sea, coming out next summer from Simon & Schuster. In one of the scenes, the protagonist’s mother makes a roast, and also a soup, the kind that speaks a thousand languages, as we Croatians would say.

Pivac (pee-vahts), I thought as we drove on, parsing out each syllable. Or the other word for it, pijetao (pee-yeh-tah-oh). How proud it looked with its red crest and its auburn hackles.

And then, because nowadays I think in English more often than in my native tongue, the English word came to me. Rooster.

I mulled the word over. Rooster, rooster, rooster.

It hit me, as if the car had hit the wall.

I broke out in cold sweat.

I couldn’t breathe as I took my phone out and logged onto my Drive, where I have the latest version of my manuscript.

And sure enough, there it was. The sentence that felt like a death sentence—death by shame.

“She had outdone herself as she always did: roasted a peacock with potatoes and homemade mlinci, a type of baked dough she briefly cooked and then swirled in the gravy. Salad, of course, and steamed broccoli. And peacock soup with semolina gnocchi—the kind of soup that lifted you from the dead.”

I turned to my husband, who was driving obliviously. “The mother in my manuscript roasted a peacock for lunch. A peacock!” I said, exasperated. “And now my writing partner, all my beta readers, my entire team at CAA, and half of Simon & Schuster all think Croatians roast peacocks for lunch!”

I imagined an actual peacock, its beautiful blue-green feathers, its delicate navy crown, the plummage so azzure you could get lost in it, like on high seas—and I was mortified. Who in their right mind would roast a peacock?!

“Are you sure?” My husband asked, and when I confirmed, he started laughing so hard, I almost made him pull over.

“Give yourself some grace, it’s an honest mistake,” he said. “Pea-cock. Pee-vaths.” And then he said, in a Donald Trump debate voice, “They’re eating the peacocks, the people that live there.”

And I couldn’t help but laugh along.

By this point I read the book several hundred times. Some of those, aloud. And never once did this word jump out at me. And all the other people who read it must have just assumed that this is yet another one of Croatian quirks—there’s plenty of those in the book.

I started obsessing over how many more mistakes I’d made that I’ve glossed over just as I’ve glossed over that roasted peacock.

Croatian society is deeply sardonic. You will often see a group of men sitting idly by the side of the road, or on a piazza, commenting on the one person actually doing something—trimming the trees, fertilizing the soil, fixing a car—and being very vocal about all the ways this person is doing it wrong, while never bothering to do anything themselves, to show how it’s done by example.

Had my manuscript been translated into Croatian, I’m sure I would’ve never seen the end of mockery.

Shame is a weird emotion. It makes you want to dig a hole and bury yourself in it. It makes you wish that you’d never made any effort at all. For a moment, I almost succumbed to it, wondering if by writing a novel in my second language, a language of a country I never even visited, I bit off more than I could chew.

We continued driving back home, leaving the rooster and its coop behind. We went through that long tunnel that winds through the womb of the mountain, the tunnel that starts in one region, but delivers you into another world entirely. It felt almost cathartic when the light appeared at the end of it.

Because light always appears, if you keep going long enough.

It was a good reminder.

I would much rather be the person doing something, than the person commenting on the person doing something, while sitting their own life out. I would much rather put myself out there, even if it means making some mistakes along the way, than succumb to the fear of mockery and remain stagnant and small.

And with all my heart, I wish the same for you, because how bland and colorless this world would be if we didn’t allow ourselves to make mistakes in order to shine.

Disclaimer: No peacocks were hurt during, before, or after writing this article –– or my novel, Slanting Towards the Sea. Sadly, the same can’t be said for some unfortunate roosters.