No, not that kind of reincarnation. I refer instead to the mind tricks involved in fiction-writing. As I've been exploring the possibility of composing an epic poem about Pyrrho and Alexander (to date I've produced less than 200 lines, so don't get too excited!), I've treated it as if it were a translation of a lost work by Timon of Phlius, the best-known disciple of Pyrrho and a thinker who often wrote in a Homeric style. However, by no means am I expert in such matters, which is why I defer to the great Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin in his essay "On Language" (translated by Mirra Ginsburg):
The writer must reincarnate himself wholly into the characters, the milieu he is portraying. If you are writing about provincial life, you must yourself at that moment live the life of the province, among provincials; you must think like a provincial; you must forget that there are such places as Petersburg, Moscow, Europe, and that you are writing, perhaps, mostly for Moscow and Petersburg, rather than Chukhloma or Alatyr. If you are writing about Carthage, Hamilcar, Salammbo, you must forget that you live in the nineteenth century A.D., you must feel and speak like Hamilcar. If you are writing about a modern Englishman, you must think in English and write in such a way that what you have written in Russian will read like a good translation from English.
As an example, Zamyatin mentions that someone once asked him if his story The Islanders had been translated from English. Yet he does not wish to take this too far:
When I spoke about "the language of the milieu," I did not mean the literal language of the milieu, but an artistic synthesis of the language of the milieu, a stylization of it. In writing about peasants, it is by no means necessary to use the crudest forms of peasant speech. This would be in bad taste and would attest to the writer's ineptness. An experienced writer always knows how to create an artistically synthesized impression of the actual language of the milieu without crude extremes or distortion.
Why is this important? The key is that, for the reader (and for the writer, too), being exposed to the language of the milieu enables you to immerse yourself more deeply in the assumptions, the thinking, indeed the very world of the characters and events being portrayed:
Every milieu, era, nation has its own language structure, its own syntax, its own way of thinking. And this is what we must absorb and utilize. The characteristic deviations in language are not grammatical, but syntactic. The most characteristic elements, and at the same time the elements which least distort literary language, are the word order and the choice of synonyms. It is these - the syntax, the word order, the synonyms - that we must study, learn to feel, and endeavor to reproduce in a story or novel. None of these factors introduce any crude distortions into the language, and yet they convey perfectly the spirit of the language of the given milieu.
Although Zamyatin is most famous for his amazing dystopia WE, I've always found great value in his essays, too...
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION