I have just finished reading Stevie Smith's "The Novel on Yellow Paper" - which ended badly in a narrative sense - but also because she kept inserting chunks of untranslated German.
A couple of weeks ago I was reading Owen Barfield's "Saving the Appearances" and he peppered the text with bits of untranslated Latin, and even several passages in Classical Greek (with the Greek letters, and all).
Both books were mid-20th Century, by authors born around 1900; and both authors will have known perfectly well that very few (and a tiny percentage) of their readers will have been able to understand these foreign bits - so what good reason could they have for including them?
The answer is (to quote Nigel Tufnel in Spinal Tap) none good reason.
There are plenty of bad reasons for deliberately using language that you know most other people will-not and (esp. before Google translate) can-not understand, but none are good.
Back in the day when I wrote in the mass media for a general audience, I knew better than to include sheets of technical language from psychiatry, biochemistry, or statistics - even if incomprehensible jargon might impress some people.
Plus; it's not as if knowing one or a few foreign languages out of the thousands of them, is even intelligence correlated - there are shoals of fluent tri-lingual people (even in Britain, in this city, here and now) of significantly below-average IQ and without educational attainments.
I'm afraid usage of untranslated-foreign is an unintentionally-revealing personality flaw; so I suppose I ought to try and be sympathetic; instead of becoming overwhelmed with irritation and hurling the book across the room.
Mea culpa.
ReplyDelete@WJT - Dir ist vergeben.
ReplyDeleteWhat about Tolstoy's use of French in many passages in War and Peace?
ReplyDelete@Ranger - Should be translated - *obviously*!
ReplyDeleteI agree.
ReplyDeleteAt least it's usually just flavoring and not essential to the main point.
Surely "traduttore, traditore" is a quite adequate justification?
ReplyDeleteAlso, in an age when equality mongering subpar pseudo-intellectual bullshitters have infested pretty much everything, whilst simultaneously both duelling and public floggings have gone out of style, one surely needs some sort of other method to keep the riff-raff out. And down.
Or, in the immortal words of Plato: ἀγεωμέτρητος μηδείς εἰσίτω.
@MR - Remind me never to read your novels...
ReplyDelete@NLR - A sub-question is when to translate whole passages (leaving out the foreign altogether), when to have the foreign then provide a chunk of translation in the text, when to provide a footnoted translation...
ReplyDeleteMy first edition of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy - which is about half foreign, several languages but mainly Latin - had the translations as footnotes; but it was cumbersome to use. I bought a second version that was all in English - that was always the one to which I referred.
Wait, isn’t there untranslated elvish etc in Tolkien?
ReplyDeleteThere's an Iris Murdoch novel, I forget which, where a character receives a letter that includes a fairly lengthy bit of untranslated Italian. I read it before online translation was available, so I spent a great deal of time looking up every word in a bilingual dictionary and trying to piece together what it meant. Then a few chapters later, the person who received the letter meets the person who sent it and says, "What did that bit at the end mean? Not everyone speaks Italian, you know?" and the sender explains that it's a quotation from Dante and provides a translation. After all the unnecessary hard work of producing a very subpar translation of my own, I wanted to throw the book across the room.
ReplyDelete@Mia - Yes, but surely *everybody* understands Elvish.
ReplyDeleteI'm sympathetic to your argument but would like to add three points:
ReplyDelete- I suspect it wouldn't have occurred to Barfield that any of his readers wouldn't know Latin and Greek. Any properly educated Englishman born in 1898 would have learnt both at school. (I find Barfield's inability to express himself clearly far more annoying, to be honest.)
- Modern technology for better or worse makes translating from pretty much any foreign language extremely easy. Barfield's Latin and Greek are accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
- I wonder if those who grow up monolingual aren't overly sensitive to this. A lot would be lost of we didn't have Tolstoy's French in War & Peace, Mann's mix of Low German, High German, French and Bavarian dialect in Buddenbrooks etc. Both were products of bi-/multilingual environments where these things just came naturally.
I just read "That Hideous Strength". Merlin converses in Latin. CS Lewis handled the issue by having the first sentences of the conversation in Latin, with a footnote attached to the English translation, and then switching to English while making it clear the conversation was being held in Latin. I though that worked OK.
ReplyDelete@Stefan F -
ReplyDeleteYour first point is not correct. Greek has never been much taught or known. Barfield himself won a classics scholarship to Oxford, but he will have known that many of the people at even his highly academic grammar school (Highgate) would be on the "modern" studies side (eg. the scientists) and would not know any Greek - would certainly not be able to translate ancient Greek phrases.
As for internet translation - I read Barfield in books, on paper - many of them are not available as e-texts. And anyway, it is not easy to translate when reading on eg. Kindle.
It doesn't matter if you are fluently bi or tri lingual, there are still *many* languages you will not be able to read at the level they are quoted.
No no... It won't do. We should not accept the unacceptable.
Maybe what it comes down to is this: You find it unacceptable, which is fair enough; I actually find coming across mysterious mixes of languages and if necessary deciphering/translating what has been said enjoyable and rewarding. Perhaps there's no more to it than personal preference, both in the case of writers and readers.
ReplyDelete@Stefan "Perhaps there's no more to it than personal preference"
ReplyDeleteMaybe, but I would prefer to believe that I am *objectively* correct ...
@Ed - It's easy enough, if you make the effort. Lewis was Barfield's best friend, and also won a classical scholarship to Oxford - but CSL was more concerned to communicate effectively when he was addressing a general audience. Indeed, he made a study of this, while giving lectures to RAF personnel during WWII - and shared this with a group of trainee vicars.
ReplyDelete