Multilingual Literature

I have a thing about multilingual texts, despite only speaking English fluently - I quite enjoy allowing meaning to be eclipsed by sonorousness or textual presentation. There is of course a charge of elitism, particularly against Modernist poets who used this technique, but I feel like you can plunge headfirst into a piece without needing to know every reference or grasp every word (there is of course a case to be made that this confidence in not-understanding is also an element of cultural capital). How do you denizens of ILB feel about this? Do you speak many languages and interpret? Allow the foreign elements to stand as semantic voids (which in itself can then have a meaningful impact)? Or do you get frustrated if you can't understand?

Also plz list examples of this phenomenon, thx.

Obvious examples here:

TS Eliot - the Waste Land
Paul van Ostaijen - Bezette Stad
Wilfred Owen - Dulce et Decorum est

Ummm, now my mind is going blank.

Joyce obviously puns multilingually but does he also use intermingled non-English in his texts? Can't think of an example...

War and Peace has large passages of French dialogue. Used as a literary device to show the remoteness of the aristocrats from Russian culture/the artifice of certain characters.

There's def some non-English in Joyce, but just little bits of Latin and French and such iirc - mainly the puns you mention i think.

http://i.imgur.com/DGWTAw1.png

I'd prob dig that in a found poetry comp.

I was intending to write an academic paper on this subject (specifically reading multilingual texts as a monolinguist), but I have no concentration or confidence left in me, so I'm making it an ilx thread. Yay me.

Pound's Cantos are definitely multilingual.

there's quite a lot of writing on Burns' use of Scots and Scottish Standard English - alongside one another and often intermingling. some look at it critically as a sociolinguistic matter, a consequence of the negative and pervasive influence of English, and its domination and extinction of Scots. More charitable readings have Burns as a man with an abundant and rich vocabulary and native understanding of both tongues using the tools at his disposal.

Bit like darraghmac in that regard.

lots of spanish dialogue in cormac mccarthy's border trilogy. he translates some of it but the effect is kind of clumsy, especially if you already got it the first time.

i just posted in the current rolling thread abt caroline bergvall doing this. it's all over the place in that book, especially between english and middle english and some intermediate slippage into french, plus no doubt a lot i don't notice, but also a lot of plan repetition in multiple languages for effect, and to clue you in. near the end there's a part where everything is done three times in her languages, english norwegian and french.

i can read enough german to take pleasure in books that mix it in - i find that when i'm writing about a german text read i read in the original now, i even am kind of drawn to writing more multilingually, myself. yet when i come across it being done with french it always irritates me, like i have this perception that french is not as widely read as the people who do that like to think, or something. of course when tolstoy does it, or thomas mann in 'magic mountain', it's supremely annoying.

i read gloria anzaldua's borderlands / la frontera many years ago, and more recently, and i felt like with more maturity, but not really any more spanish except the bits and pieces of romance language words a person can accrue, it took on a different cast from that much more alienating first encounter. it seemed much more modulated overall. i thought that was because i picked up more on the related ways in which she was positioning other cultural phenomena, songs and movies and things, in relation to the languages and the corresponding lands/cultures.

Julian Barnes usually shovels in some untranslated French in his novels, which is often annoying, since you don't know how relevant the bit you can't read is.

of course when tolstoy does it, or thomas mann in 'magic mountain', it's supremely annoying.

many europeans spoke french during that time, so it might have made more sense to them.

Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is heavily interlarded with stretches of Latin, maybe Greek too. definitely a thing for writers in English up to the middle 18th century, Swift loves an ironic Classical allusion, even Henry Fielding will allow some of his characters to drop a few phrases in, frequently mis-spoken.

i tend to go for a combination of notes, googling where possible, letting the text explain itself and just letting it sit there all sphinxlike altogether

can usually bumble thru in French and limited German to a decent approximation

have an early nineteenth c. copy of anatomy, but think it might be a good idea to get that annotated edition with the translated latin, cos no way am i that proficient.

first time i took note of this was when i started reading huxley: suddenly there would be sections of italicised french, the point of which i'm still unsure of.

i remember claude simon using this to quite good effect in conducting bodies when the central character (not knowing spanish) goes to a writers conference in south america... heightened the already very apparent disorientation of that novel.

(...think some of the spanish might have even been printed upside down)

of course when tolstoy does it, or thomas mann in 'magic mountain', it's supremely annoying.

many europeans spoke french during that time, so it might have made more sense to them.

― groovemaaan, Wednesday, 27 April 2016 05:38 (2 hours ago) Permalink

Yes Rilke does quotes untranslated French in his letters (which I am making my way through atm)

came here to complain about mann

i wonder if german is less annoying because of some deeply perceived kinship w/ english

the owen poem is interesting in that it seems to perform something-or-other -- the persons acting, dying in it are presumably not all latin readers

also interesting in that every single word in the line from horace he quotes has cognates in modern english

All of the directly reported French speech in Powell's Dance to the Music of Time is untranslated, with the author giving the clear impression that "Lady, if you have to ask..." Ironically (or not), the narrator at one point fails to get an army posting because of his poor command of written French.

I was intrigued about the Wasteland after a visit to Margate a few years ago, and my partner bought me the book, but I was put off almost immediately by the number of classical references and non-English language. Emil.y's original post is making me want to try it again. I've always been a closely analytical reader and hate skimming, but a recent interest in Finnegan's Wake, and the idea that some literature should be absorbed almost like ambient music rather than understood as a sequential text is interesting to me.

What about more mainstream texts like A History of Seven Killings or Trainspotting which feature heavy amounts of dialect and slang but are still in English? I didn't find either of them too difficult to read even if my knowledge of Jamaican patois is pretty much limited to DJ chatter at the start of dub records; but I think a lot of readers found AHOSK impenetrable. Maybe that's not what this thread is about though.

'Most' (at least a lot) of the 19th century English literature I read has passages or at least sentences in French. But it was meant to be understood by an educated readership and so I have no qualms about reading annotated classics editions with full translations.

ward: despite having thrown a translation of Mann from me with great force for committing that sin, i have absolutely no memory of Powell committing the same offense. peculiar

re joyce does he present any of the Gaelic that the Englishman (Haynes?) ventures at the beginning? or is it left off the page?

Thomp, it's pretty fresh in my mind, having just finished the sequence, and being a resolutely unilingual reader.

I also remember David Thomson quoting chunks of untranslated French dialogue in an old Biographical Dictionary entry, probably one on Godard - iirc, he stopped doing this in later revisions.

xp

And to the loud voice that now bids her be silent with wondering unsteady eyes.

— Do you understand what he says? Stephen asked her.

— Is it French you are talking, sir? the old woman said to Haines.

Haines spoke to her again a longer speech, confidently.

— Irish, Buck Mulligan said. Is there Gaelic on you?

— I thought it was Irish, she said, by the sound of it. Are you from the west, sir?

— I am an Englishman, Haines answered.

— He’s English, Buck Mulligan said, and he thinks we ought to speak Irish in Ireland.

— Sure we ought to, the old woman said, and I’m ashamed I don’t speak the language myself. I’m told it’s a grand language by them that knows.

love that exchange, and no, he doesn't quote what Haynes says, but I'm sure there's plenty of untranslated Gaelic scattered thru the rest of the book

Maybe a little obvious, but Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La frontera and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee do this very effectively as a way of exploring cultural hybridity and violence.

(Sorry, I just now saw that j. discussed Anzaldua upthread.)

many europeans spoke french during that time, so it might have made more sense to them

yes i know but also europe has been wrong about lots of things

basically most folk educated enough to be reading a novel in Europe in those days could read French I guess.

another example: Junot Diaz has quite a lot of Spanish in that Oscar Wao book, though he frequently repeats the Spanish phrases in English and it can be kind of annoying/redundant when you can actually read Spanish .

a lot of Pound's later Cantos repeat the Chinese ideograms in English within themselves - I'm reliably informed *cough*

strange that i've never heard of editions of beckett being printed bilingually on facing pages

basically most folk educated enough to be reading a novel in Europe in those days could read French I guess.

+ enough latin to discuss sex, anatomy, and other 'embarrasing' subject matter, without corrupting the minds of women or the young

strange that i've never heard of editions of beckett being printed bilingually on facing pages

I've been curious about this too. Granted, bilingual editions seem less common for prose works than for poetry, but I wonder if one factor is that Beckett's self-translations are more often treated as somehow transparent because he took direct responsibility for them?

basically most folk educated enough to be reading a novel in Europe in those days could read French I guess.

not sure about this! i think it's more a strategy of elitism (one among many) adopted to keep your work from the possible vulgarity of being comprehended by the greater public. literacy rates in Western Europe p high by late 19th (tho yes distinction between 'literate' and 'novel-reading'). anyway this is what makes me unhappy when I encounter it: because it makes me sad I'm not in the club.

re Beckett I've always been curious about the French because I wonder what takes the place of the irishisms.

I'm not sure I've seen a facing-page translation for prose that's not explicitly for language learning purposes tho.

well, herr W. and plato (thanks to loeb, for whom i guess everyone else in the ancient world is the same way).

There are Canadian novels that play with the country's bilingualism. One is Carole Corbeil's Voice Over.