Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

That sounds like French—or Italian, or perhaps Spanish—to an English speaker with no knowledge of the languages, only a familiarity with what French (or Italian, or Spanish) sounds like. The verses have no meaning, and only a few of the words are actual words of French (Italian, Spanish). The point is this: you do not have to make any sense at all to sound foreign. For the ancient Greeks, the sound of the foreign was the unarticulated, open-mouthed blabber of va-va-va, which is why they called all non-Greek-speakers varvaros, that is to say, barbarians, “blah-blah-ers.” To sound foreign is to mouth gibberish, to be dim, to be dumb: the Russian word for “German” is , from немой, “dumb, speechless,” and in an older form of the language it was used for any non-Russian-speaker.

However, since the 1980s a number of modern European classics have been retranslated into English and French by translators whose avowed intention was to make familiar classics such as Crime and Punishment or The Metamorphosis sound more foreign—although they certainly did not wish to make them sound dumb.

Nineteenth-century translators frequently left common words and phrases in the original (but mostly when the original was French), though this device is rarely used by contemporary retranslators into English, however “foreignizing” they may seek to be. When Gregor Samsa wakes one morning and finds that he has turned into an insect overnight, he does not exclaim, Ach Gott! in any modern English version; nor does Ivan Fyodorovich say in any available translation of The Brothers Karamazov. Had these novels been written in French and translated into English by the conventions of the 1820s, we can be fairly sure that Gregor Samsa would have said Oh mon Dieu! and Ivan Fyodorovich would have said Alors, voilà in the English translation.

Things have changed, not in French, German, or Russian, but in English. In the language culture of today, English-language readers are not expected to know how to recognize conversational interjections such as “Good God!” or “Well, now” when spoken in German or Russian; whereas within the language culture of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, educated readers were familiar with French expressions of that kind.

A genuine educational and social purpose can be served by maintaining items of the source text in the translation. It allows readers to acquire what they had not learned at school, or to refresh their memory of half-forgotten lessons. Retention of the original expression in narrowly delimited and self-explanatory speech situations such as greetings and exclamations provides readers with something they might well want to glean from reading a translated work: the vague impression of having read a novel in French. When reading French was an important mark of cultural distinction, this could be a very satisfying feeling indeed.

Selective, or “decorative,” foreignism is available only in translation between languages with an established relationship. For many centuries, French was a requirement of advanced education in the English-speaking world, and bits of French were therefore part of the educated English speaker’s general linguistic resource. What those fragments of the other language signified was, simply, “This is French!” together with the pleasing corollary, “I know some French!” The effect on the reader’s self-esteem was hardly diminished if the exact meaning of phrases such as parbleu and ma foi had been lost. When a mastery of French was the hallmark of the educated classes, part of the point of reading a French novel in translation for those whose education had not been quite so complete was to acquire the cultural goods that the elite already possessed. The more French was left in the translation of work from French, the better the reader’s needs and wants were served.

You can’t do that with Russian or German anymore. These languages are taught to only tiny groups of students nowadays. Knowledge of either or even both has no relation to cultural hierarchies in the English-speaking world—it just means you are some kind of a linguist, or maybe an astronaut or an automobile engineer.

What could represent “Russianness” or “Germanness” inside a work written in English? Conventional solutions to this conundrum are no more than that—cultural conventions, established within the English-language domain by historical contact, patterns of immigration, and popular entertainments such as Cold War dramas like Dr. Strangelove. But if we were to take d’Alembert’s recommendation as our guide, then we would try to make Kafka and Dostoyevsky sound like the foreigners that they surely were … by having them write English “embellished” with features not native to it.