Modernism and Non-translation

Abstract

“An arresting, recurrent feature of modernist literature, especially that written in English,” declare the editors in their introduction, is “its incorporation of untranslated words and phrases.” True enough, and it is astonishing that more has not been written on the phenomenon of foreign-language citation in the work of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and many others. The Waste Land, for example, as Harding points out in his own contribution to this essay collection, is a veritable tissue of allusions, inserted in the original Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, Provençal and even Sanskrit forms. It is as if the Cumaean sybil's prophecy, in the poem's epigraph, could not be rendered in English.How and why writers felt compelled to insert foreign phrases—Henry James, Daniel Karlin notes, included numerous French locutions like à contre coeur (“reluctantly”) even in his own personal notebooks—makes for a fascinating study, but unfortunately Harding and Nash refer to the process as non-translation, a term implying that the word or phrase in question could have been translated but was not. Non-translation, however, is misleading. If I write a letter to friends who, like me, have a special love for things Italian, and address them as Carrissimi, it is not because I could not say “Dearest ones.” It is because the Italian phrase feels more intimate, more authentic. James, who had lived abroad for many years and regarded French culture as much more sophisticated than our own, loved to use their phraseology, which often seemed to him more succinct, more to the point. Or again, Pound could have translated the repeated words “Dove sta memoria” (from his beloved Cavalcanti's Donna mi prega) as “Where memory lives,” but then he would have lost the entire tone and affect of the phrase.Citing Christopher Ricks, Harding, discussing the opening of The Waste Land, notes that the “non-translation” of line 12—“Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch”—allows Eliot to emphasize the “tonal recesses of foreignness,” the “strangeness of the voices of the displaced.” But the citation has, I think, a much more obvious function. The nameless woman in the Hofgarten is meant to epitomize the rootlessness and mongrelization of culture of the postwar years: her casual, colloquial sentence is, of course, absurd: she is not echt anything. The German phrase guarantees authenticity and irony. Similarly, in Joyce's Ulysses, we meet a Stephen Dedalus whose mind is full of Church Latin, even as Bloom comically mistranslates snatches of Italian opera. The modernists were responding to an age of increasing linguistic alterity.Equally interesting, as Stephen Romer shows in his excellent essay, is to speculate why certain poets then discontinued the practice, as did Eliot by 1930, when he evidently longed to assert his new status as a “royalist” and “Anglican” Englishman. Romer finds that Ash Wednesday contains a single foreign reference—Dante's Sovegna vos.