“Anne Bradstreet and Ralph Waldo Emerson both present their beliefs in a manner that differs greatly.”

See? The word comes into sentences that are merely talking about two people, not necessarily about two people who are doing similar things. In fact here, they are doing something together that differs. Now, if my student were going on to add a third party—”Anne Bradstreet and Ralph Waldo Emerson both present their beliefs in a manner that differs greatly from Cotton Mather’s,” for example—she might be working on an imaginable idea. But she has no such plans.

Actually Anne Bradstreet’s beliefs and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s differ greatly. So do their manners of presentation—Bradstreet’s in poetry and letters and private meditations, Emerson’s in poetry and essays and sermons. In this survey course students read some of each, so it’s hard to be sure what “manner” is in this student’s mind.

The paper itself was looking at religion in Bradstreet and Emerson and pointing out that they had different ideas about it—not surprisingly, considering their separation in time, denominations, and societal roles. But in this sentence, they’re presenting their beliefs, both of them, in a single manner (we deduce from its singular form), and that single manner differs. From what, we do not know.

One of the words I sometimes want to outlaw for student writers is “both.” In “both-and” sentences the parallelism is almost never achieved; in other sentences we get these unintended partnerships. In other words, its use is both ungrammatical and imprecise. Is this another lost cause in the great battle over English as she is spoke?

And now it’s just an ugly grey (again, #D3D3D3) in the sky, with occasional gray splotches delineating the underbellies of clouds. The sky is just too bright, and it’s incredibly irritating. I’m typing next to a window with no curtains or blinds to its frame and I can feel the subconscious urge to turn away and look towards the dark corner of the room, the one with the olive-green chair that reflects softly and doesn’t blind me when I look at it. Come on sky, you’re doing it wrong!

I had a random moment of realization in Spanish as I was copying the unit words onto my “autoprueba,” which for the uninitiated is a list of all the vocabulary words for the section that’s used as a “self quiz.” The word in English was entertaining, and the Spanish version was entretenido. And then I realized that it means “holding between,” and thought that the etymology was so much more transparent in Spanish because it didn’t steal it from French. Mind blown. Check.

Speaking of French, I’m doing my history final project on the invasion of England by the Normans. I don’t need an invitation to pursue my bizarre fascination with linguistics, and what better excuse could there be for ranting on about how the English language was totally smacked across the face by French? Its loanwords account for only about a quarter of modern English vocabulary, even more so in the higher social registers due to the use of French in the court systems for many centuries afterward. It’s good to finally have a project that I’m excited to do.

As for things that I’m not excited to do, I need to thoroughly soak my brain with chemistry facts for the SAT II. I wonder if I’ll be more interested in the SAT II Spanish. With listening or without listening, that is the question.

And the final digression before I force myself to stare at chemistry, I’m reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Roark is very unorthodox, and I think I’m enjoying the story largely due to his lack of what our society would label common sense. That and the strange “it’s complicated” going on between him and a certain Miss Francon.

Literal translation in this second sense usually leads to serious misunderstandings or gaps in the communication but it also has the potential to make people laugh! Given this potential, it is not surprising that inappropriate literary translation (like malaproprisms and similar genuine language errors) may not all be the result of ignorance but may be deliberately confected to amuse others. The two egregious cases chosen for description represent both types and they have provoked much laughter over a considerable amount of time (140 and 50 years, respectively): they may perhaps be dubbed celebrity literal mistranslations. The first was written by the Portuguese citizen Pedro Carolino, equipped with great initiative, chutzpah and ignorance of English. The second less well known example of published literal translations, on the other hand, was deliberately confected to amuse his fellow Argentine citizens by Basil Thomson.

Pedro Carolino

On the face of it, Pedro Carolino seems to have been an opportunist out to make money in the nineteenth century language tuition field. In 1855, he published (or self-published) O Novo Guia da Conversação, em Português e Inglês. This appears to be his adaptation of José da Fonseca’s 1853 O Novo guia da conversação em francês e português, and, indeed, the latter’s name is also on this first edition, but perhaps more as a courtesy.

The volume became famous in Europe for its constant and colossal language errors, which were based mainly on Carolino’s sheer ignorance of English and his daring literal translations of the Fonseca items into “English” using a French-English dictionary (à coups de dictionnaire!). In 1883, the exotic English part of his original Portuguese-English Conversation manual was published separately in Britain and USA as English as She is Spoke. Well over a century later, it is still in print, in English, as a work of humour.

My 1970 edition (London, St George’s Press), which bears only the name of Pedro Carolino, is subtitled “Extracts from The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English”. In his Introduction, James Millington comments: “…it has been reserved to our own time for a soi disant instructor to perpetrate – at his own expense – the monstruous joke of publishing a Guide to Conversation in a language of which it is only too evident that every word is utterly strange to him.” It is Middleton who offers the conclusion that, to produce his bizarre language teaching offering, Carolino had used the Portuguese-French phrase-book and a French-English dictionary mentioned above. [The contemporary US edition was published by Dover.]

Interested readers are invited to log on to amazon.com to see the various editions of English as She is Spoke at present available, including a Kindle one (but “not available” when I looked yesterday).
(Update: A better informed correspondent has kindly sent me the link to a FREE download of English as She is Spoke but note Gutenberg’s Advice: “Not copyrighted in the United States. If you live elsewhere check the laws of your country before downloading this ebook.”)

Here are a few samples of Carolino’s ignorant genius. (Speakers of French and Portuguese will detect many literal translations from French and a few from Portuguese which underlie, and inspire! – the curious book.)

From the Author’s Preface:
“A choice of familiar dialogues, clean of gallicisms … ”
and:
“We expect then, who the little book (for the care of what we wrote him, and for her typographical correction) that may be worth the acceptation of the studious persons, and especialy of the Youth, at which we dedicate him particularly.”

From “Familiar Phrases”:
“Go to send for.
“Have you say that?”
“At what purpose have say so?”
“Put your confidence at my.”
“At what o’clock dine him?”
“Apply you at the study during that you are young.”

From “Familiar Dialogues”:
“With a gardener”
“It delay me to eat some wal nuts-kernels; take care not leave to pass the season.”
“Be tranquil, I shall throw you any nuts during the shell is green yet.”

From “Anecdotes”
“A man one’s was presented at a magistrate which had a considerable Library.
“What you make?” beg him the magistrate. “I do some books,” he was answered.”

Basil Thomson

The second successful practitioner of inappropriate literal translation was an expatriate Englishman who had settled in Argentina in 1949 and worked as a journalist for the English language Buenos Aires Herald (until1979 when he was expelled by the military junta). In addition to his (serious) news dispatches, Thomson published a number of columns in which he set out to offer his bilingual middle and upper class Argentinean, Anglo-argentine and Celtic-argentine readers the pleasure of laughing at the frequent inappropriate literal translations from Spanish in the English narrative of a character whom he called Ramon (no accent). These columns (“Ramon Writes”) were highly successful from 1949 to 1977 and were finally published in book form by the newspaper in 1979, ostensibly to raise funds for a charity but possibly as a tribute to Ramon, aka Thomson, after his harassment and expulsion by the military régime. (Ramon Writes, Buenos Aires Herald, 1979)

Although aimed at a much smaller audience than that achieved in the lifetime and perhaps a century after the death of Pedro Carolino, Basil Thomson’s deliberate liberties with literal translation may still be enjoyed by speakers of Spanish, in particular Argentinians.

Here are some samples of Basil’s work. It should be noted that the English sounds so peculiar not only because of inappropriate words and phrases (and specially coined English words) but also because of double negatives and Spanish patterns of word order for clauses and sentences. Some readers will also recognise echos of the fabled exotic English of some expatriate Latin Americans.

On page 10, Thomson describes how Ramon was born. After rejecting the idea of writing a dictionary of entertaining “Irish-Argentinianisms”, “I put myself in the place of a fairly advanced and confident but careless student and expressed myself as I imagined he would. This involved thinking in vernacular Spanish and writing in English.”

The compilers chose this extract as their favourite one. I have added a few glosses.
“I supplicate you that you pass of high [ignore] so much discourtesy of my part for not writing these past four months.

What passed was that I had planned to go to that one in person and because of that I desisted. It had of object my visit to see if I could accommodate myself in some ministry or gobernation after they happened the events that are of public dominion.

But in vespers of [on the eve of] absenting myself there writes me a friend of the faculty to tell me that my voyage would be to the divine button because the things have not changed themselves nothing: the milics have copated themselves everything.

As you can await, I felt myself disillusioned, because I give myself count [realise] that this life of camp [country] doesn’t fall me well, and of commerce I do not want to occupy myself. For me, who coursed three years of studies of public traducer there should always exist entry into the official life. With the patience of always, I will wait.” (p. 12)

Just one more:
“At my arrival I went to visit a known one who is familiar of another, who is vinculated with a man who knows all the world. He gave me a letter of presentation and I presented myself and was received very amiably. This man he gave me a card, we took the coffee together and he redacted a letter for me directed to the secretary of redaction of one of the principal pregonators of the country.

“I won’t molest you with the all the letter but it was something formidable. It said that I desire to associate myself with the profession and, it being possible, to incorporate myself to the paper “of your dignified direction”. And a lot more, ending as usual, with “with my motives expressed I make propitious the opportunity to salute you attentively without any other particular.”

(This work is listed as Out of Print by Amazon.com and on Abebooks.com there is only one copy available, for $32. First come, first served!)

BORING FRIENDS

We know only four boring people.  The rest of our friends we
find very interesting.  However, most of the friends we find
interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the
most boring.  The few who are somewhere in the middle,
with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any
moment, we feel, they may become too interesting for us, or
we too interesting for them.

– from Samuel Johnson is Indignant, by Lydia Davis

hearts.

Em 1883, os editores londrinos Field & Tuer, da Leadenhalle Presse, publicaram um panfleto, assinado por um tal James Millington, propondo uma alteração radical ao acto de ler. Na sociedade moderna, argumentava ele, somos obrigados a ler em condições muito pouco favoráveis – em comboios em movimento, com pouca luz, apressadamente, etc.

A solução seria optimizar a direcção de leitura: ao lermos apenas da esquerda para a direita, desperdiçamos o tempo e o esforço de deslocar os olhos para o começo da linha seguinte; lendo alternadamente da esquerda para a direita e da direita para a esquerda, o problema ficaria resolvido. Evidentemente, a ideia não pegou e, hoje em dia, pouca gente se lembra de James Millington e de Are we to read backwards? or, What is the best print for the eyes?

Robin Kinross, no livro Modern Typography (Hyphen Press: 2004), reproduz-lhe a capa (imagem acima) e três páginas interiores (abaixo), considerando-o um modelo pioneiro de “tratado sobre legibilidade”, bem intencionado, embora talvez um pouco excêntrico.

Um dia, ao olhar com atenção para a página mais à esquerda, que simula o efeito tremido da leitura num comboio, consegui decifrar a palavra “Portuguese”.

Isso despertou-me a curiosidade e fez-me reparar que já tinha visto o título da página do meio: English As She Is Spoke.

Era o nome de um livro que eu conhecia bem e do qual tenho uma cópia. Trata-se da reedição da parte inglesa de um guia de conversação Inglês-Português, com o pormenor interessante do seu autor, o português Pedro Carolino, não saber uma única palavra de inglês. Usando um dicionário Francês-Inglês, limitou-se a traduzir um guia de conversação Português-Francês para Inglês. O resultado é, como seria de esperar, hilariante, e o livro acabaria por ter uma longa carreira como objecto cómico.

Ao consultar a minha cópia, uma edição inglesa fac-similada, reparei que James Millington era o autor da introdução, e que, num anúncio reproduzido no final do livro, aparecia também Are We To Read Backwards? no meio das outras publicações da Leadenhalle Presse.

Isto levou-me a perguntar: será que Are We To Read Backwards? não é na realidade um tratado excêntrico sobre legibilidade, como Kinross sugere, mas uma paródia brilhante? Se Millington cita realmente cientistas da época para apoiar a sua tese, por outro lado, o facto de usar como exemplo o texto de English As She Is Spoke e a própria vivacidade tipográfica da paginação parecem indicar uma intenção cómica por detrás do projecto. Mais ainda: o autor do prefácio da primeira edição americana foi escrito por Mark Twain, um humorista reputado; Millington é o autor da introdução à edição inglesa, o que pode dar a entender que também era um humorista. De certa maneira, Kinross parece admitir isso, quando fala de Andrew Tuer, um dos donos da Leadenhalle Presse, como sendo “pouco ortodoxo e historicista”, o que pode perfeitamente descrever um editor especializado em humor refinado, mas verosímil.

Contudo, parece-me difícil (senão impossível) chegar a uma conclusão definitiva sobre as intenções de James Millington e dos seus editores. Muitos livros de divulgação científica assumem um tom ligeiro e descontraído, e Are We To Read Backwards? pode perfeitamente ter sido escrito como um tratado bem humorado com intenções sérias. Pessoalmente, acharia mais interessante se fosse uma das mais velhas sátiras ainda em circulação sobre a obsessão dos designers pela legibilidade.

Here’s a gem from the company’s official website:

Somebody want lager, indeed.

Hyphens.

That would probably be a funnier lead-in if it wasn’t true.