Recently, I have been grappling with the challenge authors face when incorporating foreign languages into their writings. Many choose to italicize the given language in order to set it apart from the rest of the text. Mor often than not, the given phrase is then given a short translation -- either in a subordinate clause or sequestered away in parentheses. Cormac McCarthy has the pertinacity to use foreign phrases as regularly as English ones; let the reader be damned if he can't translate it properly. Strunk and White's little book on grammar has long held sway as an authoritative powerhouse of english language usage. I came across an interesting portion of it that deals with just this issue. The advice? Don't use foreign languages. At all. Avoid completely if possible because it just makes you sound worldy in a pretentious way and turns the reader off. As fellow writers, I am hoping you all could weigh in on this matter with any opinions as to whether one should include foreign phrases and, if yes, how to best do so.
Submissions/Competitions
Submissions for our fifth journal issue are
due June 1, 2012.
Submissions for our ninth Showcase are due June 20, 2012.
Join Our Editorial Team
Literary Laundry is now accepting applications to join our editorial team.
Recognitions
foreign
wordswordswords — July 1, 2011 - 23:36Though there may appear to be a certain pretension to writing that includes foreign phrases, it's a risk that a good writer should be willing to take. Hard-and-fast rules ("use no foreign language") smack of dogma and for that reason alone are highly suspect. Dogma is the death of art.
I can imagine situations where foreign phrasing would be very helpful, if not essential. Certainly there are borrowings from other languages that have been happily absorbed into common usage in English prose (as well as poetry). Je ne sais quois comes to mind. Pretentious? Perhaps; context is everything. But isn't it just a bit pretentious to suggest that one's own language can encompass and serve the entirety of one's expressive desire? Or perhaps it's a bit provincial to insist on a rule that so narrows one's perspective— and toolset?
Ben
Foreign Languages
Karpediem — July 29, 2011 - 20:36I generally second Ben's statement that context is everything; what would War and Peace be without the French interspersed in the Russian? That these high-society Russians are speaking French during the invasion of their country by French forces says loads about the character of the Russian people. On the flipside, putting foreign languages into a sentence without a clear reason behind it can certainly turn off the reader. Thus, as said above, context.
However, I feel that it's pretty preposterous for Strunk and White to limit their rule to foreign languages if they're going to make such a statement. What about high-level diction in English? Can't this sound pretentious and turn off readers? We often welcome high-level diction though, because it makes the writing prettier--seeing words one doesn't often see is a form of beauty in itself. Foreign languages in writing may serve the same purpose; the reader may encounter a word or even a sound that they may not often encounter, and this confers a sense of beauty in the writing. Thus, context shouldn't be the sole criterion, as it doesn't entirely take aesthetics into account.
So, in short, if it sounds good in the flow of your writing, especially if it confers extra meaning to the story, don't hesitate to violate Strunk and White's rules!
Strunk & White is as
Jacob Russell — August 24, 2011 - 11:41Strunk & White is as misleading as it is entertaining. It’s ‘usage’ in the old school—that is, a Gatekeeper’s guide to how some individual or school imagines how things ‘ought’ to be, which makes it doubly limited: as a guide to usage, it ignores systematic studies of actual usage (linguistics) and is filled with inaccuracies & stylistic preferences offered as objective facts. A guide to usage should be just that, descriptive rather than prescriptive (use the excellent Webster’s Guide to English Usage and compare entry for entry); and as a style guide, it’s perhaps even more limited—the English-only rule being but one telling example.
I imagine Strunk (though I wouldn’t pin this on the more congenial, White, who got ambushed into collaborating on this tendentious piece of political propaganda) believed in this idea of pure English (the least ‘pure’ … and for that very reason, the richest of modern languages) as an instrument superior & impermeable to the Babel that surrounds its guarded premises.
I don’t know where Strunk walked the streets—but on any trip down Passyunk to the ACME here in South Philly for milk & eggs I might hear Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Khmer, Korean—and, like the wonderful foods I smell by the time I get to the Italian Market—a gloriously creative assemblage of creoles in the making. What sort of writer would, by fiat, exclude the syntactical music of a world that has even less to do with reality now than it did in the days of that old Anglophile curmudgeon, Strunk?
http://jacobrussellsbarkingdog.blogspot.com