Examples of novels where the reader is expected to know more than one language.
March 23, 2012 4:55 PM   Subscribe

Examples of novels where the reader is expected to know more than one language.

I am looking for examples of books where the author expects the reader to be fluent in a second language in order to understand the text. I don't just mean that there are foreign words. I mean that there are possibly entire sections of text in a second language that would make comprehension of the story impossible unless you understand the second language.

Examples that I know of:
  • Tolstoy - War and Peace and Anna Karenina are written in Russian, with extensive dialogue in French
  • Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre and other of her novels have a lot of French dialogue.
  • Shakespeare - Not a novel, but Henry V has a scene entirely in French (if I remember right)
Does anyone know of any others? Even if neither language is English?
posted by AlexanderPetros to Writing & Language (36 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
Joyce scattered multiple languages throughout Ulysses -- there's French, German, Italian, Irish, Latin, and Greek in it, off the top of my head.
posted by scody at 5:02 PM on March 23, 2012 [2 favorites]


All The Pretty Horses (lots of Spanish dialogue)
posted by Sassyfras at 5:02 PM on March 23, 2012


In Dostoyevsky's "Demons"/"The Possessed", not only does Stepan Trofimovich alternate between French and Russian in his dialog, but his Russian speech adopts French grammar and sentence structure (so it says in the translator's notes. I read the novel in English).
posted by deanc at 5:03 PM on March 23, 2012


Henry V has a scene entirely in French (if I remember right)

Act III, Scene 4. But it's a cheat -- it's two characters discussing how to speak English, and they throw in English words. If you didn't know French, the comic effect is actually heightened as you discover what they're doing.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 5:05 PM on March 23, 2012


Junot Diaz's fantastic "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" is full of Spanish, and not Spanish you can look up in a dictionary, because so much of it is Dominican slang.

However it's an amazing book and I can't recommend it enough. Seriously, read it. I was able to struggle through with my high-school Spanish and context clues.
posted by drjimmy11 at 5:11 PM on March 23, 2012 [2 favorites]


There's a chapter in French in Bret Easton Ellis's The Rules of Attraction.
posted by jeudi at 5:19 PM on March 23, 2012


I haven't read it, but Watership Down reportedly has some significant dialogue in Welsh.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 5:28 PM on March 23, 2012


Umberto Eco's books are full of parts in multiple languages - not really long things, but up to a couple paragraphs or so, sprinkled throughout. Usually they're things like passages from a book that the character is reading, or something like that.

Well, I should say, at least the English translations of Eco's books, by William Weaver, are like this. I assume that Eco's books themselves in their raw form are as well, but strictly speaking I don't know for sure.
posted by Flunkie at 5:29 PM on March 23, 2012 [1 favorite]


Many of Ernest Hemmingway's novels contain fairly long passages, and ubiquitous phrases, in Spanish with no explanation or translation of what they mean in English. For Whom the Bell Tolls is probably the best example, as if you really have no idea what some of the Spanish means you miss a considerable amount of meaning.
posted by Patbon at 5:31 PM on March 23, 2012


Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County has a lengthy chapter in French.
posted by Sidhedevil at 5:50 PM on March 23, 2012


I recently read The Barbarian Nurseries by Hector Tobar and while it's possible to read it without knowing Spanish, I certainly found my basic understanding of Portuguese (which reads similarly) awfully helpful. Most of the Spanish is pretty basic, but sometimes there are fairly involved sentences of dialogue that are all in Spanish.
posted by jacquilynne at 5:58 PM on March 23, 2012


Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) was written in German but has several chapters in French, as I recall.
posted by chinston at 6:02 PM on March 23, 2012 [2 favorites]


It doesn't really count because of the languages involved, but there is some dialogue in Berlin Alexanderplatz that I believe is meant to be understood as Yiddish. (It could also be Yiddish-accented German. There's no comment in the text about the suddenly funky dialogue.)
posted by hoyland at 6:05 PM on March 23, 2012


chinston: the translation of The Magic Mountain that I have (that of John Woods) appears to render both German and French into English - there are no long passages in French. I wonder how translators into French handle this.
posted by madcaptenor at 6:06 PM on March 23, 2012


The English translation of The Magic Mountain that I read left the French sections in French. It was maddening, as a long crucial section towards the end of the book was entirely in French. I still have no idea what it said.
posted by alms at 6:58 PM on March 23, 2012 [1 favorite]


Finnegans Wake
posted by BEE-EATING CAT-EATER at 7:02 PM on March 23, 2012


Several of Dorothy L. Sayers' books have large sections of French, particularly Clouds of Witness.
posted by PussKillian at 7:41 PM on March 23, 2012 [1 favorite]


Oo, good one, PussKillian. And Sayers's French is horrible.

Her Latin was a bit better, which is good because Peter Wimsey proposes to Harriet Vane in Latin. I remember reading that when I was six or seven and going "Ew, so pretentious" long before my pretentious-o-meter was calibrated.

Trilby, by George duMaurier, has long bits in French.

as a long crucial section towards the end of {The Magic Mountain} was entirely in French. I still have no idea what it said.

The French bit right near the end? Hans asks Clavdia if she remembers their hot sex at the Carnaval party; she says there will be no more hot sex, because now she is with the Dutch guy; Hans says that's OK because he's going to die soon anyway and he needs to be all spiritual and stuff.
posted by Sidhedevil at 7:47 PM on March 23, 2012 [1 favorite]


Flann O'Brien's An Béal Bocht is mostly in Irish, but you couldn't read it if you didn't also know English.
posted by Sidhedevil at 7:57 PM on March 23, 2012


I seem to recall that short (but very significant) bits of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 are in German.
posted by muddgirl at 8:50 PM on March 23, 2012


Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange contains quite a bit of Russian.
posted by workerant at 9:06 PM on March 23, 2012 [1 favorite]


Los Gusanos by John Sayles. Many dialogs are almost entirely in Spanish, as is the title.
posted by Cold Lurkey at 9:26 PM on March 23, 2012


Does Neal Stephenson's Anathem count?
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 9:53 PM on March 23, 2012


Lolita has a lot of French in it. You can read it without knowing French, but I felt like I was definitely missing a lot of nuance.
posted by nakedmolerats at 9:56 PM on March 23, 2012 [2 favorites]


Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses," mentioned above, is the first in a trilogy which contains substantial spanish language.

And I seem to recall a bit of French in "The Arrow of Gold" by Conrad.
posted by Sunburnt at 9:57 PM on March 23, 2012


It would certainly help for Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai.
posted by brennen at 10:01 PM on March 23, 2012 [1 favorite]


Not a novel, but I have a volume of an encyclopedia from the 1910s where the entry on poetic meter contains only examples in untranslated Latin and Greek—the assumption, I suppose, being that if you were educated enough to pick up an encyclopedia, you'd be able to read ancient languages.

Here are some more relevant answers from some other people.
posted by Bufo_periglenes at 10:32 PM on March 23, 2012


Ada or Ardor by Nabokov has lots of cleverness that gets completely lost without knowing English, Russian, and French.
posted by Pwoink at 10:43 PM on March 23, 2012 [2 favorites]


My recollection is that Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond chronicles have paragraphs here and there that are not in English.
posted by leahwrenn at 11:13 PM on March 23, 2012 [2 favorites]


Mizumura Minae's Shishōsetsu from left to right is a Japanese book with a good deal of English in it, mostly dialogue. She discusses the technique a bit in this essay.
posted by No-sword at 2:39 AM on March 24, 2012 [1 favorite]


A lot of Harry Harrison's novels have Esperanto in them - For example, The Stainless Steel Rat series and the Deathworld series - as a lingua franca of future space faring societies.

I seem to remember the Henry V scene has a humours rude pun in it that you would only get if you spoke French.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:47 AM on March 24, 2012


The novel "The Bug" contains a bunch of C programming code and though much of it is explained, it is far more enjoyable if you understand C.
posted by procrastination at 6:11 AM on March 24, 2012


The slang in A Clockwork Orange is heavily based on Russian. I read it without reading the glossary, and it turned out my smattering of Russian was really helpful in understanding the narration.
posted by Nibbly Fang at 11:56 AM on March 24, 2012


Re Sayers - the long letter in French in Clouds of Witness (which is essential to the plot) does have a translation following it (one of the critics, can't remember which, says this feels as if it was inserted at the insistence of her publishers). I agree Wimsey, Uncle Paul and others break into French in conversation occasionally elsewhere, but I don't think understanding these phrases is essential to understanding the narrative in the way the OP wants.
posted by paduasoy at 5:23 PM on March 24, 2012


To clarify on The Magic Mountain, now that I've read more of it: French seems to be usually rendered as italics. (I don't have an edition in the original language. But there are bits in italics which are followed by characters asking "why are you speaking French?" and other little indications.)
posted by madcaptenor at 11:49 AM on March 27, 2012


A bit late to this, but much of modern non-English South Asian literature assumes at least the knowledge of more than one language, usually English; often Hindi as well. Classical literature, for that language, can be macaronic to varying degrees; drama, for instance, would often have one set of characters speaking in Sanskrit and another speaking in Prakrit.
posted by goodglovin77 at 1:30 AM on June 29, 2012


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