Foreign Quotations Again
When really learned men write books for other learned men to read, they are justified in using as many learned words as they please—their audience will understand them; but a man that writes a book for the general public to read is not justified in disfiguring his pages with untranslated foreign expressions. It is an insolence toward the majority of the purchasers, for it is a very frank and impudent way of saying, “Get the translations made yourself, if you want them; this book is not written for the ignorant classes.” There are men who know a foreign language so well and have used it so long in their daily life that they seem to discharge whole volleys of it into their English writings unconsciously, and so they omit to translate, as much as half the time. That is a great cruelty to nine out of ten of the man’s readers. What is the excuse for this? The writer would say he only uses the foreign language where the delicacy of his point cannot be conveyed in English. Very well, then he writes his best things for the tenth man, and he ought to warn the other nine not to buy his book. However, the excuse he offers is at least an excuse; but there is another set of men who ... know a word here and there, of a foreign language, or a few beggarly little three-word phrases, filched from the back of the dictionary, and these they are continually peppering into their literature, with a pretense of knowing that language—what excuse can they offer? The foreign words and phrases which they use have their exact equivalents in a nobler language—English; yet they think they “adorn their page” when they say Strasse for street, and Bahnhof for railway station, and so on—flaunting these fluttering rags of poverty in the reader’s face, and imagining he will be ass enough to take them for the sign of untold riches held in reserve.