"Untranslatable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mere hysterical writing by those who profess to record them. No doubt the curious shyness of the English plays its part: a man will laugh, or clap his hands, or hiss, or "boo" when others are so doing, who from mere mauvaise honte—a convenient untranslatable term—would make no noise if alone. Perhaps one might safely say that the smaller the crowd the smaller relatively as well as absolutely the noise due to the exhibition of the emotion of its component parts. ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... stimulate thought—they are the only books, indeed, that are profitable to publisher and author alike. In this connection they do not count, however; no foreigner is likely to learn English for the pleasure of reading Miss Marie Corelli in the original, or of drinking untranslatable elements from The Helmet of Navarre. The present conditions of book production for the English reading public offer no hope of any immediate change in this respect. There is neither honour nor reward—there is not even food or shelter—for the American or Englishman ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... made that in the present rendering a purely arbitrary title has been assigned this little book; chiefly for commercial reasons, since the word "dizain" has been adjudged both untranslatable and, in ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... pun" (from "The Interpretation of Dreams," by Artemidorus Daldianus). "Moreover, dreams are so intimately bound up with language that Ferenczi truly points out that every tongue has its own language of dreams. A dream is as a rule untranslatable into ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... gentleman," echoed Shirley, lifting her head with glad grace. She checked herself. Words seemed crowding to her tongue. She would not give them utterance; but her look spoke much at the moment. What, Yorke tried to read, but could not. The language was there, visible, but untranslatable—a poem, a fervid lyric, in an unknown tongue. It was not a plain story, however, no simple gush of feeling, no ordinary love-confession—that was obvious. It was something other, deeper, more intricate than he guessed at. He felt his revenge had not struck home. He felt that Shirley ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... combination of the humor of the cider-cellars with the verbal fluency of Billingsgate. Under such auspices the ill-starred periodicals naturally oscillate between insipid propriety and labored coarseness. For a month or two the talented contributors go smoothly on in their career of untranslatable pleasantry, till some special atrocity calls forth the fatherly admonition of the police. Immediately a reaction ensues, filling the objectionable columns with harmless sneers at the weather and other safe objects ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... in a singular degree the gift of carrying on business with complete control of all emotion and elimination of all deep thought. Every third word of such person is the untranslatable, elusive, "I dare say."—O.A.H. SCHMITZ, D.W.D., ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... her a little pink-and-white baby girl, toddling on the carpet. She heard her words, understood her language, untranslatable to all others than a mother. Then bedtime came. The child, with heavy eyelids, let her little fair-haired head fall on her shoulders. Madame Desvarennes took her in her arms and undressed her quietly, kissing her bare and dimpled arms. It was exquisite enjoyment which stirred ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... the aniehna"—he emphasized the untranslatable word of insult, and his voice trembled with passion—"has worked such evil to the people?" The query was directed to the Koshare Naua. The latter turned to ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... knowledge of their language with which they graciously credited me, I hunted about in vain for the French equivalent of "I know my own mind." Whereupon, allowing the conversation to take another turn, I fell to musing on those untranslatable words, together with the whole episode of the Mozart manuscript and the drawings of M. Ingres, including that rainy, chilly day at Montauban; and also another day of travel, even wetter and colder, which returned ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... sense, strain the sense, stretch the meaning, strain the meaning, wrest the sense, wrest the meaning; explain away; put a bad construction on, put a false construction on; give a false coloring. be at cross purposes, play at cross purposes. Adj. misinterpreted &c. v.; untranslated, untranslatable. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... a woman, subject to outbreaks of sudden passion, and liable to tears like the rest. Mr Morgan looked very blank at her as she sat there crying, sobbing with the force of a sentiment which was probably untranslatable to the surprised, middle-aged man. He thought it must be her nerves which were in fault somehow, and though much startled, did not inquire farther into it, having a secret feeling in his heart that the less that was said the better on that subject. So he did what his good angel ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... the author, his incomparable Lohengrin, Fils de Parsifal. I regret having it no longer in my possession so that I might quote from its delicious prose. As to the verse, I know of few attempts to translate the untranslatable. Perhaps Mr. Symons has tried his accomplished hand at the task. How render the sumptuous assonance and solemn rhythms of Marche Funebre: O convoi solennel ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... Bacchante of revenge awakes, it is with milder feelings in her heart: 'O brother mine, Matteo! art thou sleeping? Here I will rest with thee and weep till daybreak.' It is rare to find in literature so crude and intense an expression of fiery hatred as these untranslatable voceri present. The emotion is so simple and so strong that it becomes sublime by mere force, and affects us with a strange pathos when contrasted with the tender affection conveyed in such terms of endearment as 'my dove,' 'my flower,' 'my pheasant,' 'my bright painted orange,' ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... jaw protruded with a peculiar bunching of the cheek muscles, characteristic of him in his moments of irritation. He looked again at Dorothy, absorbed in the conversation of the "whaleback" from Yale, recognized the visitor at the Denning box, and, with an untranslatable grunt, abruptly took his departure, leaving his sister to wonder over the ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... to do whatever they please". Mr. Grote once quoted a phrase of Cicero's, applied to the voting-papers of his day, as a testimony in favour of this mode of secret suffrage—grand words, and wholly untranslatable into anything like corresponding English—"Tabella vindex tacitae libertatis"—"the tablet which secures the liberty of silence". But knowing so well as Cicero did what was the ordinary character of Roman jurors and Roman ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... know what excuse I can offer for making public this attempt to "translate the untranslatable." No one can be more convinced than I am that a really successful translator must be himself an original poet; and where the author translated happens to be one whose special characteristic is incommunicable grace of expression, the demand on the translator's powers would ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... "crouton," and "croute-au-pot," untranslatable, and without equivalent in English. A "croute" is the slang term for a man behind ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... a sudden, as he lifted, his cousin stood close to his elbow, pausing a moment on the bend of her foot till the obstructing object should have been removed. She looked right into his face with liquid, untranslatable eyes, that combined, or seemed to him to combine, keenness with tenderness, and mystery with both, their expression, as well as that of her lips, taking its life from some words just spoken to a companion, and being carried on into his face quite unconsciously. ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... as Caius Julius Csar Octavianus, or, briefly, as Octavius. [Footnote: Octavius was son of Caius Octavius and Atia, daughter of Julia, sister of Julius Csar, and was born Sept. 23, B.C. 63. His true name was the same as that of his father, but he is usually mentioned in history as Augustus, an untranslatable title that he assumed when he became emperor. His descent was traced from Atys, son of Alba, an old Latin hero.] Csar had bequeathed his magnificent gardens on the opposite side of the Tiber to the public as a park, and to every citizen in Rome a gift of ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... very short word for a very long process, and untranslatable by any English equivalent. It means the whole system of the laws of metempsychosis, running in a long chain forward into the future, and back into ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... each prompted to activity by the one preceding it. They flutter in unbelievable clusters, wheel in untranslatable formations through the cerebric wasteland that is the aged mind of Oliver Symmes. They have no meaning to him, save for a furtive spark of recognition that intrudes upon him once ...
— Life Sentence • James McConnell
... plough-horses steam and plovers Fling and whimper, hedges that lovers Love, and orchards, shrubberies, walls Where the sun untroubled by north wind falls, And single trees where the thrush sings well His proverbs untranslatable, I would give them all to my son If he would let me any one For a song, a blackbird's song, at dawn. He should have no more, till on my lawn Never a one was left, because I Had shot them to put them into a pie,— ...
— Poems • Edward Thomas
... English of the account of 62 teratologic cases in the human subject with the prophetic meanings attached to them by Chaldean diviners, after the translation of Opport, is given as follows by Ballantyne, some of the words being untranslatable:— ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the monk. The books used in the cathedral schools were similar. Such schools and such libraries were for the glory of God and the increase of clergy and religious. At first, especially, the ideal of the monks was high, if narrow. It is epitomised in the untranslatable epigram—Claustrum sine armario (est) quasi castrum sine armamentario.[1] "The library is the monastery's true treasure," writes Thomas a Kempis;[2] "without which the monastery is like . . . a well without water . . . an unwatched tower." Again: "Let not the toil and fatigue pain you. They who ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... material in origin and analysis, easily explicable in mere physical operation, its influence is one of the things that are not dreamt of in the philosophy of Science. Why should a certain psychological effect ensue upon certain untranslatable sounds being placed in a given relation to each other, and not when the same sounds are placed in another relation?—and why should that effect be always upward? Why should the composer be perforce a prophet of the sphere above earth's murky horizon—the musician his interpreter— charged with ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... representative of the Gullah (or Gulla) dialect. "It is the negro dialect," says Joel Chandler Harris, "in its most primitive state—the 'Gullah' talk of some of the negroes on the Sea Islands being merely a confused and untranslatable mixture of ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... Journaux and the other little masterpieces of story-telling in verse are unfortunately untranslatable, as are all poems but a lyric or two, now and then, by a happy accident. A translated poem is a boiled strawberry, as some one once put it brutally. But the tales which M. Coppee has written in prose—a true poet's prose, nervous, vigorous, ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... Marquise," murmured the girl, in the untranslatable caress of voice and eyes. "Sometimes I grow afraid, and you scatter the fear by your own fearlessness. Sometimes I grow weak, and you strengthen me with ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... of literary art. A favorite amusement of his was making translations from Horace. Among the passages which had specially provoked this enterprise was one the Latin of which is so terse and pungent that it has often been pronounced untranslatable. It is the passage in which Horace describes true happiness as that of the man who, looking back from to-morrow, is able to say, "I was really alive all yesterday." Dryden's pithy version of it is to the effect that the sole true happiness is that ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... of difficult words in the Veda. We must trace words of doubtful meaning through every passage where they occur, and we must give an account of their meaning by translating every passage that can be translated, marking the rest as, for the present, untranslatable. Boehtlingk and Roth's excellent Dictionary is the first step in that direction, and a most important step. But in it the passages have only undergone their first sifting and classifying; they are not translated, nor are they given with perfect completeness. Now if one single passage is left out ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... valley; Koom-zi, vacancy or void; Bodh-koom, ignorance (literally, knowledge-void). Koom-posh is their name for the government of the many, or the ascendancy of the most ignorant or hollow. Posh is an almost untranslatable idiom, implying, as the reader will see later, contempt. The closest rendering I can give to it is our slang term, "bosh;" and this Koom-Posh may be loosely rendered "Hollow-Bosh." But when Democracy or Koom-Posh degenerates from popular ignorance into that popular ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Gaelic poetry, incommunicable except to the native reader, and, like that celebrated composition, an untranslatable tissue of tenderness, sublimity, and mocking ribaldry. The heroine is understood to have been a young person of virtue and beauty, in the humbler walks of life, who was quite unappropriated, except ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... thing is sympathy! Undefinable, untranslatable, and yet the most real thing and the greatest power in human life! How strangely our souls leap out to some other soul without our choosing or knowing the why. The man or woman who has this subtle ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... "They are English, Angles!" the slave-dealers answered. The deacon's pity veiled itself in poetic humour. "Not Angles, but Angels," he said, "with faces so angel-like! From what country come they?" "They come," said the merchants, "from Deira." "De ira!" was the untranslatable reply; "aye, plucked from God's ire, and called to Christ's mercy! And what is the name of their king?" "AElla," they told him, and Gregory seized on the words as of good omen. "Alleluia shall be ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... you remember that night and the Spanish dance? I have shut my eyes and danced it ever so many times in memory. And you sent me away,"—with a soft, untranslatable laugh. ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... playing. The exquisite harmony seemed to be the inmost soul of the violin, speaking at last, through forgotten ages, of things made with the world —Love and Death and Parting. Above it and through it hovered a spirit of longing, infinite and untranslatable, yet clear as ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... resident English physician, sat at his left hand, and Madame at his right. I sat next to the Countess, and Henry Fenwick next to the doctor. We made a merry party. The Count opened for us a bottle of Forzato and another of Sassella, of the quaint, untranslatable bouquet which will not bear transportation over the seas, and to taste which you must go to the Swiss confines ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... friend or foe. He escapes from all classification, and is larger than any definition of him that has yet been given. How many times has he been exploded by British and American critics; how many times has he been labeled and put upon the shelf, only to reappear again as vigorous and untranslatable as ever! ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... since you was made a trustee?' said the Squire, beginning his sentence with an untranslatable sort of grunt, and ending it ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... to place women and children. I mention this fact for the benefit of the more youthful members of my species, and am satisfied that an unconditional surrender and the complete laying down at the feet of Beauty of all strong masculinity is a cheap Gallicism that is untranslatable to most women worthy the winning. For a woman MUST always look up to the man she truly loves,—even if she has to go down on her knees ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... the Matthews and Liston of Vienna. The former of these excellent actors is certainly the most successful farce-writer in Germany. Without any of Raimund's sentimental-humorous dialogue, he has a far happier eye for character, and only the untranslatable dialect of Vienna has preserved ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... days of the Greek epigram the prime consideration was not that a poem should be pointed, but that it should be what is summed up in the untranslatable French epithet lapidaire; that is to say, it should possess the conciseness, finish, and relevance required for an inscription on a monument. Its range was wide; it might express the lover's passion, the mourner's ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler |
