/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11610674]

>author uses random french phrases randomly and doesn't even bother to translate them

[Anonymous No.11610681]

>>11610674
Wat book

[Anonymous No.11610687]

But sometimes it fits the character, mon ami.

[Anonymous No.11610703]

There are a lot of French phrases that are English.
Are you sure you're not just a brainlet?
Or maybe you just don't like the Tolstoy translation you picked up?

[Anonymous No.11610741]

Their meanings are irrelevant in Lolita

[Anonymous No.11610762]

>>11610674

Just google the phrase lazy hoe

[Anonymous No.11610778]

REMINDER

if you speak less than 3 languages fluently you are a brainlet pleb and you should return to r/books

[Anonymous No.11610853]

>>11610687
Belgian, not French! Among his favorite tags en Anglais.

[Anonymous No.11610858]

Wallace you faggot

[Anonymous No.11610863]

>>11610674
I don't know, sometimes adding a bit of French adds a certain je ne sais quoi, don't you think?

[Anonymous No.11610873]

>>11610674
Dostoevsky and Mann come to mind

[Anonymous No.11610878]

>>11610863
je ne parle pas gay

[Anonymous No.11610963]

>>11610674
what is the possessed.

[Anonymous No.11610987]

>>11610873
Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy and Nabokov also do this quite often. It’s because all educated Russians were supposed to be fluent in French and because Russian was considered the language of the peasants.

[Anonymous No.11610990]

>>11610674
It was probably common for educated people to know French when he wrote it.

[Anonymous No.11610994]

>>11610987
Tolstoy doesn't write in French he just has characters speak in French, at least from what i recall. I also don't remember Lermontov doing that

[Anonymous No.11611013]

>>11610778
>mfw I speak fluently Portuguese, Spanish and English.

[Anonymous No.11611033]

>>11610674
McCarthy does this but with Spanish in Blood Meridian
Good thing I'm not a brainlet and can read Spanish and decent French

[Anonymous No.11611041]

>Tropic of cancer

[Anonymous No.11611070]

>>11610674
You probably ought to stay away from The Recognitions

[Anonymous No.11611077]

>>11610987
I've only read a hero of our time from Lermontrov and I don't recall much French but that may be because I read Tolstoy, Gogol and Dostoevsky before.

But yeah it is common for the Russians depending on which publisher/translator you get there are footnotes to translate the lenghty phases. The smaller ones I googled to begin with and have been picking up what some of the others one mean over time

[Anonymous No.11611165]

>>11611013
Are you Brazilian

[Anonymous No.11611421]

>>11610674
>he doesn't have at least a conversational level in the most /lit/ language
never gonna make it. i'm not even euro either.

[Anonymous No.11611433]

>>11610878
Mais tu es gay

[Anonymous No.11611453]

>>11610681
Lolita
War and Peace
Bras Cubás
There are obviously hundreds of others, but these are just some of the most recent examples I can recall.
>>11611421
The most /lit/ languages of all are German and French. If you can't speak and write on a native speaker's level in both, you're a pleb. If you happen to have grown up in a multilingual country/community in which both are commonly spoken, like Switzerland, Luxembourg, or Belgium, you should learn another highly poetic and literary language, like Attic Greek or Russian.

[Anonymous No.11611473]

>>11611453
>you should or you're a pleb by my standards

[Anonymous No.11611526]

>>11610987
I wouldn't say they do it quite often. I don't recall Gogol using French when he was writting under influence of Ukrainian folklore. But the rest of your statement is true.

[Anonymous No.11611672]

Neetchee does it also, and I love him for that.

[Anonymous No.11611718]

>>11610681

Every book by Nietzsche

[Anonymous No.11611739]

>>11611526
Gogol uses a fair amount of French in Dead souls but not much in the Ukranian tales but the same can be said for Tolstoy. He uses a lot of French in war and peace and little in the Cossacks.

They both use French where it fits the characters, ie upper class characters and that memer lackey Ivan in the Cossacks but not the actual cossacks

[Anonymous No.11611761]

>>11610674
>il ne peut pas parler le français
get an education loser

[Anonymous No.11611762]

>>11611739
there are entire 5 page sections of French in war and peace, it was kind of a pleasant surprise. Idk about the way he writes in French, it seems very formal, but it does fit the way the Russian nobles would have spoken it I suppose.

[Anonymous No.11611802]

>>11611762
Tolstoy made some of the most real characters and his usage of French with the noble class is a factor in that.

Along with the nobles speaking French there is also the period when they don't speak French and have a swear jar for it. It is a literaty tool.

He also does very well in using the way the Tatars and braves speak in the Cossacks or rather how the Cossacks have adapted their speech. It isn't just French that Tolstoy uses

[Anonymous No.11611809]

>>11610703
>There are a lot of French phrases that are English.
Most of them are unnecessary or poor use of language though.

[Anonymous No.11611818]

>>11611802
>swear jar
i was unaware of this as a concept lol. And that is hilarious that they did that, was it butthurt after Napoleon or what?

[Anonymous No.11611838]

>>11611818
Basically so, it was done by a rather questionable society that were in the upper circles but put on airs who couldn't make up their mind on Nappy. If you haven't read war and peace it is well worth the read.

This thread has caused me to remember so much about it that I want to reread

[Anonymous No.11611842]

>>11611761
Speak for yourself: parler does not take the definite article with languages.

[Anonymous No.11611845]

>>11610778
I speak English, American, Canadian and Australian.

[Anonymous No.11611877]

>>11611845
You have to be 18 to post on this site

[Anonymous No.11611904]

>>11611838
i have read war and peace like 5 times, but I read it in Russian, mostly to help me learn the language, so much of it flew over my head. Especially the war bits were hard to understand, the nobles fucking around was very easy to follow for whatever reason. Once you had the basic vocabulary the words are basically just reused throughout the book.

I really love War and Peace, it is the comfiest book I have read i think. There are sections in it i just reread over and over, especially the last hundred pages in the second volume where the Rostovs are away at some sort of forest property and then Andrei has his reawakening moment and starts dating Natasha, right up until the anatol incident. The very last page is beautiful when Pierre leaves the house theyre staying in and goes and looks at the sky.

I didn't like the second half of the book as much, though it also has its moments.

[Anonymous No.11611916]

>>11610674
but this has always happened
plus ca change, mais plus la meme chose

[Anonymous No.11611927]

>>11611845
if you haven't noticed we're not on reddit

[Anonymous No.11611932]

>>11611809
Whats another way of saying coup d'état in English?

[Anonymous No.11611941]

>he doesn't speak french
lol loser

>>11610994
It's pretty clear from ana karenina that tolstoy HATED that russian aristocratic reflex of conversing in french

[Anonymous No.11611948]

>>11610778
REMINDER

If you aren't (1) proficient at at least one programming language, (2) don't know topology, abstract algebra, and set theory, and (3) don't have thorough understanding of at least one Turing-Complete model of computation (e.g. term re-write systems, primitive recursive functions, lambda calculus, automata/register machines, etc.), then you are a brainlet pleb and you should avoid non-fiction and philosophy/the sciences at all costs.

[Anonymous No.11612114]

>>11610873
>Dostoevsky
Feels bad man.
>>11610987
I understand the reasons but it's not the 1800s anymore. English is the lingua franca now, they should translate that shit. Imagine if it was like 1820 and you're a french guy reading a book, and all of a sudden random lines are in chinese. Well, fuck right?
>>11611948
kek
Don't you know, everyone on 4chan speaks 5 languages, has a 6 figure income, lifts 8pl8, is 6'6", and has a 10 inch penis?

[Anonymous No.11612199]

get a kindle. it has a translate feature >>11610674

[Anonymous No.11612227]

Proust does this a lot

[Anonymous No.11612257]

>>11611033
>Native Spanish speakers speaking in Spanish
Cormac did nothing wrong.

[Anonymous No.11612288]

>>11612114
Yeah, I wasn't actually making the claim that people basically need [the equivalent of] an undergraduate degree in theoretical computer science or math to be intellectually curious, I was mocking the person who I was replying to because they're suggesting that you're a retard if you don't speak multiple languages. Personally I only speak one natural language, although I do know math and programming (and some basic Russian that I picked up from my Russian father and grandmother). My point, in short, was it's stupid to view someone as uncultured, "plebeian", or unintelligent just because they happen to not possess some arcane and technical skill that you happen to. Different people are good at different things, and even smart people can be largely uneducated and even naive regarding certain subjects. There are certain abilities (mainly logical and mnemonic) that any intelligent person should possess, but it isn't one's place as, e.g. a psychologist, poet, mathematician, or biologist, to label a historian, chemist, or anthropologist retarded simply because they know less about YOUR respective subject than you do.

[Anonymous No.11612299]

>>11612114
>>11612288
Oh wait lel, I misread your post.

[Anonymous No.11612434]

>>11610674
>French author uses random phrases randomly and doesn't even bother to make a fucking concise argument
It proliferates from the source

[Anonymous No.11612485]

>>11611842
It's optional faggot

[Anonymous No.11612808]

>rendez-vous

[Anonymous No.11612881]

>>11612808
If we want to talk about unnecessary French-isms in everyday speech, the king of this is RSVP.

[Anonymous No.11612895]

>>11612808
>deja-vu

[Anonymous No.11613026]

>>11610674
>fucking euroqueers using non-american languages