“An arresting, recurrent feature of modernist literature, especially that written in English,” declare the editors in their introduction, is “its incorporation of untranslated words and phrases.” True enough, and it is astonishing that more has not been written on the phenomenon of foreign-language citation in the work of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and many others. The Waste Land, for example, as Harding points out in his own contribution to this essay collection, is a veritable tissue of allusions, inserted in the original Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, Provençal and even Sanskrit forms. It is as if the Cumaean sybil's prophecy, in the poem's epigraph, could not be rendered in English.
How and why writers felt compelled to insert foreign phrases—Henry James, Daniel Karlin notes, included numerous French locutions like à contre coeur (“reluctantly”) even in his own personal notebooks—makes for a fascinating study, but unfortunately Harding and...
