University of Virginia Library

4

"Babel Come Again":

Mark Twain and Foreign Languages

On perhaps no American author has the impact of foreign
languages been so great as on Mark Twain. This will seem a
curious statement to those who are thinking of traditional literary
influence, of the wholesale scholarly or imaginative assimilation
of a language and cultural tradition by a formally
educated author. Dante and Milton are unthinkable without
Latin; Carlyle without German; Ezra Pound without Italian,
Greek, Anglo-Saxon, Provençal, and Chinese. Certainly
Twain's little German and less French had at most a superficial
effect on the form of his literary creation. But if the clash of
dialects and styles in a single language is the most memorable
index of linguistic variety in Twain's work, the confusion of
Babel runs a close second. Because he came to the study of

foreign languages as an adult, and because he was largely
self-taught, Twain was painfully aware of the semantic and
grammatical barriers that separate languages and the difficulties
that communication in a foreign tongue creates. To
study a foreign language was, paradoxically, both liberating
and oppressive. On the one hand, a command of French and
German provided entry into the "adult" world of cosmopolitan,
educated society; on the other, it made him a "child"
again as it limited his means of expression and forced him to
rely on others for the satisfaction of his needs and desires.

Van Wyck Brooks's indignant comment that Twain found
foreign languages "ludicrous because they were not English"
oversimplifies a set of complex and evolving attitudes evident
in the body of Twain's writing. William Dean Howells saw
more keenly when he wrote Twain during the second month
of his friend's first trip to Germany, "I could imagine the German
going [hard] with you, for you always seemed to me
a man who liked to be understood with the least possible
personal inconvenience."[1] In Twain's early treatment of his
struggles with French and German, "personal inconvenience"
is a rich source of farcical humor at the expense of the Mark
Twain persona. That variety of humor never disappears; after
the turn of the century he was still using "The Awful German
Language" in lecture appearances and turning his struggles
with Italian into similarly comic essays. But increasingly he
came to see Babel as fundamental to the human condition and
the opacity of a foreign idiom as a special case of the perplexity
that can interfere with any human communication. "We
must be careful not to overrate the uniformity of existing languages,"
American linguist William Dwight Whitney wrote in
1875; "in a true and defensible sense, every individual speaks
a language different from every other."[2] At the same time,
only through confronting the language of the Other, by struggling
to see from the perspective of another mind, can one
transcend the limitations of a single and limited point of view.
Babel was both curse and blessing. For a clergyman who was
Twain's contemporary, the building of the tower, in light of the
divine response, was a felix culpa:

The novelist's interest in Babel, however, is not necessarily
the theologian's. Mikhail Bakhtin proposes that the novel
would never have evolved as it did without the stimulus of
competing national and classical languages in medieval and
Renaissance Europe.[4] Juri Lotman goes even further, claiming
that the disruption caused by misunderstanding is crucial to
the evolution of all literary texts. A special case is the foreign
text introduced into another culture: "[Its] incomprehensibility
and undecodability . . . (or, more precisely, the difficulty
of decoding it) is a form of energy; one which sets in motion
the semiotic mechanism of culture."[5] Certainly the energy of
foreignness in general and foreign languages in particular
often sets in motion Mark Twain's writing mill. The Innocents
Abroad, Roughing It, A Tramp Abroad, A Connecticut Yankee, Following
the Equator: a half dozen long books generated by actual
or imaginative travel into alien cultures. But Mark Twain was
also apprehensive of any foreign discourse that was too energetic,
recognizing that it can overwhelm and silence one's
own, and from the Duke and King through Hank Morgan to
Mary Baker Eddy he will create or find characters who use incomprehensibility
as a rhetorical weapon. (I return to the
overall topic of incomprehension in chapter 7.) This chapter
examines Mark Twain's experience with the specific problem
of foreign languages and the dialectic between the "good" foreign
language that liberates the energy of creation and humor
and the "bad" foreign language that dominates individuals or
cuts them off from others.

The first of Mark Twain's surviving notebooks begins with several
pages of French lessons, transcribed at the age of nineteen

while Twain was traveling by steamboat upriver from St.
Louis to Hannibal. Marshaled into two columns are French
words and their English equivalents for the days of the week,
the months of the year, the names of family members, and
greetings and essential idioms. Twain's first literary encounter
with a foreign tongue begins, typically, with errors:
and ends
       

J'ai peur	I am afraid
Lentement,	Slowly.
Je n'aimie pas ça.	I don't like it.
	(NJ1, 17, 21)

As the editors of the notebooks observe, "misplaced accents
and other foreign language solecisms would persist throughout
his life" (NJ1, 21). A naturally confident English speller
since boyhood, Twain never could or would master the orthographic
systems of French or German. The eerily somber
closure of the notebook lesson seems to reflect the difficulties
he was having; here French is imposing not just a grammatical
structure but also a mood on the young learner. But Twain's
linguistic errors did not long remain mere lapses. He would
discover that the intractability of the alien idiom, inherently
funny, could be useful to a professional humorist. Gravity,
the "enemy" responsible for the pratfalls of the slapstick comedian,
is actually the ally that produces the humor; similarly
the foreign language, when it baffles the "Mark Twain" who
encounters it in The Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad, is
the agent of laughter. Both the physical and the linguistic
comedy in these works reveal the gaps between body and soul,
desire and performance; when adults are reduced to the incompetence
of childhood, the sheer mechanics of walking and
talking become problematic once again. Or, to use Henri Bergson's
terms, the "illusion of life" that our fluent use of a native
tongue creates is shattered when the foreign language reminds
us that speech is a "mechanical arrangement."[6]

Even Twain's early notebooks hint at the comic battles of
tongues that would generate so much of the later, published,
humor. Thus when Twain in his third notebook (where he has
learned enough French to be able to copy Voltaire) first sets
sail on his own and tries to reproduce a humorous anecdote
in French about a doctor prescribing to a patient, he stumbles
onto the comic genre of macaronic prose:

(NJ1, 59)

In the center of all this mangled French is the pithy vernacular
"boil 'em down," and the voice of the Mississippi momentarily
drowns out the language of Voltaire. This strategy will
have become entirely purposeful by the time Twain "retranslates"
a French translation of his "Jumping Frog" story in 1875.
Once he has begun to learn German, macaronic burlesques of
one sort or another will be his chief mode of linguistic humor.[7]
The constant eruption of English in these burlesques is a
comic sublimation of Twain's frustration in suppressing his
own natural language to reproduce another's. Bakhtin has
identified two modes of assimilating the discourse of others,
"recitation" and "retelling." The former involves transmitting
"authoritative discourse"—whether religious creed or grammatical
paradigm—that has explicit social sanction. It "demands
our unconditional allegiance" and permits no play, no
"spontaneously creative stylizing variants."[8] Retelling, on the
other hand, creates an "internally persuasive discourse," a
word of one's own, that can grow and be given aesthetic shape.
Twain's strategy for learning languages was clearly to "retell"
them, playing games with their rules, thumbing his nose at
the discipline of textbook lists and paradigms. Because he
wished to assert his own authority over foreign discourse, he
moved quickly to a defiantly macaronic, Twainian, form of
both French and German tongues. His method was to create a
dialogue between a given foreign language, taken as an amalgam
of words, rules, and social attitudes, and the "American
language"—or his idiolect of it—that he claimed was his sole
tongue. In the process Mark Twain learned the foreign idiom,
but it too had to bend and learn from him.

Only a few of the sketches that preceded The Innocents
Abroad merit Brooks's charge that Twain found languages ludicrous
just because they were not English. Twain's shortsighted
prejudice against Indians, for example, permitted
him to belittle their languages as subhuman forms of communication
and to joke at the Pidgin English that served them
as a lingua franca along the frontier. In one of the early letters
he sent home from Nevada Territory, he transcribes a bit of
dialogue between some Washoe women and a white friend
of his:

The joke here is largely on the American who is forced willy-nilly
to adopt "fractured" discourse. It depends, though, on
seeing pidgin as the linguistic equivalent of a pratfall; its form
is supposed to be self-evidently silly. We can hardly fault
Twain for dismissing Pidgin English as mere "broken English,"
since its structure and social function were poorly
understood until the twentieth century.[10] But he was equally
scornful of the native languages themselves. His distaste for
the Indians of California and the Great Basin extended to their
speech, as in his futile protest against replacing the name
Lake Bigler with Lake Tahoe; first printed in the Virginia City
Territorial Enterprise in 1863, the protest was incorporated into
The Innocents Abroad six years later. "Of course Indian names
are more fitting than any others for our beautiful lakes and
rivers, which knew their race ages ago . . . but let us have
none so repulsive to the ear as 'Tahoe.' . . . They say it means
'Fallen Leaf'—well suppose it meant fallen devil or fallen angel,
would that render its hideous, discordant syllables more
endurable?" (ETS1, 290). In The Innocents Abroad he maintains
that the "unmusical cognomen" means "grasshopper soup";
"Indian and suggestive of Indians," the word is a product of
the "degraded" Digger Indians (WMT 1:204-5). It is hard to
see what exactly makes Tahoe any less musical than Como, the
name of the Italian lake Twain has just been comparing unfavorably
to its Californian counterpart, but the objective
sound of the syllables is not at issue here. If the alien word
comes from an antagonistic or despised race, it automatically
sounds bad. "Inferior" races speak inferior languages. Tahoe
cannot possibly mean something lovely like "Silver Lake" or
"Limpid Water," Twain says, because only "Fenimore Cooper
Indians" have ever had poetry (WMT, 205). In 1879, in a notebook
entry attacking the French as "the connecting link between
man & the monkey," Twain similarly abuses the French
language in defiance of what he must have known about it:

(NJ2, 320)

Twain's late writings, as we shall see, show that he believed
language firmly constrains thought. As early as his California
days, however, he was interested in facts about any foreign
language that seemed to "explain" characteristics of its speakers.
Thus in 1864 he attributed the putative lack of conventional
morality among Chinese immigrants to their native
tongue: "It is asserted that [the Chinese] have no words or expressions
signifying abstract right or wrong. They appreciate
"good" and "bad," but it is only in reference to business, to
finance, to trade, etc. Whatever is successful is good; whatever
fails is bad. So they are not conscience-bound in planning
and perfecting ingenious contrivances for avoiding the
tariff on opium, which is pretty heavy."[11] In Hawaii in 1866,
where he carried a dictionary and a phrase book of the native
tongue and made some attempt to acquire the rudiments of
Hawaiian, he noted that the language had "no word to express
gratitude," could "but lamely express virtue of any
kind," and was "prolific in epithets to express every degree &
shade of vice & crime." The polysemy of aloha led him to suppose
that Hawaiian had "no word to express farewell—or
good-bye" (NJ1, 224). Only once he had traveled to Europe,
though, did he begin to be seriously concerned with the problem
of communicating in any language but English.

In The Innocents Abroad the relation of language to power is
complex. It might seem that to be mute, or incapable of speaking
native languages, would entail powerlessness, the inability
to get things done; the more language, the more power. Paradoxically,
it is often the case in The Innocents Abroad that less
language equals more power. The reasons have to do with the
sociology of language negotiations in a bilingual speech setting.
The minimal components of any act of communication
are often diagrammed thus:

In the Saussurean model of communication, "SPEAKER" is
active while "ADDRESSEE" is passive. But Saussure's model
is oversimplified: the silent addressee exerts a continual influence
over the speaker.[12] The speaker always intends that the
addressee act in response to the message by comprehending it
at the very least. But the addressee cannot comprehend by
virtue of willpower alone: to frame a message that can be
understood, the speaker must take into account the addressee's
competence (linguistic, but also cultural, educational,
and so on). In this sense the most successful communicators
are rhetoricians and polyglots, people who can adapt to the
widest range of addresses, thanks to mastery of their codes.
Yet from another viewpoint adaptation to the needs and expectations
of the addressee is a form of "giving in" to an implicit
demand on the part of the other party. A speaker can
refuse from the start to negotiate over language, register, or
dialect, insisting that the addressee communicate for better or
for worse in the speaker's own variety of language. This insistence
is particularly likely when two separate languages are in
question, since in most bilingual settings a tacit or even explicit
rule requires that the speech of the more "important"
social group be used. A speaker who adheres rigidly to a
prestige language can blame any breakdown of communication
on the interlocutor. If the speaker has enough social,
physical, or economic power, the interlocutor cannot afford to
complain about misunderstanding but must do his best to
comply with the speaker's demands.[13] We might thus distinguish
between two primary and opposing strategies for obtaining
power through speech, craft and force. (The archetypal
representative of craft is Odysseus, the representative of
force, Achilles.) Through rhetorical jujitsu, the crafty speaker
manipulates the listener's activity, deflecting its force to his
own ends. Huck Finn, when he lies, tells people what they
want to hear; Hank Morgan cleverly uses Socratic questioning
to demolish his opponent in an argument over economics.
The forceful speaker, on the other hand, overrides the "active"
component of listening and insists on complete passivity
in the addressee. Both "bad" characters like Pap Finn
and "good" characters like Ned Blakely are forceful in this
sense.

The "innocence" Twain examines in The Innocents Abroad is

in part linguistic incompetence. The Americans cannot speak
a comprehensible sentence in any of the languages they encounter;
unable to pronounce foreign names, they call every
guide Ferguson and Palestinian cities either Jonesborough or
Baldwinsville. Twain's satire is double-edged. He is of course
mocking the naïveté of the American traveler, his lack of culture
and learning. At the same time we recognize that the innocents'
aggressive vulgarity, their insistent monolinguism, is
a form of cultural assertion. "After nightfall we reached our
tents, just outside of the nasty Arab village of Jonesborough.
Of course the real name of the place is El something or other,
but the boys still refuse to recognize the Arab names or try to
pronounce them" (WMT 2: 192). The apparently harmless linguistic
imperialism of the "boys" is not far removed from the
high-handed renaming of "nasty" Indian villages by Americans
pushing westward across the continent. The innocents'
refusal to comprehend is closely related to their tendency to
destory, manifested in vandalism of ancient monuments, and
is treated with a similar ambivalent wavering between condemnation
and ironic admiration. If "Mark Twain" is ignorant
of foreign languages, the joke is on those who value them as
attainments of a gentleman. Twain himself was perfectly aware
of the seditious effect of his ignorance in The Innocents Abroad.
When he composes what purports to be a criticism of his
book by an Englishman who had taken the work seriously,
Twain makes the pompous "reviewer" complain that "[the author]
is vulgarly ignorant of all foreign languages, but is frank
enough to criticize, the Italians' use of their own tongue"
("An Entertaining Article," WMT 24: 283-84). This is true
enough: at bottom "Mark Twain" does not believe that Italian
is an authentic language.

When Americans must choose between craft and force in
The Innocents Abroad, the latter tactic generally wins the day.
Twain's description of confusion over a Portuguese restaurant
bill in the Azores illustrates the crude effectiveness of forceful
misunderstanding. The travelers have received a bill for ten
dinners totaling twenty-two thousand Portuguese reis. Young

Blucher, the innocent from the Far West who has been the
host for the meal, is aghast at the elevated sum but resolved to
perform his duty:

(WMT 1:38)

The "language that a Christian can understand" is both "English"
and "dollars," understood as two manifestations of the
same underlying system. Blucher cannot calculate in reis, but
his pile of American gold pieces speaks the universal language
of economic power.

Here as elsewhere, most notably in A Connecticut Yankee,
Twain simultaneously mocks the old order and the new order
that is replacing it. In linguistic terms, the old order in The Innocents
Abroad comprises the old prestige languages, Latin
and the modern Continental tongues of Italy and France,
whose cultural authority is a matter of tradition. The new
order is English—specifically, American English—which is
coming to assume political and economic authority. From the
conflict between the two emerges a double bind: neither stasis
nor change is tenable. Whether characters adhere to a single
order or attempt to move from one to another, they are objects
of humor in The Innocents Abroad and other works of the 1860s
and 1870s. Foreigners make ludicrous mistakes when they try
to speak English, but their own languages, with their irregular
verbs and odd orthography, are also ridiculous. How the
humor cuts both ways can be seen in a Territorial Enterprise
sketch from early 1866, reprinted in the Jumping Frog volume
the following year as "Among the Fenians":

The primary butt of this slight sketch is "I, Mark," who presumes
to initiate a conversation in Irish when he has in fact
only a few tags of the language. The dialogue is a poker game,
and Mark is a bluffer who loses his bet: "anteing" with an
"Arrah," he continues to raise until the Fenian calls with the
spoken equivalent of four aces. Foolish "Mark Twain" has
blundered into terra incognita once again. Yet the Fenian
comes off no better than his opponent after this skirmishing
raid. The Irishman is caricatured as a subhuman who speaks a
language not far removed from primal grunting. (The original
title of the sketch, "Bearding the Fenian in His Lair," makes
the caricature even clearer.) His speech is neither Gaelic nor
Irish English but a hodgepodge of stereotypical Irish exclamations
and slogans from both languages of the sort that Twain
had found in burlesques by Bret Harte and Charles Webb.[15]
His concluding sentence resembles nothing so much as James
Joyce's representation of Neanderthal speech in Finnegans
Wake, an atavistic nonsensical jumble.

In The Innocents Abroad "Mark Twain" is once more a pretentious
impostor whose claim to status as a speaker of foreign
tongues is shown to be baseless. The running joke for
several chapters is that Twain and the doctor, who pride themselves
on their French and Italian while criticizing young Dan
for his ignorance of anything but English, prove worse than
incompetent as communicators. They ply the natives with
questions in their incomprehensible French; Dan befuddles a
boatman with "Oh, go to the pier, you old fool—that's where
we want to go!" (WMT 1:84). In an Italian bathhouse Dan protests
the lack of soap:

(WMT 1:186)

Dan is the apotheosis of the assertive, unapologetic monolingual.
For him all referents stand in a univocal relation to
English words—no "Irish" symbol system need apply. "I want
it" is the slogan of the forceful speaker; we might recall the
retired army officer whom Twain heard declare, "We are of
the Anglo-Saxon race, and when the Anglo-Saxon wants a
thing he just takes it" (MTE, 380). The American who attempts
to gain his ends through craft, on the other hand, has little
chance of succeeding.

"Mark Twain" and the doctor's confrontation with an old
hostess at a Marseilles café becomes a model for subsequent
cultural disillusionment on the part of the Americans. They
pose a simple question, "Avez-vous du vin?" It is not understood;
neither are two repetitions. Finally the doctor lapses
into English, and the old woman says, "Bless you, why didn't
you speak English before?—I don't know anything about your
plagued French!" Twain's reaction expresses one of the many
deflations of romantic preconception that form an important
pattern in The Innocents Abroad:[16]

(WMT 1:86)

Two of "Mark Twain's" illusions have been pierced here. One
is that he can pass as a cosmopolitan polyglot; Dan can now
make fun of him, having received independent confirmation
of his suspicions about the soundness of his friend's French.
The second is far more profound, the illusion that cultural
otherness is "romantic" and can be penetrated simply by an
attitude of will, that differences of language and thought pose
no major barrier to the sentimental traveler. "Mark Twain" has
looked forward to speaking French in the same way he has
looked forward to riding a camel or getting shaved by a Parisian
barber. "Speaking French" will be part of a travel experience,
allowing the innocents to feel "happy romance . . . in all
its enchanting delightfulness" without their needing to alter
their own natures or values. If French signs are "curiously
worded," that is because their code is unfamiliar, but "Mark
Twain" does not see that he cannot preserve the strangeness
that delights him while at the same time "absorbing [French]
nature to the forgetfulness of everything else."[17] The travelers'
poor French is the shibboleth that betrays them as aliens; their
attempt to disguise themselves as natives has failed, and
their hostess's English comment on their "plagued French" is
their unmasking and their rebuke. The hostess draws firm
boundaries between varieties of language, boundaries that romantic
philosophies of language had tended to obscure or
deny. For Emerson, different languages were simply so many
homologous transformations of the thought of the "universal
soul"; because all language is the expression of spirit mediated
by nature, "the idioms of all languages approach each
other in passages of the greatest eloquence and power."[18]
"Mark Twain" in The Innocents Abroad is continually being
flung from the heights of eloquence into the hurly-burly of
everyday speech and thought, where the "idioms of all languages"
have little to do with one another.

The travelers set out to find the center of Marseilles, asking
for directions now and then. "We never did succeed in making
anybody understand just exactly what we wanted, and neither
did we ever succeed in comprehending just exactly what
they said in reply—but then they always pointed—they always
did that, and we bowed politely and said, 'Merci, monsieur'
" (WMT 1:87). The only universal language the innocents
discover in Europe is the most primitive of all, sign
language, whose simplest element is pointing—the "deixis"
of semiotics. Once they are humiliated to this degree, their
fascination with foreign languages begins to wane and disappears
entirely by the time they reach the Near East. Back on
the ship after traversing France and Italy, Twain exclaims at
the comfort of once again being able to hold familiar conversation
with friends in his own language: "Oh, the rare happiness
of comprehending every single world that is said, and
knowing that every word one says in return will be understood
as well!" (WMT 1:260). In The Innocents Abroad incomprehensibility
is a danger that remains "out there," like the
lurking bandits in Palestine, not yet an essential part of human
experience. Since it can be externalized, since it does not
yet threaten the self, it remains an occasion for light humor.

In 1895, while Twain was staying in Paris, an interviewer asked
him a question about the translatability of humor, suggesting
that English speakers

In "How to Tell a Story" Twain distinguishes between wit and
comedy, which arise merely from the content of an anecdote,
and humor, which depends on the manner of telling. If the
form of humor is part of its meaning, it is as untranslatable in
principle as poetry. Twain's response to the interviewer shows
that he was ready to generalize from humorous language to
all language: the worldview that generates the form of a language
is inaccessible to an outsider, who can therefore never
use that language as a native speaker would. Jorge Luis Borges
has played brilliantly with this problem in his short story
"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," about a scholar who
seeks to re-create Cervantes's composition not by copying but,
in George Steiner's analysis, by putting himself "so deeply in
tune with Cervantes's being, with his ontological form, as to
re-enact, inevitably, the exact sum of his realizations and
statements"—entering the holy of holies, in short.[20] Twenty
years before the Paris interview, Twain had written his own
version of "Pierre Menard," the second, longer, version of his
"Jumping Frog" story, which Twain criticism has almost universally
ignored in favor of its predecessor.

In 1872 there appeared in the Revue des deux mondes a French
translation of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
County" as part of an article introducing Mark Twain to a
French audience. Author and translator Thérèse Bentzon had
chosen to begin with Twain in a two-part series on American
humorists and had nothing but praise for his work, barring
reservations about the provincialism she found in The Innocents
Abroad. But when Twain eventually read the piece two
years later, he stumbled over Bentzon's claim that the humor in
his most famous story was hard to find:

But Bentzon's translation signally fails to convey Twain's tone,
mainly because she renders the piece in consistent standard
French, even though she recognizes how important vernacular
is to the effect of the original.[22] Twain's irritated response is
just: Bentzon, he complains, "has not translated [the story] at
all; he [sic] has simply mixed it all up; it is no more like the
Jumping Frog when he gets through with it than I am like a
meridian of longitude" (WMT 7:16). To prove it, Twain determined
to retranslate Bentzon's French into an English version
whose absurd clumsiness would bear no resemblance to the
original tale.

At least one critic has called "The Jumping Frog" the "best
example of Twain's frontier humor."[23] For most critics, as for
the general public, the original version of 1865 is the "Jumping
Frog": Simon Wheeler's monologue about Jim Smiley's being
conned by a clever stranger who loads Smiley's champion frog
with quailshot. The story that created Twain's national reputation,
it served as a title for his first collection of sketches in
1867, and it would receive place of honor as the first piece in
the Library of Humor that Twain later helped edit. But in Sketches
New and Old (1875) and thereafter, the story would officially
appear with a lengthy subtitle: "The Jumping Frog. In English.
Then in French. Then clawed back into a civilized language
once more by patient, unremunerated toil." It is a mistake
to see the additional material either as inferior buffoonery
or as a husk that may be discarded to get at the meat of the
story. This new "Jumping Frog" is in important ways an organic

outgrowth of the original. The problematic of framing,
translation, and quotation that figures in "Frog1" is extended
and made more complex in "Frog2." (Since both versions
carry the same short title, I hope I may be pardoned this ungainly
but brief notation to distinguish between the original
story and the revision.)

"Frog1" is a quoted story, a fact emphasized in the narrator's
introduction. The "I" of the story is the persona "Mark Twain,"
an impatient and rather stuffy fellow, whose formal language
contrasts markedly with the vernacular of Simon Wheeler, the
narrator of the tale. The reader is meant to understand that in
evaluating Wheeler's tale as an "exasperating," "tedious,"
"monotonous," and "interminable" narrative (WMT 7:17),
"Mark Twain" shows himself deaf to the humor of its style
and delivery. Moreover, "Twain" gives us the important information
that Simon Wheeler himself saw nothing funny in the
tale but delivered it as straightforward history. The humor of
the story thus derives not just from Wheeler's manner but
from the dialogue between Wheeler's unselfconscious garrulousness
and "Mark Twain's" judgmental frame. We give
"Mark Twain" credit, at least, for quoting Wheeler accurately:
"I let him go on in his own way, and never interrupted him
once," Twain says, and the direct discourse of Simon Wheeler
immediately follows, uninterrupted until the exasperated narrator
departs at the end of the story. The structure of "Frog1"
is thus (brackets indicate quotation):

"Frog2" becomes a Chinese box of quotations because in it
"Frog1" is quoted entire. Mark Twain frames the sketch at both
ends with an introduction in propria persona. In the middle
are three versions of "The Jumping Frog": the original sketch
("Frog1"), Bentzon's translation of the Wheeler narrative (the
Revue version includes the "Mark Twain" frame, but Twain
omits it here), and Mark Twain's retranslation of Bentzon. In

the following diagram, MT = Mark Twain, SW = Simon
Wheeler, { }F = French translation, { }E = English translation:
The core of "Frog1" was Simon Wheeler's narrative; the core of
"Frog2" is Bentzon's gallicized Simon Wheeler. Like Wheeler,
Bentzon had presented her narrative with "impressive earnestness
and sincerity," without imagining "there was anything
ridiculous or funny" about the translation qua translation.
By framing Bentzon's translation with the original on
one side and Twain's purposely wretched Englishing on the
other, "Frog2" asks the reader to find Bentzon funny as a storyteller
just as we find Simon Wheeler funny. The most important
general implication of the sketch is that Simon Wheeler—
and therefore Mark Twain—cannot exist in French, because direct
discourse can never be preserved in translation.[24] The
quotation marks in Bentzon's translation are misleading, in a
sense, because her "Simon Wheeler" is her own creation and
speaks her own words. (Twain was not yet ready to affirm the
more radical proposition that all quotation marks are illusory
because there is no such thing as direct discourse, but he
would approach this position in his latest works.)[25]

Twain's retranslation does not need the defense of a structural
analysis to demonstrate its interest and its worth. Granted,
the joke is carried through to the end with relentless thoroughness,
but the reader who takes the trouble to read aloud
will be rewarded with some of the funniest passages Twain
ever wrote, like this one from the description of "André" Jackson,
Jim Smiley's fighting dog: "When the bets were doubled
and redoubled against him, he you seize the other dog just at
the articulation of the leg of behind, and he not it leave more,
not that he it masticate, you conceive, but he himself there
shall be holding during until that one throws the sponge in
the air, must he wait a year" (WMT 7:29). Twain's retranslation
is not "fair" because he does not limit himself to parodying

the formal diction and grammar of Bentzon's translation.
Instead, he mocks the French language itself, purposely (or
accidentally—the effect is at any rate the same) confusing
tenses and pronoun genders and cognates ("the infinite misery"
for l'infinie miséricorde—a blasphemous "error"), and
perversely translating idioms word for word so as to make
nonsense of them. Yet by making us stumble over the manifold
awkwardnesses in an overliteral French-to-English translation,
Twain forces us to ask whether authentic translation is
ever possible. Clearly, American English and French semanticize
the world differently—all the more reason why a French
Simon Wheeler is an impossibility. Consider Twain's burlesque
of the French narrative tenses: consciously or not, he seizes
on an important difference between the English system and
the French. English vernacular narrative has available a stylistic
choice between definite past and historical present, the
latter being freely used to convey a sense of immediacy and
interest. It is important that Simon Wheeler never moves out
of the past tense in telling about Jim Smiley (with the single
exception of the colloquial narrative "says" for "said"). The
reason is that he betrayed no enthusiasm for his story: "In his
mouth this episode was merely history . . . he was drawing
on his memory, not his mind" ("Private History of the Jumping
Frog Story," WMT 22:101). French oral narrative, on the
other hand, is much more likely to use the historical present,
and indeed this is the tense Bentzon uses to recount the culminating
frog-jumping contest. Simon Wheeler accordingly
loses much of the deadpan quality that makes him such an
effective narrator. Likewise, the cunning Yankee stranger
loses his individuality in another idiom. The stranger's "I
don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other
frog" rapidly became a national catchword after the "Jumping
Frog" was published. So it is natural that the French version of
this line drew Twain's particular irony: "What has a poor foreigner
like me done, to be abused and misrepresented like
this? When I say, 'Well, I don't see no p'ints about that frog
that's any better'n any other frog,' is it kind, is it just, for this
Frenchman to try to make it appear that I said, 'Eh, bien! I no
saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each frog'?"
(WMT 7:34). Even a twentieth-century American, for whom
the laconic Yankee has faded as a stereotype, may miss the
humor in the stranger's assertion. In French, as a bare referential
statement stripped of dialectal and social context, the
stranger's phrase lacks all the irony that makes it the "nub" of
the story in English.

A relatively minor result of Twain's interest in translation
was his contribution to a genre that might be called language
interference humor, the collection and publication of laughable
errors by foreigners writing or speaking English. Each of
his travel books contains examples: in The Innocents Abroad, a
"notish" posted in an Italian hotel and a "placard fairly reeking
with wretched English" in a Milanese museum; in A Tramp
Abroad, excerpts from A Catalogue of Pictures in the Old Pinacotek,
a German museum catalog "written in a peculiar kind of
English"; in Following the Equator, specimens of "Babu English"
showing Indians' "quaint imperfect attempts at the use
of our tongue" (WMT 1:188-89; 9:128-29; 21:273-84). By far
the most notorious example of the genre was José de Fonseca's
New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English, for
which Twain wrote an introduction when it was reissued by
Osgood in 1883. In all earnestness, Fonseca wrote a Portuguese-English
language manual despite his wholesale ignorance
of English grammar and syntax, apparently manufacturing
English equivalents of Portuguese by translating word
for word with the aid of a dictionary. First published in 1855,
Fonseca's book had received widespread attention when "discovered"
by English and American reviewers a few years
thereafter. Twain's introduction celebrates the guide's "delicious
unconscious ridiculousness" and "miraculous stupidities"
(WMT 24:301, 302). Always for Mark Twain the fall of
Babel was a felix culpa insofar as it made humor possible.

Often enough for Mark Twain, though, the curse of Babel was
merely a curse. The beginning of his serious interest in foreign

languages can be dated precisely: 1878, the year he and
his family began the European stay recounted in A Tramp
Abroad. Before that date he rarely gives any thought to his limitation
as a monolingual; from 1878 on, his notebooks and
letters are filled with accounts of his frustrations and minor
triumphs as he studies German, calls upon his rusty French,
and eventually learns enough Italian to get by. The biographical
details of Twain's encounter with the "awful German language"
are amply provided in John Krumpelmann's Mark
Twain and the German Language.[26] Krumpelmann shows that although
Twain was a competent reader and translator of German
by the time of his last stay in German-speaking Europe
(1897-1899), he was never comfortable with the give-and-take
of conversational German. Krumpelmann's study, however,
contains little assessment of the effect Twain's knowledge of
German had on his creative life. Ultimately Twain's direct literary
use of German in A Tramp Abroad and elsewhere is less
important than the sheer experience of continual failure to
make himself understood.

"How charmed I am when I overhear a German word which
I understand!" he wrote to Howells not long after setting foot
on German soil (4 May 1878, MTHL 1:228). His initial delight
was not to last long. As he found that book knowledge of German
was not enough to enable him to capture the living word
in transit, his comments on German took a different tone:
"Drat this German tongue, I never shall be able to learn it. I
think I could learn a little conversational stuff, maybe, if I
could attend to it, but I found I couldn't spare the time. I took
lessons two weeks & got so I could understand the talk going
on around me, & even answer back, after a fashion. But I neither
talk nor listen, now, so I can't even understand the language
any more" (27 June 1878, MTHL 1:237). Twain confided
most of his frustration to his notebook. In the notebooks he
kept from May through September 1878, alongside material
that he would work up for use in A Tramp Abroad one finds a
diary of his struggles with languages. Given the scarcity of
overt attention to language in the preceding notebooks, the
density of references now is striking:

(NJ2, 80)

(NJ2, 83)

(NJ2, 98)

(NJ2, 102)

(NJ2, 117)

(NJ2, 119)

(NJ2, 170)

Given entries like these, we understand why Albert Bigelow
Paine wrote that for Twain the study of German "became a
sort of nightmare."[27] His experience was by no means unusual;
surely the diaries of innumerable travelers have contained
similar plaints. But this struggling learner was Mark
Twain, by now a world-famous author. Although he could
manipulate audiences at will through the artistry of his oral
delivery, he was suffering petty humiliations because he could
not understand or be understood. His immediate reaction
was to sublimate his frustration by transforming it into the
comedy of "The Awful German Language"; a secondary benefit
was a practical lesson in the inferiority of traditional foreign-language
teaching. But the entries quoted above suggest
the outlets through which his subterranean "raging inwardly"
would finally vent itself. Both in imagination and in reality,
Twain is feeling what it is like to become a deaf-mute, a stammerer,
a mysterious stranger who runs out of words or who is
despised as an ignoramus.

Beginning with A Tramp Abroad, in the comedy based on
foreign language two basic modes of humor reflect corresponding
insights on Twain's part into the nature of language.
First, the rules that govern language are always potentially
repressive; second, to paraphrase Talleyrand, "Language was
invented for the purpose of misunderstanding." The first
insight, translated into comedy, produces Twain's diatribes
against entire systems of natural languages, while the second
underlies the encounter between speakers who cannot understand
each other. I do not wish to magnify the importance of
these minor comic works, which are not among Twain's funniest
or most interesting pieces (and I include "The Awful
German Language," which strikes me as less skillfully managed
than some readers have thought.)[28] But I believe that underlying
their broad humor are the same concerns found in
more substantial narratives.

We must come back once again to Howells's remark about
Twain's wanting to be "understood with the least possible personal
inconvenience," because its implications are profound.
What discourse would in fact permit the absolute minimum of
inconvenience? Only an unimaginable, instantaneous, telepathic
transfer of thought from mind to mind that would bypass
the mediation of symbols altogether (see pp. 151-53). All
language, all semiosis, is inherently inconvenient. To communicate,
I must map on a continuum of interior thought the
discrete units prescribed by the grammar and semantics of the
language I am using; the desire for immediate self-expression

is frustrated by the prior existence of the rules that govern
signs. Twain's burlesque of the German language—toying
with its paradigms, throwing happy chaos into its syntax—is
a temporary victory of the pleasure principle over the reality
that language is always an imposition.

Twain made his first literary use of German barely more
than a month after arriving in Germany, in the form of a
"Fourth of July Oration in the German Tongue" delivered at
a banquet of the Anglo-American Club of Heidelberg; this
speech is appended to "The Awful German Language," itself
Appendix D of A Tramp Abroad. The prevailing tone of this address
is cheerfully comic. Twain is not so much satirizing German
as toying with it, proclaiming his own verbal independence,
enjoying his ability to make puns and plays on words:
"Hundert Jahre vorüber, waren die Engländer und die Amerikanen
Feinde; aber heute sind sie herzlichen Freunde." Once
again a chief formal constituent of the humor is macaronic
"interlarding": "Sie müssen so freundlich sein, und verzeih
mich die interlarding von ein oder zwei Englischer Worte, hie
und da, denn ich finde dass die deutsche is not a very copious
language, and so when you've really got anything to say,
you've got to draw on a language that can stand the strain"
(WMT 10:283). The authoritative rigors of standard German
are not at issue in this brief speech. But the rest of "The Awful
German Language" denies the authority of the language in
any situation.

The tacit assumption of the essay is that there is, or ought
to be, a language that expresses thought naturally, logically,
and independently of troublesome categories of grammar.
Twain's humor depends on the assumption that German more
obviously than English violates these requirements. Thus German
sentences are constructed "backward" because the verb
appears at the end; the root and the particle of separable verbs
are put at intolerable distances from each other; gender is assigned
in total defiance of biology; and the wealth of case endings
is a needless multiplication of meaningless forms. Facts
about German are presented as if they were self-evidently absurd.
It is supposed to be clear that the table for adjectival declension

is horrifying or that no self-respecting word should
have as many meanings as Zug. (The humor requires us to ignore
similar complexities in English; get is no less tricky than
Zug.) Twain is at his most penetrating when he explores, as he
had in the revised "Jumping Frog," the incommensurability
between the ways that two different languages slice up the
world. In a hilarious literal translation, the "Tale of the Fishwife
and Its Sad Fate," Twain shows what would happen if we
preserved the gender of adjectives and possessive pronouns
when moving from German to English. Grammatical gender
in and of itself is not funny, but its incompatibility with the
neuter universe of English is: "See the Flame, how she licks
the doomed Utensil [a fish basket] with her red and angry
Tongue; now she attacks the helpless Fishwife's Foot—she
burns him up, all but the big Toe, and even she is partly consumed"
(WMT 10:274). Suddenly we conceive how alien to
our mode of thought a gender system is, how animistic its
picture of the world; to translate a language literally is almost
automatically to defamiliarize it. Twain's farcical lesson in determining
the case of a noun suggests how incompletely even
a four-case declensional system covers the gamut of possible
relations between subjects and objects:

(WMT 10:268)

Unfortunately, Twain continues, the correct form is des Regens
because wegen idiomatically throws its object into the
genitive. Beneath this nonsensical attempt to apply pure logic
to grammar is the realization that any mode of cutting up the
continuum of potential meaning is arbitrary. Simply because
it is articulated, language produces the effect of the mechanical
that Henri Bergson identifies as the root of humor.

When Twain reworked similar material into a speech entitled
"Die Schrecken der Deutschen Sprache" he assured his
German-speaking audience that he had never desired to hurt
their "noble language" (MTS, 317). That is doubtless true of
his conscious intent, but "The Awful German Language"
gives occasional evidence of a hostility that is not simply exaggerated
for comic effect. Twain devotes a paragraph to showing
that "a description of any loud, stirring, tumultuous episode
must be tamer in German than in English" (WMT 10:
279-80). He makes the puzzling claim that words like Schlacht,
Gewitter, and Ausbruch are less forceful than battle, storm, and
explosion. The German aspirate ch is usually perceived as harsh
by speakers of English, and the preponderance of consonant
clusters in German nouns is anything but "tame" to their
ears. It seems that Twain is manufacturing a quarrel out of
thin air, as he had in asserting that Bigler was melodious and
Tahoe only odious. Twain concludes his article with eight proposed
"reforms," his comic revenge for the troubles German
has caused him. The last of these is a humorous version of the
explosion at the end of A Connecticut Yankee that obliterates
Arthurian England: "And eighthyl, and last, I would retain
Zug and Schlag, with their pendants, and discard the rest of
the vocabulary. This would simplify the language" (WMT
10:283).[29]

"Italian with Grammar" (1904) is for the most part a pale
imitation of the excursus on German, with the difference that
it uses the language and attitude of Twain's old Western vernacular
persona to ridicule formal grammar. Learning that the
verb is the troublesome part of Italian grammar, Twain decides
that he must "intelligently foresee and forecast at least
the commoner of the dodges it was likely to try upon a stranger
. . . get in on its main shifts and head them off, . . . learn its
game and play the limit" (WMT 24:244). The fifty-seven forms
of avere are Twain's prime target, as he plays Scotty Briggs to
an Italian tutor's parson: "Never mind explaining, I don't care

anything about it. Six Hads is enough for me; anybody that
needs twelve, let him subscribe; I don't want any stock in a
Had Trust. Knock out the Prolonged and Indefinitely Continuous;
four-fifths of it is water, anyway" (WMT 24:252).[30]

More interesting is the companion piece, "Italian without a
Master," which had appeared several months earlier.[31] The
title plays on the popular French (and German, and so forth)
Without a Master manuals but also recalls Humpty-Dumpty's
famous thesis concerning semantics. When he uses a word, he
tells Alice, it means just what he chooses it to mean. The question
is "which is to be the master—that's all."[32] For Twain's
sketch celebrates the interpretive freedom he enjoys when he
reads Italian without the aid of either teacher or dictionary,
assigning his own meaning to words he is uncertain of. (The
first illustration in the Harper's text shows Twain seated in an
armchair, reading an Italian newspaper, using an Italian-English
dictionary as a footstool.) The "master," then, is any
authority figure who insists that the foreign idiom be received
in a prescribed way. Twain creates a linguistic utopia where
one can play at being the "master" of an incomprehensible
foreign tongue without suffering any of the ill effects that
such an arrogation usually brings. It helps that in Florence he
is literally the master of his household domestics. The sketch
opens:

(WMT 24:229-30)

Of course Twain knows that sono dispiacentissimo means "I am
most displeased," precisely the language of a master who
knows how to make the servants jump. But he is posing here
behind the persona of a "powerful speaker" who can dispense
with worrying about the needs of his interlocutor.

The remainder of the sketch describes how Twain, ensconced
in the "deep and dreamy stillness" of the villa, subscribes
to the Florentine paper, which he always reads unhindered
by the dictionary. "Often I do not quite understand,
often some of the details escape me, but no matter, I get the
idea." A knowledge of French helps him recognize cognates,
as he shows by translating a few short items. The words that
elude him are no concern:

(WMT 24:238)

He illustrates with an Italian newspaper item, reproduced
photographically in his text:

(WMT 24:240)

Twain gives a confident translation; only the word spalleggiato
has baffled him.[33] But "this is where you revel," for the word is
so obscure as to be susceptible to any and all interpretation.
The word does "carr[y] our word 'egg' in its stomach"; perhaps
it means "egged on." The "egg" in spalleggiato is
Humpty-Dumpty, as it were, sitting in the midst of the alien
word, coping with its otherness by reducing it to the lowly familiar.
The humorist resists the constant insistence that the
Other's word be understood according to the Other's rules,
playfully subverting the purpose of dictionaries and grammars,
to provide rules for mapping out a one-to-one correspondence
between idioms. Carried to its logical extreme, the
unruly semantic theory of Humpty-Dumpty and "Mark
Twain" entails that every word can mean anything, since by
following either a metonymic or a metaphoric chain one can
make every signifier identical with every other. Adherents to
this theory are either malaprops or misanthropes, willfully ignoring
discourse communities when they assign their individual
interpretations. So these people themselves as much as
the idioms they burlesque are the object of Twain's humor: the
Twain persona here, too lazy to look up spalleggiato; the aggressive
monolinguals in the travel narratives blithely unconcerned
about the reception of their English; Tom Sawyer casually
misconstruing the vocabulary of romantic fiction while
using it to show off.

Mark Twain's most substantive criticism of the grammar books
and language manuals was that in teaching a language through
formal grammatical analysis or arbitrarily structured dialogues,
they themselves impeded the acquisition of the foreign
tongue. From personal experience he had learned that
the paradigms and exercises in the books were of little use in
helping him to "get into the man himself, the man of another
country":

(NJ2, 184)

Twain's criticism of traditional grammar-based methods of
teaching foreign languages would be increasingly echoed during
the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The most important
advocate of reform in language teaching was the Frenchman
François Gouin. Works on the methodology of teaching
language still refer to his Art of Teaching and Studying Languages
(1880; English translation 1892).[34] Twain noted the title
and publisher of the English edition in his notebook in July
1892; if he did obtain the book, he must have appreciated the
horrific struggle with German that had led Gouin to formulate
his own method of language instruction.[35] Wishing to
study in German universities, Gouin had set out to teach himself
German via the traditional formal deductive method:
So he "devoured" German grammar in a week, memorized the
irregular verbs in two days, and then attended his first German
lecture. He understood nothing. The problem, he concluded,
was vocabulary; so he bought a list of German verbal and
nominal "roots," memorized them in four days, and went
back to the lecture hall. Again he understood not a syllable.
Deciding he needed structured lessons, he bought a copy of
Ollendorff's German version of the "New Method for Learning
to Read, Write, and Speak a Language in Six Months,"
which he managed to master in only a month. Then he spent
a week in Berlin attending lectures for eight hours a day—
understanding nothing. Finally he made the heroic resolution
to learn the entire German dictionary and memorized three
hundred pages—thirty thousand words—in thirty days.
(There is no reason to doubt Gouin's claim to a near-eidetic
memory.) At last prepared, as he thought, to understand German,
he attended his lecture and "understood not a word—
not a single word!" He assures the reader that he means what
he says literally.[37] Gouin's mistake, of course, had been to
think that knowledge of the written language would confer a
knowledge of the spoken: the ear, not the eye, was the "receptive
organ of language."

Gouin's experience moved him to devise the "Natural
Method" of language instruction, which subordinated paradigms
and memorization to dialogues anchored in a specific,
practical, social context. Twain understood intuitively that
lack of a context was a shortcoming of traditional language instruction,
and in his humorous way he prefigures the work of
serious revisionists of language teaching. In "Italian with
Grammar" he complains to his teacher about verb paradigms:
"They say I have, thou has, he has, and so on, but they don't say
what. It will be better, and more definite, if they have something
to have; just an object you know, a something—anything
will do; anything that will give the listener a sort of
personal as well as grammatical interest in their joys and complaints,
you see" (WMT 24:248). But his most extended satire
of language teaching is the comedy Meisterschaft: In Three Acts,
written for and performed by friends in Hartford who were
studying German with Twain in the 1880s. Margaret and
Annie, sisters, have been required by their father to spend
three months in the country studying German; they may have
visitors on the condition that all conversation be conducted in
German. Their beaux, previously ignorant of the language,
decide to memorize the Meisterschaft books to conform to the
injunction. Since the girls are also novices in German and can
only parrot what they find in their phrase books, the four
must court in the prescribed dialogues of the Meisterschaft.
"What would such a conversation be like!" Margaret protests.
"If you should stick to Meisterschaft, it would change the subject
every two minutes; and if you stuck to Ollendorff, it
would be all about your sister's mother's good stocking of
thread, or your grandfather's aunt's good hammer of the carpenter"
(WMT 15:343). The comedy of the second act consists
in the constraint on the young people to make such sentences
serve as love talk. Far from protesting their restriction, boyfriends

George and William embrace it, for as George asks,
"Suppose we wandered out of [the text] and took a chance at
the language on our own responsibility, where the nation
would we be?" (WMT 15:356). In fact the girls complain bitterly
when William skips over fifty pages at one point, and the
boys call "no fair" when the girls switch texts:
Twain's themes of foreign language as nonsensical, as incomprehensible,
and as rule-bound all come together here. The
"little language" of lovers ought to be at least a dialect shared
by two, at best a wordless instantaneous communication.
Here the lovers' language is alienated in three respects: it is
foreign, its forms are prescribed, and its topics are arbitrary.
Beneath the specific satire of the tyranny of the Meisterschaft
and Ollendorff systems, however, is the implication that transcendent
love talk is a fiction because all language is part of a
language game, part of a "text" already given to its users,
from which one deviates at the risk of not "playing fair." Slight
as it is, Meisterschaft asks the questions of the Shakespearean
love comedies after which it is patterned: how profound can
"love" be if it is generated by superficial phenomena of language,
looks, and social conventions that do not necessarily
correspond to any inward reality? Substitute Herz—or even
the English word heart—for Hund in the above dialogue, and
would the lovers really understand one another better? Babel
lurks, Twain would come to realize, in every word of every
language.