Omniglot - the blog

There’s a genre of poetry known as ‘found poetry’ which involves take words, phrases and sometimes longer chunks of text from various sources and arranging them in a poetical way. Here’s a blog called simply ‘found poetry‘ with the subtitle ‘pulling poetry from pages of prosaic piffle’ which features many examples.

There’s a short story called Useful Phrases by Gene Wolfe based on the phrases found in a phrasebook, including such gems as Pava pacch, tîsh ùtra. Neéve sort dufji. (How like a ghost are the fountain’s waters! The flood carries away my riches), and Semphonississima techsodeliphindera lafiondalindu tuk yiscav kriishhalôné! (How delightful to discover in the shrinking sea a crystal blossom of home!”) - I suspect these phrases come from an imaginary phrasebook in a made-up language, but could be wrong. The story appears in Wolfe’s collection of short stories: Strange Travellers.

After discovering this today on this blog, I started thinking whether it would be possible to construct a story entirely or mainly from the phrases in a phrasebook, or maybe using a language textbook or grammar book as your source. Stories put together in this way might be called ‘found fiction’. Phrasebooks and other language books would probably be a good source of found poetry as well.

The other day, someone mentioned that large chunks of French dialogue appear in War and Peace without any translation into Russian. In the 19th century, when the novel was written, knowledge of French was widespread among the Russian aristocracy and they tended to speak French to each other. So they would have been able to follow the French in the book without difficulty.

This got me thinking whether there are many other bilingual novels. In regions where two or more languages are a part of everyday live, you’d think that some writers might use a mixture of those languages in their stories. However, apart from a few Welsh and Irish novels which include bits of English dialogue, I haven’t come across any bilingual novels. Have you?