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More "Untranslatable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that Poe intended him as a 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
... of Fraech, Dartaid, Regamon, Flidais, and Regamna; which in the originals differ from the five tales in volume i, in that they include no verse, except for a few lines in Regamna, most of which are untranslatable. The last four of these are short pieces written in a prose extremely rapid in its action, and crowded with incident. They are all expressly named as "fore-tales," remscela, or preludes to the story of the great war of Cualnge, which is the central ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... art that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite principle—that the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind—is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism. For, as art addresses not pure sense, still less the pure intellect, but the "imaginative reason" through the ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... that of Tennyson. I have already said that Pushkin is not an eagle soaring in the heavens, but he is a nightingale perched singing on the tree. But this very perfection of form makes his lyrics well-nigh untranslatable, and their highest beauty can only be felt by those who can ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... name. The titular head of my family was a Cardinal of Rome, my father's own brother. I went to him, and I demanded the means of support. He answered me with an epigram which I will not repeat, besides which it is untranslatable. I will only tell you that he gave me a sum equivalent to a few hundred pounds, and bade ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 gift of sympathy and magnetism of soul ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... are certain French authors to whom should be secured the use of the literary German whereof Germans, and German women in particular, ought with all severity to be deprived. For Germans often tell you of words in their own tongue that are untranslatable; and accordingly they should not be translated, but given over in their own conditions, unaltered, into safer hands. There would be a clearing of the outlines of German ideas, a better order in the phrase; the possessors of an alien word, ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... now so rapidly being forgotten; with a remembrance too of the numerous long and involved paragraphs—even pages—that I skipped, as being prosy or unintelligible, written as they were in a dialect often untranslatable even by a Cornish child, I have here tried to present a few of these tales in simpler form, to suit not only Cornish children, but those ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... nature of these motives, the character of the personality which appears in their varied presentments, it is almost idle to speak in the absence of the work itself, so eloquent is this at once and so untranslatable. But it may be said approximately that M. Rodin's temperament is in the first place deeply romantic. Everything the Institute likes repels him. He has the poetic conception of art and its mission, and in poetry ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... 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 ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... A 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 ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... a hubbub of broken English, the gibberish being mostly spoken with self-confidence and ease. Indeed, many of these people had some difficulty in speaking their native tongue. Bad English replete with literal translations from untranslatable Yiddish idioms had become their natural speech. The younger parents, however, more susceptible of the influence of their children, ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... "crouton," and "croute-au-pot," untranslatable, and without equivalent in English. A "croute" is the slang term for a man ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... time insensible. When the 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 ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... for Picketwire, and make Zumbro River of the Riviere des Ombres of brave old Pere Marquette? And so, too, it goes through all the broad Northwest. Indian names, beautiful in themselves even though at times untranslatable, are tossed contemptuously aside to be replaced by the homeliest of every-day appellations, until the modern geography of Wyoming, Dakota, Montana, and Idaho bristles with innumerable Sage, Boxelder, Horse, ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... grandiloquence—and, true to the spirit of it, he seeks the maximum of effect through the minimum of means. Then, he never shouts. Here is an example of his quiet method, the rhythmical beauty of which is unfortunately almost untranslatable: ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... deep breath and began to give his full Garvian name. It was untranslatable and unpronounceable to Earthmen, who could not reproduce the sequence of pops and whistles that made up the Garvian tongue. The doctors listened, blinking, as the complex family structure and ancestry which entered into every Garvian's ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... translation of Heine's poems and ballads, which was generally accepted as the best version of that untranslatable poet. Very curious is the link between that bitter, mocking, cynic spirit and the refined, gentle spirit of Emma Lazarus. Charmed by the magic of his verse, the iridescent play of his fancy, and the sudden cry of the heart piercing through it ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... freshness, but no other quality of music. Her singing was as inept as the rest of the entertainment. Yet the old man smiled, the mother beat time with her heavy foot, and nodded at her husband with pride in their daughter's accomplishment. And again in the throng the ill-conditioned talk, the untranslatable jests of the Arabs and the negroes went their round. It was horrible, don't ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... life. The chorus with which the tragedy winds up—"Ahi! lagrime; Ahi! dolore"—the words appropriately carved upon his tombstone at St. Onofrio—is unspeakably pathetic. It is his own dirge, the cry of a heart whose strings are about to break. It is as untranslatable as the sigh of the wind in a pine forest. If the words are changed, the spell is lost, and the way to ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... cycles, 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 in ...
— Life Sentence • James McConnell
... "curiosity" as the keynote); but in any case it is that which we require an artist to bring with him—"fineness," "light," "choiceness," "comeliness," "graciousness"—when he visualises or focusses his object. Does not that untranslatable liparos aither of Homer—the shining upper air—suggest not only the physical atmosphere breathed by the gods of Olympus and the great-hearted Odysseus, but also the poetic ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... written of the eloquence of the Indians, but it all conveys a very imperfect and inadequate idea of the beauty and excellence of their orations. They are untranslatable by whites, for we are without the nice perception of natural beauty and sublimity which the Indian possesses, and therefore cannot convey with accuracy and fulness his ideas of the external objects from which his figures and metaphors are drawn. If a bird flits ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... established himself in the house, in spite of all the sour looks and short answers Mr Smith could bestow on him. All his attempts at a lodgment were aided by the invitations of Sibylla, whether conveyed in words or in untranslatable smiles and glances. An instantaneous friendship was established between him and the younger branches; and from some of the children, who came down to see their papa, and congratulate him on his return, he picked out a great mass of information about the affairs of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... Signor Placci), for the purpose of seeing him. He is fond of reciting passages from the works, and has even made attempts at translation: though he understands them too well not to pronounce them, what they are for every Latin language, untranslatable. ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... about, not really injured—but rather the intense and almost devilish malignity of the expression that hovered on the blurred features and in the half-closed eyes. But no attempt was made by George to translate the look into words, and indeed Philip felt that it was untranslatable. He also felt dimly that the hate and malice with which he was regarded by the individual at his feet was of a more concentrated and enduring character than most men have the power to originate. In the lurid light of that one glance he was able, though he was not very clever, to pierce ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... not offer again, but sat and watched her pack up the things with an untranslatable look on his face. When she had almost finished he took something ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
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