Is It Not Possible to Understand in Another Tongue?

October 25, 2009

In Act V of Hamlet, Hamlet, Horatio and a sycophantic courtier named Osric are engaged in a lengthy and bombastic verbal joust, which Hamlet, of course, wins handily. It is the kind of logomachy that the Renaissance loved; see Rabelais’ Gargantua (early 16th century). And not only did intellectuals love this sort of thing; ordinary people did, like you and me, and like people who enjoyed Abbott and Costello in their vaudeville act of many years ago about “who’s on first, what’s on second, I-don’t-know’s on third.”

Osric, whom Hamlet calls a “waterfly,” praises Laertes with such sugary hyperbole that Hamlet mocks him while seeming to agree with him:
Hamlet: But in the verity of extolment, I take him [Laertes] to be a soul of great article, and his infusion of such dearth and rareness as, to make true diction of him [this is all gobbledygook], his semblable is his mirror, and who else would trace him, his umbrage, nothing more.
Translation: Blah...blah...blah...only his mirror can match Laertes, and besides that only his shadow would trace him.
Osric: Your lordship speaks most infallibly of him. [Fails to see the joke.]

Hamlet does not know that Laertes and the king plot to kill Hamlet with a poisoned foil. But he knows the king wants him dead, and for his own reasons he wants the king dead.

The play is approaching its apogee, or denouement, wherein everything will be revealed, yet Hamlet, whose time is short, who has lost Ophelia to suicide, engages in a ten-minute repartee with an idiot. Osric’s language is more and more fancifully obscure, and Hamlet still takes the time to overmatch him.

Hamlet: The concernancy, sir? Why do we wrap the gentleman in our more rawer breath?
Osric: Sir? [Doesn’t understand.]
Horatio: (aside to Hamlet) Is ‘t not possible to understand in another tongue? You will to’t, sir, really.
Translation: Might Osric not understand a simpler variety of language, one less fanciful? Put another way: switch to a direct code, cut the nonce words, the metaphors and the circumlocutions, and perhaps he will understand you.
Hamlet takes his time and lets Osric continue in his description of the bet. The king wagers six Barbary horses and Laertes, six French rapiers and daggers, with sword-belts and scabbards. But Osric can’t resist a flowery turn of speech, a type called synecdoche. He calls the belt-and-scabbards “carriages,” or decorated carts for cannons, because of their artistic (Frenchified) imagination of design, or “conceit.”
Osric: Three of the carriages, in faith, are very dear to fancy, very responsive to the hilts, most delicate carriages, and of very liberal conceit.
Hamlet: What do you call the “carriages”?
Horatio: I knew you must be edified by the margent ere you had done. [I knew you’d have to have a marginal gloss for that one]
Osric: The carriages, sir, are the hangers (sword belt and straps).
Hamlet: The phrase would be more germane to the matter if we could carry a cannon by our sides. I would it might be “hangers” till then. But on. Six Barbary horses aainst six French swords, their assigns, and three liberal-conceited carriages — that’s the French bet against the Danish.

Hamlet is especially irked at Osric’s inept and clumsy use of hyperbole in place of precision in language. He remarks to Horatio “He did comply, sir, with his dug before he sucked it,” or, he made a deep bow and a fruity compliment before taking his mother’s breast. Here, at the brink of doom, Hamlet allows himself to vent healthy anger at windbags who use language to impress stupid people rather than for its rightful purpose: as a tool of thought.

If you think this example is a little far out, think again: Hamlet is perhaps the most performed play of all time, and the Elizabethans relished this comic relief before the duel, though, for us, the language is just a touch too old to move us so quickly. But it is perfectly timed just in front of the violent action which will end the play, resulting in four more royal deaths.

This brings me back to the ACTFL's idealistic description of the Superior foreign-language learner, Superiorspeak, or Abstractspeak:

Speakers at the Superior level are able to communicate in the language with accuracy and fluency in order to participate fully and effectively in conversations on a variety of topics in formal and informal settings from both concrete and abstract perspectives. They discuss their interests and special fields of competence, explain complex matters in detail, and provide lengthy and coherent narrations, all with ease, fluency, and accuracy.

Abstractspeak can move from narration in the “concrete” to hypothesizing in the “abstract” in the twinkling of an eye. He can talk big and he can talk small.  He can explain complex things with ease. Native speakers unused to Learnerspeak are not unnerved by him. They listen to him with ease, forgetting he’s not one of them.  

I contend, however, that Abstractspeak is not what the native speaker, or the very-very-very proficient learner does. The real speaker, be she two years or twenty, plays with language, makes language games, and appreciates a pun put just right, unforced and without exaggeration, likes a well-made narrative much more than an academic “argument,” and treats verbal imagination as the highest pinnacle of language, not verbal suasion. Many's the very-very "near-native" speaker who, by the way, cannot explain abstract concepts with ease. Where the ACTFL puts narration down on the intermediate-high level, readers of great writers like Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol and Flannery O’Connor prize not their abstraction, not their not concretism (whatever that is) but their aptness, their precision, the revelation of their language. Any native speaker will love his language so much that he will defend it to the end, or to the brink of his own demise, as Hamlet does. Any native speaker considers himself an expert on his language, because he has in it, by birthright, a lifelong proprietary interest.

gmc