"Untranslatable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 |
