Did the Ancient Romans Have Posh British Accents? From James W. Ziskin

Do books get lost in translation? What are some non-English novels you love and are there any that didn’t work over the cultural divide? 

I’ll veer slightly off topic this week since I don’t read a lot of works in translation. I did, however, do my graduate work in Romance languages, which means that I read a lot of novels in the original French, Italian, and Spanish. Everything from Elsa Morante to Manzoni to Stendhal and Sartre. And while I have read many European books in translation, I wouldn’t know if anything was lost in translation if I didn’t read the originals. Makes sense, right?

More recently, within our genre, I’ve read Scandinavian authors such as Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbø, Ragnar Jónasson, Arnaldur Indriðason, and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, but since I don’t speak Norwegian, Swedish, or Icelandic, I wouldn’t know if the translations were lacking in any way. I have a sense, however, that Nordic languages translate more easily into English than, say, Italian. Maybe it’s because English and the Scandis all sit on the Germanic branches of the Indo-European family tree of languages and are more closely related to each other than to the Romance languages. While it’s true that English enjoys a rich French legacy—about thirty percent of our words—thanks to those conquering Normans, our language shares fewer of the grammatical and lexical similarities that French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese do with each other.

Laurence Olivier

So, in movies, a British accent always sounds believable coming from a German or Swedish character. On the other hand, how many Italian characters speak with the clipped precision of Received Pronunciation? The exception here, of course, is the Ancient Romans. In film, they all speak like John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, or Laurence Olivier, and we like that.

Franco Nero

Rossano Brazzi

Louis Jourdan

Anthony Quinn

But if we’re talking French characters, they’re usually Americans parroting—how you say—zee phony accents. Unless they’re Louis Jourdan, Charles Boyer, or Maurice Chevalier. Maybe Jean Reno more recently. And Italians? Back in the 1950s and 1960s, it was undoubtedly Rossano Brazzi or Franco Nero playing the handsome Italian in American movies. Those two also played Frenchmen in a pinch, but never with a posh English accent. And, if we wanted a good-ol’ American to play a Mexican, Greek, or Italian, well, there was always Anthony Quinn. Hell, even Fellini cast Quinn as an Italian in La strada. Okay, Quinn was born in Mexico, so he’s in the same boat as Brazzi and Nero playing Frenchmen. My point, I suppose, is that those guys were Latin types, not British, and, as such, somewhat interchangeable by Hollywood standards. Just as Brits and Ancient Romans are.

But back to books. Which foreign language mysteries do I enjoy reading? I confess to a cultural bias, having read mostly Western European authors. I love Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels, Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano, and Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which is one of the greatest crime novels of all time (in my opinion, at least.) I also recommend Ilaria Tuti, alongside whom I was a finalist for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award in 2021. Alas, neither of us took home the hardware. That went to Rosalie Knecht. Right now, I happen to be reading Fred Vargas’s Pars vite et reviens tard. Super!

I suppose I need to branch out and read more broadly. Please post some suggestions in the comments below.