A vade-mecum, but not quite a sine qua non
John Jolliffe
THE CONCISE DICTIONARY OF FOREIGN QUOTATIONS edited by Anthony Lejeune Stacey, London, £25, pp. 332 The idea of this dictionary, ranging over Latin, French, Italian, German and Spanish sources, is an excellent one. It is also time- ly, since the Europhilia of today, far from being inspired by a love or even knowledge of the culture of European countries, is largely derived from wishful economic thinking and a desire for self-aggrandise- ment on the part of ministers and officials. It is a relief therefore to turn to the elo- quence and freshness of many, though not all, of the entries in this book. To start with Latin, the most moving lines are from Vir- gil, the neatest (and plainly the most untranslatable) from Horace, the sharpest from Juvenal (There are scarcely any legal disputes that are not started by women') and the most sententious and irritating from Cicero, who is over-represented, beat- ing Catullus, for example, 16-7. But it was a mistake to waste space on everyday expres- sions such as vade mecum, caveat emptor, to quoque and even vice versa, inter alia. But I like the firmly anti-egalitarian Vuod licet Jovi, non licet bovi', what is permissible to Jupiter is not permissible for an ox. The next section is in French. Ronsard and La Fontaine are consistently excellent, Pascal deserved better selection, Rousseau is muddled and sometimes plain wrong. Sartre is rightly ignored, but Gide comes off well: 'Everything has been said already, but since no one listens, one must always start again.' Napoleon's disapproval of the metric system comes as a surprise: 'Nothing is more contrary to the organisation of the mind, of the memory, and of the imagina- tion.' There is too little Taine and too much Victor Hugo, usually dull and often also wrong, as in thinking that 'the 19th century is great but the 20th century will be happy.' De Gaulle, predictably, is splendid. There is the well-known, 'How can you govern a country which has 264 different kinds of cheese?' but also his comment on the death of his Down's syndrome daugh- ter, which is very touching: `Maintenant elle est comme les autres.'
France gets 68 pages, Germany 69. Many of its entries invite the reaction `So what?'
Goethe's sayings are curiously flat and unreadable, though perhaps badly chosen. Brecht is often boring, and often disagree- able, accurately reflecting his nature. There is too much of Hitler, often trite and insignificant, but it is interesting that Fred- erick the Great, so often praised for his lib- eral attitudes, urged on his hesitant troops with the words, 'Rascals! Would you live for ever?' And Lichtenberg, a new one on me, is .surely often right in saying that books are not only printed, bound and sold, but also reviewed, read and now even written by people who don't understand them. Metternich thought that not only Italy, but also Germany, was a geographical expression; but then he came before Bis- marck, who incidentally observed that poli- tics is not a science, as the professors tell us, but an art.
In Italian, Dante puts everyone else in the shade, but Petrarch has been inade- quately served. In this section it is notice- able that the sheer beauty of the words often makes up for a lack of profundity, or interest, in what is being said. But I like someone called Ojetti, who noticed that 'a mosquito bite itches much less when you've squashed the mosquito'. And Rossini, interestingly, is credited • with the expres- sion of a mauvais quart d'heure, with refer- ence to the large number of them to be endured in the music of Wagner.
For me the greatest revelations came from Spain. I especially like Sema, who noted that 'the accountant is someone who you can seldom count on'. (What German could have said that?) There is also Baroja, who noticed that 'a group is always more easily deceived than an individual'. Other- wise, where would politicians be? Far more attention in this country should be paid to Unamuno, and above all to Madariaga, who observed that 'women govern America because America is a land of boys who refuse to grow up.'
The book is well produced, and the translations opposite each entry are mostly good. But the reader would have been bet- ter served if instead of the random alpha- betical order of the entries, each author's sayings had been grouped together, to give a coherent impression of what he was like. (I say the',. because out of about 550 authors quoted, there are only 26 women, nearly all of them with one entry each.) The editor is presumably not responsible for the choices from languages with which he is not familiar. The names of those who made the other selections are tucked away on the copyright page: they deserved better. Altogether, this is a desirable book; but it could have been a great deal better.
Previous page
