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I’ve always found the 19th-century phrasebook English as She is Spoke irresistibly funny, but I had only ever seen the version without the Portuguese original. It was first published in 1855 as The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English by Jose da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino. The presumption was that they used a Portuguese-French phrasebook and a French-English dictionary. The book I knew until this week was the ‘fourth edition’ published in 1884 by Field and Tuer at the Leadenhall Presse, as an intentionally funny exercise. It included only selections from the thematic word-lists provided by the original, so that under ‘Fishes and shell-fishes’, for example, we find: ‘Calamary, Dorado, A sorte of fish, Hedge hog, Large lobster, Snail, Wolf, Torpedo and Sea-calf.’ I had presumed that ‘a sort of fish’, for example, was a dictionary entry for some named species. But then I was given an edition of The New Guide republished in 2002 by McSweeney’s Books with the Portuguese originals included. From that I learnt that a sort of fish rendered peixe-caldeira, which is, I think, ‘fish-stew’. Hedge hog is no other than ourico-do-mar, in English ‘sea urchin’; the roes being eaten with lemon juice in Portugal. The fish translated wolf is in the Portuguese original solho, which is ‘flounder’. I don’t know how wolf came into it, but loup de mer in French is what fish-shops like to call ‘rock-salmon’, a kind of catfish. It’s the devil’s own business to translate fish.
Another clue to unravelling The New Guide came when I saw a revised version of the 2002 edition. This included information supplied by an American philologist, Alex McBride, that Carolino had quietly cannibalised Guide de la Conversation Française et Anglaise published by Fonseca in 1837. Fonseca’s book had been of a perfectly respectable quality, so it is difficult to know how Carolino managed to translate the Portuguese Deitar perolas a porcos as ‘To make paps for the cats’ when Fonseca would have given ‘Cast pearls before swine’. The cats’ paps come in the section Carolino headed ‘Idiotisms and proverbs’. The most abidingly fascinating of these is the phrase ‘To craunch the marmoset’. It is said to translate the Portuguese Esperar horas e horas. What could the French intermediate phrase be? Can anyone help?
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