George Monteiro – ENGLISH AS SHE IS SPOKE (1855)

Surprising as it may seem, the 2002 Casa da Palavra edition of José da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino’s celebrated phrase-book, based on the book’s first edition published in 1855,¹  appears to be the first such edition ever published in Brazil. What is even harder to believe—the original was published in Paris—is that the book seems never to have been published in Portugal. The Brazilian edition under review also reproduces in English and in Portuguese translation the two prefaces, by Mark Twain and by James Millington, for independent English-language editions published on either side of the Atlantic in 1883. The 2002 McSweeney edition, in fact, is only the latest addition to a series of English-language editions over last one hundred and twenty years.²  
      Fonseca and Carolino’s inadvertent masterpiece has been called many things. “An Anglo-Portuguese phrasebook to end all phrasebooks.”³  “Perhaps the worst foreign phrasebook ever written” and a “linguistic train wreck.”⁴   A book of “miraculous stupidities.”⁵  “The most ludicrous foreign attempt ever made to teach our language.”⁶  Most often under the title English as She Is Spoke—a title shared by an English song published in 1880 and first employed for the Fonseca and Carolino volume in 1883—the mid-nineteenth-century Portuguese phrase-book has become a minor classic.⁷  Yet it is not as a book of instruction intended for those Portuguese who would learn English that it has survived—nay thrived—for the last century and a half, but rather it is as a work of accidental comedy and unintended humor. It is known that there was at least a second edition of José da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino’s guide following its first publication in Paris in 1855, but in the United Kingdom and the United States there have been numerous editions, as will be seen below.

 
      The curious story behind English as She Is Spoke is told by Leslie Shepard:

      It really began in 1836, when a certain José da Fonseca, a respected Portuguese lexicographer resident

      in Paris, published a little book entitled: 

            O Novo Guia da Conversação em frances e portuguez; ou escolha de dialogos familiares sôbre varios
            assuntos; precedido de um copioso vocabulario de nomes proprios, com a pronuncia figurada (etc.)
            Paris, 1836

      This work, offered to the students of Portugal and Brazil,” must have proved very useful, for it was
      reprinted in an enlarged edition in 1853 (a further edition of 1849 is reported from Rio de Janeiro, but I
      have no details). The idea of an English language version was perhaps a natural one, and it seems that
      da Fonseca [sic] became acquainted with a certain Pedro Carolino, who confidently undertook the task of
      producing an exact English edition. This bilingual work bears both names as authors:

                                                     

              O Novo Guia da Conversação em Portuguez e Ingles (etc.) em duas partes

                                                 _________

             The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English, in Two Parts

             por José da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino. Paris: J.-P. Aillaud, Monlon e Ca, 1855 (Two
             parts in one volume)

      This had the same format as the original Portuguese-French work, except that the columns of French
      words were replaced by somewhat approximate English equivalents with imitated pronounciation, the
      Portuguese original remaining the same.⁸  

As James Millington surmises in his introduction to the first English edition in 1883, it is more than likely that Pedro Carolino’s knowledge of English was limited to what he could learn, not from a Portuguese-English dictionary, but from a French-English dictionary.⁹  Even during José da Fonseca’s lifetime, the product of his collaborative effort with Carolino was widely deemed, in Shepard’s words, to be “a greater contribution to humor than linguistics,” and he authorized no second edition.¹⁰   Yet in 1869, less than three years after Fonseca’s death, Pedro Carolino brought out a new edition that he credited solely to himself. Actually printed in Paris, this edition is identified as having been published in Peking. As Shepard surmises, “it is possible that the surprising ‘Peking’ imprint was a blind to justify piracy, or it may be that Carolino’s edition was really distributed in the Far East and helped to perpetuate some of the unusual English that is still spoken there.”¹¹
(Pedro Carolino’s identity has not been discovered, though it is possible that, he was the Pedro Carolino Duarte who translated works by Cónego Schmid, as catalogued by the Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon, Portugal: Escola de histórias moraes (1858), Stema ou a joven turcaA joven Stephania (1857), A filha incognita (1857), A senhora de preto (1855),  (1861), and Berta ou o guarda-fogo (1861). which were published in Paris by V. J. P. Aillaud. José da Fonseca [1788–1866] was a reputable linguist, who, among other works, compiled the Novo Diccionario da lingua portugesa in 1836, translated Vinhola dos proprietarios from the French, and edited a Parisian edition of Camões’s Os Lusíadas in 1846.)

      Beginning in 1883, Fonseca and Carolino’s book has gone through a number of English-language editions. So far I have identified fourteen of them: 

1. English As She is Spoke, or, A Jest in Sober Earnest by José da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino, with an introduction by James Millington (London: Field and Tuer, S. C. Simpkin, Marshall and Co.; Hamilton, Adams and Co., 1883).
2. English As She is Spoke, or, A Jest in Sober Earnest, “Her Seconds Part”, with an introduction by James Millington (London: Field and Tuer, 1883).
3. English As She is Spoke: or, A Jest in Sober Earnest by José da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino, with an introduction by James Millington (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883).
4. The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English in Two Parts by Pedro Carolino. First American Edition, reprinted verbatim et literatim, with an introduction by Mark Twain (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1883).
5. English As She is Spoke: or, A Jest in Sober Earnest by José da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino (The Parchment Paper Series, No. 1) with an introduction by James Millington (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1884).
6. The New Guide of the Conversation in English, with an Introduction by Mark Twain (London and New York: George Routledge and Sons, 1884).
7. English As She is Spoke by Pedro Carolino, edited from the original edition by Paddy Kitchen, with an introduction by Paul Jennings and illustrations by Edward Bawden (London: Lion and Unicorn Press at the Royal College of Art, 1960). An edition of 200 copies.
8. The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English by Pedro Carolino (Halcyon Booklets VI), introduction by Mark Twain, with an Introduction by Brendan Gill to the Introduction by Mark Twain (New York: The Halcyon-Commonwealth Foundation, 1966). (An abridgement of the 1883 Osgood edition.)
9. English As She is Spoke: or A Jest in Sober Earnest, with an introduction by James Millington, and a new introduction by Leslie Shepard (Detroit: Gale Research, 1967).¹²  
10. English as She is Spoke (The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English) by Pedro Carolino (José da Fonseca), with an introduction by Mark Twain (New York: Dover Publications, 1969). (Abridgement of 1883 Osgood edition.) [Reprinted in 1974, 1985.]¹³ 
11. English As She is Spoke, or, A Jest in Sober Earnest by José da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino, with an introduction by James Millington (London: Hamish Hamilton/ St. George’s Press, 1970). A facsimile edition.¹⁴
12. English As She Is Spoke: or A Jest in Sober Earnest [by José da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino], introduction by James Millington (Whitstable, Kent, UK: Pryor Publications, 1982). (Facsimile of English As She Is Spoke: or A Jest in Sober Earnest [1883]) (Reprinted in 1999).
13. The New Guide to the Conversation in English by Pedro Carolino (Cloone, Leitrim, Ireland: Mermaid Turbulence, 2001).
14. English as She is Spoke: Selections from O Novo Guia da Conversação, em Portuguez e Inglez, em Duas Partes/ The New Guide of the Conversation, in Portuguese and English, in Two Parts by José da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino, edited by Paul Collins, No. 1 in the Collins Library ([Brooklyn, New York]: McSweeney’s Books, 2002). An edition of 1000 copies.

      In the United States it is Mark Twain who is most frequently associated with Fonseca and Carolino’s work. His interest in the book might well date from the late 1850s or early 1860s. In 1858 The Athenæum published a piece entitled “English Spoken,” in which it is remarked: “The English of this volume so strongly resembles the Pigeon patois that I fancy the authors must have studied our tongue in the school of Hong-Kong; otherwise it is difficult to conceive how they could have had the audacity to concoct such an unprovoked and atrocious libel upon the language of an ancient ally.”¹⁵  The piece caught the attention of the compilers of Littell’s Living Age, published in Boston, who reprinted an abridged version of the piece in November of the same year.¹⁶  Five years later Thomas Hood published a piece entitled “Portuguese English” in Browne’s Register for March 1863.¹⁷  

      In 1864 Mark Twain was working on The Californian. As this new journal’s assistant editor, he was at least aware of, if not responsible for, “Portuguese English” and “More Portuguese English,” two unsigned compendia of selections from the Portuguese phrase-book. These pieces appeared in the fifth and sixth issues of that journal. The first selection in The Californian, in the June 25th issue, is prefaced with these remarks:

      Ludicrous blunders are often as amusing as the most brilliant wit. Who has not laughed
      at the mistakes of foreigners trying to speak our language? We have been fortunate
      enough to discover a mine of just such blunders. It is a book entitled O Novo Guia da
      Conversação em Portuguez e Inglez (“New Guide to Conversation in Portuguese and

      English”) published in Paris in 1855. The main purpose is to assist Portuguese and
      Brazilians to learn English. In the preface the two authors, José da Fonseca and Pedro
      Carolino, say that they had examined many books published for the same purpose but
      all were full of imperfections, and typographical errors, and were written by persons
      who did not understand English; and their book is recommended for scrupulous
      exactness, typographical “correction” and adherence to the spirit of both languages. We
      quote the preface entire and then give some quotations from the English column; the
      Portuguese translation occupies a parallel column. In some places, we have thought it
      necessary to translate the English of Fonseca and Carolino into common English,
      putting our translation in brackets. In more places than one we have been unable to
      ascertain the meaning of a sentence until we had read the Portuguese.¹⁸  

      Although the Fonseca and Carolino volume continued to find an audience in the English-speaking world in ensuing years—there were pieces in journals such as Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1865 and 1872), Galaxy, London Examiner and Round Table (all in 1867), and All the Year Round (1870),¹⁹  the book itself did not appear in English until 1883, when an abridgement was brought out in London and a full version in Boston. James R. Osgood published the latter with a preface by Mark Twain, who was pleased enough with Osgood’s finished product to send copies of the book to friends and acquaintances. He even thought about sending a copy to Queen Victoria. After meeting Princess Louise (Queen Victoria’s daughter), he announced that he “very much want[ed] to send a little book to her Royal Highness—the famous Portuguese phrase book.”²⁰  

    
      The “famous” phrase book seems to have had a wide appeal—from lending its English title to one of the famous Haldeman-Julius Blue Books, a collection of pieces by Mark Twain (not including, oddly enough, his preface to the Osgood edition of the Carolino book) to a beautifully illustrated edition with a run of two hundred copies. Among its prominent readers was the wife of the historian and writer Henry Adams, Marian “Clover” Hooper Adams. Resolutely she begins a letter written in 1883: “I will take the day by the front hair, as my Portuguese grammar says,”²¹  referring to “Tomar a occasião pelos cabelos,” which Pedro Carolino translates as “Take the occasion for the hairs.”²²  She need explain no further, she knew, confident that her correspondent would understand the reference. Mrs. Adams’s “Portuguese grammar” was still well enough known when dozen or so years later the Chicago Chap-Book commented on the changes evident in magazine portraits of Stephen Crane, now flush with the success of his novel The Red Badge of Courage: “oh! which wonderful change! and who, the little boy for the pleasure what he gives us! as the Portuguese grammar might say.”²³

   
      A particularly pleasing reference occurs in “Recent Conversations in a Study,” a piece of dialogue between two artists, Belton and Mallett.” First published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1889 and reprinted in the same year in Littell’s Living Age, this sprightly piece is the work of William Wetmore Story, the Boston businessman turned sculptor whose biographer was the American novelist Henry James. 

      Bel. Did you ever see an extraordinary phrase-book in English and Portuguese published in Paris by José de Fonseca and Pedro Carolino?

      Mal. Yes, I have heard of it—a most amazing book. But why do you ask in this connection 

      Bel. Because, as we were speaking of proverbs, one or two in this book came into my mind—this, for instance: “A horse baared don’t look him the tooth”—for “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

      Mal. Amazing! It seems hardly possible that a book like this could have been written in earnest, and yet it plainly is. No one in joke could so travesty English. Nothing but ignorance could succeed in such wild blunders, just as no accomplished artist can draw with the naiveté of a child, however he may try. But it is difficult to believe that any two men could seriously have set their heads together to teach the Portuguese how to speak English after this fashion.

      Bel. Oh, the seriousness is not to be contested. These authors are, as Heine says, “as serious as a dead German.” And yet it is difficult, as you say, to believe it when you read such an anecdote as this: “One-eyed was laid against a man which had good eyes, that he saw better than him. The party was accepted. ‘I had gained over,’ said the one’eyed. ‘Why, i see you two eyes, and you not look me who one.’”
      

      Mal. What a magnificent series of unintelligible monosyllables! The astonishment is that we can understand this, though the meaning is plain despite the grammar and construction.²⁴ 

      As Mark Twain himself marveled, in the Century Magazine in 1887, everyone had “sampled ‘English As She is Spoke,’” along with “‘English As She is Wrote,’” the latter a concoction thrown together to cash in on the popularity of Fonseca and Carolino’s phrase book.²⁵  Billed as “A Companion to English as She is Spoke,” English As She is Wrote (Showing Curious ways in which the English Language may be made to convey Ideas or obscure them) was issued by D. Appleton and Company in New York as No. III in the Parchment Paper Series in 1884. And in “Humours of Dictionaries,” Cecil Headlam, writing in the London version of Literature magazine in 1899, followed a list of eccentricities from English and French dictionaries with this remark: “These things, indeed, are not so perfect of their kind as the ‘This girl have a beauty edge’ or the ‘Not so devil as he is black’ of Senhor Pedro Carolino’s ‘New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English.’”²⁶  

      With Mark Twain’s introduction as a guide, the poet Elizabeth Bishop drafted an essay on The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese. “On my desk I have a borrowed book (& now have had, for two years, since I cannot bear to part with it),” it starts out. “It is small, about 6 by five inches, the sad color of dried mustard, and on the cover it says, in black fanciful late nineteenth century lettering: THE NEW GUIDE OF THE CONVERSATION IN PORTUGUESE AND ENGLISH ‘with preface by Mark Twain.’” She proposed to offer a “sampling” of those things that promised to “secure,” as Mark Twain said, the little book’s “immortality.” In her mind she envisioned its author. “I somehow see Doutor Pedro Carolino as an elderly eccentric, living, perhaps in a small town where he tutors a few sons of the distinctly wealthier citizens,” she imagined. “Although it may be about 1830, he is still living in the 18th century; he wears steel-framed glasses, a pig-tail, and breeches—perhaps in the last pig-tail in the parish. He has always wanted to travel and has got as far as Oporto once. “ 

      As a sample, here is the second of the two dialogues chosen by Mark Twain to conclude his preface to the 1883 Osgood edition:

      DIALOGUE 17

      To inform one’self of a person.
     

      How is that gentilman who did speak by and by?

      Is a German.

      I did think him Englishman.

      He is of the Saxony side.

      He speak the french very well.

      Though he is German, he speak so much well italyan, french, spanish and english, that
      among the Italyans, they believe him Italyan, he speak the frenche as the Frenches
      himselves. The Spanishesmen believe him Spanishing, and the Englishes, Englisman. It
      is difficult to enjoy well so much several langages.

      To which, Mark Twain adds inimitably: “The last remark contains a general truth; but it ceases to be a truth when one contracts it and applies it to an individual—provided that individual is the author of this book, Senhor Pedro Carolino. I am sure I should not find it difficult ‘to well enjoy so much several langages’—or even a thousand of them—if he did the translating for me from the originals into his ostensible English.” ²⁷

      Remarkably, a century and a half after its first appearance, Pedro Carolino’s inadvertent and most unlikely classic, continues, unchanged, to find new readers and, quite impressively, new publishers.

---

[1]O
Novo Guia da Conversação em Portuguez e Inglez by José da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino,
introductions by James Millington and Mark Twain, preface by Marcelo de Paiva
Abreu. Rio de Janeiro: Casa da Palavra, 2002; José da Fonseca and Pedro
Carolino, O Novo Guia da Conversação, em
Portuguez e Inglez, em duas partes/ The New Guide of the Conversation, in
Portuguese and English, in Two Parts (Paris: J.-P., Aillaud, Monlon e C^a.,
1855). 

[2] José da Fonseca and
Pedro Carolino, English as She is Spoke:
Selections from O Novo Guia da Conversação, em Portuguez e Inglez, em Duas
Partes/ The New Guide of the Conversation, in Portuguese and English, in Two
Parts, ed. Paul Collins.
[Brooklyn, NY]: McSweeney’s Books, 2002. 

[3] Paul Jennings, Introduction to English
As She is Spoke by Pedro Carolino, edited from the original edition by
Paddy Kitchen, illustrations by Edward Bawden (London: Lion and Unicorn Press
at the Royal College of Art, 1960), p. 6. 

[4] McSweeney’s Books,
http://store.yahoo.com/mcsweeneysbooks/enassheisspo.html. 

[5] The New Guide of the
Conversation in Portuguese and English, with an introduction by Mark Twain
(Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1883), p. vi. 

[6] Quoted in Paiva Abreu, "Prefácio à Edição
Brasileira," in O Novo Guia, p. 9 n
1. His source is the copy of Fonseca and Carolino’s
original edition in 1855 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The sentence, undated
and unsigned, appears as an inscription. 

[7] "English as she is spoke," written by and composed by George Dance,
arranged by Jean
 Paulus (London: Francis Bros. and Day, 1880).
There is a copy in the British Library. 

[8] Leslie Shepard, "The Curious History of a Most Curious Book," in English As She is
Spoke: or A Jest in Sober Earnest (1883), introduction by James Millington (Detroit: Gale Research,
1967), unnumbered pages 2-3. 

[9] James Millington, "Introduction," to English As She Is Spoke, p. iii. 

[10] Shepard, "Curious History," unnumbered page 3. 

[11] Shepard, "Curious History," unnumbered page 4. 

[12] It was reprinted for "Friends of the Gale Research Co. on the
occasion of the 86t^h Annual Conference, American Library
Association, San Francisco, May, 1967." 

[13] There is evidence to indicate that, also in 1969, Dover brought out
the same text under the title Fractured
English As She Is Spoke. 

[14]See Richard Boston, "Pedro is valuable his weight’s gold," Manchester Guardian (April 8,  1972), p. 9.
[15] R. W. R., "English Spoken," Athenæum,
no. 1613 (Sept. 25, 1858), 400. 

[16] "English Spoken," Littel’s
Living Age, 59 (Nov. 6, 1858), 458. 

[17] See M. H. Spielman, "’English as She is Spoke,’" Literature (London), IV (May 20, 1899),
529. 

[18]⁸ "Portuguese English," The Californian, I, no. 5 (June 25,
1864, p. 5. It was followed by "More Portuguese English" in no. 6 (July 2,
1864), p. 5. 

[19] See A. H. Guernsey, "English for the Portuguese," Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 30 (Feb.
1865), 365-66; Edward Gould Buffum, "Parisian English," Galaxy, 4 (May 1867), 47-52; "English for the Portuguese," Littell’s Living Age, 94 (Sept. 14,
1867), 688-89; "English Broken to Bits," All
the Year Round, new series, no. 67, 348-52; and James Grant Wilson,
"English Translations," Harper’s New
Monthly Magazine, 45 (Oct. 1872), 769-70. 

[20] Shepard, "Curious History," unnumbered page 6. 

[21] The Letters of Mrs. Henry
Adams 1865-1883, edited by Ward Thoron (Boston: Little, Brown, 1936), p.
428. 

[22] Abreu, O Novo Guia, (2002), p. 197. 

[23] Chap-Book, I (April
1896), 496.  

[24] W. W. Story, "Recent Conversations in a Studio," Littell’s Living Age, 183 (Oct. 19,
1889, p. 166.
[25] Mark Twain, "English as She is Taught," Century Magazine, 33 (May 1887), 932-36. This essay was later
issued by the Mutual Book Company of Boston, Massachusetts, as English as She is Taught by Mark Twain
with Biographical Sketch of Author by Matthew Irving Lans (1900). 

[26] Cecil Headlam, "Humours of Dictionaries," Literature (London), IV (May 13, 1899), 497. 

[27] Mark Twain, Introduction, in Abreu, O Novo Guia, p. 27.

George Monteiro, Professor Emeritus of English and of Portuguese Studies at Brown University, has interests in the areas of English-language and Portuguese-language literature and culture. He is the author of The Coffee Exchange and Double Weaver’s Knot, books of poetry. Among his other publications are critical studies of Henry James, Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Luis de Camões, and Fernando Pessoa, as well as translations of the poetry of Jorge de Sena, Miguel Torga, Pedro da Silveira, and Fernando Pessoa, and the prose of José Rodrigues Miguéis and José Saramago. He and his wife make their home in Connecticut.