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Article: "You don't know the Italian language well enough": the bilingual dialogue of A Farewell to Arms.
- Article from:
- The Hemingway Review
- Article date:
- September 22, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Ernest Hemingway Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway's representation of the inherent gap between Italian-speakers and English-speakers mirrors the inevitable confusions of war. He needed to balance contradictory challenges, representing members of the Italian Army speaking to each other as authentically as possible--in Italian--while still allowing the novel to be understood by an English-speaking readership. In an extension of his decade-old practice in representing the Italian language in his prose, and a precursor of his more acclaimed technique with Spanish in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway captures this ethnic and linguistic--uncertainty by manipulating word choice, tense, grammar, ...