A humorous bilingual book about the difficulties of navigating a language not one’s own, An Irishman’s Difficulties with the Dutch Language tells the tale of an Irish academic’s travels in the Netherlands. Although he is very confident with his dictionary and phrasebook, none of his attempts to converse in Dutch go quite the way he would like. Unfortunately there are no footnotes or translations featured, so a reader must be conversant in both English and Dutch to get a full picture of the humor within:
“I witnessed a street dispute one evening. It was about herring, I think, but really couldn’t follow the one thousandth part of that vigorous debate. Picturesque idioms were bandied to and fro; happily no harm was done. One could not help noticing that the Grammar-book was right. Jij and jou were freely employed, and the disputants did not once address each other as U or UEdele. On that occasion there was another epithet or pronoun or interjection, which none of my previous studies had at all prepared me for. Turning it up in the dictionary as well as I could, I learnt that it might be translated by ‘lightning,’ and that it was an ordinary noun. Next day I enquired of Enderby if the word for lightning could ever be employed as an interrogative particle or a pronoun. He was horrified and said ‘Please don’t be vulgar.’” (p.35)
- Title: An Irishman’s Difficulties with the Dutch Language
- Author: Cuey-na-Gael
- Publisher: M. Bredée’s Boekh
- Place: Rotterdam, Netherlands
- Year: 1928
- Edition: 8th Edition
- Length: 125pp
- Dimensions: 6” x 8.25” x 0.75”
- Condition: Hardcover, original khaki cloth-covered boards are in good condition—slightly worn about the edges, spine significantly tanned and soiled, and with a small amount writing at the top of the front cover in pencil. The front cover bears a striking illustration of an Irishman and a Dutch woman conversing, engraved and printed in black, white, and orange ink. The binding is tight. No pages are missing. The endpapers are very tanned. The main text block is generally clean but dotted with foxing marks. There are no folds, tears, or extraneous marks.