Hemingway’s portrayal of Spanish in For Whom the Bell Tolls
While living in Guatemala, I re-read the novel and realized why the dialogue seemed strange.
The first time I read Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls was in the United States. I had the same reaction as most people who read the novel: The language of the dialogue seems odd. The use of archaic English language and the seemingly awkward arrangement of the words in sentences made the language of the novel sound strange to me.
The next time I read the novel I was living in Guatemala, where I spent most of my time studying Spanish. By focusing on the language of the novel at the same time as studying the Spanish language, I recognized what might have been Hemingway’s goal: writing the language to sound strange, or better yet, foreign.
To constantly remind the reader that the Spanish language is being spoken for the majority of the text that is written in English, the novel distinguishes between the English of the internal thoughts of Robert Jordan–the American protagonist in Spain–and the Spanish of the dialogue. The novel portrays a foreign language through the sentence structure and the choice of vocabulary. Furthermore, the reader is able to experience the foreign language without knowing the language because of the author’s use of Spanish as the basis of his written English.
A simple example of this is when Robert asks Anselmo, “How are you called?” Instead of asking him, “What is your name?” the text is more akin to the Spanish “Comó se llama?” By using the verb “called,” Hemingway bases the question on the Spanish use of “llamar,” which means “to call.”
Hemingway manipulates syntax and vocabulary to convey the impression that the characters are speaking Spanish. His choice of vocabulary in order to portray Spanish is seen, for example, when one character says, “Those who commence the attack are above.” Instead of using words more commonly used in English like “start” or “begin,” the text is “commence.” In this way, the dialogue better portrays Spanish by using the verb more regularly used in Spanish: “comenzar.”
The novel gives a foreign feel to written English in order to allow the English-speaking reader to enter into a world where another language is spoken. Though some critics, particularly Allen Josephs, have accused Hemingway of “excessive sloppiness” in his replication of Spanish, Hemingway had no intention of language replication. Josephs says that the failure to replicate the language properly makes the reader “unable...to take the novel seriously.” However, the intention of Hemingway was not to create a language identical to Spanish, but instead to create a feeling for the English-speaking reader by which they can enter into the world of the Spanish Civil War without struggling to understand what is written. An examination of the novel’s choice of words shows that the novel is intended to allow the reader to feel the presence of another country and culture without feeling separated from that place by difficult language restrictions.
Hemingway’s mimicking of a language–or the feel for a language–comes as no surprise given his admiration for Mark Twain’s ability to do the same. Green Hills of Africa features Hemingway himself as a character. In the novel, character Hemingway says, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn...[It’s] the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that.” For Twain, the goal is for the reader to fully enter into the world of Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist about twenty years before his novel was published. Hemingway’s novel has similar intentions: for the American reader to enter fully into a Spanish speaking world.
However, Hemingway was faced with two challenges that do not concern Twain’s work. First, the language Hemingway was working with is far from that spoken in America; the dialogue in For Whom the Bell Tolls is not merely a matter of different dialects. Additionally, Hemingway faced his desire to express unity. For Whom the Bell Tolls is a work that attempts to show connection amongst people, so it is important that the novel’s portrayal of Spanish not be such that it would cause the English-speaking reader to stumble and feel overly separated from the events taking place in a country across an ocean.
The novel’s title is borrowed from John Donne’s “Meditation 17.” Unlike other Hemingway heroes, Robert believes that “no man is an island” (Donne 1). He seeks unity with the people he is with and does not separate himself from others. Because of the story's theme of unity, it is important to Hemingway that the reader not be too separated from the characters by language barriers. However, he also wishes to portray the foreign language spoken by the characters, so he manipulates English in order to create a new dialect.
In addition to the sentence structure, Hemingway’s use of archaic language. When Spanish is being spoken, the characters use words like “thy,” “thee,” “hast,” “thou”, and “art.” A look at when these words are spoken shows that this is not used in an effort to create any sort of literal translation from the Spanish “usted” versus “tú,” as some critics have suggested. Instead, it is a way to give the English-speaking reader a feeling of being in a different place and culture; yet, they are words that the English reader would recognize and be able to understand. In other words, when this sort of language is used the reader is jolted enough to feel a sense of other worldliness, but not so much that it completely separates the reader from the Spanish characters.
To further convey that Spanish is being spoken, Hemingway peppers Spanish words throughout the written English. These words, though, do not throw the English reader off because their meaning is either clear based on the context or they are cognates. One word written only in Spanish is “máquina.” This word is not translated or glossed because it is clear to the English reader that this is referring to a machine gun, particularly given the descriptions of what is done with the máquina, how the máquina is carried, and mention of how much ammunition they have for the máquina.
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When Spanish is written other times, and it is not clear what it means, Hemingway glosses it. For example, the text reads, “No me gusta estar solo...I do not like to be alone.”
Mark Twain is hailed by critics such as Susan Tamasi as “one of the most prolific writers of literary dialect.” His works have been studied for both their content and structure of language. Just as Twain was successful in bringing readers into the world of the South, so too does Hemingway bring his readers into the Spanish world in For Whom the Bell Tolls.