"Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek"
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Fitzgerald’s sentence performs its own modesty while quietly staking a claim: he was inside French, not merely peering at it through the glass of grammar. The parenthetical hedges - "however imperfectly" - are almost tactical. They lower the emotional temperature, inviting trust, while the rest of the line lays out a formidable intimacy: understood, spoke, read "in great quantities". He’s describing competence the way an old-school scholar might describe wealth: apologetically, as if it would be gauche to sound certain.
The real drama sits in his comparison. Latin and Greek are framed as languages of formal encounter, the kind you parse, translate, and reverence. French is positioned as lived practice, a medium you can half-messily inhabit and still have it change you. That difference matters for Fitzgerald because his career was built on the razor’s edge between classical exactitude and modern voice. If you can speak a language, you can mis-speak it, joke in it, misunderstand it in productive ways. That messiness is often where literary style is born.
The syntax mirrors the thought: long, qualifying, self-correcting, like someone thinking aloud in a study lined with books. It also signals a mid-century intellectual culture where French was the closest thing Anglophone writers had to a contemporary cosmopolitan passport, while Greek and Latin remained the gatekept credentials. Fitzgerald’s subtext: my relationship to French was not just academic; it was a rehearsed, daily instrument - and that changed the kind of reading, and translation, I could do.
The real drama sits in his comparison. Latin and Greek are framed as languages of formal encounter, the kind you parse, translate, and reverence. French is positioned as lived practice, a medium you can half-messily inhabit and still have it change you. That difference matters for Fitzgerald because his career was built on the razor’s edge between classical exactitude and modern voice. If you can speak a language, you can mis-speak it, joke in it, misunderstand it in productive ways. That messiness is often where literary style is born.
The syntax mirrors the thought: long, qualifying, self-correcting, like someone thinking aloud in a study lined with books. It also signals a mid-century intellectual culture where French was the closest thing Anglophone writers had to a contemporary cosmopolitan passport, while Greek and Latin remained the gatekept credentials. Fitzgerald’s subtext: my relationship to French was not just academic; it was a rehearsed, daily instrument - and that changed the kind of reading, and translation, I could do.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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