“Humour is the first gift to perish in a foreign language.”
-- from Virginia Woolf's essay "On not knowing Greek", 1925.
It is vain and foolish to talk of "knowing Greek", ... since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition. ... There is this important problem: Where are we to laugh in reading Greek? There is a passage in the Odyssey where laughter begins to steal upon us, but if Homer were looking, we should probably think it better to control our merriment. To laugh instantly, it is almost necessary ... to laugh in English.
Humour, after all, is closely bound up with a sense of the body. When we laugh at the humour of Wycherley, we are laughing with the body of that burly rustic who was our common ancestor on the village green. The French, the Italians, the Americans, who derive physically from so different a stock, pause, as we pause in reading Homer, to make sure that they are laughing in the right place, and the pause is fatal. Thus humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue, and ...when we turn from Greek to English literature it seems, after a long silence, as if our great age were ushered in by a burst of laughter.
FWIW, the original quote related to reading theatrical text out loud.
The first time I thought that Much Ado About Nothing was funny, was when I heard it spoken in the proper way. Up to then, I had only read it to myself (out loud) or had to read to me by school teachers (who were often saved by the bell). It was a revelation to me that Shakespearean "comedies" were actually meant to be funny. No doubt I'm unable to appreciate all of the humour contained in it (e.g. I seldom find puns funny if they have to be explained to me first, and puns are most funny when they are unexpected).
[Edited at 2020-01-26 14:32 GMT]
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