Conrad’s Languages

Abstract

Conrad’s mother tongue was, of course, Polish; but towards the end of his life, and after long residence in England, married to an English wife, and with largely English-speaking friends, his Polish seems to have deteriorated. Najder points out that, in commenting on an indifferent Polish translation of his story ‘II Conde’, Conrad showed a sense of Polish style that was ‘in general uneven and incomplete’. He adds that Conrad’s few letters in Polish from his later years show a deterioration of syntactical control, and that ‘whenever he wanted to express a more complex idea, he resorted to French expressions’.

… when one considers his personal history, the English of his books is something like a miracle (George Gissing to Edward Clodd, 30 November 1902).

I’ve been so cried up of late as a sort of freak, an amazing bloody foreigner writing in English …(Conrad to Edward Garnett, 4 October 1907).