"I admit that the ass of Balaam did spoken, but he not did kicks"

[English as She Is Spoke] The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English in Two Parts

Twain, Mark (introduction); Carolino, Pedro

Publication: Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1883. First US edition.

Notes: Fonseca and Carolino’s inadvertent masterpiece has been called many things... "Perhaps the worst foreign phrasebook ever written" ... A book of "miraculous stupidities." "The most ludicrous foreign attempt ever made to teach our language." Most often under the title English as She Is Spoke...the mid-nineteenth-century Portuguese phrasebook has become a minor classic. Yet it is not as a book of instruction intended for those Portuguese who would learn English that it has survived—nay thrived—for the last century and a half, but rather it is as a work of accidental comedy and unintended humor."—George Monteiro.

The New Guide to Conversation began as an 1836 French-Portuguese phrasebook by José da Fonseca; in 1855, Pedro Carolino, with only a limited grasp of English, translated the French text to make an English-Portuguese phrase book. In succeeding years, excerpts made the rounds of English-language magazines until in 1883, a London publisher reprinted the book under the title, English As She Is Spoke, and within a year, six editions appeared (the book was not protected by copyright).

This is apparently the first American edition (published in mid-1883), and the first edition with an introduction by Mark Twain. For more information, see BAL 3412 and George Monteiro, English as She Is Spoke: 150 Years of a Classic, Luso-Brazilian Review, Volume 41, Number 1, 2004.

Edition + Condition: First American edition and first edition with the Twain preface (first printing). A very good copy in somewhat scuffed thin cloth-covered boards; the cloth is beginning to fray at the top of the spine (there was also a simultaneous paperback version). Uncommon.

Item No: #362701

Price: $500