Ages ago, I acquired two recordings that inspire a1
feeling of weirdness whenever I listen to them, or even think
about them. Both are performances of the great Lerner and
Loewe musical My Fair Lady in languages other than English.4
Each of them has a special twist of irony. At the core of the
original story is how the coarse Cockney girl Liza Doolittle is
as a challenge, taken in by the insufferably smug but utterly7
enthralled professor Henry Higgins, and through painful
exercises — “The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain” —
acquires such an impeccably upper-class Oxbridge way of10
speaking English that at her (and his) ultimate test, a posh ball
that she attends incognito, drifting among the cream of British
society, the keenest linguistic sleuth in the land dances with13
this mysterious beauty and in the end declares her too good to
be true, and hence not English elite at all, but Hungarian!
The whole idea of de-anglicizing this story strikes me16
as really nutty — and yet there they are, those recordings on
my shelf. And so, on what wet plains do those heavy,
drenching rains mainly fall, in Mi Bella Dama? And in the19
Hungarian version, to what elite nationality is the too-good
to-be-true unrecognized Cockney girl assigned? Of course, the
truly strange part in both cases is that the whole time she is22
speaking Spanish or Hungarian, the charade is maintained that
she is actually speaking English, and, unlike most plays or
movies where one language is made to pass for another, the25
linguistic medium here is not just an incidental fact, but the
very crux of the entire plot. I suppose the suspension of
disbelief involved is no more strained than our willingness to28
accept as “reality” a story that is occasionally interrupted by
the actors’ breaking into lyrical song, and then, as suddenly as
it started, the singing is over and apparent normalcy resumes31
on stage.
Douglas R. Hofstadter. Le ton beau de Marot: in praise of the music of
language. New York: Basic Books, 1997, p. 198 (adapted).