So, one has to discover the 'foreign' elements in national cultures in order to learn the rules of the game. The ultimate example is that of Don Quixote: the library full of books about chivalry, on which Cervantes expounds at the start of the novel ¾ one of the many starts ¾ establishes the coordinates by which to distinguish the 'grotesque' from the 'lyrical', representing an impossible synthesis between the dreams of the old hidalgo and the reality against which he finds himself in combat. For a translator, it will be a case of having successfully assimilated the gossamer voicings of Petrarch, without which it would be impossible to render Dulcinea, or captured the sense of caricature used by Horace in the Satires to succeed in distilling the hallowed ground of chivalry into that comical spectacle of the knightly vigil at the inn. But there are many more registers than these in Don Quixote: there is the curial language of the Jesuit preachers, derived from Saint John of the Cross and Saint Dominic, the rowdy tone of the picaresque novel, ideal for the portrayal of good-for-nothing rascals (modelled on Plautus), the parody of Arcadia with its syrupy turns of phrase recalling Achillini and the Marinists, and so forth. In the most drastic of assessments, there is almost nothing 'original' in Don Quixote, just as in Shakespeare's fairy tales it is an invisible Ovid who serenely directs the game of turning men into beasts, and beasts into men...

Similarly, relations between the arts mirror different varieties of logic from nation to nation. In Elizabethan England poetry proceeds from music: the Masque, with its blend of rhythm and prosody, is itself the shaper of those ready-made formulae whereby Myth comes down to Earth and the forests of Britain are peopled with nymphs. Blank verse uses an interplay of assonances and homoeoteleutons in which the effect of redundancy is based on variants of the semantic roots. In other words, British poetry ¾ classicist like no other ¾ takes up the latin conception of language as a perpetual semantic variation, rather than organizing the argument employing the artful strategy of burdens and symmetrical reiterations that characterize the Italian poetic tradition. And yet, the origin both of Shakespeare and of, say, Poliziano, is in Virgil and Ovid. In Poliziano however, classic models are mediated by Lorenzo Valla and by the grammatical categories of the humanists, whereas in English the 'monumental'aspect of the latin language, defined by Cicero as its concinnitas ('density') has come through unaffected.

Underlying this divisive dichotomy there is a historical process. Neo-latin languages derive from the assimilation of Greek culture bedded in a legal and commercial language that had two characteristics: 1) it was a product of artificial synthesis, built on a system of academic rules; 2) it reflected the needs of coexistence and the emergence of a life involving relations between different cultures and languages. Ductility therefore, or what we might better refer to as anthropocentricity, was not the special feature of Latin. Greek on the other hand was the language used by a modest city of fourteen thousand inhabitants ¾ the Athens of the fourth century ¾ which grew from a dialectic structuring of attitudes particular to the various arts and professions (including Philosophy and the Theatre). In Greek, then, one has the aorist, precursor of the German preterit and the English present continuous, which before being English was Saxon. In aoristic expression, what matters is the result: that circumstance whereby if event A does not come about, then event B cannot even be contemplated (Aristotle's tertium non datur...). In Latin, by contrast, the organization of meaning is never logical, but always spatiotemporal and therefore hierarchical. In nocturnal languages, the concept of 'near' and 'remote' as denotative of tense, of chronological sequence, does not even exist.

In certain cultures characterized by the struggle to achieve a recognizable national identity, use is made of foreign stylistic conventions to mark the introduction of a parody or the definition of particular historical and social contexts. In Russian literature, there is Tolstoy's instructive device of employing French dialogue in War and Peace to illustrate the isolation of the Russian nobility from that European revolution in which the story of Napoleon was unfolding with such shattering force. In Dostoevsky's Idiot, Polish is the language used to convey marginalization and diversity. The way Nastasia Filippovna makes fun of the Poles, imitating their way of speech, is a mark of her mean-mindedness. Likewise in The Inspector General, Gogol uses the dialects of provincial Russia as theatrical sets affording backdrops on which the bureaucratization of the System casts its sinister shadows. In German, the introduction of foreign expressions takes on a parodistic aspect. Jean Paul's parodying of the Latin used by lawyers and notaries, in the spirited testaments of the Flegejare, has a connotation at once sinister and merry. Heine has the Devil speak in eight-line rhyming stanzas ¾ an Italian Humanist. In the case of 'peripheral' writers like Mörike or Keller, by contrast, foreign language interpolations become the utterances of indolent poets and drifters enlightened by some long-lost popular wisdom. Mozart on the Way to Prague and Spiegel the Cat (the Keller original) are 'submerged' works of great importance in this regard.

In Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus, the guest called up by the protagonist Adrian Leverkühn, hallucinating in a syphilis-induced fever, assumes different national masks one after the other: from a Luther speaking counter-reformation Saxon to a French impresario whose only language is the jargon of vaudeville. Similarly, in Pasticciaccio by Gadda, the Roman and Venetian dialects become conduits for 'philosophical' conclusions (the gloomy thoughts of Inspector Ingravallo) on the intentionally inconsistent aspects of the case. This way of intensifying the 'rhetorical accent' of a character or of a situation by using foreign technicalisms reaches its zenith in the language of criticism and formal analysis. Terms like plot, pattern, cluster, in Literature, ground bass, Urlinie, continuo, in Music, or feedback and spin in Physics ¾ to mention just a few examples ¾ show how every national language, for reasons connected with historical contingencies or with the circulation of ideas, is able to dissociate itself in given disciplines from the normal context of will and sentiment and adopt 'neutral' modes of description, explanatory and denotative, serving to underscore the intended meaning when addressing different art fields. In Literature, this 'meta-language' can sometimes be the vehicle for exercises in alienation and parody (another example, in addition to those already mentioned, would be the linguistic melting-pot of a writer such as Sanguineti, who employs terms from Physics and Mathematics alongside archaisms and neologisms).