ABSTRACT
Robert Browning's words recognise a peculiarity in the distant language: poised on the borders of our linguistic competence, they can just about be made sense of according to the conventions of English writing, but at the same time they bear the marks of the foreign language which lies behind. The imagined translations enacted by the monologues edge their way into questions of cultural and linguistic identity from a different angle than the writing in translationese. Browning's translationese tables a conundrum similar to but distinguishable from that posed by proper names. Translationese is a different kind of translation, or 'translation', than the reiteration of a proper name: it creates boundaries between languages by the very act of bridging them. 'Interlingua' is supposed to override linguistic difference, aiming to recreate the pre-Babelic world tongue; translationese, in contrast, registers the difficulty of carrying meanings from one language to another.
