In one not often acknowledged way P.G. Wodehouse is an especially interesting writer for discussion in a context of translationtheory: he writes English like a non-native. He assumes, that is, a freedom to pick out from any part of the English word-hoard just those words, phrases, or registers which serve his precise and immediate purposes. English writers in general do not do this: they work within some narrower parole, obedient or perhaps resistant to a specific social or educational conditioning. In any comparison with him, then, the often-praised ironic poise of an Evelyn Waugh or an Anthony Powell is bound to suffer, the former emerging as coarse and coercive, the latter as lymphatic and reedy. In Wodehouse the energies stem less directly from the pressures and dilemmas of class and cultural authority, and much more from the language at large, in its capacity as the cognitive store of these and many other paradoxes of experience. He stands out in such contrasts as one of the great twentieth-century masters of mannered English prose – his only rival, perhaps, that authentically non-native speaker, Vladimir Nabokov.
