Literature – Monsieur Miller

2022-12-292022-12-29

La rivière à l’envers: A pre-teen trek

La rivière à l’envers, by Jean-Claude Mourlevat, is a two-volume fantasy series published in 2000 and 2002 and aimed at a pre-teen or early-teen audience. In the first volume (named Tomek), an exotic teenager named Hannah walks into a small village general store and asks Tomek, the teen behind the counter, if he happens to have any water drawn from the river Qjar. Tomek’s store has nearly everything imaginable, but he’s never heard of Qjar and has no water from it. Hannah admits it was a long shot, buys a candy stick for one sou, and leaves. In the days that follow, Tomek can’t get Hannah off his mind, so eventually seeks out the village elder to get information on this river. The elder has heard only rumors of Qjar, located in some magical land far away, a land full of incomparable people, plants and animals. The river Qjar has two distinctive properties: it runs backwards, from the ocean to the mountain, and its waters can cure any illness. Tomek decides to leave his village and go in search of Hannah and the Qjar river. His fig leaf reason? One sou is far too much to pay for a candy stick.

We get to follow Tomek on his 200 page trek across these mythical lands, meeting all the strange flora, fauna, and people who live there as well as various episodic characters who help Tomek on his quest. We pass with Tomek through La forêt de l’oubli, entry into which causes a person to be temporarily forgotten by all others. We follow him through a vast meadow of flowers, one of which issues a perfume that causes people to fall into a long-term sleep from which one can be awakened only by a magic phrase – but each victim’s rousing words are different. The neighboring community of perfume makers routinely hosts sleeping guests for months on end while round-the-clock shifts of volunteers read aloud to them from a vast library in hopes of finding just the right words (Tomek’s were «sous le ventre du crocodile»). And we follow Tomek as he takes to the sea and accidentally stumbles into L’île inexistante, a place shrouded in fog and always-in-flowing tides. Boats that arrive can never escape again … unless they can answer a riddle that Tomek divines at the last moment.

It’s all kid stuff, and Tomek overcomes each obstacle with relatively little difficulty or tension. This is a storybook more than a thriller. It does paint a luxurious picture of each new landscape and fantastical ecosystem, which made it a great source of new vocabulary words for me. I find it rather curious that there are so many unfamiliar words, as they are presumably in the working receptive vocabulary of a 10 or 11 year old child. Here’s a collection of some of these words, without definitions.

se dégourdir
sucre d’orge
un bocal
laisser en plan
une échoppe
s’asseoir en tailleur
friandise
mâchouiller
dompter
un passe-montagne
la loutre
grappiller
badaglang
rapiécés
borgne
un miche de pain
rassasier
joncher
pardessus
queue leu leu
bancals

élancée
brinquebaler
bossus
une brassée
la croupe
la moelle
se dandiner
couche de fortune
balluchon
à votre guise
une passerine
sortilège
un moineau
piler
rondelette
rondeur
rêvasser
des vivats
en apparat
la liesse
jeu d’adresse
un pantin

se morfondre
jouer aux petits chevaux
drôles de pitres
à la dérive
aux embruns
pagnes
une étreinte
juteu
une natte
rebrousser
une brouette
un coup de jarret
un pitre
à qui mieux mieux
une pagaie
un lamantin
accroupi
barboter
s’ébrouer
escarpé
grassouillet

With a few chapters to go, Tomek does find Hannah, who has somehow acquired a giant living panda-bear pet. Together, they eventually find the headwaters of the Qjar with next to no drama. There’s no particular significance to the river’s flowing backwards, and they harvest a few drops of water so that Hannah can bring it home to heal … her pet songbird who’s really a princess trapped in a bird’s body. A bit random, but perhaps the author ran out of good ideas.

Mourlevat seems to have recognized that in the first-volume Hannah was little more than a motivating prop for Tomek’s story. So he wrote a second volume (named Hannah) in which a now elderly Hannah tells us all the adventures she was having on her own while Tomek was following her trail. A complete life with a dessert caravan that turns out to have been all a dream. A case of mistaken identity with a princess who will be kidnapped should she ever see her reflection. A trek across a mountain into a long-abandoned ghost-town with a centenarian. I found these adventures distinctly flatter and paler than Tomek’s, which reinforces my theory that the author ran out of good ideas after the first 150 pages of Tomek. I’m guessing he decided to write this sequel either for economic reasons or to try to make up for having relegated Hannah to second-class protagonist status in the first volume. Either way, the most valuable thing I got from Hannah was another clutch of vocabulary words. Here are some:

la rade
une marmite
déguerpi
détalé
menton en galoche
frayé
les hardes
prélasser
les bas

l’oseille (f)
ronchonner
ma dodue
une apparat
démordir
bougon
être en cheville avec
un psyché

le taillis
la rocaille
pisé
déglingué
rapiécée
ébréché
comme un coup de trique
dégrisé
un réduit

On the whole, I’m happy I read these 400 pages. It was light reading that went quickly, and it was good to reinforce a subdomain of outdoor vocabulary that I don’t often encounter in plays or news stories. Unremarkable, but unregretted.

2022-10-03

Odds and Ends

I’ve read / watched to a lot of excellent English language books / movies / television. I’ve also consumed a lot of ordinary stuff, and more than my fair share of absolute junk: insipid novels, low-brow sitcoms, cringeworthy comic books or comic-book movies. In French, though, I’ve mostly read things recommended to me by someone, and that’s mostly good stuff. The past couple weeks, though, I’ve strayed from the recommendations path a bit, with the predictable result that the stuff I’ve consumed has … a range of quality. But it’s all part of expanding my cultural literacy, so it’s all good.

Le viandier de Polpette: L’ail des ours

Le viandier de Polpette is a quirky but charming volume of bandes desinées by Julien Neel and Olivier Milhaud. I picked it off the shelf of the French Library completely at random. It features Polpette, a former army cook who now runs the kitchen for the adult son of a nobleman in their mountain redoubt, Le Coq Vert. The book interleaves lovingly presented country French recipes with a vague plot about the Count’s father coming to visit. There’s a lot of running gags among the other denizens of the Coq Vert, including a retired British colonel and a stereotypical French proletariat. And there’s also a firebrand of a young woman who walks around with an entourage of unleashed pet ferrets. Oh, somewhere in there we encounter the rather large titular animal who may or may not be a bear, and who seems to have no relationship to garlic. The overall effect is off-beat, shall we say.

I did pick up a number of vocabulary words from this book:

capiteux – se dit d’un vin, d’un alcool qui monte à la tête, d’un parfum très fort.
la minerai – roche présentant une concentration élevée minéraux utiles (si inutiles, on l’appelle la gangue).
châtelain – propriétaire d’un château.
chaland (vieux) – celui qui achète habituellement chez un même marchand.
gargote (f) – restaurant où l’on mange à bas prix une mauvaise nourriture.
amenuiser – rendre quelque chose plus fiable, moins important. réduire, diminuer. Cf la menuiserie, «amenuiser une planche».
la guigne – (familier) malchance persistante; déveine, poisse. Avoir de la guigne.
ça barde – (populare) cela devient dangereux, en parlant d’une action; cela devient violent, en parlant d’une discussion.
être givré – (familier) être fou.
couver – entourer quelqu’un de soins attentifs et excessifs de tendresse.
d’ores et déjà – dès maintenant.
jaja – (populaire) vin rouge.
toupet – (familier) audace, effronterie. «Quel toupet !»
un encas – repas léger préparé pour être servi en cas de besoin.
un fantassin – militaire de l’infanterie.

Balle Perdue

The movie Balle Perdue (2020) is available on Netflix, and is in French, so I watched it. I haven’t seen any films from the Fast and Furious franchise, but I imagine they are similar. There’s a great deal of high speed car chases, various souped up vehicles with enhancements like hardened front grills, turbo thrusters, and sharpened forklift attachments. Inevitably, most of the cars crash, with the exception of our hero’s. It endures one non-fatal collision after another, yet somehow not only keeps functioning, it magically appears without dents or scapes just seconds later during the same chase. Not a great job of film editing. There’s also a lot of shooting, as there’s a lot of (corrupt) police officers involved. The plot, such as it is, involves a brilliant but wayward young car mechanic who enhances cars for a criminal gang, gets arrested and sent to jail, but is then paroled under the sponsorship of a police captain who wants his own fleet of enhanced police cruisers to catch the bad guys.

This works out great, until the police captain figures out too many bad guys are still getting away, and starts to suspect a leak in his department. Naturally, this being a French police movie, large parts of the brigade are corrupt and in the pay of the drug gangs. The police captain is murdered by his lieutenant, who then pins the crime on the wunder-mechanic, who flees and then has to clear his name and expose the corruption. This gives the film an excuse for lots of gun battles and dead bodies in addition to the high-speed car chases.

Not a lot of vocabulary here, but always good to hear rough accents and street language.

Skidamarink

Guillaume Musso is one of the best-selling French authors of the 21st century. He’s written over twenty books, primarily mysteries and thrillers, and sells more than a million copies a year. His first novel, entitled Skidamarink, appeared in 2001 and made very little impression. It sold a few thousand copies and got tepid reviews before going out of print. But it was re-published in 2020 with a new forward by the author, and was subsequently recorded as an audio-book. This is how I came to listen to it — I browsed Audible.com for French mysteries, saw this as a recent publication, looked up the author and found he was widely celebrated in French popular literature and clicked “buy”. Only when I listened to the forward did I learn that it was Musso’s first book and not a recent one.

The forward also had an interesting bit about the book’s place in the Musso canon. Apparently, Musso doesn’t think much of it: it was a first novel, he wrote it while he was teaching school, his editor for the book was his mother. But when his later works became popular, fans went looking for this early work. Prices for used copies skyrocketed on auction sites, and low-quality pirated scans circulated on the web. Musso writes that he held off from republishing the work because he thought he’d revise it first, but then kept prioritizing new works. So in 2020, he finally greenlighted the re-issuance of the book with its original text. In the forward, he notes “the faults in its quality, but also the quality of its faults.” He also notes the similarities with Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, but points out that his book was published two years before Brown’s blockbuster.

Skidamarink book isn’t terrible, but it’s pretty shoddy. The mystery is shoddy somebody stole the Mona Lisa painting, cut it into pieces, and sent them to four seemingly unconnected people. The thief also sent literary quotes from Victor Hugo, John Dunne, and the like and summoned the four civilians to a secret meeting in an Italian church. Subsequent events convince the four that their lives are in danger if they don’t work together to decipher a series of cryptic criminal threats that the thief issues through the media, like murdering prominent business leaders and poisoning gated communities. The whole thing is a bit too rococo and (as Musso writes in the forward) romanesque for my tastes.

But the audio book is in French, which is really all it promised to be. Listening is a bit of a challenge, not because of the clichéd expressions, but because of the narrators unfamiliar accents, especially as he tries to differentiate three Americain characters and one Italian.

Glenn, naissance d’un prodige

Glenn Gould was a Canadian classical pianist who lived from 1932 to 1982, dying of a stroke at the age of 50. His 1956 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations was one of the best-selling classical recordings of all time. He had an unusual style, crouching over the keyboard as he played and humming audibly to himself. After a short concertizing career as a young artist, he retreated to the studio where he made dozens of recordings right up to his death. He was a pop icon and a bit eccentric, but recorded interviews make it clear he was quite intelligent and could speak affably about his life and his music without difficulty.

I point this out because Ivan Calbérac’s play Glenn, naissance d’un prodige, paints the title character as far more eccentric, to the point of being paranoid and incoherent. Perhaps Gould was that way in private or in down periods, but there’s enough public footage and interview recordings of him being fairly normal that the play’s presentation rings hollow. The script is otherwise undistinguished, presenting a sequence of biographical sketches that offer little beyond the biography section of his Wikipedia page. There’s a homey portrayal of Glenn’s father, and a depiction of Glenn’s mother as both narcissistic and obsessive, but given the distorted presentation of Gould himself I put little stock in these as accurate characterizations of his parents.

But the play was featured in the September 2022 issue of L’avant-scène théâtre, so I read it. I noted several unfamiliar vocabulary words as I went, which are always valuable to me:

un brochet: poisson ésocidé des eaux douces [pike en anglais].
écueil (m): (litéraire) tout ce qui fait obstacle, met en péril; danger, piège. Litéralement, une tête de roche couverte par moins de 20 m d’eau.
espiègle: personne vive; malicieuse mais sans méchanceté. De Till Eulenspiegel. espièglerie.
voilage (m): Grand rideau de fenêtre en voile.
limace (f): mollusque pulmoné terrestre sans coquille externe [slug en anglais].
décoifant: surprenant; dérangeant les cheveux de quelqu’un.
dithyrambique: très élogieux, d’un enthousiasme emphatique, outré. Dithyrambe – cantique consacré à Dionysus.
clavecin (m): instrument de musique à cordes pincées et à clavier.
parti pris: opinion audacieux; idée fixe a priori.
fêlure (f): fracture incomplète d’un os.
luxation (f): déplacement des 2 extrémités osseuses d’une articulation.
convier: inviter
accaparer: occuper exclusivement quelqu’un, lui prendre tout son temps; absorber.
larguer: abandonner quelqu’un, quelque chose; s’en débarrasser.
foutoir (m): (populaire) endroit où règne un désordre extrême.
fiston (m): mot d’affection adressé à son fils ou à un jeune garçon [kiddo en anglais].

Other than that, I’ve been doing French crosswords and collecting vocabulary words from children’s books. But this post is long enough, so I’ll write about that in an upcoming article.

2022-09-252022-09-25

Les Travailleurs de la Mer, Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo is a giant of French literature, whose mark on the language is rivaled perhaps only by Molière. He was also politically active during the heart of the 19th century, a period I know shamefully little about. Hugo is best known today, especially among Americans, for his two novels Notre Dame de Paris (1831) and Les Misérables (1862), each of which has been adapted for the stage and screen many times.

The 30 year gap between these two masterpieces has three explanations. First, during the 1800’s novels were not considered the preeminent literary form. They shared the stage, as it were, with theater and, to a lesser extent, essays. The many modern French prizes for best novel (from Prix Goncourt on down) were originally marketing gimmicks by publishers struggling to get the theater-focused public interested in novels. Although Hugo wrote one other novel between Notre Dame and Misérables (the 1834 Claude Gueux), most of his literary output during that period was in the form of plays, poems, and political pamphlets. The second reason for the publication gap was the death of his oldest daughter Léopoldine in 1843 at the age of just 19. Léopoldine drowned in the Seine river while Hugo was visiting the southwest France, and overcome with grief he stopped publishing entirely for nearly a decade.

The event that pushed him back onto the literary stage was also the third explanation for his 30 year abstention from novel writing: the coup d’état by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in 1851, which brought the end of the Second Republic of France and began the Second Empire. Hugo was serving as a deputy in the Assembly when the coup happened, and organized a failed resistance movement. He fled from France to Belgium in December 1851, and in January 1852 he was officially exiled from France (along with 60 other former Assembly members). Later that year he judged Belgium too precarious a resting place and retreated further to the Channel Islands, which were British protectorates at the time and so relatively safe from French interference. From this remove he wrote scathing critiques of the Second Empire government, including both polemics and poems. Hugo lived on the island of Jersey for 3 years, and then on the island of Guernsey for another 15, until finally returning to France on September 5, 1870, the day after the declaration of the Third Republic (the date of which is immortalized by the downtown Paris metro station named “Quatre-Septembre”).

Quatre-Septembre: I’ve used this station many times, rarely looked up the origin of the name.

All of this preamble is to explain how it is that Hugo came to set his 1866 novel Les Travailleurs de la Mer on the island of Guernsey, an otherwise odd choice for a French literary giant. I listened to Travailleurs in audiobook form after Steven Galante (of the French Library of Boston) recommended it to me as his favorite of Hugo’s work. It’s a relatively short novel, whose unabridged recording weighs in at only eight hours. I finished it in three or four weeks of irregular listening during my commute to work. (Note that most modern paper editions of the book include an 80 page introduction (!) that Hugo wrote for the 1883 edition, and which presents a non-fiction treatment of the island of Guernsey. The audio edition I listened to omits this text).

Les Travailleurs de la mer, the proper novel, also starts off as a portrait of island life and the people of Guernsey. There’s a lot of initial descriptions of landscapes, seascapes, buildings, social classes, and individuals. After this rather slow, extended set-up, we move on to what critic Marc Eigeldinger dubbed “an Iliad of one”. Gilliatt, a 30-year-old sailor, has fallen hopelessly in love with the much younger Déruchette. He is a loner, considered an odd duck by his fellow islanders, but recognized as a polymath who has mastered sailing, fishing, boat-building, and iron-smithing (plus reading and writing). She is the delicate niece of Mess Lethierry, a rough but wealthy steamboat owner, who has vowed to give her every comfort imaginable and to keep her cosseted until the perfect husband can be found. When the prized steamboat aground on a mid-channel rocky outpost (un écueil), Lethierry promises Déruchette’s hand in marriage to anyone who can save the vessel. Gilliatt announces he will go, spends the better part of 4 months completing the task single-handedly, and returns to claim his bride. Alas, he finds that she has fallen in love with another (the Reverend Ebenezer Caudray), and so he selflessly helps the young couple elope before tranquilly drowning himself in the incoming tide off Guernsey. There’s also some stuff about a treacherous captain who sabotaged Lethierry’s boat, which is how it came to crash on the rocks in the first place.

On the whole, I enjoyed the book greatly, especially hearing Hugo’s rich vocabulary and poetic sentences read aloud. I don’t have statistics for this, but I suspect that the total number of distinct words in this novel is much higher than in contemporary novels of comparable length. There’s all kinds of boat words and waterfront words and words for ropes pulleys and winches and cords and barricades – all the stuff you need to describe meticulously the operation of one man solo freeing an engine from a crashed steamboat and loading it onto a sailboat. To top it off, after the false climax of withstanding the onslaught of a hurricane, we get the real climax of Gilliatt surviving a giant squid attack by means of cutting out its eye and brain with a knife. Prior to Hugo’s book, the French word for squid was «poulpe». But Hugo coined a new word for the monster, «pieuvre» (possibly a blend of two other words from French fishermen, «poufre» and «pouvre». Shortly after Les Travailleurs de la Mer was published, «pieuvre» became the dominant form (according to Wikipedia; however the Google N-gram viewer suggests the two forms are pretty much equally frequent since 1870).

Since I was listening while driving, I did not note unfamiliar vocabulary words or underline memorable phrases. But every few minutes I remarked to myself “now that’s a sentence.” One example that I can recall occurs after Gilliatt has spent countless weeks carefully preparing for the engine-hoisting operation. When the day approaches and the weather turns threatening, he abandons his usual caution and hurries to complete the final steps. Hugo writes: «À ce point d’achèvement et si près de la fin, la hâte est prudence.» Good stuff. I am not usually a fan of poetry, but based on the poetic language of this novel, I went to the French Library of Boston to look for some of Hugo’s most famous collections of poems works (Les Châtiments, Les Contemplations, La Légende des siècles). Unfortunately, they are still unboxing their collection from a multi-year renovation… and the boxes of poetry are last on the schedule to be reshelved. So I guess I’ll just have to wait.

From the Guernsey Museum at Caddie collection, 1863.

2022-02-212022-02-21

L’anomalie, Roman de Hervé Le Tellier

This holiday weekend I finished reading the novel L’anomalie by Hervé Le Tellier, winner of the 2020 Prix Goncourt, one of the biggest annual literary prizes in France. I learned of the book from a New York Times article in late November, 2021, which announced the publication of the English translation of this work. The article noted that the original work had been a smash success in France, selling over 1 million copies despite (because of?) being published in August 2020 amidst the various confinements and disruptions of Covid. I figured it was worth a read and so got a hold of a French copy. It sat on my shelf for a while, but I picked it up early this month and polished off its 327 pages in a couple of weekends.

The book is interesting in and of itself; but after I finished it, I read some reviews, looked up the author’s background, and listened to an interview with the author, all of which gave another dimension to the book that I had missed in my ordinary reading. The book begins with a vignette of a professional hitman: his back-story, his methods, and the double life he leads. In the open he’s a successful entrepreneur with a small international chain of vegetarian restaurants, a wife and two children, and a bourgeois Paris apartment. But behind it all he’s a killer for hire with a second apartment, secret bank accounts, multiple passports, a presence on the Dark Web, and any number of lethal toys. This duality gives us the theme of the book right from the outset, though hardly in a way I expected at the start.

The book is divided into three parts. In the first part we meet character after character, one or two per chapter, seemingly without rhyme or reason. Some live in France, some in New York, one in Nigeria, another in New Jersey. What eventually becomes apparent is that they were all on the same Air France flight from Paris to New York in March 2021, a flight which encountered violent turbulents shortly before landing safely at JFK airport. As the first part ends, we learn that a second instance of this airplane – and its full complement of passengers – somehow also appears in June 2021 just after the violent turbulents and tries to land as well. Air traffic control goes nuts at the sudden appearance of the airplane and then they and the military Air Force get very confused as the pilots insist over the radio on their identities and the plane’s designation. All the physical evidence backs their claims, and they are eventually escorted to an Air Force base in New Jersey.

In the second part of the novel we see a lot of U.S. and then world government officials dealing with this unprecedented situation. There are DoD and NSA and CIA meetings. There are mathematicians and physicists and philosophers. There are religious leaders and world presidents. And of course there are the passengers themselves, whose “March-landing” instances we have already met in the first part, and whose “June-landing” (who are 3 months younger and still think it’s March) counterparts we follow in the makeshift camp / prison that the military has set up in a giant hangar. The experts offer various explanations for what has happened, along with citations of which work of science fiction has already illustrated the phenomenon, but come to no conclusion. Meanwhile global intelligence services coordinate a round-up of the March-landing versions of each passenger and bring them to a separate part of the Air Force base. Finally, word leaks out to the public of what has transpired. In a somewhat unbelievable plot twist, the authorities decide to introduce each passenger to their double, provide them with counseling services and economic assistance, and release them back “into the wild”.

The last part of the novel is surprising in that it drops the whole science-fiction bit entirely. Who knows how these people got here, they are here. Once again we are treated to a parade of episodes, each chapter following another character. We get to see ten different ways that this “meet your double three months in your past/future” plays out. Some meetings are violent, others are venomous, some are blassé, others joyful, and some are painful (the cancer didn’t go away, so now the children have to bury their father twice). There are apartments to be shared – and jobs, and husbands, and children. The situations described are very awkward, though the writing is quite good. There’s some slight surprise twist at the end that is left unexplored, but does a nice call-back to the philosophical and science-fiction aspects of the middle part.

So there you go, a traditional if somewhat intricately structured modern French novel with a lot of American flavors running through it, right ? Not sure why it caught the eyes of the Prix Goncourt jury, but surely a decent book, glad I read it. Come to find out (with an hour or two of post-book web surfing) that I missed some fairly major bits. First of all, each chapter in the first part is not only treating a different character, it is written in a totally different style: noir detective pastiche, hackneyed romance, psychological introspection novel, Africain exoticism, littérature blanche. Sure, I got all the settings and the stories, but the exaggerated stylistic changes went over my head completely. Next, it turns out that the author is a mathematician, linguist, journalist, and since 2019 the president of the International Oulipo Society.

What is Oulipo you ask ? Ah, that could be a blog post all of its own. In brief, a group of intellectuals who liked thinking about pushing the boundaries of creation and expression started meeting regularly in 1960 and subsequently founded a literary / philosophical movement they called L’Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (the Workshop for Potential Literature) or Oulipo for short. Its most famous members have been the writers Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau, and Georges Perec. Although some members were authors, their goal wasn’t so much to produce literature as it was to produce new forms that had the potential for yielding interesting literature. It was very meta, and many of the participants had far more interest in the forms than in the actual literature that could come from them.

Getting back to L’anomalie: the author explicitly pitches it as a work of the Oulipo genre, in the tradition of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler (I haven’t read it, but there’s a main story involving international book thieves, and then 10 intruding chapters which are the opening chapters of 10 different novels). There’s an obscure final 20 lines of text that are masked versions of some underlying text, with the masking getting more disruptive as the text flows down the page in the form of an hourglass. The last escaping grains of sand spell out «fin» (“End”), while earlier lines have winks to other Oulipo works. And the three major parts of the book are named with lines from poems by founding Oulipian Raymond Queneau (who wrote: “Oulipians: rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape”). Needless to say, this was all lost on me, but it helps explain why the Prix Goncourt jury would have been more inclined to take the book seriously: Oulipo has a proud place as an off-beat but home-grown literary genre.

Despite all these hidden oddities, the book is perfectly easy to follow, at least if you are practiced at reading speculative fiction where a situation is revealed little by little. I haven’t read the English translation yet, but I will have no hesitation recommending it to my English-speaking friends. Come to think of it, I think I’ll go out and purchase a copy for that friend who introduced me to Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes …

2022-01-19

Un Prince, pièce d’Émilie Frèche

Now that I’m done with Camus, I can catch up on some back issues of L’avant-scène théâtre. Last night I did a quick read of their July 2021 issue, which featured the play Un prince by Émilie Frèche. Weighing in at just 21 pages it’s barely more than an extended scene, an unbroken monologue by a single character (“un homme”) played by Sami Bouajila. The play first made an appearance at théâtre d’Antibes in November 2020, then had a much delayed and then abbreviated run at the same theater in July 2021. I had heard of Antibes, but didn’t really know where it is until I looked it up on a map (it’s in the far south east of France, between Cannes and Nice, just 60 miles from the Italian border).

The play shows a French man of Algerian descent, now homeless (as the the French say SDF = sans domicile fixe) and living in an abandoned construction site. The man’s father moved from Algeria to France in search of a peaceful life with economic opportunity, but the man’s own life didn’t work out that way. After 20 years of growing up poor and another 20 years of working at low wage jobs, he finds himself destitute after the factory he spent years at relocates to Algeria (!) in search of cheaper labor. The man sits among the piles of sand and gravel, somewhere between half- and fully-deluded about the nature of his situation, speaking of his goats and his fields of agranier.

We learn in bits and snatches the story of the man’s father, his own childhood, his life as a young married person, his economic dissipation, and his multiple refusals to accept help from the French social services. In the end the man concludes that France is not a land of peace at all, but one of constant economic warfare. Throughout the tone seems wistful rather than harsh, and at times a bit playful.

The solo actor Sami Bouajila is apparently quite famous; he’s appeared in over 50 feature films since 1991 and garnered 2 César awards, including the 2021 prize for Best Actor in the film Un fils. I’ve never seen him in film, but you can get a small taste of his stage performance from this teaser promotion for the July 2021 production of Un prince.

https://vimeo.com/596663608

Not a bad play, and one which I would have enjoyed more live than reading. But nothing that makes me want to go seek out more by this playwright.

2022-01-18

La Peste, Roman d’Albert Camus

Sometime around four o’clock this morning I read the final pages of Albert Camus’s La Peste, a 1947 existentialist novel that chronicles a city’s year-long battle with bubonic plague. I had aimed to finish it over the weekend, but some combination of the day getting away from me and my having trouble sleeping meant that I was up in the middle of the night and figured there was no better time to swallow what I hope will be my last helping of depressing philosophy for some time.

I started the novel 51 days ago, and I’ve got to say that it was a slog. Although it’s only 350 pages, the writing is difficult with sophisticated vocabulary, elaborate grammar, and sentences reaching nearly half a page in length. The work is recognized as a classic, with lots of subtext and many analogies to World War II and Europe’s occupation by Nazi Germany (“the brown plague” according to remarks by Camus outside the novel). You can read good summaries of the book here and ici. It enjoyed a revival in popularity with the arrival of Covid in 2020, and I acknowledge that the observations Camus makes about the human spirit and condition in the context of a long epidemic response hold up reasonably well today. This conversation with philosopher Robert Zaretsky is an example of folks finding renewed relevance in the book.

La Peste was hard to read on many levels. I was interested in it for the first 100 pages or so, but it became oppressive from there. One central theme is human impotency, an idea which always sours my disposition. The characters lack any depth or warmth, as we learn almost nothing about them. And the book contains lengthy digressions as the author delivers polemics against the Church or the death penalty. But completing it felt like an accomplishment to be proud of, so I stubbornly plowed ahead, 10 pages at a sitting, until I was done. Hooray ?

One bonus outcome is that I noted unfamiliar vocabulary words as I went, so I now have a collection of some 400+ words that I can study. I might start a running series of posts sharing some of them here. I am curious to see upon reflection how many of these are fairly common words that had escaped me to date, and how many are obscure words that I am likely not to come upon outside of high literature. Stay tuned …

2022-01-082022-01-08

Grizzwold, Le Grand Ours

Translating English language children’s stories into French is an interesting challenge. My latest foray is a 600 word story named Grizzwold written in 1963 by author and cartoonist Syd Hoff. Hoff contributed many titles to the “I Can Read” series, whose name highlights the translation challenge. The books in this series aimed to provide reading practice for early-stage readers, kids aged 3 to 7 or so, while still telling engaging stories. So when translating the text, I tried to keep three questions in mind:

Is the translation faithful to the original meanings, connotations, and narrative voice?
Could a young child comprehend the translation when read aloud by an adult?
Would a young child have difficulty reading the words aloud from the page?

The first consideration is universal to all translation, but the second and third impose additional constraints. For example, when the wild bear Grizzwold visits a circus and fails in his attempt to do some of the tricks that the circus bears perform, he observes “I guess it takes practice.” The trained bears reply “It sure does”. How should their reply be translated?

My ear tells me to use the single word « Évidemment. » This has the right feel of agreeing while also gently accusing Grizzwold of naive foolishness. How could he have thought otherwise? In a book for adults I would use « évidemment » without hesitation. But is that a word young French children hear often and understand at age 3 ? The direct English analog is “evidently”, which is not a word I think most kids have mastered by age 7, let alone age 3. « Évidemment » is very common in French, so maybe it works in a children’s story read aloud. However, it’s a long word with a double letter and three different sounds for the letter ‘e’. In the end, I went with the expression «Bah ouais». It has more or less the same meaning, is a bit less formal, and uses only short, simple words. These kinds of choices came up throughout the story.

An interesting counterpoint to preferring simplicity is that my translation uses the passé simple conjugation throughout. Passé simple is typically thought of as a literary tense, never used in conversation, and often replaced by the passé composé in more contemporary writings. But children’s stories, like fables and fairy tales, have a very formulaic style in French, just as they do in English. You would never say “Once upon a time …” without being fully intentional about announcing to your listener that you are going to tell them a story. In the same way, both classic and modern French stories for children use this tense. It has all kinds of odd-ball endings like -èrent and -âmes. And it interacts even more oddly with the subjunctive mood, giving rise to the almost-never-used subjonctif imparfait. But according to my French-native teacher, French children are routinely exposed to this kind of language in their story books and readily intuit its meaning, even if they will never speak that way and will not learn to produce that tense in writing for another decade. So, I’ve followed convention and used the passé simple where called for. The story has a lot of dialog as well, so I got to employ the normal conversational tenses as well. All in all a great learning exercise.

I’ll have more to say on individual words and expressions after the story.

Version française (traduite par David Miller, éditée par Virginie Bordier)

Il était une fois un ours qui s’appelait Grizzwold qui habitait dans le Grand Nord. Grizzwold était si grand que trois lapins pouvaient s’asseoir dans ses empreintes. Quand il pêchait, la rivière lui arrivait à peine aux genoux. Les autres ours entraient dans les grottes pour dormir sans problème. Grizzwold se faisait toujours coincer. Il lui fallait dormir en plein air. Mais ça ne le dérangeait pas. Il avait une fourrure épaisse pour rester au chaud. Aucun animal n’osait le réveiller.

  Un matin, il y eut un grand bruit dans la forêt. Tous les autres ours s’enfuirent. Grizzwold alla voir de quoi il s’agissait. Il vit des bûcherons qui abattaient des arbres. « Gare à vous ! » hurlèrent-ils.
  « C’est quoi l’idée ? », demanda Grizzwold. « Qu’est-ce que vous faites à ma forêt ? »
  « Nous sommes désolés », dirent les bûcherons. « Il nous faut envoyer ces bûches à la scierie en aval de la rivière. On les transformera en papier. »
  « Je ne peux pas habiter dans une forêt sans arbres », dit Grizzwold.

Il chercha à s’établir dans un nouveau lieu.
« Savez-vous où se trouve une jolie forêt ? », demanda-t-il ?
« On ne trouve pas cela là en-haut, » dit un chèvre de montagne.
« Savez-vous où se trouve une jolie forêt ? », demanda-t-il ?
« On ne trouve pas cela ici », dit un loup des prairies.
« Savez-vous où se trouve une jolie forêt ? », demanda-t-il.
« Waouh ! Vous avez perdu le nord », dit un lézard du désert.

Grizzwold chercha jusqu’à ce qu’il vît une maison.
« Que puis-je faire ici ? », demanda-t-il.
« Vous pouvez être un tapis en peau d’ours », dirent les habitants. Ils le laissèrent entrer chez eux. Grizzwold se coucha au sol. Les gens le piétinèrent.
« Aie ! Je n’aime pas ça », dit Grizzwold. Il sortit de la maison.

Grizzwold vit un réverbère.
« Je vais grimper dans cet arbre », dit-il.
« C’est déjà occupé », dit un chat. Il chassa Grizzwold.
Grizzwold vit un chien [à côté d’un panneau qui avertissait « Attention au chien. »]
«Vous ne savez pas lire ? », demanda-t-il. Il chassa Grizzwold.

Grizzwold vit des gens qui allaient à un bal. Les gens portaient des masques. Grizzwold alla au bal aussi.
« Vous ressemblez à un vrai ours », dirent les gens.
« Merci », dit Grizzwold. Les gens commencèrent à danser. Grizzwold commença à danser aussi.
« C’est le moment d’enlever les masques », dit-on. Tout le monde enleva son masque.
« Vous aussi, enlevez le vôtre », dirent-ils à Grizzwold.
« Je ne peux pas », dit-il. « C’est mon vrai visage. »
« Vous n’avez pas votre place ici », lui dit-on. « Votre place est au zoo. »

Grizzwold alla au zoo. Les ours quémandaient pour des cacahuètes. Grizzwold aussi quémanda.
« Ne reste pas là, s’il te plaît », dirent les ours. « Nous avons besoin de toutes nos cacahuètes. Présente-toi au cirque. »
Grizzwold alla au cirque. On lui fit porter des patins à roulettes. Patatras ! On lui fit faire de la bicyclette. Vlan! On essaya de lui faire faire le poirier. Il n’y arriva pas non plus.
« J’imagine qu’il faut s’entraîner », dit Grizzwold. « Bah ouais », dirent les ours bien formés.

Grizzwold essaya de se reposer au bord de la rue.
« Défense de stationner », dit un policier.
« Je trouverai un lieu où rester », dit Grizzwold.

Il courut jusqu’à une jolie forêt.
« Je suis très heureux d’être ici », dit-il.
« Nous aussi, nous sommes très heureux que tu sois ici », dirent des chasseurs. Ils le visèrent.
« Ne tirez pas ! », dit un garde forestier. « C’est un parc national. Défense de chasser. »
Les chasseurs partirent.
« Merci », dit Grizzwold.
« Vous serez en sécurité ici », dit le garde forestier. «On ne peut pas tirer sur des animaux ici. On ne peut que tirer leur portrait. »

Tout le monde voulait prendre la photo de Grizzwold. Il était l’ours le plus grand qu’on ait jamais vu.
« Merci de poser pour nous », disaient-ils.
« Voici la vie idéale pour moi », dit Grizzwold. Il était vraiment heureux.

Version Originale (par Syd Hoff)

In the far North lived a bear named Grizzwold. Grizzwold was so big three rabbits could sit in his footprints. When he went fishing, the river only came to his knees. Other bears had no trouble going into caves to sleep. Grizzwold always got stuck. He had to sleep out in the open. But he didn’t mind. He had a nice coat of fur to keep him warm. No other animal dared wake him.

One morning there was a loud noise in the forest. All the other bears ran away. Grizzwold went to see what it was. He saw men chopping down trees. “Timber!” they shouted.
“What’s the big idea?” asked Grizzwold. “What are you doing to my forest?”
“We are sorry,” said the men. “We have to send these logs down the river to the mill. They will be made into paper.”
“I can’t live in a forest with no trees,” said Grizzworld. He went to look for a new place to live.

“Do you know where there is a nice forest?” he asked.
“You won’t find one up here,” said a mountain goat.
“Do you know where there is a nice forest?” he asked.
“You won’t find one here,” said a prairie wolf.
“Do you know where there is a nice forest?” he asked.
“Boy, are you lost!” said a desert lizard.

Grizzwold looked until he saw a house.
“What can I do here?” he asked.
“You can be a bearskin run,” said some people. They let him into their house. Grizzwold lay down on the floor. The people stepped all over him.
“Ow! I don’t like this,” said Grizzwold. He left the house.

Grizzwold saw a light pole.
“I’ll climb that tree,” he said.
“I was here first,” said a cat. He chased Grizzwold away.
Grizzwold saw a dog [under a sign saying “Beware of Dog”].
“Can’t you read?” asked the dog. He chased Grizzwold away.

Grizzwold saw people going to a dance. The people wore masks. Grizzwold went to the dance too.
“You look just like a real bear,” said the people.
“Thank you,” said Grizzwold. The people started to dance. Grizzwold started to dance too.
“It’s time to take off our masks,” said somebody.
All the people took off their masks.
“Take off yours too,” they said to Grizzwold.
“I can’t,” he said. “This is my real face.”
“You don’t belong here,” said the people. “You belong in the zoo.”

Grizzwold went to the zoo. The bears were begging for peanuts. Grizzwold begged too.
“Please don’t stay,” said the bears. “We need all the peanuts we get. Try the circus.”
Grizzwold went to the circus.
They put skates on him. He went FLOP!
They put him on a bicycle. He went CRASH!
They tried to make him stand on his head. He couldn’t do that either!
“I guess it takes practice,” said Grizzwold.
“It sure does,” said the trained bears.

Grizzwold tried to rest.
“You can’t park here,” said a policeman.
“I’ll find a place to park,” said Grizzwold.

He ran until he came to a nice forest.
“I’m very glad to be here,” he said.
“We are very glad you are here, too,” said some hunters. They took aim.
“Don’t shoot!” said a ranger. “This is a national park. No hunting allowed.”
The hunters left.
“Thank you,” said Grizzwold.
“You will be safe here,” said the ranger. “People cannot shoot animals here. They can only shoot pictures.”

All the people wanted to take Grizzwold’s picture. He was the biggest bear they had ever seen.
“Thanks for posing for us,” they said.
“This is the life for me,” said Grizzwold. He was very happy.

Things I Learned

To be continued …

2021-10-312021-10-31

Fin de partie: On divorce de Dieu

I expect that the most familiar example of theater of the absurd, at least for U.S. readers, is Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. We read it in English class in high school, and even took a field trip to see it performed on stage. We also read it in French class in high school. When I was at college, I frequently used a computer system that offered you short text each time you logged out. The texts were randomly drawn from a collection maintained by the administrators. The most memorable one I ever saw was about the local public transit system: “One has the feeling that if Godot himself walked on stage in the middle of the second act and said ‘Sorry I’m late, I came by T.’, the audience would entirely understand.” Separately, I recently read a description of Godot as “The play where nothing happens. Twice.”

This week’s play is perhaps Beckett’s second most well-known work, Fin de partie (“Endgame”). It appeared in 1957 and has been regularly performed in French and in English ever since. You can find a full-length recording of a recent staging of the play in Toulouse. In 2018 an opera company in Milan commissioned a musical setting of the text which can be seen in all its glory on YouTube.

https://youtu.be/ALFiOCXQUek

There are four characters in the play: the blind and wheelchair bound Hamm; his hobbled servant Clov; his father Nagg (who lives in a trashcan); and his mother, Nell. The names are apparently symbolic for “hammer” and “nail” (in various languages, e.g. clou in French, nagel in German), but I didn’t see much of that in the play. There’s also apparently a fair amount of chess symbolism in the play, but I didn’t get that either. Likewise, I have no idea what to make of the two characters in the trash cans. What I did get was the heavy dose of existentialism. I didn’t understand the first thing about this philosophy when they tried to teach us about it in high school, but I understand it (or at least the Wikipedia presentation of it and some scattered follow up reading) a good deal better now. I wonder if I was an outlier, or if existentialism made no sense to any of us adolescents then.

As with past plays in this series, I tried writing something sensible about Fin de partie in French and then reviewed it with my teacher. This one turned out to be way more evidentiary than my previous analyses – all the page numbers are from Les Éditions de Minuit version, copyright 1957. Not the most exciting essay, but not terrible either. And even if the argument is weak, the practice at writing French was useful as always. This runs 1200 words, but many of them are just quoting Beckett directly, so my actual writing is less. Here’s the finished draft, post correction:

Fin de partie: On divorce de Dieu

On dit souvent «La guerre, c’est l’enfer». Mais qu’est-ce qui arrive après la guerre ? Le paradis, certainement pas. La fin de la deuxième guerre mondiale, et à vrai dire les quarante années précédentes, ont donné naissance à deux mouvements liés: l’existentialisme et l’absurde.

L’idée centrale de l’existentialisme et que le sens à la vie ne vient pas d’une source extérieure, mais d’une source intérieure. Les adeptes de l’existentialisme disent que «l’existence précède l’essence». Nous n’avons pas été créés ou destinés à faire quelque chose. Nous existons, et donc c’est à nous de créer un but, un destin, un sort, chacun pour lui-même. Les religions, les grands concepts abstraits comme les classes de Karl Marx, la liberté de Thomas Jefferson ou le nationalisme de Georg Hegel doivent tous être rejetés. Dans son livre L’existentialisme est un humanisme (1946), Sartre a écrit «L’existentialisme n’est pas autre chose qu’un effort pour tirer toutes les conséquences d’une position athée cohérente.» Les autres philosophes trouvaient la cohabitation de Dieu et de l’existentialisme envisageable, mais pas Sartre.

Quant à l’absurde, c’était une réaction contre les idées classiques et réalistes de l’art et de la littérature, ou peut-être une réinterprétation de ces idées. On peut dire qu’une œuvre d’art est un reflet de la vie elle-même, captée par un artiste. Mais pour les auteurs absurdes, la vie ne suit pas des chemins bien illuminés. Elle n’a aucun sens prédestiné. Les choses se passent aléatoirement, sans raison, sans justice, sans structure et sans prédictibilité. Donc présenter une image ou une histoire bien rangée, c’est mentir. Le théâtre de l’absurde a embrassé cette idée avec des pièces qui manquent d’une intrigue cohérente , dont les répliques sont souvent répétitives, et qui n’ont pas d’ancrage spatio-temporel.

Mais les pièces absurdes ne sont pas sans importance. L’écrivain a instillé des idées et une signification. Cependant, c’est à nous les spectateurs de construire le sens, à la manière des existentialistes. Si on arrive au même terminus que l’auteur, c’était un bon exercice pour donner forme au chaos. Si on arrive à sa propre destination, tant mieux. Forcer le public à penser par soi-même, c’est déjà une réussite pour les auteurs absurdes.

Donc, c’est à moi de repérer l’essence de Fin de partie, une pièce absurde de Samuel Beckett créé en 1957. Selon moi, c’est une pièce existentialiste dans la tradition de Sartre, dans laquelle on observe le divorce de l’homme et de Dieu. L’Homme est représenté par le personnage de Clov, pendant que le personnage de Hamm est l’incarnation de Dieu. Hamm donne des ordres toutes les deux minutes, Clov les suit sans comprendre pourquoi. Clov annonce qu’il voudrait tuer Hamm, et puis qu’il va le quitter. Finalement, Clov regarde quelqu’un à l’extérieur et il part sans même couvrir Hamm avec le drap.

L’apothéose de Hamm, c’est une thèse audacieuse, mais l’évidence est partout. Pour commencer, où sont les personnages dans cette pièce? La scène est sans lieu spécifique, mais il y a deux fenêtres qui donnent vue sur la terre et la mer (pp 43-45). Ça nous rappelle les vers initiaux de la Bible «Puis Dieu dit : Que les eaux d’au-dessous du ciel se rassemblent en un seul endroit pour que la terre ferme paraisse. Et ce fut ainsi. Dieu appela « terre » la terre ferme, et « mer » l’amas des eaux.» Nagg, le père de Hamm, raconte l’histoire du tailleur anglais qui compare la confection de pantalons à la création du monde (p. 34). Hamm insiste pour être placé bien au centre de la salle (p. 40), comme Dieu était au centre de la civilisation pendant des millénaires. Hamm raconte l’histoire de l’origine de Clov, qui se termine avec les mots : «Sans moi, pas de père. Sans Hamm (geste circulaire), pas de home» (p. 54). On constate qu’avec l’insertion d’une seule lettre, la phrase devient «Sans Hamm, pas de homme.»

Certes, d’autres arguments s’opposent à l’identification de Hamm à Dieu. Nagg est le père de Hamm, n’est-ce pas? C’est vrai, mais Chronos est le père de Zeus et Bor est le père d’Odin, ce qui ne les empêche pas d’être des dieux. Qu’en est-il de l’épisode où Hamm siffle pour Clov puis ordonne «Prions Dieu.» (p. 73) ? Ils commencent, avec Nagg, mais que se passe-t-il ? «Bernique!» et «Macache !» (p. 74). Hamm annonce «Il n’existe pas !», mais il est aussi possible qu’il n’y ait pas de réponse parce que Dieu était l’abonné absent, étant celui qui a passé le coup de fil.

Enfin, on peut objecter que Dieu est puissant, même omnipotent, tandis que Hamm est vieux et chétif. Comment expliquer cela? Toutes les choses s’épuisent, même les dieux. Il y a plusieurs indices que nous sommes à la fin d’une ère dans cette pièce. Les personnages parlent souvent du passé avec nostalgie: «Hamm: Autrefois tu m’aimais. Clov: Autrefois!» (p. 18); «Nagg: J’ai perdu ma dent. […] Je l’avais hier. Nell (élégiaque): Ah hier!» (p. 28) «Nagg: Hier tu m’as gratté là. Nell (élégiaque): Ah hier!» (p.32); «Clov: Nous aussi on était jolis – autrefois. Il est rare qu’on ne soit pas joli – autrefois.» (p. 59); «Hamm: J’ai un fou qui croyait que la fin du monde était arrivée […] Clov: Un fou ? Quand cela ? Hamm: Oh, c’est loin, loin […] Clov: La belle époque.» (p. 61). Jadis Dieu était puissant, mais maintenant il est aveugle et cul-de-jatte.

Il n’y a pas que Dieu qui s’épuise. il y a un manque de presque tout: «Il n’y a plus de roues de bicyclette (p.20), «Il n’y a plus de nature» (p. 23), «Il n’y a plus de dragée» (p. 74), «Il n’y a plus de marée» (p. 81), «Il n’y a plus de navigateurs» (p.86), «Il n’y plus de calmant» (p. 92), «Il n’y a plus de cercueils» (p. 100). Il y a un manque de contraste aussi. Le ciel n’est ni blanc ni noir mais gris, ou comme Clov dit: «Gris ! GRRIS! Noir clair. Dans tout l’univers» (p. 46). Si Clov connaissait les théories de Lord Kelvin il dirait «La mort thermique de l’univers», le terminus asymptotique pour un univers qui dure suffisamment longtemps. Même le titre de la pièce annonce la fin de quelque chose.

Pourtant, à chaque fin il y a un nouveau départ. Dès le début de la pièce Clov désire un redémarrage: «Si je pouvais le [Hamm] tuer je mourrais content» (p. 41); «Je te quitte» (p. 54). «Je te quitte» (p. 77). Mais il ne le quitte pas. Pourquoi? Jadis il essayait de trouver l’essence de la vie en obéissant à Hamm. Au moment où nous le rencontrons, il a abandonné cette idée comme une mauvaise blague: «Hamm: Clov! […] On n’est pas en train de … de… signifier quelque chose? Clov: Signifier ? Nous, signifier ! (Rire bref.) Ah elle est bonne !» (p. 47). Néanmoins, il n’est pas encore prêt à quitter Hamm parce qu’il n’a pas de source alternative de signification. C’est seulement l’arrivée de quelqu’un – à l’extérieur, à peine visible – qui motive Clov à partir.

La nature de cette arrivée est obscure. Clov dit qu’il s’agit d’un môme, mais Hamm doute de l’existence du visiteur. Cependant, réelle ou non, les jours où Clov sert Hamm sont terminés, et Hamm le sait. «Clov: Tu ne me crois pas ? Tu crois que j’invente ? Hamm: C’est fini, Clov, nous avons fini. Je n’ai plus besoin de toi.» (p. 103) Quant à moi, j’estime que c’est Clov qui n’a plus besoin de Hamm. Il a créé son propre sens de la vie, comme un bon existentialiste. Quelle absurdité.

Things I Learned

Come follow, follow, follow, follow, follow, follow me: there are many ways to express that someone is a follower of a school of thought. Un adhérent refers to someone who is a dues-paying member of a political party. Those who agree with the positions of a party but don’t pay for membership are sympathisants. For something less political, like a religion or a theory, one can use words like partisan, adepte, or défenseur. For a sports team, the word is supporteur.
Mirror, mirror on the wall: the phenomenon of light bouncing off a shiny surface is distinct from the light or image produced by that phenomenon. The act of bouncing is la réflexion. The resulting image is un reflet. La réflexion is also the act of thoughtful introspection. When art imitates life, the work of art is un reflet.
Captive audience: the word captiver means enthrall, fascinate or enrapture. The word capter means to catch, emprison, or absorb. Artists hope the theater audience is captivé by their work, but concession stand prices are set knowing the audience is capté.
Distilled spirits: the word instiller literally means to introduce a substance bit by bit into a cavity or absorptive material. Think the condensing drops in an alcohol distillery. More metaphorically, it is used to mean to make someone gradually believe or adopt a set of values or culture. By contrast the word instaurer is the more formal establishment of a policy or set of rules. It is imposed rather than taught.
What do you call a work that carries the essence of existentialism? Existentialiste. What do you call a work that carries the essence of absurdism? Absurde. Apparently there’s no need for consistency when one is being absurd.
“The audience applauds” or “the audience applaud”? Not sure there’s one right answer to that in English, but apparently in French le public is singular.
Creationism: there are different nouns in French to describe the creation of different kinds of things. One speaks of la construction of a building, but la confection of a garment. Although according to CNRTL, you only use confection if the clothing is mass-produced, not if it is a bespoke garment. I don’t know what word you use in that case. The more generic word fabrication may be used for building and clothing alike.
Working for peanuts: Becket uses two offbeat words for meager results: bernique and macache. The dictionary says bernique is both archaic and familiar, an expression of frustration, disappointment, and rejection. It’s literally a kind of scallop shell. Macache is also old and slang. It means “not at all” or “nothing at all”. There are a lot of words like this in English: zilch, bupkis, nada, peanuts, squat, diddley, beans …

2021-09-182021-09-18

Harvard Course: French Theater and Performance

Last month somebody introduced me to the existence of a course at Harvard University on French Theater and Performance. The one-line description of the class is “In this course, we will trace the history of French theater from the early twentieth-century to the present: its major trends, figures, and forms as well as its intellectual, historical, and political contexts.” I live just a few miles from the university, so briefly flirted with the idea of arranging to audit the class this semester (lectures in French!). But after a few minutes, I settled on a more modest undertaking: read all nine plays on the reading list. I might have to go more slowly than the one play per week pace that the course follows, but I figure it will be a good way to get a sampling from the past 120 years of French theater.

Here’s the reading list for the course:

Jean Genet Les Bonnes, Gallimard Folio
Marguerite Duras, L’Amante anglaise, Gallimard Folio
Albert Camus, Les Justes, Gallimard Folio Plus Classiques
Samuel Beckett, Fin de partie, Editions de Minuit
Bernard-Marie Koltès, Combat de nègre et de chiens, Editions de Minuit
Nathalie Sarraute, Le silence, Gallimard Folio
Jean-Luc Lagarce, Juste la fin du monde, Solitaires intempestifs
Marie NDiaye, Papa doit manger, Editions de Minuit
Wajdi Mouawad, Tous des oiseaux, Actes Sud Papier

The books were all available via the Harvard Coop bookstore. They very nicely put them all in a list so I could fill my cart with just a few clicks. A week later, I had a nice stack of reading for the Fall.

Perhaps if I get wrapped up in this I’ll contact the professor, Matthew Rodriguez, and ask if I can sit in on just one or two lectures to get the feel of it. In the meantime, Allons-y!

2021-07-312021-08-01

Summer Lessons, Day 4: La Vérité sur l’Affaire Harry Quebert

On Day Four of my lessons with Virginie, we stuck with the theme of writing reviews but moved from film to literature (I cheated last time and reviewed a play). We began by reading a review of Dominique Godineau’s «Citoyennes tricoteuses – Les femmes du peuple à Paris pendant la Révolution française», a non-fiction historical work written in 1988 for a popular audience. We talked about expressing a positive or negative attitude towards something through the connotations of the words one chooses rather than through an overt statement of opinion. Then we identified instances of this technique in the sample text. That lead naturally to some vocabulary study of words and expressions, some familiar to me and some not.

Our grammar lessons for the day covered three subjects: nominalisation, le futur historique (Hari Seldon would be proud!), and the solitary ne. I knew by ear almost all of the adjective-to-noun transformations we reviewed, but hadn’t thought to put them in suffix groups, or that the suffix determined the gender of the resulting noun. As for the solitary ne, the goal of the lesson was for me to understand it when I encounter it, which I already mostly do. It’s good that the goal was not for me to use this technique correctly, because I’m only mostly confident that I would get it right.

Lastly, my turn to write a book review. I thought of choosing one of the Simeon novels I’ve read this summer but opted instead for one of my favorite contemporary French books, La Vérité sur l’Affaire Harry Quebert. I’ve mentioned it on this blog in passing, but never wrote about it at any length. Now is the time to correct that!

As always, in the columns below my original draft is on the left, and the result after jointly editing it with Virginie is on the right. One oddity, though: I wrote most of the first paragraph this evening, two days after the editing session. In the original I wrote down a few bullet points for the introduction because I wanted to get to the meat of the subject. I meant to come back and flesh them out before the editing session, but ran out of time. For consistency I’ve pasted this new text into both columns, with the result that most of the first paragraph is the same on the left and right because only the final sentence existed at the time of correction. Any glaring faults are entirely my own, not a reflection on Virginie.

Version Originale

On dit souvent que c’est la vie que l’art imite. Joël Dicker, écrivain Suisse, avait 27 ans seulement quand se second roma est paru. La Vérité sur l’Affaire Harry Quebert était une réussite internationale qui lui a valu le Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française en 2012. Depuis, il a été traduit en 40 langues et a été adapté en série télévisée américaine. De quoi s’agit-il? Par une coincidence presque préconnaisante, il s’aborde les difficultés d’un jeune auteur phare qui s’inquietait d’écrire son second roman, qui deviendront finalement un grand succès. La Vérité sur l’Affaire Harry Quebert est à la fois un polar non-traditionel, innové, mais également une memoire (peut-être autobiographiqe) sur la formation d’un écrivain, et aussi une réflection sur la peur perpetuel de la gloire inachevé.

Située aux Etats-Unis, l’histore déroule dans trois époque, voire quatre, qui se présent tout au début de roman. Dès la première page, il y a une transcription d’une appelle d’urgence qui date de 1975. Dans la petite ville d’Aurora, dans le New Hampshire, une femme alerte la police qu’elle a vu une jeune fille adolescènte courir à travers le fôret à côté de chez elle, avec un homme en pursuit. Après la transcription, la texte nous announce que la jeune fille s’appellait Nola Kellergan, et que depuis ce jour-là elle est disparu sans trace.

Deuxième vignette, nous sommes en octrobre 2008. Le narrateur se présent à nous comme Marcus Goldman, âge 29, l’écrivain le plus célèbre des États-Unis grâce à son dernier livre l’Affaire Harry Quebert. Il s’agit de la disparition de cette jeune fille il y a 33 ans, qui est pour la première fois, maintenant en 2008, à la une de touts les journaux. Il propose de nous raconter la chaîne des événements qui a donné naissance à ce bouquin que tout le monde s’arrache.

Troisième scène, très courte, c’est une dialogue entre M. Goldman, universitairien maintenant, et son professeur d’écriture Harry Quebert. Il enseigne que le premier chapitre d’un roman et le plus important, parce qu’il piège le lecteur en l’obligeant de suivre l’histoire juste au bout.

Et quatrième, nous faisons un pas de recul (ou peut-être en avance? On est un peut déboussolé après trois rebondissement saccadé) au début de 2008. M. Goldman nous raconte un longue reportage de ses difficultés créatives. Après avoir écrit son premier roman, paru en 2006 avec grand éclat, il souffre d’une crise page blanche. La manque d’un deuxième manuscrit tracasse son agent littéraire et son maison de rédaction, qui lui traque sans cesse. Éyant désespéré, il demande à son ancien professeur Harry Quebert de séjourer chez lui dans le New Hampshire pendant l’été.

Comme ça continue le reste du roman, entremêlant les scènes de la ville d’Aurora en 1975, de la jeunesse de M. Goldman de 1994 à 1998, et de l’été de 2008 à Aurora encore. Évidement Harry Quebert, un trentenaire à l’époque, avait une relation défendu mais discrète avec la jeune fille Nola Kerrigan. Après sa disparition il était dans le petrin, mais a été exoneré grâce à une manque de preuve de n’importe quel délit. Et prévisiblement, l’affaire se réouvre pendant l’été de 2008, qui pousse M. Goldman à fouiller cet épisode sordide et tragique au lieu d’entamer son manuscrit déja en délai. Mais ce qu’il trouve, la vérité sur cette affair, et loin de ce qu’on pourrait jamais imaginer, et en même temps si cohérent qu’il apparait finalement avec une clarité éblouissant.

Point final: c’est la vie que l’art imite. Après ce roman incontournable, le dernier roman de Joël Dicker, La Disparition de Stephanie Mailer est un déchet total.

Version Corrigée

On dit souvent que c’est la vie que l’art imite. Joël Dicker, écrivain Suisse, avait seulement 27 ans quand son second roman a paru. La Vérité sur l’Affaire Harry Quebert était une réussite internationale qui lui a valu le Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française en 2012. Depuis, il a été traduit en 40 langues et a été adapté en série télévisée américaine. De quoi s’agit-il? Par une coïncidence presque préconnaisante, il aborde les difficultés d’un jeune auteur phare qui s’inquiétait d’écrire son second roman, qui deviendront finalement un grand succès. La Vérité sur l’Affaire Harry Quebert est un polar non conventionnel mais également un mémoire sur la formation d’un écrivain, ainsi qu’une réflexion sur la peur inapprivoisable de la gloire éphémère.

Située aux Etats-Unis, l’histoire se déroule sur trois époques, voire quatre, qui sont présentées tout au début du roman. Dès la première page, il y a la transcription d’un appel d’urgence qui date de 1975. Dans la petite ville d’Aurora, dans le New Hampshire, une femme alerte la police qu’elle a vu une jeune adolescènte poursuivie par un homme courir à travers la fôret à côté de chez elle. Au dessous de la transcription, le texte nous apprend que la jeune fille s’appelait Nola Kellergan, et que depuis ce jour-là elle a disparu sans laisser de traces.

Deuxième vignette, nous sommes en octobre 2008. Le narrateur se présente à nous comme Marcus Goldman, âgé de 29 ans, l’écrivain le plus célèbre des États-Unis grâce à son dernier livre l’Affaire Harry Quebert (N.B.: pas de la Vérité ici). Il s’agit de la disparition de cette jeune fille qui est pour la première fois à la une de tous les journaux 33 ans après les faits. Il propose de nous raconter la chaîne d’événements qui a donné naissance à ce bouquin que tout le monde s’arrache.

Troisième scène, très courte, c’est un dialogue entre Goldman, à l’époque étudiant à l’université, et son professeur d’écriture Harry Quebert. Celui-ci enseigne que le premier chapitre d’un roman est le plus important, parce qu’il entraîne le lecteur et l’oblige à suivre l’histoire jusqu’au bout.

Et enfin, nous faisons un pas de recul (ou peut-être en avant? On est un peu déboussolé après trois rebondissements saccadés) au début de 2008. Goldman nous raconte un long reportage de ses difficultés créatives. Dix-huit mois après la parution de son premier roman, un grand succès, il a souffert d’une crise de la page blanche. L’absence d’un deuxième manuscrit commence à tracasser son agent littéraire et sa maison d’édition, qui le harcèlent sans cesse. En désespoir de cause, il demande à son ancien professeur Harry Quebert de séjourner chez lui dans le New Hampshire pendant quelques mois.

Le reste du roman continue comme ça, entremêlant les scènes de la ville d’Aurora en 1975, de la jeunesse de M. Goldman de 1990 à 1998, et de l’été de 2008 à Aurora encore. Il se trouve qu’Harry Quebert, trentenaire en 1975, entretenait une relation cachée avec la jeune mineure Nola Kerrigan. Après sa disparition, celui-ci avait été soupçonné, mais les poursuites contre lui ont été abandonnées par manque de preuves. De manière très prévisible, l’affaire se rouvre pendant l’été 2008, ce qui pousse Goldman à fouiller cet épisode sordide et tragique au lieu d’entamer son manuscrit déjà hors délai. Mais ce qu’il trouve, la vérité sur cette affaire, est à la fois loin de ce qu’on pourrait jamais imaginer, et tellement cohérent qu’elle apparaît finalement avec une clarté éblouissante.

The observant reader may not that the last paragraph from the original version was deleted entirely in editing. Fear not! Virginie wanted me to get practice writing negative reviews as well as positive, so she turned my criticism of Dicker’s fourth book into a homework assignment. In my next post you can read my incomplete efforts to pan that novel.

Fun parting thought: my brain continues to switch back and forth between English and French. As I wrote “efforts to pan that novel”, my Gaulic brain shouted «carboniser!»