Category: Books

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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.

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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).

Illustration by Achille Granchi-Taylor

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.

Illustration by Gustav Doré

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.
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Quand sort la recluse, livre audio

I recently finished the novel Quand sort la recluse by Fred Vargas. I’ve read seven or eight books by Vargas since a bookseller in Paris recommended one to me in 2013, but this is the first one I’ve experienced as an audio-book. Indeed this is the first full-length audiobook I’ve ever listened to in French (I’ve listened to dozens of audiobooks in English). I listened to it over a period of a month or more, off and on during the half-hour blocks that are my commute to the office. It runs about 12 hours in total, surprisingly little for a 477 page printed book. I don’t think I read French silently at 40 pages an hour, though I haven’t timed myself recently.

I enjoyed the book enormously, but that’s almost certainly a combination of enjoying the content and enjoying the medium. I remember being elated when I first reached the point where I could read a full-length French novel without constant reference to a dictionary. The first several French books I read that way seemed to me marvelous, wonderful tomes of literature simply because I experienced them in French. It wasn’t until I had 10 or 15 under my belt that I was able to start assessing the book independently of the things my brain was doing to read the book in French. I assure you, Sigmund Fred ne répond plus is pretty dreadful, even acknowledging that it’s written by a master and intended as a pastiche. Just awful.

I knew from watching plays or listening to the radio that trick to comprehending an audiobook is accepting that one won’t catch every word or understand every expression. Instead, the goal is to understand enough of what’s being said to have a decent chance of following the next sentence, and the next. With the audiobook, I have an escape hatch of hitting the rewind button and going back to re-listen to the most recent 10 or 30 seconds. But I tried to use that very sparingly with Quand sort la recluse. While it’s true that I didn’t catch every word, I was delighted to find that I caught 90-95% of them.

Even more enjoyable was that I found this didn’t take all my brain power: I was able to think about other things while following along with the recording. One of the things I was able to think about was: “wait, what was that he just said?”. To use a programming analogy, it was like my brain would launch a new execution thread whenever it hit a difficulty. That thread would dwell on the word and try to recall its meaning, or dwell on the sounds and try to resolve them into the correct words, while the main part of my brain program continued on ingesting and understanding the recording as it went. I could maintain this for 15 or 20 seconds before having to shut down the auxiliary thread if it hadn’t reached a conclusion. My success rate at figuring out these puzzles in not-quite real-time was something like two-thirds, and those successes were enormously satisfying. I drove to work with an odd expression on my face, a mix of intense concentration but also repeated reward. I arrived at the office with my brain tired but abuzz, although somewhat mystified about how exactly I had gotten to the office — all the attention on the book left me with scant memories of the drive. I hope I didn’t run any red lights….

As to the book itself, it’s pretty decent. Quand sort la recluse is the ninth book in the series featuring Commissaire Adamsberg, head of a criminal brigade in Paris (Vargas writes other books not in that series). The brigade has a well-established cast of supporting characters whose signature traits make for a sort of Commedia dell’arte feel. We already know and love the lieutenant with the eidetic memory, the hypersomnolent computer specialist who must sleep every three hours, the tall, heavy-set female detective, and the confidant who grew up with Adamsberg in the Pyrénées. There is a bit more tension among this crowd than usual, as the story features an internal plot of division within the brigade as well as an external plot of who is behind a series of murders. Adamsberg does his usual thing of investigating without method, following as the wind blows, and letting “tiny bubbles of gas” float around in his brain (a process he himself hesitates to dignify with the word “thinking”). There’s a French expression for this lack of method, which I learned elsewhere: proceeding «à tatons», i.e. by feel. We would say “flying by the seat of his pants”.

Une recluse

As always, Vargas has done her research on an offbeat topic and has something interesting to share with us. This time it’s a venomous spider named «la recluse», rare in France though common in the US (the brown recluse). Although the spider seldom encounters humans and its bite is not fatal if treated with antibiotics soon enough, multiple octogenarian men living around Nîmes die from the poison within a matter of days despite medical treatment. This attracts the attention of the Adamsberg, though the investigation must be unofficial as insect bites are not typically in the purview of the police. Sure enough, the victims share an unlikely and sordid history, and their deaths turn out to be a revenge scheme executed (pardon the pun) with an unusual and symbolic weapon.

A second meaning of «la recluse» dates from the middle ages and refers to a woman who sequesters herself in a tiny stone enclosure, perhaps a meter squared, entirely sealed except for a small window (une fenestrelle) to allow for food to be passed in. The women who became recluses in this way were almost always unmarried rape victims who were deemed impure, too damaged to be desirable as a wife by any man, and too impure to be accepted at a medieval convent. They semi-voluntarily cut themselves off from society, living in sordid conditions and dependent on the charity of anonymous others to provide food. Most died within a few years of this from malnutrition or lack of exercise, but perversely, towns viewed having a recluse as a sort of totem who brought God’s blessing upon the local community for maintaining the recluse. Towns allegedly took pride in having a recluse, and the enclosures (often pigeonniers) could be found under bridges, up against church walls, or in cemetaries.

But wait, didn’t Commissaire Adamsberg encounter a modern-day recluse living in a pigeonnier many decades ago when he was just a boy?! Why yes, now that you mention it, he did, although it takes many chapters for this memory to surface. Somehow the murders, the victims’ history of being a gang of rapists in their youths, the spider poison as the means of killing, and the medieval practice of semi-forced sequestration of rape victims all come together in a well-constructed (if slightly contrived) mystery plot. There are a suitable number of twists and turns (rebondissements) and enough suspects introduced to keep me guessing until the end who dunnit and how. I would certainly recommend the book, as apparently would others: Quand sort la recluse won the Prix Audiolib 2018.

One final note: when I read a paper book these days I typically underline unfamiliar words or expressions and sometimes (when I have the energy) go back afterwards to compile lists of vocabulary words to study. Listening to this book while driving, I could not do that, and I find the lack of such a list unsettling. Or maybe it’s the lack of a physical volume to place on my shelf now that I’ve finished the book. It’s as if I have nothing to show for having read the novel, which feels hollow somehow. I guess this is a property that all audiobooks share, but I feel it pronouncedly with this, my first French audiobook. I suppose I’ll just have to listen to more of them to get over it.

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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.

Hervé Le Tellier

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.

Page 212 of L’anomalie

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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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Camus, Covid et l’Avenir

I’m only about a quarter of the way through reading La Peste by Albert Camus, but I like it very much so far. It’s quite different in style from Les Justes and also from what I remember of L’Étranger (which I last read some 35 years ago). So far it’s got a straightforward narrative style, chronicling the imagined events that follow the return of bubonic plague to Oran (Algeria’s second largest city) in the 1940s. Bubonic plague still exists in the world today, but it is easily treatable with antibiotics if identified early enough. However antibiotics like penicillin were not in widespread civilian used until the mid- to late-1940s, and so far they don’t factor into the story.

La Peste reminds me a bit of Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain, though of course Camus got there a couple decades earlier. But where Crichton went for medical techno-babble (which even by the 1980s hadn’t aged very well), Camus focuses on the human reaction to the slow-motion realization that the Black Death has returned. These age very well, I’m afraid, and resonate quite all to accurately with modern human reactions to Covid. I’m also told (though I hadn’t noticed it on my own yet) certain parallels with other calamities that struck the world in the 1940s.

I wrote up some musings on Camus and Covid (700 words) for this week’s French lesson. Here’s the text after some light revisions with my teacher.

Camus, covid, et l’avenir

Je viens de recevoir un email qui annonce les dates du festival d’Avignon 2022, qui a lieu d’habitude les trois dernières semaines de juillet. Je dis «d’habitude», mais en fait les dates précises sont plus aléatoires que prévisibles. Cette année on commence le 7 juillet, mais pendant les derniers dix dernières années le jour J variait du 4 juillet au 7 juillet sans modèle. Quelquefois on commence le jeudi, autres fois le dimanche,  le lundi ou le mercredi. Et la date de fin est aussi arbitraire que la date du commencement. Et le festival 2020 a été totalement annulé à cause de la crise sanitaire de Covid-19. J’aurais bien voulu réserver un logement pour le festival il y a trois mois (car les hébergements au centre ville et bon marché sont rares), mais sans savoir les dates c’est trop aléatoire. Maintenant, avec l’arrivée d’omicron, le nouveau variant du virus, c’est encore possible que l’agenda du festival 2022 soit bouleversé. J’oublie quel petit malin a dit «La prévision c’est difficile – surtout quand il s’agit de l’avenir».

Ah, l’avenir, l’avenir. Pour moi, c’est incontournable – au moins, je souhaite accueillir l’avenir dans quelques années, sinon soit lui soit moi serons morts. J’ai passé ma jeunesse à jouer aux échecs, une entreprise ou on reste presque immobile pendant plusieurs heures en ne contemplant que l’avenir, où chaque coup est évalué en fonction des contre-coups possibles. Un peu extrême pour un gamin, j’admets, mais la fascination pourc l’avenir est un trait inné chez tous les humains. Le psychologue Daniel Gilbert écrit dans son livre Et si le bonheur vous tombait dessus : «Ce qui différencie l’homme de tous les autres animaux, c’est qu’il pense à l’avenir.»  Pourtant, il y a souvent un manque d’imagination parmi ces penseurs de l’avenir. Mon beau-père, bien muni en  adages qu’il estime sages, dit souvent «L’avenir n’est pas simplement une extension  du passé». Bien que cela me peine de l’admettre, j’ai peur qu’il ait raison.

La tendance à fouiller le passé pour prévoir est évidente sur la page Wikipédia qui concerne La peste, roman d’Albert Camus qui est paru en 1947. Après les parties typiques pour un tel article (historique du roman, résumé, personnages), on découvre une toute petit note au-dessous du titre Augmentation des ventes en 2020:  «En 2020, avec la pandémie de covid-19, le livre connaît un regain d’intérêt, notamment en France et en Italie, en raison de la ressemblance entre ce que le livre raconte et ce que vivent des populations dans de nombreux endroits du monde». Sans doute, l’auteur anonyme de cette page (un Bourbaki moderne) a totalement raison, car il peu probable que j’aurais commencé à lire ce premier chef-d’œuvre de Camus si la pandémie ne s’était jamais passée.

J’ai pris connaissance de La peste pour la première fois cette année après avoir entendu un entretien à la radio avec Marylin Maeso, qui a écrit un livre La fabrique de l’inhumain. Elle revisite La peste et le prend comme un point de départ pour parler des phénomènes sidérants et variés: la guerre, la torture, le terrorisme, etc. Elle constate nos incapacités à les confronter avec l’humanité, et cite les observations de Camus sur le désaccord entre l’échelle humaine et la taille des fléaux:

« Les fléaux, en effet, sont une chose commune, mais on croit difficilement aux fléaux lorsqu’ils vous tombent sur la tête… pestes et guerres trouvent les gens toujours aussi dépourvus. Quand une guerre éclate, les gens disent : «Ça ne durera pas, c’est trop bête. » … Nos concitoyens [étaient] humanistes : ils ne croyaient pas aux fléaux. Le fléau n’est pas à la mesure de l’homme, on se dit donc que le fléau est irréel, c’est un mauvais rêve qui va passer… Ils continuaient de faire des affaires, ils préparaient des voyages… Comment auraient-ils pensé à la peste qui supprime l’avenir … ? »

Albert Camus, La peste

Je trouve ces phrases de Camus, écrites il y a soixante-dix ans, vraiment effrayantes. L’annonce d’Avignon arrive et je me hâte de réserver les billets d’avion, en imaginant que l’achat lui-même pourrait éloigner de la France cette peste contemporaine. Ça ne durera pas, ça fait déjà dix-huit mois. Y en a marre de l’incertitude, je déclare que c’est le Covid qui est annulé pour 2022 et pas le Festival d’Avignon. 

«Ce qui différencie l’homme de tous les autres animaux, c’est qu’il pense à l’avenir.» Pas seulement penser à l’avenir, mais défendre l’avenir, insister sur l’existence de l’avenir. Avec mon cerveau de joueur d’échecs, je vois clairement la possibilité de la résurgence de la crise sanitaire. Et je vais attendre quelques mois avant d’acheter les billets pour Avignon. Mais en même temps, je vais identifier les spectacles auxquels j’irai, je vais faire des recherches chaque semaine pour des logements disponibles au centre ville, et je vais informer mon patron de mes dates de vacances en juillet. Je ne suis pas prêt pour que le Covid supprime l’avenir. 

I imagine I’ll have more to say once I’ve finished the book. Meanwhile, I spent several hours yesterday planning my trip to Avignon in July. One can hope …

Things I Learned

  • For the beginning and end of a multi-day event, use la date de commencement and la date de fin. The phrases date initiale and date terminale aren’t strictly wrong, but are clunky.
  • Speculatif is used for financial dealings or for way-out-there scientific research. For an action taken with a lot of guesswork, the outcome is better described as aléatoire.
  • Un variant, une variante have subtly different meanings and domains of use. The masculine form is reserved for the context of biology and genetics. The feminine form is for music, art, language, and chess openings. Roughly speaking, une variante corresponds to the English “variation” (“theme and variation”, “Queen’s Indian defense, Nimzowitsch variation”), while un variant corresponds to the English “variant” (“omicron variant”).
  • Malin can be used as an adjective or a noun. It has a range of meanings along a spectrum from pretty negative (“evil”, “wicked”, or “demonic”) to moderately positive (“smart”, “astute”, “clever”). Ideas like “sly” and “crafty” are in between these two poles. However the phrase « petit malin » is more along the lines of “smart alec”, “wise guy”, or “slick character”.
  • On passe son temps à faire quelques chose. I would have thought it was en faisant qqch, but that’s not grammatical.
  • Fascinating: the proper locutions are être fasciné par or avoir la fascination pour. Choosing the right preposition in French is one of my enduring challenges.
  • Inné means “innate” or “inborn”, and here again choosing the preposition trips me up. In English, a characteristic or ability is innate to a person. But in French, there are multiple possible prepositions following inné. The most common is inné chez qqn, but you can also use inné en qqn, inné dans qqn, or inné à qqn. I haven’t been able to discern if there are rules of when to use which preposition, or if it is purely a stylistic choice.

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Learning Log, 2021 Week 35

I’m logging what I do each week to improve my French. Maybe it will motivate me to do more. No need to post the details here, but I’ll see if posting a skeleton log of my actions helps motivate me to keep it up. I’ll update this post over the week rather than make new articles each time.

  • GPdF Chapitre 3: Les Négations
    • La Place de la négation
      • Dites dans les exemples suivant si «ne» est explétif ou s’il est négatif.
      • Créez des interdictions d’après les contextes proposés.
  • GPdF Chapitre 4: Les Temps de l’indicatif.
    • Le Présent
      • Utilisez le présent à la place des passés quand c’est possible pour donner à ce texte un caractère plus vivant.
    • Les Passés
      • Mettez les verbes entre parenthèses à l’imparfait.
  • GPdF Chapitre 5: Le Subjonctif
    • Formation et caractéristiques
    • Utilisez le subjonctif comme dans le modèle.
    • Complétez avec le subjonctif.
  • J’ai regardé …
    • Dix pour cent
      • Juliette (s2 e6) with French audio only.
  • J’ai lu …
    • La Nuit des temps, de René Barjavel, pp 62 – 237
  • J’ai écrit …
  • J’ai écouté …
    • L’Univers . Cours « tout public » Aurélien Barrau.
    • L’Invité de 8h20: Le Grand Entretien (FranceInter)
      • Pierre Rosanvallon : “Il y a un désir d’égalité, que chacun soit reconnu dans sa singularité”
      • Atiq Rahimi, écrivain et réalisateur, et Jean-Pierre Filiu, historien. Afghanistan : “Maintenant les islamistes, les djihadistes partout dans le monde, se disent que c’est possible”
      • “10 à 11% des enseignants pas vaccinés” affirme le ministre Jean-Michel Blanquer
      • Gérard Larcher, président du Sénat, sénateur LR des Yvelines, est l’invité du Grand entretien de France Inter.
      • Bruno Le Maire : “le pass sanitaire n’a ralenti ni la consommation, ni la croissance”
    • Le 7/9 par Nicolas Demorand , Léa Salamé (FranceInter)
      • Sept 1 émission, 70 minutes.
  • Cours particulier

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Learning Log, 2021 Week 34

I’m going to try doing some simple French exercises daily as a supplement to consuming organic language (reading books and articles, listening to podcasts, watching videos). Exercises were a big part of how I learned French in high school, but I haven’t done much with them in the past 10 years. Maybe the habit of a little each day will be helpful.

I randomly picked a source of exercises from my shelf: Grammaire progressive du français (niveau avancé). Long ago I had written in the answers to the first few exercises, so I’m starting with Chapitre 2: L’Adjectif. No need to post the details here, but I’ll see if posting a skeleton log of my actions helps motivate me to keep it up. I’ll update this post over the week rather than make new articles each time.

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Odds and Ends

Random French bits I picked up in the past week that don’t merit a post in and of themselves.

  • I watched the first one and a half episodes of the Netflix series Marseille. It’s more or less the French equivalent of House of Cards, but with Gérard Depardieu taking the role of Kevin Spacey. It’s unclear to me how explicitly Netflix meant it to be a direct adaptation of the concept, but others have noticed the obvious parallels as well. One can only hope that Netflix didn’t mean to have their leading actor plagued by sexual assault scandals, but Depardieu seems to have that in common with Spacey as well. So far I’m willing to separate the art from the man and haven’t given up on watching Depardieu films. I’ll see if this TV series is worth watching more of.

  • In this week’s French conversation lesson I found myself explaining how I met a French-teacher friend, and then I found myself explaining my mathematics graduate school career and why I left, and then I found myself explaining my advisor’s research, and next thing you know I’m explaining the five families of modern cryptography schemes and the corresponding hard math problem each one is based on. I was able to get across most of the ideas (and kudos to my teacher for sticking with me on this), but I lacked some of the technical terms in French for various mathematical objects. It’s times like these I wish I had reviewed Cryptographie sur les courbes elliptiques in advance of my lesson.
https://youtu.be/8WTesYp5H8o
  • Google News and YouTube keep feeding me various Georges Brassens materials, which are all the rage as we draw near the 100th anniversary of his birth in October 2021. This one is a particular gem. It’s an hour-long TV program from 1972 (Bienvenue à George Brassens) that has Brassens in a cozy setting surrounded by maybe 100 members of a television audience. The show interleaves performances with interviews, and many of Brassens collaborators are present and participate in the discussions. A large part of the charm of this particular video is the anonymous audience members in all their 1970’s glory. Look at the hair styles, what they are wearing, how and what they smoke, and their reactions to his sometimes ribald songs. I have some sense of what Americans in the 1970’s were like, as I lived through 90% of the seventies and watched plenty of movies and films from that time. But French styles in the 1970s were different, so this is a nifty look back through both time and space.

    Brassens is also charming and disarming with his total lack of pretentiousness.
Rubens, 1 of N
  • I finally got around to watching the final two episodes of the Netflix series Lupin. They were OK, but the plot holes were large enough to drive une fourgonne through. It’s better if you just enjoy the scenes and the acting and don’t worry too much about how it all fits together. I’ve read one Lupin short story long ago, but ordered from my local bookstore one of the re-issues that the success of the Netflix series has spawned. It’s taking a while to arrive, but I’ll read it someday …