L'art en traits

La rentrée is a big thing in France. I never found a completely satisfactory way of translating it, maybe because in English-speaking countries there is not the equivalent of everyone downing tools for the whole summer.

À la rentrée: at the end of the summer recess

I remember the thrill of the last minutes of school in June, and the excitement of having unlimited free time ahead, and the excitement of going back to school and wearing new clothes and having a new teacher and later on, new classmates. But the phenomenon didn’t seem to concern the rest of society.

Lard entrée - rentrer dans le lard...

Yesterday the temperature changed from thirty to thirteen. The sunflowers look decidedly wabbit.




"Musicians talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time. They really are interested in music and art."
-- Jean Sibelius, explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his home

"If one hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation."
-- Oscar Wilde

Stratum emoticum

<layers of the epidermis. These layers consist of the stratum germinativum, stratum spinosum, stratum granulosum, stratum lucidum, and the stratum corneum.>

As I was reading this, I could feel the analogy with perception, experience and behaviour. You are born, you spin around for a while in a pram pushed by adults, free-wheeling, then you grow a bit and become grand, then reality kicks in and you realise you are not so grand and finally you grow a hard shell to protect yourself from all that.

My mother passed away peacefully on August 4th.

Séjour is a stay, a holiday, and also a living-room in a house.

The word Ottoman to me is a blanket box. When I first noted it down I saved a link to the Wikipedia article on Ottoman furniture. However, I have not been able to post for a while and the article has now been deleted. The blog is truly a medium of the moment. There is no way of telling how long what we are “building” here will last. Maybe some of it has already disappeared. Like Denis Martinez filming himself drawing on the sand in the desert just before the evening breeze gets up and swooshes the traces away. Like Andy Goldsworthy’s ice sculptures and other ephemeral land art.

Part of me is far too slow in some ways, but not all.

Here is a beautiful typing error – reproduice

It stresses the similarity between deduce and juicy.

Freize – freeze - freesia

“Oeillet” in French is carnation or buttonhole in English

Sweet William (Dianthus barbatus) is “Oeillet des poètes” in French – does the English name refer to the Bard, I wonder?

œillet d'Inde (Tagetes patula) is French marigold.

Reminds me of the incomprehensible translation of Indian ink as encre de chine…

We were in the carpark at the foot of the Puylaurens Cathar castle, eating our picnic. Someone came along this road and bubbled excitedly that you only had to walk ten yards to get a fantastic view of the castle. So I set aside my sandwich and off I went in search of the view. I walked for a long time, and met Marty coming back from where I was going. We thought we had been sent on a wild goose chase. But when we were almost back at the carpark, the chateau came into sight. It would have sufficed to walk ten yards to get this view, if only we had turned around and looked back!

Two-tone buzz

I had to translate the word “buzz” from French to English several times in a marketing context – créer un buzz – and it reminded me of “what’s the buzz – tell me what’s a’happenin” from Jesus Christ Superstar. I wondered if it meant the same.
The honeysuckle at my front door smelt heavenly and was all abuzz with bees. To try to share the sensory experience with you I took a picture of it, but the computer refused to recognise my camera. Built-in obsolescence. I got it the day the twin towers were nuked. It was a present from my mother. I suppose I could get a card reader and salvage the pictures from the card... today I bought a 2 MB card for my digital recorder – watch this space, or, rather, listen to this space…

I love the French verb “butiner” which is also what bees do. (Originally I wrote 'what a bee does'). I have been to at least two fancy dress parties dressed as a bee to be able to flit from flower to flower. Or was it because I like Black and yellow stripes... (Another one I attended as Cleopatra with a black wig and a rubber snake round my neck.) I also like to think of reading as a way of gathering the nectar and pollen of other people’s minds.

Why is Wensday spelt Wednesday? Choose day, chews day…

Trite:
1. Lacking power to evoke interest through overuse or repetition; hackneyed.
2. Archaic Frayed or worn out by use.

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[Latin tritus, from past participle of terere, to wear out; ]

I had already used the words libel and slander and needed something for calomnier so I looked it up and there was “traduce”, from the Latin “traducere”.
For one fleeting moment, I thought maybe "traduction” existed in English? No. The noun is traducement. (faint echo: seducement). Dragging something from one language to another. But the very act of transposing anything from one code to another necessarily involves loss. Even one person passing on what they have heard without switching languages. We crave precision but live in the "à peu près".
Egregious = outstandingly bad

Shakespeare said it all. So many great quotes, out of context. I can’t remember the English for time being “sorti de ses gonds” – gonds are hinges and when my son was born, "They that went on crutches ere he was born desire yet their life, to see him a man.”

In the mountains, there were lots of tiny star-like flowers all over the place. And these faintly phallic ones, whose name I forget… Alpine something or other. Strange how “alpine” has come to mean “relating to mountains” the way hoover means vacuum cleaner.

As the camera was not working, I took some pictures with my phone. If you look carefully enough, you will see two dark tunnel holes through which “le petit train jaune” went hooting.

I made up a sentence to help my American friends with their French: “Some of the blackberries on the wall are not ripe” she whispered. (“Des mûres sur le mur ne sont pas mures” murmura-t-elle).
And even in such a cursory glance at life – as I was marvelling at the sparkling brilliance and pure beauty of the clear mountain stream I remembered Mekas

– I can’t sign off without a mention of Marginal Melon. The desert that Marty and Eva ordered (to remember who ordered it I remembered whose teeth went black) at Le Canard Gourmand. Our venerable veritable institution of a local restaurant where Xavier, the ultra-creative chef, doesn’t like making deserts… The ironic thing is that Marty’s starter was a savoury dish (fresh foie gras flipped in the frying pan) served with vanilla sauce. The desert was partly dyed black by encre de seiche... octopus ink. Which is pretty salty. Ok if used for colour only, as suggested in the description (the macaron) but when added to whipped cream the result was likened to shaving foam…

Gullible's travels

In my mind, I have a picture of Gulliver tied down with thousands of tiny ropes, especially his hair. This is not the exact image but it was the closest thing I could find. I think of it sometimes when I am lying on the couch. Psychoanalysis is a question of carefully cutting all the little ropes, but the ropes don’t want to be cut, and they automatically grow back, and you have to cut them again and again. In other words, you have to be really serious about being free or the bars of your prison will find you again.

Another similar image is of elephants. The cruellest picture I have of them is the adult females chasing pubescent males out of the group and forcing them to trot off and do their own thing in the jungle. The boys become a nuisance when they reach puberty, so they are excluded. It sometimes takes days to get rid of them. They hang around and cry and try to sneak back into the herd, but the females are relentless in keeping them out. I don’t know exactly how human mothers are supposed to push their male offspring out into the world, but I hope there is a less cruel method.

Here I was thinking of how elephants are trained. One ankle is tied to a post when they are young. They rebel and push and try to free themselves. They find they can’t run away because they don’t have the strength to break the chain or uproot the post. Then they grow up and increase in strength but they have internalised the experience of not being able to run away so they don’t even try anymore. Analysis is a way of identifying the parts of our behaviour that were adopted in childhood circumstances and no longer correspond to our adult setting and means. And ideally adapting the behaviour!

I've just bought a brilliant version of Basin Street Blues by Keith Jarret from I-tunes. I can’t put it on here because it is “protected”. The same goes for The Blower's Daughter I bought specially for my life’s soundtrack. This is frustrating. I’ll have to find a way round it, somehow. Anyway, I was humming the song “Halleluja” the other day and was surprised to learn it was by Leonard Cohen, the man who moved me to take up the guitar to learn to play Suzanne and Bird on a Wire. The best version I found was Alison Crowe, and what do you know, I then found a You Tube tutorial on how to play it! Somebody took the trouble to clearly and slowly explain what to do and how to do it in front of a camera for people like me! That restored my faith in human nature. I never managed to play Danny Boy fluently enough on the piano to be able to sing along with it, so it looks like Leonard could be another first. Watch this space! For the moment, here is Alison Crowe singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

Notes on quotes

There are sentences we read that immediately become a part of us forever. They strike a deep chord and stay there. Taken out of context, they evolve inside us, and polished by our needs, turn into something slightly different. One of mine comes from Proust. The context is a shared student flat in Dowanside road, just off Byres Road (what a name! they tried to change it to Victoria but the residents refused. It is a rather good antidote to the pretension that can grow up around Universities, especially ones as old and beautiful (if you like old things) as Glasgow.).

I remember Cath MacClean from Prestwick reading a passage to us that she found too beautiful to keep to herself – from the untranslatable “à l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs” (Within a Budding Grove or In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower...). It was breathtakingly beautiful, I think we all understood how beautiful the writing was without understanding really what he was getting at, which is as good a way as any of discovering aesthetics. My memory is of Cath enthusiastically reading a very beautiful passage from Proust which came to a satisfactory end with the words “les après-midis bleus de ses fenêtres” (“the blue afternoons of its windows”). In my mind’s eye, I can see the full-stop on the page, Cath’s finger on it, her eyes looking up at us in wonder, and then the book slowly closing with a sigh.

As the University was not in session in the summer, all my memories of it are in the other three seasons, and very dull, almost damp. So I suppose those few words encapsulated everything I imagined about France, a place where there was warmth, lots of bright sunshine, blue sky visible through the windows, and people who could live in cork-lined rooms and write for the pleasure of the words, write as a way of worshipping language, live completely for the activity of the mind, totally unconnected to anything involving physical work. If human experience was a spectrum then this was the opposite end from soul-destroying manual labour.

Today I looked up that quote and was horrified to find it ended with a semi-colon; “un tout petit (salon), vide, que commençait déjà à faire rêver l’après-midi bleu de ses fenêtres;”. It was unlikely that Cath would have stopped reading with such an emphatic feeling of satisfactory completion at a semi-colon; I was also horrified to realise that I had no recollection whatsoever of the preceding passage. And so my memory was part fiction.
Another Proust quote I live with is “J’avais un rendez-vous urgent avec moi-même” – ‘I had an urgent appointment with myself’.

Apron strings. The idea of a “mummy’s boy” has always annoyed me, as a jealous female sibling, d’abord, then as a girlfriend - they say that mother-in-law/daughter-in-law animosity is genetically programmed, for the survival of the species, which does not make it any easier to bear. I hate the idea of a man being “attached” to his mother. There is something unpleasant about the very words sycophantic infantilism. Maybe this is because one of my biggest worries, as the mother of a male teeneager, is “will he be able to stand on his own two feet?”. So imagine my horror as a translator when I read that Proust wanted to translate Ruskin, but his English wasn’t up to it, so his mother translated the text literally for him so that he could “write Ruskin in excellent French”. Yikes! Talk about silver spoon feeding!!

Tipping point.

Looking for info on Byres road I came across a passage from Alasdair Gray

Who did the council fight?"

"It split in two and fought itself."

"That's suicide!"

"No, ordinary behaviour. The efficient half eats the less efficient half and grows stronger. War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation."

"I refuse to believe men kill each other just to make their enemies rich."

"How can men recognize their real enemies when their family, schools and work teach them to struggle with each other and to believe law and decency come from the teachers?"

"My son won't be taught that," said Lanark firmly.

"You have a son?"

"Not yet."

Lanark, p.411

One of my Shakespeare ones is "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.

Nancy Huston did not win the Orange prize for fiction, but was shortlisted. As a translator, I feel compelled to react to the following delicious comment:

"First published as Lignes de Faille, the novel sold over 400,000 copies in France, was then translated by the Canadian-born author herself with a level of creativity and confidence simply not achievable by the average translator."

Well, I wanted to react, but words fail me...