Harry Potter chez les francophones

Today in class we were asked to translate a passage from J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. This passage appears towards the end of the novel, where Harry is working his way through the third challenge of the Triwizard Tournament. Amidst a hedge maze, Harry comes across a sphinx who bars his passage to the maze’s centre, where the Triwizard Cup – and wizarding glory – awaits. The sphinx tells Harry that she will let him go past her if he manages to solve her riddle; but should Harry fail to solve it, she will attack him. Alternatively, Harry may choose to turn around and take a more long-winded way to the maze’s centre, so as not to hear the riddle and get it wrong. But Harry being Harry, he opts to take up the challenge. So the sphinx asks him the following riddle:

First think of the person who lives in disguise,
Who deals in secrets and tells naught but lies.
Next, tell me what’s always the last thing to mend,
The middle of middle and the end of the end?
And finally give me the sound often heard
During the search for a hard-to-find word.
Now string them together, and answer me this,
Which creature would you be unwilling to kiss?

---

So here’s my attempt at translating it into French:

Penses d’abord à un symbole dont les usages sont vastes,
qui est l’Alpha d’un système et au milieu d’une phrase.
Puis, dis-moi la chose pour laquelle on ne paie,
qui réchauffe la peau et qui vient du soleil.
Puis, donnes-moi le verbe qui peut décrire bien celle
qui, s’ouvrant les poumons, trouve le souffle vital.
Ces fragments combines, et puis réponds à ça:
Quel créature embrasser tu ne préférais pas?

***

Back translation:

Think first of a symbol whose usage is vast,
the Alpha of a system and in the midst of a phrase.
Then, tell me the thing for which one doesn’t pay,
which warms up the skin and comes from the ‘soleil’.
Then, give me the verb which perhaps depicts she
who, opening her lungs, finds the breath of ‘la vie’.
So combining these fragments, do respond now to this:
Which creature would, preferably, you not like to kiss?
 

---

The answer of the riddle is, of course, spider. But in translating the riddle, it would make little sense to keep the word ‘spider’ as it appears in English. For one thing, unless the francophone reader has an acquaintance with English, the word ‘spider’ is unlikely to elicit the mental image of an eight-legged creature. Moreover, even if one were to recognise the word, it is not exactly easy to translate the request appearing in the first two lines, the answer of which is ‘spy’. The French equivalent is ‘espion‘ (from whence comes ‘espionage’), which could not, in any case, spell out the word ‘spider’.

So it makes more sense to use the French word for spider, araignée. But with this word, it thus becomes necessary to change the three requests in the riddle. So I’ve tried my best to create a riddle that hints at ‘araignée’, using imagery that departs from the ones in J.K. Rowling’s riddle, but which serves the same function of pointing towards a spider. 

 

Quelques corrections

Pour imiter Dante

Quand je suis parti du milieu du chemin de notre vie,
Un désir de connaître, de cette forêt, le monde j’ai trahi,
Je crevais d’être perdu et la mort m’a envahi.

Si grands sont les remords nés de cette vie!
Et la peur qui demeure sous la peau, sans merci, 
Me rappelle du choix si aveugle que j’ai pris.

Après des années à rêver des lumières jolies,
De ce conteneur de douleur, pour mes espoirs je prie:
Que le Paradis je touche ait les étoiles qui brillent.

 —

Besides a few grammatical errors, a friend has told me that ‘mourir de trouille’ is too informal for Dante. I guess he must be right – ‘mourir de trouille’ basically means ‘to be scared shitless’. So I’ve replaced it with the phrase ‘la mort m’a envahi’ (literally ‘death invaded me’), which I wish I’d thought up sooner. Still, the case could be made that although Dante’s writing style is undeniably refined, it’s not as if his narrative is free of vulgarity; on the contrary, the flatterers residing in the second ‘bolgia’ of hell’s eighth circle, reserved as it is for fraudsters, are literally wading in human excrement. If I were in their position, I’d most probably be ‘mort de trouille’, ceteris paribus.  

Oscar the Stranger

Over the last few weeks, the world has looked on as a smartly-dressed Caucasian man has appeared in a South African court accused of murder. It seems that everyone has an opinion of Oscar Pistorius, who claims to have accidentally shot and killed his former girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in the early hours of 14th February last year. For Reeva’s grieving family and friends, the previous year has been a nightmare. No number of condolences will bring back from the grave one whose life was tragically cut short; and whatever verdict Oscar eventually receives, be it murder or manslaughter, will offer little in the way of consolation.

While many view the sprinter in a negative light, no one knows exactly what took place that morning – no one, that is, except the man standing in the dock. But that has not stopped observers from viewing Oscar’s testifying in court with deep suspicion. If anything, many consider his performance in court, which has seen the alpha male burst into tears and vomit on occasion, as an attempt to manipulate public opinion in his favour. In a sense, that view would be correct: Pistorius’ lawyers have had months to prepare for this trial and would have drilled their client in countless mock trials to make sure he would be able to explain his version of events – and without contradicting himself – in court, with the prosecutor and the world media looking on, hoping to expose him for the murderer they believe him to be.

But the approach that his defence team has adopted is to be expected. Whether they succeed at portraying their client as an honourable, law abiding citizen – who became unwittingly involved in a terrible accident – can mean the difference between a long prison sentence and a slightly shorter one. But for those who dislike artifice, Oscar is a liar, and every word and utterance proceeding from his mouth would serve only to confirm their conviction that he is not to be trusted.

But in light of this high stakes trial, let us entertain a major counterfactual: what if Mr Pistorius hadn’t cried in court? What if, upon seeing pictures of his fatally wounded girlfriend, he hadn’t vomited? What if he hadn’t said that the events of that fatal morning haunt him to this day? Instead, what if the Oscar we see in court had claimed that the shooting was simply an incident; that having to testify in court was ‘annoying’; that he would much rather be at home watching television?

This hypothetical situation is worth imagining because it shares similarities with another murder trial involving a Caucasian man that took place so to speak on the African continent. This fictional trial is described in the novel The Stranger by French writer Albert Camus, which follows the life of Meursault, who appears in a court in French Algeria charged with murdering an Arab man. In Camus’ story, Meursault is the Stranger, a young man living with complete and utter detachment from his world and its preoccupations. What is spectacular about him is his inability and unwillingness to make judgements of the world around him – a characteristic that defines him as one of the most maddening characters in world literature. At the start of the novel, Meursault tells us of his mother passing away, but does not transmit the news to us with anything approaching emotion. Upon arriving at the elderly home where his mother’s corpse is being kept, he does not cry or reflect on the fragility of life; rather, he smokes in the presence of others, completely indifferent as to what they may be thinking. That evening, he goes to the cinema and spends the night with a young woman. And then a few days later, he shoots an Arab man dead. All of these facts he describes in almost autistic detail, making no attempt to portray himself or others in a positive light.

Standing in the courtroom, Meursault confesses to the shooting but does not show the faintest sign of remorse. He does not claim to have a motive for the killing and is not characterised by any strong emotions. In fact, earlier in the novel when Meursault describes the exact moment he kills the man, he seems to suggest that it is the overwhelming force of the sun’s radiance beating down on him that compels him pull the trigger – an action more sensuous than senseless. As far as Meursault is aware, the shooting isn’t a big deal: the Arab man’s life was bound to end at some point – and whether he was to die of natural causes or be pierced with a bullet makes not one iota of difference. Meursault defies our expectations as to how a defendant ought to act in court; not surprisingly, he wins him little sympathy from the jury.

When it is the prosecutor’s turn to speak, however, what is notable is that the prosecutor focuses his attention less on the incident that resulted in a man’s death, and more on the person that is Meursault. Evidence of the protagonist’s nonchalant attitude towards his mother’s death – as seen in his failing to grieve and in his involvement in an “irregular liaison” with a young woman – are heard in court, testifying to his lacking in human decency. This attempt at portraying the defendant as a heartless monster is ultimately successful, for despite the subsequent efforts of Meursault’s lawyer to paint him as an honest, hardworking citizen, Meursault’s fate has been sealed. Convicted of murder, he is to be guillotined in public.

The Stranger is a fascinating novel because it illuminates a fundamental truth: for us humans, there is always a right emotion to feel for every occasion. Even if the consequences of a wicked act may never be reversed, it is still comforting to see the perpetrator face retribution in the form of feeling bad for the wrongs they had wrought. One of the most infamous criminals in recorded history, Judas Iscariot, felt terrible for betraying Jesus, and subsequently killed himself. In some ways, the pangs of guilt, shame, and remorse that a criminal can feel are seen as a superior form of punishment to a jail sentence, because while the latter may constitute but the deprival of material comforts, the former involves the guilty parties subjecting themselves to self-torment – that is, a harrowing experience that afflicts their entire being. In this way, while the concept of corrective action appeals to our natural desire for vengeance, it is limited insofar as it does not guarantee the perpetrator of evil deeds undergoing a mental purgatory.

It is for this reason that Meursault suffers at the hands of the French judicial system, for he does not behave in the way expected of him. The fact that he views death in so carefree a way – as seen in how he handles the deaths of his mother and the Arab man he had shot – results in him losing any respectability in the eyes of the public. The jury had expected him to show sadness over their deaths – so his refusal to play by their rules offends their values, which they use to make sense of what Camus may consider a senseless universe, and leads inevitably to his public execution. Had he lied through his teeth and feigned sadness over the deaths, and had the prosecutor been less skilled at manipulating public opinion, perhaps his life would have been spared.

Going back to the hypothetical situation for Oscar Pistorius we imagined earlier, it does not take a genius to imagine what would ensue: his lawyers would be pinching themselves in disbelief; the news media would become even more caught up in their feeding frenzy; everyone following the case would be moved with indignation. Oscar would be subject to the most ferocious attempts at character assassination: he would be branded a scoundrel, incapable of neither sympathy nor empathy. With his reputation as a human being in tatters, some may even call for the death penalty to be reinstated. His name would live long in infamy, his testimony synonymous with moral depravity. Ladies and gentlemen: the Anti-Christ is among us.

Over-the-top though this scenario may seem, it falls well within the realms of possibility. Human nature is such that if a man fails to cry at his mother’s funeral, he is bound to face the public’s wrath. But of course, what society is really taking offence at is a man’s comfort with the possibility of his and their lives having no meaning other than the ones they have constructed for themselves. Meursault is handed a death sentence not because he is proven to be evil – but because he challenges the legitimacy of society’s code of ethics. And because society needs a common morality that they can abide by and regulate, society gets rid of all those who bring the legitimacy of its morality into question. That is why every criminal trial must necessarily feature the sort of ingratiating behaviour Oscar Pistorius is currently engaging in, lest his name be tarnished more than it already is. This may well be an uncomfortable truth; then again, to paraphrase a well-known saying: in the courtroom, the first victim is truth.

Candide (Satirical Book Review)

Candide, ou l’Optimisme is a novella by a French writer called Voltaire. In this coming-of-age bildungsroman, the eponymous hero finds his comfortable, if uneventful, life in the Prussian town of Thunder-ten-Tronckh abruptly turned on its head after expressing his love for the town’s baron’s daughter. Unable, as he is, to resist Cunégonde’s charms, Candide resolves to kiss her, inciting rage in her father, who promptly banishes him to a world much darker and less predictable than the one he had thought to have known.

As befitting a modern retelling of Adam & Eve’s fall from grace and subsequent exile from Eden, Candide has its fair share of drama. Every few pages, the protagonist finds himself caught up in a life-threatening situation from which he must then extricate himself. With its giddy pace, the story takes us on a whirlwind tour across the globe, which sees Candide travel quite inadvertently to Holland, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, El Dorado, Suriname, England, Venice, Paris, Transylvania, and Constantinople. Given the photogenic nature of many of these sites, it is obvious that from the very beginning, the writer’s heart was set on writing the next big global novel. In fact, so pronounced is Candide’s intercontinentalism that it gives Around the World in 80 Days a run for its money.

One can imagine the excitement Voltaire must have felt upon conjuring up his story, which he had of course written pour encourager les autres; knowing he had just struck narrative gold would have made his dream of stardom seem that much closer. Having said this, to say that any story dealing with love and war is a surefire recipe for Hollywood success would be to misunderstand every trope bandied about at those most venerable of cultural institutions, i.e. writers’ workshops. For despite Voltaire’s best efforts, Candide is ultimately a lesson on how not to write a novel, never mind one adaptable to the silver screen.

For starters, Candide does not fit comfortably into any one of the five or so categories reserved for genre fiction. Though ostensibly an action/adventure thriller, the novella displays elements of romance, utopia, fantasy, drama, and philosophy. In a sense, therefore, it is as if Voltaire could not decide on what genre to write in – and so he bites the proverbial bullet and goes after all of them. The problem with this scattershot approach, however, is that he fails to do justice to any of their conventions. Even when the protagonist essays to locate and be reacquainted with his beloved Cunégonde against all odds, the sheer number of adventures that come to impede his mission are such that one almost forgets he even has a love interest. How could Candide possibly resemble a male Mills & Boon stock character when he’s too busy being tied to a stake which a Portuguese public, believing him to be a heretic, is about to set on fire? Or what about the time that Candide shoots and kills two monkeys? In doing so, he proves he is less like Romeo and more like the poacher of Tintin in the Congo infamy.

On the subject of character development, Candide exposes its lightweight credentials. Despite the eponymous hero embarking on an adventure of such magnitude, his transformation from wide-eyed ingénu to Ecclesiastes-like sage is not wholly convincing. Part of the problem is that Voltaire breaks the fundamental writer’s rule of thrusting his protagonist into the wider world before giving us a chance to understand his modus vivendi. But if truth be told, his Candide is so bland and lacking in any remarkable personality traits that when misfortune befalls him, as it does time and time again, the reader is hardly inclined to sympathise with him – or any of the novel’s other one-dimensional characters, for that matter.

For one who considers himself as something of an ‘enlightened’ philosopher, Voltaire is in complete darkness when it comes to metaphysics or epistemology. Rather, it seems he channels the sum of his mental energy into devising increasingly sadistic ways of hurting the people of his imagination. Based on his attentive, nay, obsessive chronicling of humankind’s most glaring foibles, the writer must rate as the foremost expert in misanthropy. Who else could derive such pleasure from inventing a world so inimical to human flourishing? Most of his vitriol is targeted at humanity itself: in his tale, none of the aristocrats, anabaptists, soldiers, popes, kings, slaveholders, philosophers, literary critics, or Manichean scholars are spared his virulent criticism. As the problems afflicting Candide and Cunégonde would suggest, Voltaire enjoys crushing his characters’ dreams of leading happy lives, like the overcaffeinated reprobate that he probably is.

Whether Voltaire’s novella properly addresses theodicy – the problem of evil, as Homer would call it – as he claims to have done so, we cannot be so sure. The world described by Voltaire is so crooked and perverse that the question of why bad things happen to good people becomes basically irrelevant: there are no good souls to speak of. The overwhelming bleakness of the novella’s conclusion must surely undermine whatever potential for box-office success it could have had. One can only imagine filmgoers attending a Candide film screening expecting to see a middle-of-the-road rom-com, only to leave the cinema as trembling philosophers, their sunny outlook on life giving way to a sober evaluation of humanity’s and the universe’s naked amorality. This being the case, this critic cannot help but advise Voltaire to stick to his day job at the comically-named Académie Française (‘French Academy’), which sounds rather like a flailing suburban hair salon. “We must cultivate our garden,” says a wised-up Candide. His creator would do well to translate his words into action.

In Imitation of Dante

Later on, I tried my hand at translating the poem into English, albeit by breaking the rules of terza rima:  

In Imitation of Dante (English version)

When from the midpoint on life’s way I had strayed,
A desire to know this vast world, I’d betrayed, 
I found myself lost, in dark woods, and afraid. 

So great was my rue that came after the sin,
And now, the fear that thrives under my skin
Recalls that dim choice I had blindly let in. 

Through the years I have dreamed of the lights from afar,
In a container of pain, where my noble hopes are
To touch Paradise, from whence comes the original star.

—

The English translation was by far the easiest one to complete, not only because English is my native tongue, but also because in the language, monosyllabic words are plentiful. In comparison, French has a fair number of monosyllabic words, but is much less flexible when it comes to verb conjugations – in fact, verbs take up so many syllables that one has to take some liberties with the literal meaning of the original poem simply to fit in enough ideas:

 

Pour imiter Dante

Quand je suis parti du milieu du chemin de notre vie,
Un désir de connaître, de ce forêt, le monde j’ai trahit,
Je crevais d’être perdu et de mourir de trouille.

Si grands sont les remords nés de cette vie!
Et la peur qui demeure sous la peau, sans merci, 
Me rappelle du choix si aveugle que j’ai pris.

Après des années de rêver des lumières jolies,
De ce conteneur de douleur, pour mes espoirs je prie:
Que le Paradis je touche ait les étoiles qui brillent.

 

—

If the French version was difficult, it was the Italian translation that was a real struggle for me. Perhaps my Italian vocabulary is rather limited; but in any case, the way in which Italian words are stressed makes finishing lines with monosyllabic words nearly impossible. I also had to alter Dante’s words to render more faithful this Italian translation of my first poem. 

 

Per imitare Dante:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi han visto
desiderare conoscere il mondo, anche se tristo, 
per una selva oscura mi ritrovai, insisto! 

Grand’è il rimorso che da ‘sta vita è venuto;
E ora, la paura che sotto la pelle – aiuto! –
Mi ricorda della scelta che ho fatto senza lutto. 

Dopo anni di sognare di luci sì belle,
Di dove ogni pena fa muovere le vele,
Toccherò il Paradiso in cui brillano le stelle.

The Comic Divinity

When from the way of all life I had strayed,
Un désir de connaître le monde j’ai trahit,
I found myself lost, in thick concrete, and afraid.

Si grands sont les remords qui ont suivi mon ‘oui’!
E ora, la paura che fiorisce sotto la pelle
Me rappelle du choix si aveugle que j’ai pris.

Attraverso gli anni sognavo delle luci sì belle
While serving my sentence in this bétonnière here;
Ma conoscerò il Paradiso appena avrò visto le stelle.

Leaves of Knowledge

On Friday 18th October 2013, I had my last proper day as an undergrad. The thought that I will be graduating from university and heading into the ‘real world’ is strange. My four years at Auckland have really flown by. I swear that time moves faster the older you become. In honour of my time as a student (and there’s still a chance I will be pursuing postgraduate studies next year), I have compiled a list of facts which I have learnt in lecture theatres, from textbooks, and on the internet. The facts aren’t in any particular order, but do shed light on my scattershot interests. On y va: 

1) The Greek word for virtue, aretê, refers more to ‘excellence in activity’ than to moral uprightness. Socrates was probably the first  philosopher to question the Ancient Greeks’ conception of virtue (c.f. Plato’s Meno). The name ‘Aristotle’ means ‘the best purpose’, and ‘aristocracy’ refers to a form of government that is ruled by nobles/aristocrats.

2) The word ‘spirit’, in its original Greek context, means ‘breath’; hence in the Middle Ages the word ‘inspiration’ meant ‘the taking in of breath’ (c.f. Giorgio Agamben’s essay on Dante: The Joy that Never Ends)

3) The ‘wind’ mentioned in Ecclesiastes 1:14 (“a chasing after the wind”) can be translated as ‘breath’ or ‘spirit’. The Authorised King James Version translates the fragment as “vexation of spirit”)

4) For the Pilgrims onboard the Mayflower, their migrating from Europe to the Americas was an allegory that represented the way in which God’s chosen people had moved from captivity in Egypt to the Promised Land (c.f. American history professor at the Sorbonne)

5) The American media company, NBC, is owned by General Electric, a weapons manufacturer (c.f. Media professor at the Sorbonne)

6) The three poems that make up Dante’s magnum opus all finish with the same word: stelle. Dante saw the stars as heavenly bodies whose distance from the earth symbolises man’s separation from God (c.f. The Divine Comedy)

7) The German sociologist, Max Weber, describes the increased rationalisation inherent in modern life as the ‘iron cage’ (c.f. Sociology lecturer at Auckland)

8)  Taking Homer’s lead, writers of epic poetry usually begin their epics by invoking the muses. In Paradise Lost, John Milton attempted to go one step further than the Ancients by calling on the ‘Heavenly Muse’ to aid him in his quest to “justify the ways of God to men” (c.f. Paradise Lost)

9) For the Apostle Paul, faith is the “substantiation of things hoped for” (c.f. Hebrews 11:1)

10) Abel Tasman sent his men to explore the area around New Zealand’s Golden Bay in a cock-boat and a pinnace

11) The 19th century Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, would fill his coffee mug with a ‘white pyramid’ of sugar before pouring in the coffee (c.f. Soren Kierkegaard: A Biography by Joakim Garff)

12) Plato’s Academy was the forerunner to the university (Philosophy professor at Auckland)

13) Plato believed in reincarnation; in his Republic, he talks about the processes that the formerly incarnated soul undergoes in the afterlife before it is once again placed within a vessel (c.f. The Republic by Plato)

14) In Marco Polo’s account of his journey through Asia, he claimed to have seen a unicorn. Modern critics believe what he actually saw was a rhinoceros (c.f. Il Milione)

15) The word ‘logo’ comes from the Greek logos, which is translated as ‘word’ in most English translations of John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”. It goes without saying that the English appropriation of the word has much more commercial connatations

16) Antonio Vivaldi, the Italian Baroque composer, arguably wrote more music than anyone else in history

17) The Ancient Greeks had no word for ‘blue’. Homer described the sea as being ‘wine-dark’ not because it had a red complexion, but because red was, curiously, the closest description of blue that he had available (c.f. Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher)

18) The state of Pennsylvania was so named because it was established by the English Quaker, William Penn, and because it had plentiful forests (silva is the Latin word for ‘forest’). (c.f. American History professor at the Sorbonne)

19) Artists are often considered as being melancholy by nature, but the extent to which they express their ‘black bile’ has varied over time. Medieval artists rejected melancholy because it was associated with sloth, or accidie, which was one of the six deadly sins. Romantic artists, on the other hand, reveled in their melancholy.  (c.f. Les Enfants du Saturne by Rudolf Wittkower &  Margot Wittkower)

20) John Keats, the English Romantic poet, used to imitate the sound of a trombone whenever he and his siblings amused themselves by humming classical music pieces

21) Aristotle was so highly regarded by Medieval thinkers that he held the title of ‘the scientist’; whenever a philosophical or scientific dispute could not be resolved, the scholars would apply the term ‘ipse dixit‘ (Latin for ‘what he said’) to support their arguments if Aristotle had used the arguments previously

22) The painting technique chiaroscuro that is most famously associated with Caravaggio simply means ‘clear-dark’

23) In Greek, an apologia is a defence. When Socrates gave his Apology before the Athenian citizens, he was not expressing regret for the way of life that he had chosen to lead (c.f. Plato’s Apology)

24) The word ‘culture’ was coined during the French Enlightenment, and is derived from ‘cultivation’

25) The French word for ninety-nine is quatre-vingt-dix-neuf, which literally means ‘four-twenty-ten-nine’ (4*20+19)

26) Mainland France is known as the L’Hexagone, which is refers to its general shape. The adjective hexagonal(e) is used to distinguish the mainland from its départements, or overseas territories

27) The German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, was born in Koenigsberg, which is situated in modern Russia    

28) Hansen’s law refers to the belief that third generation immigrants desire to reaffirm the cultural values and practices that  their parents, the second generation of immigrants, wanted to forget (c.f. The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant by Marcus Lee Hansen)

29) Aladdin, the eponymous hero of the tale found in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, is Chinese (c.f. Aladdin)

30) It has been speculated that the word ‘Iscariot’ derives from the Greek-Aramaic hybrid Iskarioutha, which means ‘chokiness’. In other words, the man who betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver may have been named after the manner in which he died

31) In English, the words ‘luxury’ and ‘lust’ have the same Latin root: luxuria

32) The prefix used to denote all things Chinese, sino-, is Persian in origin. In the Old Testament,  the “Land of Sinim” in Isaiah 49:12 probably refers to China

33) The Greek word ‘cosmos‘ literally means ‘order’ or ‘ornament’ and is a metaphor for ‘world’; hence the term ‘cosmopolitan’ refers to one who participates in the practices of more than one culture

34) The adjective ‘antebellum‘ comes from Latin and literally means ‘before the war’

35) Crème brûlée is French for ‘burnt cream’

36) Stanford University was founded by Leland Stanford, who made his fortune as head of the railway company that hired emigrant Chinese workers, who, working in slave-like conditions, constructed the First Transcontinental Railroad

37) Karl Marx’s well-known quote that history repeats itself, “the first as tragedy, then as farce”, refers respectively to Napoleon I and his nephew, Napoleon III

38) Marseille, the oldest city in France, was founded by Phoenicians

39) Fish & Chips were brought to England by Portuguese Jews

40) The first meritocracy was implemented in the second century BC by the Han Dynasty, with the introduction of civil service exams

41) The German city, Trier, is said to have been founded by an Assyrian prince called Trebeta

42) In 18th century France, it was fashionable for aristocrats to watch commoners excrete bodily waste in the street (c.f. American History professor at the Sorbonne)

43) In Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles, the devil, first appears to the eponymous hero as a black poodle. Perhaps this is the original inspiration for Winston Churchill’s description of depression as the ‘Black Dog’ (c.f. Goethe’s Faust)

44) When Richard Wagner was young, he showed so little aptitude for playing piano that he was the only child in his family not to receive formal lessons

45) The word ‘soccer’ is English in origin, being an adaptation of the term ‘Association Football’ 

46) In Italian, the word peccato refers to both ‘sin’ and ‘shame’ (in the sense of “It’s a pity”). To put it bluntly, that which is a shame to the English, is a sin to the Italians.

47) The terms ‘white’ and ‘coloured’, which have been used to denote supposed ethnic groups, were coined as recently as the 17th century

48) The ‘great’ in ‘Great Britain’ (Brittania Major) is used to distinguish the British Isles from Brittany in France. Great Britain is ‘great’ (meaning ‘high’ or ‘tall’) because it is situated to the north of Brittany

49) Philosophy comes from the Ancient Greek philosophia, which means ‘love of wisdom’. The term ‘philosophy’ was synonymous with ‘science’ (which means ‘knowledge’) in the West up until the second half of the 19th century

50) New Zealand was first settled in 1250-1300 AD, which is the same time period during which Marco Polo travelled to China. One could say that the Middle Ages is to Europe what the beginning of human history is to New Zealand

Of space & men / Lolita

“So what’s the point of going to France if you’re going to study English?” I pondered while catching the metro and making my way to Clignancourt. Of course, it was not as if I wasn’t taking courses in French. Indeed, my Philosophy course was so intensive that I actually found myself needing English-language courses – and if only to lighten the study burden I was then bearing. As I quickly found out, the Université Paris-Sorbonne sure knew how to throw exchange students into the deep end. What it had lost in prestige, it more than made up for in homework.

On Thursday mornings, I would turn up to an American history class, which was entitled, of all things, “Of Space and Men”. At the university, many history lecturers had been re-invented as English lecturers, and hence gave history lectures in English. This policy proved a boon to students studying English, but it was also a godsend to international students like me. But while lecturers had a good grasp of English, for native English speakers, it was clear where proficiency ended and comedy began.

At the time, my lecturer was a true history-buff who had developed an encyclopedic knowledge of the United States. He was also gay, and had a manner about him that put common flamboyance to shame. While lecturing to the class in English, he would speak in a way that I can only describe as a cross between an overworked Swiss CERN scientist and a 19th Century English drag queen. It is one thing to break free of the accent ascribed on oneself by one’s mother tongue; but to go so far as to adopt the speech conventions of subcultures – now that is another thing altogether. For in expressing the identity with which he was most comfortable, he would at times gaze at the class and flutter his eyelashes, as if he were advertising Chanel No. 5. I once even saw him after class sitting on a wall, wriggling his legs back and forth like a hyperactive Humpty Dumpty.

To be fair, I hold Lolita* in high esteem, and hope not to say a bad word about him. He cared about his students, and marked our work much more generously than other lecturers I came to know. He also knew English to a high standard, speaking with an eloquence that I could only dream of. But there was no doubting the fact that he had a unique way with words – and one of which he was not in full control.

Since my course was about immigration to the United States, my lecturer would describe the peoples who made the journey across oceans in search of better lives. While being careful to distinguish between nationality and ethnicity, it was still amusing to hear Lolita* talk about “people of Arabian origins”, as if “origins” were a standard term. And for what reason did many people of various origins come to America? It was “to flee persecutions.” Why have one persecution, after all, when your complex can house a whole series of them?

Other linguistic faux pas he would commit had to do with transcribing locutions from French to English. Though English and French have many expressions and words in common, when it comes to some phrases they are an ocean apart. When Lolita said, “They don’t want to put into brackets the fact that the Indians lived in poor conditions,” it was clear he was thinking of the French “mettre entre parenthèses“, a locution closer in meaning to “downplay” or “set aside”. Then again, with a teacher that twice remarked that “Pennsylvania has nothing to do with pencil”, anything was possible.

At times, Lolita would gallicise his speech, granting an aura of childlike innocence to words that normally evoked anything but sweetness. While aiming to use the word ‘influx’, he ended up saying, “the infloo of fresh blood stirred mainstream reaction and resentment.” On other occasions, his mistakes were simply of his own making: The “numerous supremacists” became the “numb-erist suprem-massists”; the United States legitimised racial segregation by implementing “Jim Crow Lows”; pronouncing silent h’s, he told us that “Jamestown was named in h-onour of the king”; Hawaii became “Ha-why?”

I think what made Lolita so memorable was the fact that he represented a Paris that foreigners seldom ever see. Not all Paris is chic, after all – a fact he himself noted when he said that 18th century Paris was ‘filthy’. But to have for a lecturer a man who did not shy away from all-out goofiness was both refreshing and an unforgettable highlight of my trip.

* Not his real name

Thoughts on language 2

Vowels are like round floatation aids. With an abundance of vowels, Italian words become so buoyant that if they were to find themselves under 70,000 fathoms of water, they would soon enough rise to the surface, sending the saddest of thoughts out on a high note:

Io sono al terzo cerchio, della piova

etterna, maladetta, fredda e greve;

regola e qualità mai non l’è nova.

It is impossible to say two or more English words at the same time. Try to say “cat” and “dog” simultaneously, and you’ll probably end up saying either “cidog” or “dicat”. Since oral communication takes place in time, when one pronounces a word, one must necessarily pronounce each of the word’s syllable in order. To do otherwise risks compromising the intended understanding of the word.

In contrast, a written word can be understood in a fraction of a second simply by glimpsing its outline. Written words have a definite beginning, because someone must write them down; but once written, they can exist for as long as the material on which they are written exists, during which they may be read and interpreted an infinite number of times.

Many so-called rules of English grammar are followed without any real justification. It is perfectly fine to end sentences with prepositions if one has to. And there is nothing wrong with beginning sentences with ‘because’, ‘and’, and ‘or’. Nor is it wrong to boldly split infinitives, since the ‘to’ isn’t even part of the infinitive.

Each language has its own flavour. Since English phonetics are different from French ones, if one were to pronounce the French word “merci” as one would say the English word “mercy”, would this be equivalent to pronouncing the English “thank you” as “thonk you”? How do you measure the distance of vowels from one another?

Words are like the courses of a meal. If words were seen in terms of their size, a good sentence would contain hors d’oeuvres, appetisers, mains, salads, soups, deserts, and after-dinner mints. Why settle for monosyllabic hors d’oeuvres, when you can have a full course dinner?

Though translations can faithfully capture meaning, they cannot always imitate the ‘sound’ of words. The aesthetics of languages depend largely on the phonetics that make them up. Even if an aesthetic sensibility is subjective by definition, it is a truism that “crème brûlée” sounds much more delicious than “burnt cream”.

Poesia in trois tongues

Il poeta che scrive in tre lingue o più
‘sta poema speciale sin capo che coda
è sempre in cerca di parole più giuste,
vuote di senso e proprio di moda.

Le poète qui écrit en trois langues ou plus
ce poème spécial sans raison ni rime
doit constamment chercher les mots les plus justes
pour feindre une profondeur mieux que sublime.

The poet that writes in three proud tongues or more
this poem unique, without reason nor rhyme,
is always in search of the right words to share
some senses both pleasing and dull at a time.

Il poeta che scrive in tre lingue o più
ce poème, qui n’avait ni raison ni rime,
s’efforce à tout moment de faire des bons mots
that happen to be less profound than they seem.