Diacritiques

Now for some reading material that’s more commonly considered escapist: mystery novels.

First I have to make a shameful admission: I knew that Fred Vargas is a woman, but didn’t pick up on the fact that she is French. English first name + Spanish last name = American, in my heuristics. I therefore put off looking at her books until my next foray into one of the better English-language book stores.

I corrected my error, and have just finished reading Pars vite et reviens tard. An excellent book, much closer to Frances Fyfield in the use of metaphor, recurrent phrases and psychology (but with more straightforward plotting) than the Léo Mallets and Daniel Pennacs the foreign reviewers compare her to.#[1]

There is a mediocre review in the Guardian (the reviewer likes the book, but I’m not sure he or she has read it very thoroughly), another one at Tangled Web, and one that tells too much of the story and misspells the name of one of the main characters.

The English title, Have Mercy on Us All, sounds slightly strange to me. I’ll return to this later since this means uncovering a bit of the story. If you want to discover the book for yourselves, you can stop reading in time.

The book offers other translation matters that piqued my interest. One is about how to describe a symbol that is central to the story and depicted on the book cover here (image file).

The first passage describing the mark (twice) goes as follows:

Maryse [a witness] s’appliqua à représenter un grand quatre fermé, en typographie d’imprimerie, au trait plein, à la base pattée comme une croix de Malte, et portant deux barres sur son retour.

– Voilà, dit Maryse.

– Vous l’avez fait à l’envers, dit doucement Adamsberg [the detective]en reprenant son calepin.

– C’est parce qu’il est à l’envers. Il est à l’envers, large au pied, avec ces deux petites barres au bout.

So the mark looks like a number 4, but an uncommon one. À l’envers clearly means flipped left to right here. Otherwise, it could mean upside-down (as the Guardian reviewer wrongly writes). For “the world is turned upside-down”, eg, French uses “le monde [est] à l’envers“. But in the case of an upside-down symbol, I think (but am not quite sure), that French would prefer renversé.

The other reviews employ “backwards looking figure ‘4s’” and “reversed 4s”. In any case, the book cover is helpful (the French like the English version).

We also find the delightful use of an eggcorn to link and characterise the two central protagonists#[2]. The eggcorn’s “original” is a bit of French legalese, a noun (post-)modifier, y afférant. The English translation of this is thereto relating, like in The Inquiry Committee shall receive a copy of the grievance form together with all documentation thereto relating taken from here.

One of the protagonists, the police commissaire#[3] Adamsberg, has just transferred to a homicide unit. He reflects on what lies behind him: dealing with housebreaking, theft, etc. and the inevitable paperwork, “les kilos de papiers y afférants”.

Earlier in the novel, we meet Joss Le Guern, a former sailor who has reinvented himself as a town crier. He uses a home-made letterbox to collect the messages he reads out three times a day on a public square. On this letterbox, he has painted a list of “prices and other conditions” y affairantes. The bit of legal language has stuck with him from a brush with the law that has turned his life upside-down (or flipped it left to right). Having heard it a lot of times during his trial, he obviously believes it to derive from affaire, meaning “business”, or “matter” in general#[4], like the affaire that brought him before a court.

Last, there is the matter of the title I mentioned above. Its literal translation is “Leave swiftly and come back late”. As the plot unfolds, we learn [and this is why I left some spoiler space] that the letters CLT that are left, signature-like, next to the number-four shaped graffiti, come from the Latin phrase Cito, longe, tarde (”fast, far, late”), the long version of which is Cito, longe fugeas, et tarde redeas, ie “Flee fast and far away, and come back late”. This, in turn, is a traditional piece of advice given when the plague threatened.#[5] And yes, the plague is very significant. Why was a suitable translation not good enough for the book title? The German version managed, with “Fliehe weit und schnell”.

[1]: Do reviewers always have to go on about “the atmosphere of Paris”, or of “the 14th arrondissement of Paris”? What hidden nostalgia lies behind this tendency? Vargas isn’t particularly concerned with local colour. Sure, the novel is set in Paris, recognisably so. Sure, a particular neighbourhood the history of which holds some degree of significance, and which happens to be located at the north-western edge of the 14th arrondissement, is the scene of much of the action. But its characterisation, brilliant as it is, draws more on the grotesque than on what the real Paris is like.

[2]: Note to self: I really need to start writing about French eggcorns in French.

[3]: Yet another translation problem. If I understand British police ranks correctly, a Commissioner would be a bit above a French commissaire. The equivalent might be a Detective (Chief) Inspector. As for corresponding US ranks, this translation would take too much liberty with the particular setting of the novel. Using one of these terms would clash as much as when French translations use ANPE for another country’s unemployment office. Which, unfortunately, sometimes happens.

[4]: But not “love affair”, which is liaison or aventure.

[5]: I couldn’t find out since when exactly (there was one attribution to Hippocrates, but I’m far from sure), but at least since Latin was commonly used for treatises about the plague.

Putting this entry in the category “inspiration” feels quite wrong. This hasn’t been a good week, on several counts, and I’ve been suffering from a painful lack of inspiration. However, that’s precisely the reason it has to be categorised thus.

In times like these, reading remains, and there may be a pinch of escapism in it.

The blogosphere, of course,relentlessly produces text, thought, and gems up with which it’s hard to keep.

OK, I shouldn’t have written the last sentence. It is ungrammatical. The reason it has crept up during the interaction between my fingertips and the keyboard is that I’ve been intrigued with two posts by Geoffrey Pullum on Language Log (easily one of the three blogs I enjoy most). In A Churchill story up with which I will no longer put, he chastises “Winston Churchill” for “cheating”: “Churchill” (ok, let’s call this person Speaker from now on) is the supposed utterer of the sentence “This is the kind of English up with which I will not put” (or some variation), thus rebuking a meddlesome copyeditor who, following the “rule” that English sentences aren’t allowed to end in a preposition, supposedly (again) corrected the great man’s grammar in some book draft or other. The second one, in reality a guest post by Benjamin G. Zimmer, A misattribution no longer to be put up with, reveals that the sentence isn’t by Churchill at all.

I’m intrigued because, like, is there anything wrong with either of that? Benjamin Zimmer’s post is certainly interesting, but the post title kindof implies that the bon mot shouldn’t be presented as Churchill’s. But … it’s an anecdote, and as such I, for one, never expected the real Mr Churchill to have uttered the sentence in the first place. With anecdotes it’s a bit like with what my mathematical friends said about mathematical theorems: If a theorem is named after a mathematician, it is almost certain that this mathematician wasn’t the first one to prove it.

As for the cheating charge, why shouldn’t Speaker have? The sentence does, after all, show that the “rule” against sentence-ending prepositions is fabricated and fallacious. Wrong, if you prefer. If the effect is achieved because this particular sequence, put [vb.] + up [verbal particle, or preposition-that-doesn’t-take-an-object] + with [preposition that does take an object], just like keep up with can’t be taken apart and rearranged all over the sentence, more power to Speaker! He or she found a case the mysterious editor couldn’t do away with.

Update: Thinking about this post from a few hours ago, originally, I felt it didn’t accurately reflect the enjoyment and enlightenment I draw from Prof. Pullum’s blog entries. Yesterday’s She’s they until you acknowledge her, on singular-antecedent they is another gem. It reminded me of example N° 15 in Garnier and Guimier’s L’épreuve de linguistique au CAPES et à l’agrégation d’anglais#[1], which consists in commenting the pronoun gender choice in the following excerpt from The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky by S. Crane#[2]:

The dog of the barkeeper of the Weary Gentlemen saloon had not appreciated the advance of events. He yet lay dozing in front of his master’s door. At sight of the dog, the man paused and raised his revolver humorously. At sight of the man, the dog sprang up and walked diagonally away, with a sullen head, and growling. The man yelled, and the dog broke into a gallop. As it was about to enter an alley, there was a loud noise, a whistling, and something spat on the ground directly before it. The dog screamed, and, wheeling in terror, galloped headlong in a new direction.

Like in the singular-they article, a trait of the pronoun that would appear to be uniquely determined by the antecedent (here, gender; there, number) changes while the antecedent itself stays the same. And in both cases it happens for a good reason.

[1]: For non-French readers it’s necessary to explain that this is an exam-preparation guide for the linguistics (otherwise called, grammar, or linguistic text analysis) part of the two exams offered in France to qualify as an English teacher in the public educational system. In the easiest case, this part of the exam consists of giving an intelligent commentary (informed mostly by semantics, as far as I can make out) on some passage like the one cited, with particular emphasis on a particular feature of grammar. I took the lower of the two exams in 2002, but two years later, was forced to give up on the profession for the time being. Or maybe the profession gave up on me. The bits of linguistics training I got from studying for the CAPES#[3] are something I hold dear, though.

[2]: No, I don’t know this book. I just copied the attribution.

[3]: Since I have no formal instruction in English (language, literature or civilisation), having prepared myself for it entirely on my own, the piece of paper that says I once passed is the something to hold on to as well. Some have suggested I try for the higher-level exam next time (it wouldn’t be entirely out of my reach even though quite a bit harder). It would qualify me for teaching up to the (roughly, undergraduate) post-secondary level.

For many people, the one special date of the year is an occasion to reflect on other — more famous — anniversaries that fall on that day.

For me, this is the 6th of December. I used to think that this date wasn’t an extraordinary one, apart from being St Nicolas’ Day (which is important in Germany, as children put their stockings out over the night and find it in the morning filled with nuts, oranges and candy), and the birthday of Peter Handke and Ève Curie.

But I was wrong. There’s another, much more painful and, I fear, somewhat significant event that took place on this date. Here are the details on the CBC archive site. The perpetrator left a letter about his intentions, which is here — no one can say he wasn’t clear on what his acts signified.

One thing I find slightly disquieting is when the massacre at the Montreal Polytechnique University happened, I wasn’t a child any longer. I was a young adult, and should have been open to what happens in the world. Still, I only learnt about these events a few years ago.

For more links in French, see the French version of this article.

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