Diacritiques

I spent a very pleasant day yesterday having lunch with Suw Charman (in whose IRC channel#[1] I like to hang out), Kevin Anderson of BBC World Have Your Say and Matt Mullenweg (the WordPress lead developer). They are in Paris for the Les Blogs 2 conference. The local welcome committee included Michel Valdrighi (who took some great pictures) and Mark Cabiling. Frédéric de Villamil joined us later, after we’d taken a stroll showing off Paris to our visitors and arrived at the Lizard Lounge bar for pre-conference drinks and socialising.

Even though I’m not at Les Blogs, the meeting was rather stimulating. Kevin proceeded to interview Fred and me about the French blogs’ reaction to the recent unrest in the French peri-urban housing estates#[2], in the context of the traditional media. Even though I’ve only been interviewed a handful of times in my life, I could tell that Kevin is an excellent interviewer. We had an interesting discussion about political blogging: how, via the tools that are now available to any interested citizen, a political debate that is deadlocked between the oft-repeated stances of whatever the dominating political actors are in a given country, can be shaken up and revitalised. This includes places where blogging is subjected to massive censorship (China, for example), but also the old Western democracies that are typically suffering from stagnation of the political life and ossification of the structures. How exactly this (often still very modest) injection of new democratic lifeblood happens varies a lot between countries, localities or other units that are covered by a common political process.

Another topic that came up with various conference-goers was that of multilingualism in the blogging world. Multilingual blogging tools — multilingual anything, really — feature prominently in that, but also the problem of vehicular languages, at the moment English most of the time. There is a fine balance between the nefarious effects of the domination of one language in international communication, on the one hand, and the effective silencing even the most brilliant ideas undergo if they are not reflected in the common discourse, on the other. This is a question I’ll have to come back to in another post.

[1]: #suwcharman on irc.freenode.net — it’s rather like a 19th century salon, 21st century version. [2]: It is time, maybe, to admit that I decided some months ago to reorganise my online activities. I have, in effect, split my web presence, focussing this blog on matters of language, my forays into linguistics, reading, uses of the new electronic tools and occasionally meta-blogging posts like this one. The more personal stuff, topics related to local blogquaintances, snarky remarks and polemicising has been shifted to a different place, which is not publicised under my real identity. I don’t have any doubt that a competent searcher will be able to find the rest of my writing — I’ve been active on the internet for over ten years after all, and it has left traces with my name attached to them. Yet I’m trying to prevent my more experimental and controversial material to show up on top of any Google search for my name. Another, more important, reason for the split was that I had started blogging without any consideration for a potential readership. Those local or regional bloggers I’ve made friends with, sometimes via the blogging platforms we use, sometimes around a pint of Guinness, aren’t necessarily interested in this blog. And those readers who are, could care less#[3] about what’s shaking the locals, or the weather in Paris. So, yes, I have indeed written about the French riots. In English even. Just not here.

Trois rencontres créés par l’hasard. Toutes ont eu lieu dans les halls et couloirs souterrains de la ligne 14 du métro parisien. Pour les deux premières, ça s’est produit jeudi dernier, après les au-revoirs avec Steph, Gare de Lyon. La dernière, lundi. J’habite près d’un des deux terminus de la ligne 14.#[1] C’est ma ligne.

• Hostilité. Deux femmes station Gare de Lyon, aux tourniquets. L’une est déjà de l’autre côté, l’autre derrière moi. Je n’ai pas l’habitude de m’offusquer des gens que la RATP apelle les resquilleurs : sauter et laisser sauter, ce sont les us et coutumes du pays. Mais ce jour-là, je suis crevée, je tremble, je tiens à peine debout. Je ne me rends donc pas compte de leur manœuvre.

  La première femme couvre de sa main la cellule infrarouge pour que le tourniquet reste ouvrert après mon passage. Problème, elle est trop rapide, elle empèche la barrière de s’ouvrir devant moi. Je grommelle un peu. Et une fois passée, c’est l’assaut verbal. « Qu’est-ce que ça va te couter de nous laisser passer avec toi ? Connasse ! … ». Je me demande si je vais me faire taper dessus par une femme plus petite que moi. Je brédouille.

  Et c’est là que tombe la phrase. « Je te casse pas les couilles, tu me casses pas les couilles. » Dans une conversation, pour ainsi dire, entre deux femmes, cela fait bizarre. Je me détends involontairement. La situation se détend aussi. Je poursuis mon chemin, elles poursuivent le leur.

• Le cuisinier collant. A peine échapée à la rencontre précédente, je gagne le quai et m’assieds. Un homme, tiré à quatre épingles, costume-cravate, manteau-serviette me salue. C’est la panique chez moi — peut-être devrais-je le connaître ?

  Moi, je me sens crade, vétue d’un vieux jeans, rêvant d’une bonne douche. J’essaye de faire le minimum de conversation (et puis, c’est idiot, la manière dont les gens ne se regardent pas dans le métro, non ?). Il a un énorme livre de cuisine illustré sur ses genous. J’ai donc un coup d’inspiration et sors la question originale, « C’est un livre de cuisine ? » Grosse erreur. Il est cuisinier. Me raconte son métier. Son adhésion (ou élection ?) à l’Académie Nationale de Cuisine (ou quelque chose comme ça). Et m’intérroge.

  Je ne veux pas parler de moi, ni de ce que je fais, je parle donc de l’internet et des blogues. Avantage : il n’en connaît rien. J’échappe à peine aux bises quand nos chemins se séparent enfin. Déconcertant.

• Les deux idiots. Idiot, ça vient du grec et signifie personne privée, personne ne se souciant de rien au monde que de soi-même.

  Exemple. Je suis sur l’escalator qui mène sur le quai. Une rame attend, prête au départ. (Rappelons que c’est le terminus.) Devant moi il y a deux hommes de mon âge, qui parlent de leurs iPod, Palm, portables, qu’en sais-je. Et avancent avec une lenteur qui me met sur les dents.

  On est à quelques mètres des portes quand le signal (sonore) retentit. Et les deux badauds règlent leur vitesse de manière qu’ils parviendront à monter, mais personne derrière.

  J’y suis quand même arrivée, j’ai les bleus sur les bras pour le prouver. Oh, quelle innocence offusquée quand je leur jette des regards à fendre l’acier, leur tire dessus avec mes yeux.

[1]: « Terminus. Tous les voyageurs sont invités à déscendre. Last stop. Would all passengers kindly leave the train. Terminal. Invida a todos los pasajeros a bajar. »

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.