Translation, Perfume And Fruit

Translating Time

I've been amused for years by foreign football players and managers struggling with English words that express time: time itself, moment, period and (by implication) patch, spell, run, sequence, stage, etc. And now I've seen that Gareth Southgate, manager of England' Under-21 team, has caught the disease. I've seen him quoted as saying that “we are in a good moment”. Who on earth who is English and not exposed to foreigners struggling with our language would express the thought that their team was having a good patch or a good run of results by saying “we are in a good moment”?

Bizarre changes do occur in language evolution. We have the verb to sidle (up to someone) only because someone centuries ago thought that the ancient noun a sideling (assistant) must be the present participle of a verb, as in singing, talking, etc, and so invented the verb to sidle. It hadn't existed beforehand and has no other origin. The word time in English doesn't translate easily into most romance languages; their general equivalent, be it temps, tiempo, or whatever, applies to the concept of time but not always to a period of it; it depends on context. Saying that a football team was having a good temps, tiempo or whatever would mean that they were living it up, so foreign football staff use what they assume to be the English equivalent of their word in that context, which would be moment, momento or whatever. But a moment in English is very much shorter than the period of time they are talking about. If the prevalence of foreign football players and coaches in England persists, however, they may succeed not only in changing our football style but also our language.

Yellow Hillsides

The hillsides around here are probably best known popularly for groves of olive trees or rows of vines and those are certainly abundant. But between the months of March and June the hillsides are a blaze of yellow, as in the photo. Towards the middle of March coronilla starts bloomimg, not only colouring the hillsides but also perfuming the landscape. Coronilla has special connotations for me as it was one of my mother's favourite flowers, although it wasn't easy to find plants in UK garden centres. Here it grows wild, everywhere. Then, as the coronilla fades, broom starts to bloom and the photo here shows just one hillside between Mollans and Buis covered in its flowers. Later on, higher up, there will be fields of lavendar and, lower down, fields of sunflowers, but for the moment this area can claim the prize for the most attractive landscape.

Fruit

It's been asparagus and strawberry season for the past six weeks and I've been indulging heavily in both. About a week ago I decided I didn't want to eat any more asparagus for a while. This evening friends Hallie and Mary came to drink wine on my balcony and stick their noses in all the honeysuckle growing over the front of the house. The honeysuckle has been there for some years now and always flowers but for some reason this an exceptional year; honeysuckles front and back are covered in bloom and, in the evening, perfume the whole house. I offered Hallie and Mary some strawberries with their wine and both said, reluctantly, that they really couldn't eat another strawberry. I know how they feel but, for the moment, strawberries are still me. The first apricots are now appearing in the markets though and the first melons and peaches won't be far behind. It's all looking good for a fruitaholic like me.

Mostly About Photos

The Bench

A couple of years ago I moved a bench from further down the road into the space between two trees on the opposite side of the road opposite my kitchen window. This year I posted two notices on the trees. One quoted Georges Brassens “Les amoureux qui se bécottent sur les bancs publiques …..ont de petites gueules bien sympathiques” and the other quoted John Donne “No man is an island...donc ne cherchez pas à savoir pour qui sonne le glas, le glas sonne pour vous”. I felt that they would give people sitting on the bench something to think about while viewing the scenery. However, I also went to the Mairie to say that the wood on the bench was rotten and needed replacing. So, two months ago, the village council had the bench removed and they have taken two months to replace it. In the meantime I and others went to the Mairie and pointed out that cars were being parked in the space and spoiling the flowers I had planted and that some elderly people who could not walk far came to sit on the bench and could no longer do so. This week, while I was away in the regional boules tournament in Chorges, the bench was replaced. So all is now well again.

Flowers

I'm of a generation that deals in text rather than graphics, which dates me. Everybody now posts photos, and has the means to do so, Thus my blog has been noticeably lacking in graphic content, a point which I'm determined to correct at least to some extent. So here are some photos of flowers in the front of my house and at the back. My house has become known in the village for its floral display and the best way to convey that is to show some photos; no amount of description can do the same in any useful way. Tourists takiing turns to take photos of themselves in front of the house are such a commonplace that my neighbours Florence and Jean-Marc say it is the most photographed house in the village. So photos there shall be.

Chorges

This week the village boules players and I went to Chorges, in the mountains near the Itlaian border, to play in the regional boules tournament. None of us did particularly well (no surprises there) but we all enjoyed ourselves, which was the main objective of the exercise. But, again, a photo is called for and in this posting or the next another will be forthcoming. I'm doing my best to get more graphically and less textually oriented.

Photos

There is a saying is that a picture is worth a thousand words and that can be the case. After all, what greater testament can there be to an event than that you have actually seen it with your own eyes? However…….I recall a class in my sixth form at school in which a teacher was trying to teach us to question everything and think for ourselves. In one lesson he showed a large photograph which could be cropped in different ways to suggest different interpretations of what was happening. In particular I remember a photo of a scene of devastation in a newspaper in which a policeman could be seen grasping a plank of wood which was on top of the head of a man on his knees. So was the policeman brutally beating the man over the head with the plank of wood or taking the plank of wood off the man's head to allow him to stand up? There was no way to know and the newspaper could equally have captioned the photo “police brutality” or “police help”, according to what it wished to convey. So a picture may well convey a thousand words but not necessarily the words you read in its caption.

That should be a caution for the graphically oriented generation, although text also should carry similar cautionary notes. As ever, the distinction will probably be between those who want to jump to conclusions and those who are prepared to say that they are not sure, that they don't really know. And those can be the most difficult words to utter.

Shakespeare Event

Shakespeare Event

As befits English ex-pats, the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare's death had to be celebrated locally in some way and the Beaumont English library duly took note and staged its event on the 8^th of May. Fifty one people attended, both French and English, so those responsible for the publicity certainly did their work. Various library members recited sonnets or excerpts from plays and there were Shakespearean songs and even some nibbles exemplary of the period; and muscat from Beaume de Venise substituted well for mead. The whole proceedings, masterminded by friend Jo, went off extremely well and seemed to be greatly appreciated by the audience. A good time was had by all.

I read Mark Anthoy's forum speech from Julius Ceaser. However, there was something else that I really wanted to do for which there was no time in the programme. Jo would have killed me if I'd done it unannounced. (Being a kind person she would have killed me humanely but I decided not to risk it.) I wanted to recount my personal experience of acting in a Shakespeare play, a most noteworthy event since it was the evening the MacBeth tragedy was turned into a comedy. That is quite a feat, as I am sure you will admit.

I went to a boys' grammar school, a rather traditional one. Every year there was a school play and every second year it had to be a Shakespeare play. One year that I took part the play was MacBeth. The school had three or four boys with genuine claims to be able to act and four or five others who would have a reasonable go at it. Now, if you've ever had a look at casts for Shakespeare's plays you may notice that they all have one thing in common: they are long. Adding up our actual and potential actors we found that we were around 30 short for MacBeth. Where to find the extra bodies?

Amateur sportsmen are generally loyal to their team and loyalty, like patriotism, is an attribute that can be usefully abused. So the rugby team was approached. “The school needs you; do it for the school; you owe it to the school”. So we had another fifteen on the cast list but still needed the same again. A sometimes useful attribute of first year boys is that they are generally small and can be bullied. “I saw you talking in Assembly; do you want a detention or do you want to volunteer for the school play?” Wise choice. That gave us the full cast that we needed.

It should be pointed out that many of the characters in Shakespeare's casts are essentially “extras” and have little or nothing to say, except perhaps something like “yes my lord”. Even rugby players can be trained to say that in a couple of weeks. This is where we cast our “volunteers”.

Those familiar with MacBeth will remember that towards the end of the play the rival armies (actually about 8-10 soldiers of each) troop onto and off the stage in successive scenes, hearing what a messenger has to say, being exhorted, or whatever. We hadn't made one army out of rugby players and one out of first year boys as that would be giving the game away; it would have been obvious who would win. So we mixed them up. The result was a succession of scenes in which two motley crews consisting of some hefty 6ft rugby players, looking rather formidable in their military gear, and some diminutive first year boys, lagging behind and dragging their swords behind them because they were too heavy to carry, trooped on and off the stage. The audience loved it. They howled with laughter and brought the house down. And so we turned MacBeth into a comedy.

There was one piece of isnpired casting in all this, and that was me. I was cast as a witch; in fact the first (lead) witch. I was going through puberty at the time and never knew whether the voice that came out of me was going to be a growl or a squeak. Ideal for a witch. I am still immensely proud of having been the lead witch in the first performance of MacBeth as a comedy. We never got to do Hamlet when I was at school but you can be sure that, if we had, it would have been exceptional.