Translation Etc

Translation Etc
We've had two or three days' rain during which I got back to the translation of Daniel's film on olive trees. The first (rough) translation was straightforward and is finished so now it's on to the details: polishing it and, finally, synchronisation and recording. I knew the latter would take time but it's now clear the first of these will too.

The problems start right at the beginning, a quote from Pliny the Elder stating that there are two “liquides” (wine and olive oil) particularly beneficial to man. “Liquids” is the obvious translation and will do but doesn't sound right. Bouncing this off friend Steve we came up with “fluids” which somehow sounds better but is still not ideal. I then thought: it's a saying by Pliny the Elder so look that up on the Internet. No joy; plenty of quotes of Pliny saying things about olive oil and wine but not that particular one. I could get back to the Latin and try my rusty Latin on it but decide against; it's a fine detail and I doubt my Latin is up to that.

Then......there's a man in the film carving a bowl from a chunk of olive wood. After doing a rough cut to shape on a lathe he takes first a chisel and then a knife to remove rough edges. The verb in French is “poncer”. Then he fits a round file attachment to a power unit and does the same to the inside of the bowl. The French verb is again “poncer”. I'm thinking: he chisels, he cuts, he grinds; and the translation is getting wordy. Trying the dictionary on “poncer” is no help. But there is a French instrument called a “ponceuse “ (I have one) to which you attach a strip of sandpaper for grinding away whatever. Maybe there's a clue there but I can't think what we call the thing in English. In desperation I look up the B&Q website to find out what it's called. It's a sander; so no help there then either. Finally, after several hours of musing in the back of my mind about chiseling, cutting, etc, I come up with “smooth”. What the guy is doing in all these different ways is smoothing the wood. It's obvious when I think about it (but I couldn't see the wood for the trees!) The trouble is that as my French gets more fluent my English gets less so. I begin to sympathise more with my mother who, at 93, is always struggling to find the right word.

Then.....there is a picture in the film of a number of ancient pots for storing olive oil; each has a different name in French (dioure, bombonne, etc). I could just call them pots but decide that something like “urns, ewers and pitchers” is probably much better; however, do we English have specific names for these things? I think it's unlikely as we don't have native olive oil and haven't had much imported until recently but I feel I'd better do an Internet search anyway. Again, no luck but I can't get rid of the obscure feeling that somewhere in England there's an expert (probably in the Victoria and Albert museum) who does know specific names in English for them. Life's too short...................

Then.....the film ends with a recitation of a poem by Jean Giono. Daniel is happy for this to remain in French but I'm not too sure about that. Now translation of poetry is a definite no-go area for me; it's just too difficult. But, maybe there's a translation of the poem on the Internet. I search. It seems very little of Jean Giono's work has been translated into English and certainly not this poem. No luck again. It occurs to me that I've spent an inordinate amount of time achieving very little; so the polishing of the translation is going to take a long, long time.

Footnote
The film The King's Speech is in the cinemas here now. The double-entendre in English is impossible to translate so I wondered what they'd go for for the French title. They've gone for (a) speech (discours) rather than manner of speaking.

Reminiscences

Reminiscences

Patricia, my cleaning lady, came round as usual yesterday afternoon and, as usual, we sat down and had a coffee before she started. I was preparing a paella for Daniel, Steve and myself that evening so conversation got on to food and, somehow, what had been available during the war. Patricia said her father had been taken away for forced labour in Germany (one of the 300,000) but that her uncle had fled to England with De Gaulle and had subsequently been parachuted back in to organise the maquisards in the area. This made me make a mental note to ask Daniel that evening if he had ever thought of making a film of local reminiscences of the war.

He hadn't and estimated it would take too long and be more work than he was inclined to undertake. Conversation then turned to the Foreign Legion, which still exists and in fact has its headquarters about 40 kilometres away in Orange. I had a vague impression of it as a force in some way suited to the dirtier jobs governments get involved with but I didn't know much about it. Daniel explained that it is still today based on a simple premise that would have obvious attractions to people in certain situations. If a man is accepted by the Foreign Legion he can sign on under any name he chooses and thereafter has that identity; his previous identity is expunged. He signs on for five years and, at the end of that time, has the right to French citizenship under his new identity. Clearly, this is going to appeal to people with criminal pasts of one sort or another but could also be very useful to, for instance, political refugees or witness protection programmes. As far as I know, it is a unique formula; I've never heard of anything like it applying elsewhere.

It reminded me of a novel by Romain Gary whose title escapes me but that I had read during my late teens. The protagonist had been a prisoner of war in Germany and formulated an idea to avoid ever stepping on ants as a way to preserve his humanity. Living in the Chad when it was still a French colony, he had grown fond of elephants and embarked on a programme of punishing those who hunted them for their tusks, If he caught elephant hunters, he would shoot them in the buttocks with a shot gun. This held no danger of being fatal but was always very painful for a long time. For this “crime” he was hunted across the Chad by the Foreign Legion (hence the connection) and the novel recounts his escapades and the attempts to capture him.

And so, back to the cross-beams in my bedroom. It rained yesterday for the first time in nearly a month, which avoided my having to water the bulbs in the pots outside.

A Perfect February Day

A Perfect February Day
Yesterday I got up, went into the village for bread and had a breakfast of bread, honey and coffee. I've recently renewed my supply of mountain honey, collected from hives high up in the hills. I'm not sure where the bees there get their nectar. There is lots of lavender high up but the hives hadn't been placed in lavender fields or the honey would have been called lavender honey. Anyway, it is quite dark in colour and rich in flavour; my favourite.

Having looked through the news online through various papers and news aggregators I put in an hour staining cross-beams in my bedroom. The bedroom is my last major project in the house (I hope). The walls are currently covered with a horrible custard-coloured wallpaper. I shall paint them, off-white, over the paper if it is firmly fixed as it seems to be. The big job is the cross-beams, 64 in all, laid from a large central beam across to the walls either side. They are covered in white paint which I have been scraping off for quite a long time. It's a three-part process: first, scrape off most of the paint; then dig it out of cracks, knots, and as far as possible from under where the beams overlap with the plaster between them; then go over them with a wire brush to remove the dust and any hanging bits of paint. I've done that for 32 cross-beams and am now staining them. I wanted to be sure I had the tint of stain required and, having now seen it on some beams, I know have: medium oak. When the 32 cross-beams are all stained I shall move the bedroom furniture to the other side of the room and work my way down the remaining 32. Anyway, there is now visible progress so that was satisfying.

Then it was off to Daniel's for lunch. Daniel doesn't cook but gets paella from the man in the village who sells it on Saturdays. Two of his sons were with Daniel so we had a good chat and lunch. It would actually have been warm enough to eat on his balcony but we ate inside. I agreed to meet them on the boules ground at 3.00 and then went home for an hour to let the paella go down and catch a bit of football on the television. At the boules ground it was too warm at first to play with a pullover on. I don't know what the temperature was in the sun but around 22-23 degrees at a guess. And the sky came up trumps, cloudless and a deep shade of blue that must exist elsewhere but which I can't recall seeing outside Provence. We played until 5.30 when I again returned home to finish preparing a meal I'd started the previous day, a “daube provencal”. It's a more or less conventional stew but with bacon and olives added to the beef and vegetables. I thought I'd try it with couscous rather than potatoes or pasta and that worked well. Steve, Jo and Mana were coming to eat and duly arrived around 7.45. So we then had a pleasant evening eating and talking, After which I retired to the living room with a coffee and calvados to watch some more football before bed.

There's nothing dramatic in all this but it was a very satisfying and not untypical day in February. I'm not sure where else I could have had such a day at this time of the year.

Apart from the remaining cross-beams to look forward to(?) I have started on the translation of the text of a film Daniel and Martine (from Pierrelongue) have made on the olive tree and it's role in the life of the region. The translation is not proving difficult so far but I will then have to review it while viewing the film to check timings before recording the English commentary. I get friend Steve to check my English as, somehow, when I get immersed in French I tend to come up with some awkward English phrases. The whole process will be interesting as I haven't done it before. And Daniel and Martine have started making another film, this time on fountains in villages in the area (there are 11 in Mollans).

And then it will be spring............................

Mind Your Language

Mind Your Language
I went to Daniel's house to have dinner with him, Patricia, Steve and Jo as it was Patricia's last night before returning to La Réunion for a few months. As seems almost inevitable when the five of us get together, conversation turned to language. For some reason the word “événement” came up. I would have sworn blind the first two “e”s carried an acute and a grave accent respectively; Patricia thought the same. Daniel said that both “e”s had acute accents on them and was proved right by the dictionary. (What hope is there for we English when even the French can't agree among themselves?) I then vaguely recalled the word as being some kind of exception from my school days' French lessons.

However, it then occurred to me that pronunciation of the word should make the spelling clear, since é is a more open sound then è (as I had been taught). I made the point and got the reply: “Oui, mais on ne distingue plus de nos jours”. This really shocked me. I remember Steve asking me why the French had so many ways of writing the same sound “e” and explaining to him at some length that there were three “e” sounds in French (as I had been taught), in fact four if you counted the last syllable of “heureux”. I've frequently chided Steve on this point since but it seems that he was right after all. My (school-based) information was that the most closed “e” sound was as in “le”, the intermediate sound was as in è or an “ais/ait” word ending and the most open sound was é or an “ai” ending. Not so any more, it seems. My old professor of phoentics at Bristol would be turning in his grave, knowing his carefully thought out phonetic graphs were no longer valid. On the other hand, he above all would know that language phonemes change with time. So what if the difference between the two accents is critical to the meaning? The answer is, of course, that some other way is found to make the distinction.

Being an Old Fogey, I find this loss of ability to easily make fine distinctions in meaning somewhat distressing. But the same kind of change can be found happening in English. I have always been very clear about the distinction between uninterested and disinterested. In practice, disinterested is taking the place of uninterested and uninterested is falling out of use (probably,ironically, to be replaced by unbiased). Similarly the use of less and few and most and majority is also becoming corrupted. I remember an old colleague, John Laski, liking to quote the sentence his sister Marghanita had created to illustrate use/misuse of the word “only”. The sentence was: the white swans fly over the black hills. You can place “only” at any point in that sentence but each time producing a slightly different meaning. The British Standards Institution, when I worked there on the definition of Year 2000 compliance, was also very keen on this; definitions, after all, have to be definite and precise.

Well, it's probably time to say goodbye to all that. Does it matter? I have to confess that it often worries and saddens me but I have to recognise that language change is continual. Moreover, the Law of Least Effort is usually the dominant one in language change, and always has been.

Footnote
In my last post I suggested English as an intermediate language for translation purposes, whilst recognising the diplomatic difficulties. The diplomatic solution would be a language like Dutch. Nobody speaks Dutch but the Dutch themselves (almost true, Afrikaans and Flemish are slightly different). So there would be less ego and nationalism involved in its acceptance.