But Nicaise also wrote a memoir in French, which includes some 60 pages describing his Kingsport experience. Vince allowed as how he was having to plug it in bit by bit into Google Translate for an English version, but he provided a link to the original -- also maintained by the same Belgian organization. I took a look at it and thought I might be able to save Vince some time and provide a translation that would be -- it is to be hoped -- more readable and more accurate than anything Translate would crunch out. I volunteered and Vince took me up on it.
He asked how I came to learn French, and the short answer was that it's in the family, what with my father's more settled side steeped in French-speaking Creole New Orleans. Torn from her French Quarter roots and re-settled in Chattanooga, my grandmother maintained her French connection with a weekly "salon" in her home at which only French was spoken. For her services to French language and culture, she was late in life awarded a "palme d'or" (gold medal) by the French government.
I now regret not going to those salons, but at the time I was a heedless teenager. What's more, an episode of antibiotic treatment as a very young child had left me hearing-impaired and oral-language-challenged, and I had a demoralizing chip on my shoulder about the fact that I was a lip-reader with a consonantal speech defect. I didn't realize at the time that the salon would've been an ideal way to practice lip-reading among French speakers. Instead, what did I do? I plugged away in a high school French class, listening to instructional language tapes that were incomprehensible to me -- because, duh, there was no lip-reading -- and completely walling off the idea that it was possible for me to understand spoken French.
But at the same time I loved foreign languages -- because of their music. My parents -- foot soldiers of the international folkie movement, armed with the records and songbooks of Oscar Brand and Theodore Bikel -- sang folksongs in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Hebrew, Russian, and even some in English. More formally, I sang German (Bach), Latin (Pergolesi), and macaronic Latin/middle English (Britten) in the Chattanooga Boys Choir. Rarely did I know what any of it meant. It didn't make any difference. It was music.
(Because of my hearing, I have never understood sung song lyrics in my entire life -- even in English -- by themselves, without the help of printed lyrics. Imagine what a revelation it was when the Beatles printed their lyrics on the back of the jacket of the Sergeant Pepper album!)
When it came to the actual meaning of foreign languages, my first introduction was Latin in junior high school. Because Latin is a dead language, you don't learn it for the chitchat factor. That was my kind of language: printed in a book. You worked out the meaning like a puzzle, with a grammar guide and a dictionary. I went on to more of this kind of language learning in French in high school, Greek and French again in college, and finally to German, Spanish, and Italian in my first dream job in a library, where in the downtime waiting for "patrons" to approach me for assistance I was allowed by management to spend as much time with language learning as I wanted.
But it is French that I know best. Bear in mind that my "knowledge" is of a highly artificial kind, as it comes by way of its written rather than its spoken form. Nonetheless, there are so many printed learning tools -- and so many of them speech-oriented -- that it's possible to get some semblance of spoken nuance this way. Here are some examples from my experience:
- I first saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail in Paris with French subtitles. I was grateful to the subtitles for helping me understand what the hell the Python boys were saying in my own native language, e.g. "ta mère était un hamster et ton père puait le sureau!" if you get my drift (plug it into Translate if you don't). I have always preferred subtitled foreign movies to English ones because I could follow the conversation better, thanks to the subtitles.
- Also in Paris I stumbled upon one of my favorite books of all time, La méthode à Mimile: L'argot sans peine, by Alphonse Boudard and Luc Etienne. This book deserves a blog entry of its own. Argot is slang, of course, but it also carries with it more than a whiff of forbidden fruit, since it often derives from the insider language of the underworld. It's like the hip jive of jazzers, knowwhatimeanbro? In true language-guide style, the book is a series of dialogues in argot, with, on the facing page, the translation into standard, "correct" French. In general it gave me a glimpse into how oral French changes (simplifies, corrupts, enriches) the written language. It was my bible for a few weeks. I took it with me when I visited a friend of my grandmother's out in the Paris suburbs, a very proper if somewhat rigid gentleman who took one look at the book and was absolutely horrified that I would be defiling her memory by learning such trash. I was taken aback at this. But today, after years of reflection, I realize it was like going to a D.A.R. meeting and doing a book talk on something with the title I Moved on Her like a Bitch: How to Trump like a Motherfucker.
- While in Paris I lived in a pension (boardinghouse) that, quite coincidentally, had once been the residence of the French lexicographer, Emile Littré. (The "coincidentally" became in my mind "providentially" and resulted in a novel whose title was the address of the place.) It also just happened to be right around the corner from L'Alliance Française, where I took a French class. In the French way of things, it is assumed that you will learn to converse on your own, and thus incorrectly, so you must be properly educated in the academic version (the King's English of French, or whatever). This involves a highly structured exercise called the dictée (dictation) in which the instructor reads out a passage and the students have to write it out. This played to my strengths of grammar and spelling, but at the same time it padded my conversational weakness, since the passage was read at least three times deliberately and with clear articulation, such as no conversation ever was in the history of the world. Thus I could be an ace at dictation in the classroom and a dunce at conversation out in the world.
With all this, then, I do think I have the background to do justice to this memoir, and that is what is uppermost in my mind--doing justice to the author, Jean Nicaise, who in his Kingsport pages wants to get at a larger meaning behind his own experience. This larger meaning is the United States of America. Thus a discussion of the history of Kingsport, the tiny pioneer village on the Holston reborn as a planned industrial city, where the hospital can undergo an orderly expansion on land set aside for the purpose, becomes grist for an extended reverie on the qualities of America vis-a-vis the Old World, and how those qualities, unchallenged by a sense of peerless over-confidence, might lead the country into such missteps as the Iraq invasion of 2003. (Nicaise writes looking back and freely mixes in comments about events that took place in more recent years.)
It's hard not to think of the French nobleman de Tocqueville, whose memoir of travels in late 1830's America has convinced many American readers that he knew us better than we knew (or know) ourselves. Whether this will be the case with Nicaise and Kingsport remains to be seen. I just hope that I can help make him understood to readers of English while at the same time introducing some flavors of the Gallic language that might be, as it were, found in translation. The ear, after all, doesn't discern "sense" from "scents." The nose, on the other hand ...
If you want to get a whiff, here you go. Three installations so far. Many more to come!
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