I’m contemplating a French experience fraught with danger and huge consequences. It’ll probably take months to undo all the damage, and who knows how I’ll manage day-to-day with it hanging over my head.
I’m very seriously considering getting a haircut in Paris.
Since growing out the rather disastrous bowl cut of my early childhood (what were you thinking, Maman?) I’ve never done anything special with my hair. It’s hung a bit past shoulder-length for almost fifteen years. What better place to go wild with layers and side bangs for the first time in my life than Paris?
That said, I’m planning to bring along a dossier of vocabulary and key phrases, such as “Please don’t make me bald” and “I want side bangs, not a pixie cut.” I’m bracing myself for a showdown with the hairdresser worthy of the makeovers on America’s Next Top Model (maybe I’ll cry as they snip off a few inches of my hair, to keep the comparison going).
It’ll be epic and dangerous and I’ll probably regret it. But I’m going to do it anyway.
You’re all fully entitled to say I told you so.
October 23, 2008
A Morning with Eugene
This morning, I ambled along the Seine to arrive at the Louvre before it opened at 9am. Educo provided us with cartes jeunesses when we arrived that allow us to visit the Louvre whenever we like, as many times as we like, for free. This was my third visit to the Louvre this fall, and I’m planning to go many, many more times.
My approach is quality over quantity, because I have the luxury to do so! I pick a time period or a few rooms to visit each time, and I don’t stay for more than two hours. I can walk at my own pace, take in every piece of art, and know that I’ve got a couple more months ahead of me to really get to know this museum.
I started with Greek & Roman antiquities. I’m much bigger on paintings than sculptures, so that went by pretty quickly. Then I walked through the apartments of Napoleon III (famous Napoleon’s nephew, who ruled as emperor from his coup d’état in 1852 to his capture by the Prussian army in 1870. According to his apartments, he was just nuts about velvet). My second visit, I was a dutiful Dutch daughter and wandered through the paintings from Holland, Germany, and Flanders, and fell in love with Rubens along the way.
This visit? I finally graduated to the French paintings!
Since I got to the Louvre before it opened and didn’t have to wait in line to buy a ticket, I was able to scurry right over to the French paintings. No one was there. It was amazing. There are usually a hundred people milling through, whether they’re tourists making the mad dash between the holy three (Mona, Venus, and Victory) or groups of bored, chatty French students ignoring their guide.
I spent a solid fifteen minutes alone with Delacroix and Géricault before the first tour group came trotting in, and let me tell you: this is the only way to visit the Louvre.
My approach is quality over quantity, because I have the luxury to do so! I pick a time period or a few rooms to visit each time, and I don’t stay for more than two hours. I can walk at my own pace, take in every piece of art, and know that I’ve got a couple more months ahead of me to really get to know this museum.
I started with Greek & Roman antiquities. I’m much bigger on paintings than sculptures, so that went by pretty quickly. Then I walked through the apartments of Napoleon III (famous Napoleon’s nephew, who ruled as emperor from his coup d’état in 1852 to his capture by the Prussian army in 1870. According to his apartments, he was just nuts about velvet). My second visit, I was a dutiful Dutch daughter and wandered through the paintings from Holland, Germany, and Flanders, and fell in love with Rubens along the way.
This visit? I finally graduated to the French paintings!
Since I got to the Louvre before it opened and didn’t have to wait in line to buy a ticket, I was able to scurry right over to the French paintings. No one was there. It was amazing. There are usually a hundred people milling through, whether they’re tourists making the mad dash between the holy three (Mona, Venus, and Victory) or groups of bored, chatty French students ignoring their guide.
I spent a solid fifteen minutes alone with Delacroix and Géricault before the first tour group came trotting in, and let me tell you: this is the only way to visit the Louvre.
October 16, 2008
Language frustrations
The first week of orientation, I did well enough on my placement exam to be excused from taking a requisite French grammar or phonetics class. Instead, I signed up to meet one-on-one with a French tutor twice this semester. I had my first meeting this morning. She had this to say:
I’m still thinking in English.
It’s an unbelievably frustrating thing to admit. I’ve changed the language on Facebook to French. I’m reading French books. I’m trying – though I know I can do much better – to speak in French with my friends in the Educo program. And yet I keep using Anglicisms, I find myself messing up French prepositions because I think of the English (and usually more general) equivalents, I’m getting flustered when I speak and reverting to basic grammatical mistakes I learned to avoid years ago.
I know the quasi-French language immersion is working in some regards: when I speak English, I’ll find French words popping into my head. I need to stop and think for a second about the English equivalent. But it’s not enough.
I guess a part of me thought that studying in Paris would be the magic ‘on’ switch for French fluency. It’s just so frustrating. It feels like the more I’m exposed to the language, the less I know.
I’m still thinking in English.
It’s an unbelievably frustrating thing to admit. I’ve changed the language on Facebook to French. I’m reading French books. I’m trying – though I know I can do much better – to speak in French with my friends in the Educo program. And yet I keep using Anglicisms, I find myself messing up French prepositions because I think of the English (and usually more general) equivalents, I’m getting flustered when I speak and reverting to basic grammatical mistakes I learned to avoid years ago.
I know the quasi-French language immersion is working in some regards: when I speak English, I’ll find French words popping into my head. I need to stop and think for a second about the English equivalent. But it’s not enough.
I guess a part of me thought that studying in Paris would be the magic ‘on’ switch for French fluency. It’s just so frustrating. It feels like the more I’m exposed to the language, the less I know.
October 12, 2008
French Dialogue in Literature, or, Description is overrated
I’ve been dwelling a bit more on the text translations I’ve been reading recently (and wrote about in the blog entry below). As a writer, it’s interesting to see how a different language can change the sense of the text. No French translation, after all, can capture all the complexities and double meanings in practically each word of Shakespeare’s writings. And no English translation can give a text the same poetic fluidity of the French language. No matter how good the translator, you miss out by reading a translation.
One major difference I noticed while reading the French translation of the Twilight series was the presentation of dialogue. In the U.S., obviously, we use quotation marks; your only real restriction is to give each speaker their own line when they say something new. But the dialogue can start practically anywhere in the new line. The line could obviously begin,
“The sky is blue, and the grass is green,” Susie said. She was smiling.
But it could also start like this:
Susie smiled. “The sky is blue, and the grass is green,” she said.
The benefit to the latter, of course, is that you have a sense of how Susie's feeling about what she's saying - before she says it. It's like the upside down exclamation point in Spanish that's put at the beginning of a sentence to warn you that there will be an inflection at the end of it.
I’m pretty liberal with description when I write, so those small additions before a piece of dialogue are very important to me…they can change everything about the tone of the conversation. So I was a little taken aback when I saw the French literary depiction of dialogue:
Susie smiled.
– The sky is blue, and the grass is green, she said.
Since there are no quotation marks, just the long line indicating spoken text, you obviously can’t start with anything but the spoken words. While putting the "Susie smiled" in its own line above works in this case, within a conversation it would probably break up the flow of the dialogue. And as it's such a small detail, does it even merit its own line? I think most writers would cut it completely.
And adding the description of Susie's smile after the spoken words doesn’t avoid confusion, either:
– The sky is blue, and the grass is green, she said. She was smiling.
In the phrase above, while ‘she was smiling’ makes the most sense as part of the description, there’s no guarantee that Susie didn’t just jump onto a new train of thought in her spoken text. With the formatting of the above sentence, we are obliged to assume that random Susie says ‘she was smiling’ aloud.
Translating from English, the French translator for the Twilight series decided to put some of the description related to the dialogue in parentheses (a little jarring for someone who has been told by English teachers for years to stop relying on parentheses so much. Oh, oops…). So a longer description might look like this:
– The sky is blue, she said. (She was smiling widely.) And the grass is green.
I've got to agree with all those English teachers - parentheses look pretty weird in an official text. And how much description can you really fit inside there without irritating the reader?
It’s a small difference in dialogue format, but it must change the writing style here – I know it would change mine if I were writing in French. Less description means more “talking heads,” and a more subjective view of the conversation by the reader. The French writer’s characters get to escape from the author’s control, a little bit.
One major difference I noticed while reading the French translation of the Twilight series was the presentation of dialogue. In the U.S., obviously, we use quotation marks; your only real restriction is to give each speaker their own line when they say something new. But the dialogue can start practically anywhere in the new line. The line could obviously begin,
“The sky is blue, and the grass is green,” Susie said. She was smiling.
But it could also start like this:
Susie smiled. “The sky is blue, and the grass is green,” she said.
The benefit to the latter, of course, is that you have a sense of how Susie's feeling about what she's saying - before she says it. It's like the upside down exclamation point in Spanish that's put at the beginning of a sentence to warn you that there will be an inflection at the end of it.
I’m pretty liberal with description when I write, so those small additions before a piece of dialogue are very important to me…they can change everything about the tone of the conversation. So I was a little taken aback when I saw the French literary depiction of dialogue:
Susie smiled.
– The sky is blue, and the grass is green, she said.
Since there are no quotation marks, just the long line indicating spoken text, you obviously can’t start with anything but the spoken words. While putting the "Susie smiled" in its own line above works in this case, within a conversation it would probably break up the flow of the dialogue. And as it's such a small detail, does it even merit its own line? I think most writers would cut it completely.
And adding the description of Susie's smile after the spoken words doesn’t avoid confusion, either:
– The sky is blue, and the grass is green, she said. She was smiling.
In the phrase above, while ‘she was smiling’ makes the most sense as part of the description, there’s no guarantee that Susie didn’t just jump onto a new train of thought in her spoken text. With the formatting of the above sentence, we are obliged to assume that random Susie says ‘she was smiling’ aloud.
Translating from English, the French translator for the Twilight series decided to put some of the description related to the dialogue in parentheses (a little jarring for someone who has been told by English teachers for years to stop relying on parentheses so much. Oh, oops…). So a longer description might look like this:
– The sky is blue, she said. (She was smiling widely.) And the grass is green.
I've got to agree with all those English teachers - parentheses look pretty weird in an official text. And how much description can you really fit inside there without irritating the reader?
It’s a small difference in dialogue format, but it must change the writing style here – I know it would change mine if I were writing in French. Less description means more “talking heads,” and a more subjective view of the conversation by the reader. The French writer’s characters get to escape from the author’s control, a little bit.
Gimpy says bonjour
After three days of lots of lying around doing nothing, my ankle is doing much better. I’m looking decreasingly like Igor when I walk (always a plus), and I’m down to one painkiller a day (which makes me more optimistic that I won't become one of those sad sad stories about a girl who left to study in Paris for a semester and came back a drug addict).
My older host sister, who just turned 16 about a month ago, left a note and a huge stack of books outside my door for me to find on Thursday morning. She had to run to school, but she wanted to make sure I didn’t get bored as I lay around recovering, and left me about a third of her rather impressive book collection to get through the day.
I don’t know if I’ve ever been so entertained.
These are the books she probably read when she was about 12 or 13, but since my French proficiency is obviously lower than hers she left them for me to read as a 20-year-old. I forgot how hilarious “Youth Reading” can be. Idealized romantic interests, enemies in the form of mean girls at school, easy endings…it’s glorious. They’re teenage fairy tales.
She also lent me the French versions of the first three Twilight books. For those who don’t know the series, it’s an absolutely terribly written but hugely entertaining – wait for it – vampire love saga. Yep. It’s swept through the United States as a kind of teenager’s equivalent of Nora Roberts. I've highly enjoyed reading them, at first because I was hugely entertained by the concept, and eventually because – as awfully written and mind-blowingly ridiculous as they are – I just can’t help myself.
Anyway, the books here (translated as Fascination, Hésitation, Tentation, and the soon-to-be-released Révélation) seem to be as hugely popular with the female set as they are in the United States. My host sister is counting down the days for the release of the fourth book, which came out in August in the U.S. It’s easy to forget that so many other countries don’t get to enjoy the newest English-language releases right away like we do – they had to wait months for each new Harry Potter, for example.
It’s interesting to read through the translations they have to wait so long for. As far as I can tell there are minimal changes to the text itself. The translator for the Twilight series, however, seems to have taken it upon himself to translate aspects of American culture as well. At one point, a character mentioned Las Vegas, and a little footnote symbol appeared next to the words. I looked down to the bottom of the page, and saw in French, “A place in the United States where Americans go to get married quickly.” These footnotes are all over the text, clarifying everything from comic book superheroes to metal detectors in high schools. It’s an interesting insight into the things we Americans take for granted as common knowledge…
Well, my homework calls. I can only put off my actual reading for so long by reading youth fiction, after all! Hope everyone is enjoying the fall weather, and keep in touch!
My older host sister, who just turned 16 about a month ago, left a note and a huge stack of books outside my door for me to find on Thursday morning. She had to run to school, but she wanted to make sure I didn’t get bored as I lay around recovering, and left me about a third of her rather impressive book collection to get through the day.
I don’t know if I’ve ever been so entertained.
These are the books she probably read when she was about 12 or 13, but since my French proficiency is obviously lower than hers she left them for me to read as a 20-year-old. I forgot how hilarious “Youth Reading” can be. Idealized romantic interests, enemies in the form of mean girls at school, easy endings…it’s glorious. They’re teenage fairy tales.
She also lent me the French versions of the first three Twilight books. For those who don’t know the series, it’s an absolutely terribly written but hugely entertaining – wait for it – vampire love saga. Yep. It’s swept through the United States as a kind of teenager’s equivalent of Nora Roberts. I've highly enjoyed reading them, at first because I was hugely entertained by the concept, and eventually because – as awfully written and mind-blowingly ridiculous as they are – I just can’t help myself.
Anyway, the books here (translated as Fascination, Hésitation, Tentation, and the soon-to-be-released Révélation) seem to be as hugely popular with the female set as they are in the United States. My host sister is counting down the days for the release of the fourth book, which came out in August in the U.S. It’s easy to forget that so many other countries don’t get to enjoy the newest English-language releases right away like we do – they had to wait months for each new Harry Potter, for example.
It’s interesting to read through the translations they have to wait so long for. As far as I can tell there are minimal changes to the text itself. The translator for the Twilight series, however, seems to have taken it upon himself to translate aspects of American culture as well. At one point, a character mentioned Las Vegas, and a little footnote symbol appeared next to the words. I looked down to the bottom of the page, and saw in French, “A place in the United States where Americans go to get married quickly.” These footnotes are all over the text, clarifying everything from comic book superheroes to metal detectors in high schools. It’s an interesting insight into the things we Americans take for granted as common knowledge…
Well, my homework calls. I can only put off my actual reading for so long by reading youth fiction, after all! Hope everyone is enjoying the fall weather, and keep in touch!
October 9, 2008
An American Gimp in Paris...
Last night I had the unique opportunity to be carried down stairs by three strapping French men, ride in a French ambulance, go to a French ER, and to witness two people getting arrested, all thanks to a slippery staircase and poorly designed shoes.
Said slippery staircase is in the Institut Charles V, where I take two of my classes. I was leaving my French theater class with a large group when my flats – with their laughable excuse for traction – hit the slippery stairs the wrong way and I suddenly found myself sliding oh-so-elegantly on my butt down the rest of the stairs to the landing of the first floor (second floor to Americans). I immediately felt pain in my ankle and knew I’d sprained it. Everybody from class was so incredibly nice; running to get ice, supporting my foot, and calling for Professor Tufts, my theater professor whose class I had just left.
Prof. Tufts called the French pompiers (firefighters) to take me to the hospital for an X-ray, and three of them came up to bring me to the ambulance. I got to wear a super attractive puffy leg brace, and they put me in a little chair that they then carried down the last flight of stairs. One of my friends snapped a couple photos of me being carried down like a princess. I am very much looking forward to showing my future grandchildren photographic evidence of the time Grandma got literally picked up by three French firefighters.
Then it was off to the emergency room at the Hôtel Dieu, punctuated with the jokes of the pompiers that there we no choice: they'd have to amputate my whole leg. Professor Tufts and I then got the – privilege? – of witnessing firsthand a French emergency room. Within the first five minutes we saw a man being taken away in handcuffs (he left screaming in French, “But I’m not a member of al Qaeda, you know!”). As we saw more of the other patients in the hospital we saw that this was by no means an odd occurrence; it looked like I was the only one there for a non-drug related reason. Everywhere I looked, there were people on hospital gurneys with IV’s apparently sleeping off drugs. By the time my x-ray was being taken (a few hours after we arrived; French ER’s are no more time-efficient than American ones, apparently) we saw another man escorted out by police officers in handcuffs. As Prof. Tufts said, “Welcome to another Paris.”
X-rays and a multitude of doctor visits confirmed what I knew from the beginning; my ankle was sprained. I was discharged with a still pretty painful ankle, lovely painkillers, and – my personal favorite – a super-dorky fashion statement in the form of an aircast for my ankle. Luckily it’s not a boot and I can wear shoes with it. But yes, that’s right…for the next three weeks I get to hobble around Paris in a bright-green ankle brace. How super-chouette.
Said slippery staircase is in the Institut Charles V, where I take two of my classes. I was leaving my French theater class with a large group when my flats – with their laughable excuse for traction – hit the slippery stairs the wrong way and I suddenly found myself sliding oh-so-elegantly on my butt down the rest of the stairs to the landing of the first floor (second floor to Americans). I immediately felt pain in my ankle and knew I’d sprained it. Everybody from class was so incredibly nice; running to get ice, supporting my foot, and calling for Professor Tufts, my theater professor whose class I had just left.
Prof. Tufts called the French pompiers (firefighters) to take me to the hospital for an X-ray, and three of them came up to bring me to the ambulance. I got to wear a super attractive puffy leg brace, and they put me in a little chair that they then carried down the last flight of stairs. One of my friends snapped a couple photos of me being carried down like a princess. I am very much looking forward to showing my future grandchildren photographic evidence of the time Grandma got literally picked up by three French firefighters.
Then it was off to the emergency room at the Hôtel Dieu, punctuated with the jokes of the pompiers that there we no choice: they'd have to amputate my whole leg. Professor Tufts and I then got the – privilege? – of witnessing firsthand a French emergency room. Within the first five minutes we saw a man being taken away in handcuffs (he left screaming in French, “But I’m not a member of al Qaeda, you know!”). As we saw more of the other patients in the hospital we saw that this was by no means an odd occurrence; it looked like I was the only one there for a non-drug related reason. Everywhere I looked, there were people on hospital gurneys with IV’s apparently sleeping off drugs. By the time my x-ray was being taken (a few hours after we arrived; French ER’s are no more time-efficient than American ones, apparently) we saw another man escorted out by police officers in handcuffs. As Prof. Tufts said, “Welcome to another Paris.”
X-rays and a multitude of doctor visits confirmed what I knew from the beginning; my ankle was sprained. I was discharged with a still pretty painful ankle, lovely painkillers, and – my personal favorite – a super-dorky fashion statement in the form of an aircast for my ankle. Luckily it’s not a boot and I can wear shoes with it. But yes, that’s right…for the next three weeks I get to hobble around Paris in a bright-green ankle brace. How super-chouette.
October 4, 2008
"I can, you can...Yes we can!"
Thursday night, a large group of us headed to Carr's Pub in the 1e arrondissement to watch the VP debate. CNN International was projected live onto a huge screen, and the pub was completely packed – mostly with college students studying abroad. Of course, because of the time difference, we had to wait til 3:00 in the morning for the debates to start (let no one say us college kids aren't invested in the political future of our country).
I thought
it would be very hard to be across the ocean from all the pre-election craziness and excitement no doubt going on at Colby, but France is more invested in the U.S. election than you might think. The first week I was here, a construction worker working on our old apartment pulled me aside for a fifteen-minute discussion about Obama versus McCain when he realized I was American.
The French are very aware of and look very favorably on Obama. He even appears in the local advertising here (see left)! My host sister was telling me that whenever the verb conjugations of “can” come up in her English class, all the students chant “Yes we can! Yes we can!” McCain is another story…the same host sister thought the race was between Hillary and Obama!
I thought
it would be very hard to be across the ocean from all the pre-election craziness and excitement no doubt going on at Colby, but France is more invested in the U.S. election than you might think. The first week I was here, a construction worker working on our old apartment pulled me aside for a fifteen-minute discussion about Obama versus McCain when he realized I was American.The French are very aware of and look very favorably on Obama. He even appears in the local advertising here (see left)! My host sister was telling me that whenever the verb conjugations of “can” come up in her English class, all the students chant “Yes we can! Yes we can!” McCain is another story…the same host sister thought the race was between Hillary and Obama!
Of course, they look on the last eight years with rather less enthusiasm:
October 1, 2008
“Mais ils sont fous ces romains!”
Right around Paris VII’s campus, placards in the shape of cartoon speech bubbles have started popping up on road signs and sidewalks. They’re there, as far as I can tell, for no apparent reason other than to give me SO MUCH JOY day after day as I trudge from the metro to Paris VII for my classes.
The signs are quotes from a popular bande dessinée (comic book) called Asterix et Obelix. The BDs are pretty different from the American comic book; they're often bound hardcovers, and since all French children read them they don’t carry quite the same dork stigma as in America. I read lots of them growing up: Asterix, of course, but also Tintin, Yakari, Les Schtroumpfs (you know them as Smurfs), Marsupilamis, etc.
Asterix et Obelix is one of the most popular, partly, I’m convinced, because it features some of the most hysterically awful facial hair you’ll ever see in a comic book. It was even made into a live-action and hilariously campy movie starring (who else?) Gérard Depardieu as Obelix. The movie almost singlehandedly doubled the European audience for French films.
Asterix et Obelix features the inhabitants of the only Gaulish village to resist the Romans. They do so with the help of their druid, who brews a potion that temporarily gives them extreme strength – enough to defeat, story after story, the invading Roman troops. The Romans naturally never learn, prompting Asterix or Obelix to exclaim, Mais ils sont fous ces romains! (“But they’re crazy, those Romans!”)
The signs are quotes from a popular bande dessinée (comic book) called Asterix et Obelix. The BDs are pretty different from the American comic book; they're often bound hardcovers, and since all French children read them they don’t carry quite the same dork stigma as in America. I read lots of them growing up: Asterix, of course, but also Tintin, Yakari, Les Schtroumpfs (you know them as Smurfs), Marsupilamis, etc.
Asterix et Obelix is one of the most popular, partly, I’m convinced, because it features some of the most hysterically awful facial hair you’ll ever see in a comic book. It was even made into a live-action and hilariously campy movie starring (who else?) Gérard Depardieu as Obelix. The movie almost singlehandedly doubled the European audience for French films.
Asterix et Obelix features the inhabitants of the only Gaulish village to resist the Romans. They do so with the help of their druid, who brews a potion that temporarily gives them extreme strength – enough to defeat, story after story, the invading Roman troops. The Romans naturally never learn, prompting Asterix or Obelix to exclaim, Mais ils sont fous ces romains! (“But they’re crazy, those Romans!”)
All the quotes posted around Paris VII are immediately recognizable to anyone who read the BD growing up. It’s a great feeling to be privy to a cultural understanding like this; it makes me feel like a real Parisian!
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