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.