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!