When in French (11 page)

Entrusting oneself to a translator, or to a translation, is an act of faith. A person who knows two languages can make fast fools out of those with only half his repertoire. In the mid-1990s Denis Duboule, a postdoctoral student in genetics in Strasbourg, France, came up with a new technique to
produce duplications in the chromosomes of mice. Like 98 percent of scientists, he was to publish his findings in English. One Friday afternoon, he and some colleagues got together to decide what to call their discovery. Over beers, they hit upon TAMERE—“targeted meiotic recombination.” In later papers, francophone researchers detailed their advances in sequential targeted recombination-induced genomic approach (STRING) and pangenomic translocation for heterologous enhancer reshuffling (PANTHERE). It wasn't until 2014 that English-speaking geneticists learned that their French-speaking peers, for the better part of two decades, had been having a laugh at their expense.
Ta mère
(“your mom”) is shorthand for
niquer ta mère
(“fuck your mother”). The apotheosis of
mère
-slagging is
Ta mère en string panthère
—“Your mom in a leopard G-string.”

The problem of translation is perhaps most acute in literature, to which renderings must be true in spirit as well as letter. Even the most diligent and creative translators find themselves hard-pressed to replicate such techniques as rhythm, assonance, alliteration, idiom, onomatopoeia, and double meaning. (Dr. Seuss books, with their oddball rhymes and invented words, are said to be the Nikita Khrushchevs of the written word.) Sometimes the loss is concrete: translators of
Harry Potter
found it impossible to convert the name Tom Marvolo Riddle—an anagram for “I am Lord Voldemort”—into many nonalphabetic East Asian languages, so they just left it out. Other times, it's ineffable but real. It is difficult to argue with Philip Larkin: “If that glass thing over there is a window, then it isn't a
fenster
or a
fenêtre
or whatever. ‘
Hautes Fenêtres
,' my God!”

Vladimir Nabokov spoke Russian, French, and English, all three more masterfully than the overwhelming majority of their respective constituencies. In 1951, when
Conclusive Evidence
, a memoir of his childhood in Russia, was published in
America, he confessed that he had found the task of rendering sensations that he had experienced in one language into another an anguish. “
Conclusive Evidence
was being written over a long period of time with particularly agonizing difficulties,” he wrote, “because my memory was attuned to one musical key—the musically reticent Russian—but it was forced into another key, English and deliberate.” It wasn't that Nabokov, as seamless a polyglot as there ever was, couldn't locate the English words; if they had existed, he would have known them. Rather, English seemed an improper vessel for his Russian memories. It was like trying to put water in a cardboard box.

Three years later, Nabokov translated
Conclusive Evidence
into Russian, producing
Drugie berega
. As the linguist Aneta Pavlenko notes in
The Bilingual Mind
, the book metamorphosed: “The translation for an audience of Russian émigrés made many explanations unnecessary, yet at the same time, the use of the childhood language triggered new memories, akin to the Proustian madeleine.”

Both books contain detailed descriptions of Nabokov's family home at 47 Bolshaya Morskaya Street in St. Petersburg. Nabokov's first toilet, as he remembered it in
Conclusive Evidence
, was “casually situated in a narrow recess between a wicker hamper and the door leading to the nursery bathroom.” The same room appears in
Drugie berega
, but this time with a sound track: “between a wicker hamper with a lid (how immediately I remember its creaking)!” There are new details: a stained glass window “with ornate designs of two halberdiers constructed from colorful rectangles”; a floating thermometer; a celluloid swan; a toy skiff. In 1966 Nabokov published
Speak, Memory
, a “re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first
place.” The thermometer vanished, but the halberdiers remained. Translation also has its gains.

If translation is a catalyst, the B that turns A to C, sometimes it seems to work in reverse. After translation, C does not revert to A, but rather into A+ (or A–), an entity that has been permanently altered by the transformation. “Dog days” sharpen their teeth as
canicules
. Bats (
les chauves-souris
) become bald mice. Learn French, and
umbrella
is, forever after, an overbroad concept: is it a
parapluie
(for rain) or a
parasol
(for sun)?

 • • • 

O
N LABOR DAY
—the French one, May 1—Violeta sent me an e-card decorated with a flashing lily-of-the-valley, enfranchising me into the global proletariat, and, I hoped, the family. My birthday came in June, accompanied by a necklace and a note, wishing me a happy day with my “love friend.” Soon after, Olivier and I visited Andernos again. To win over the senior Madame Bovary, Emma endured rounds of dire conversation, “and even pushed deference to the point of asking her for a recipe for pickling gherkins.” All I had to do was go on a bike ride to Le Truc Vert, a local beach. Splayed out on the sand, we made a funny pair—me in a T-shirt and sunscreen, and Violeta covered in oil,
seins nus
—but I admired her verve, her generosity, her sense of occasion, her femininity, at once steely and coquettish. I came from more pragmatic women. She was a different model, a space heater of a person, emitting warmth in extravagant blasts.

We were going to Andernos for Christmas that year. The holidays, in my parents' house, had always been an ambivalent time, coming, as they did, on the anniversary of John Zurn's
death, and entailing two of my mother's least favorite things, cooking and the raising of expectations. Every year she grudgingly spent an afternoon in the kitchen, transforming Colman's mustard powder into gift jars of homemade mustard. My best friend Helen's mother, also named Sue, made mayonnaise. Per annual tradition, as soon as we stepped off the plane from New York, the respective Sues would send us out on overlapping delivery routes.

“I'm thinking of watching a foreign film this afternoon!” Sue No. 2 said one year, after a long day of condiment making.

“Which one?” Helen asked.

“It's called
Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
.”

On Christmas Eve we'd go all out, warming up a HoneyBaked Ham that one of my father's colleagues sent him every year, as a thank-you for referrals. My father drank Coors Original. My mother would have a glass of wine and then switch to Diet Coke. We'd long since stopped getting out the china, “since it's just the four of us.” By the time the sun went down, we were usually in fleece. Often, we watched the hockey movie
Miracle
, chanting “U-S-A” as Mike Eruzione scored the game-winning goal.

In households across France, Christmas Eve was
le réveillon de Noël
—an elaborate feast meant to be served after Midnight Mass. We would not be going to church. (Olivier, having been baptized, called himself “a Catholic emeritus.”) But I could see from the way the groceries were spilling out of the refrigerator that it was going to be a major affair. Olivier and I drove into Bordeaux to do some last-minute shopping. When we got back, I origamied myself into the bathtub and successfully washed my hair. Getting into the spirit, I put on a silky dress and doused myself with half a dozen more spritzes of Miss Dior Chérie than I'd usually wear.

Nine o'clock came and went. So did ten. Around ten thirty, the doorbell rang. Jacques, Marie, and Hugo came in, shaking off coats and scarves. They were carrying a trash bag full of presents. At some point Fabrice materialized, fresh off the plane from Paris. We all crowded into the living room, into which Teddy brought a lacquered tray that held a half dozen bowls—pistachios, cashews, potato chips, bugles, olives, cherry tomatoes—and a bottle of Champagne. He popped the cork and carefully poured eight flutes.
Réveillon
was under way.

To me, this was a storybook Christmas. There was jazz on the stereo. A fire crackled. I fancied myself at last at home among people who appreciated good food, good wine, the art of conversation. I didn't know what anyone was talking about, but I was content to occupy the role of armchair anthropologist.

My main research interests were how French people were able to remain so quiet in large groups and why, in multigenerational social settings, it was okay to step out for a cigarette (as Fabrice had just done) but not to ask for a refill of one's wine (in an attempt at pacing, I was making myself eat a cherry tomato before every sip). Eventually the finger food dwindled, and the rest of the group's glasses ran as dry as mine. At midnight, we toasted Hugo's birthday. There he was, a newly minted adolescent, stuck with a bunch of adults whose age surpassed his by a collective 317 years. He drank his Champagne slowly, made charming conversation without being precocious. I never saw his phone. Before every visit, Olivier and I said to each other, “Okay, he's totally going to be a brat this time.” Every time he was delightful, playing James Blunt songs on the piano.

Teddy returned to the kitchen. A few minutes later, a tea party's worth of small cups appeared. They were filled with fanciful concoctions like salmon mousse, topped with chives
that had been curled like ribbons. These were the cold appetizers. Hot ones followed: spring rolls, cod croquettes, skewers of chicken satay. It was almost one o'clock, and we were still on the snacks portion of the evening.

“À table!” Teddy said as the clock struck one thirty.

We sat down to a proliferation of gold and glass. Oysters came first, on plates of ice. Then slabs of foie gras the size of pieces of toast, surrounded by hillocks of salt. I was starting to feel like a human foie gras as Teddy emerged with stacks of blinis, glistening with caviar. He scurried back to the kitchen.

“Prost!” he said, the door swinging open. He was brandishing a platter of vodka shots—the
trou normand
, or “Norman hole,” a mid-meal liquor break that was claimed to aid digestion.

Réveillon
, it was becoming clear, was an endurance event. I had trained for a sprint. As
chapon farci aux fruits
blurred into
coquilles Saint-Jacques à l'ancienne
, I could barely keep my eyes open. Under the table, I kicked off my shoes, trying to jump-start my circulation. The night wore on. I kept pretending to sneeze so that I could turn away from the table, stealing glances at a digital clock that sat on the buffet. The red display barely seemed to budge. Two thirty-seven a.m.: salad. Two fifty-one: cheese course. I perked up momentarily when Violeta asked who wanted coffee, assuming that the offer was a euphemism for “Everybody go home.”

“Oui!” Olivier responded.

“Moi!”

“Moi aussi!”

“Absolument!”

We packed back into the living room, where Teddy brought out a
bûche de Noël
, accompanied by another bottle of Champagne (and a mango ice cream cake for good measure). We ate the cake, we drank the wine. Several people had a second
espresso. At last Violeta made an announcement: it was time to open presents.

 • • • 

C
HRISTMAS—
the house was as dead as a college dorm on a Sunday morning. Because breakfast, in a French family, cannot be skipped, we sat down at two and ate croissants and jam. This time I took some tea. Because lunch, in a French family, also cannot be skipped, even if you have just eaten breakfast, we returned to the table forty-five minutes later. Fortunately, lunch was soup.

It was a gray day, wood smoke choking the sky. We'd already stuffed our faces and torn through our presents: to an American, bred on hectic Christmas mornings, it felt a little anticlimactic. Jacques, Marie, and Hugo had dispersed. Fabrice had gone back to Paris. I suggested—well, sort of insisted—that the rest of us go to the movies, which was what my family always did on Christmas afternoon.

Violeta and Teddy kindly went along with it. We drove to the nearest multiplex, in Bordeaux. Our only criterion being that we needed something that everyone could understand, we decided to see
A Dangerous Method
, a historical film by David Cronenberg. It was playing in the original English version, with subtitles in French.

I was the only one to require popcorn. We proceeded into the theater and took our seats, close to the front: Teddy, me, Violeta, Olivier. The lights dimmed, and the curtains opened. Violins wailed as the screen filled with the opening credits.

The film began: a horse-drawn carriage barreling through verdant countryside while Keira Knightley, restrained by a pair of men in peaked caps, screams at the top of her lungs. The carriage arrives at a mansion on a hill, and the men join
forces with a white-jacketed orderly to carry her, flailing, into the Burghölzli clinic near Zurich.

In the next scene, a door opens into a room with lots of molding.

“Good morning, I'm Dr. Jung,” says a man with a mustache and a pocket watch. “I admitted you yesterday.”

“I'm not . . . I'm not . . .
mad
, you know,” Keira Knightley stutters in Eastern European–inflected English, jutting out her chin.

“Let me explain what I have in mind,” Dr. Jung replies. “I propose that we meet here, most days, to talk, for an hour or two.”

Soon Dr. Jung and Keira Knightley are enjoying a constitutional in a hardwood forest. When Keira Knightley drops her coat in the dirt, Dr. Jung picks it up and beats it with his cane. Keira Knightley makes an Edvard Munch face, soon confessing that any kind of humiliation makes her “so excited.”