Chicago Literary Club
19 January 2009
Lost in
Translation
Peter V.
Conroy Jr
Tonight I would like to speak about
the frustration and fascination of translation, which in my case means going
back and forth between English to French. I am equally fluent in both
languages, so the passage of literal meaning from one tongue to the other is
not the problem. What is at issue are the extra, supplementary significances
that lie beyond the surface of the literal. These nuances, these difficult-
to-calculate additions to meaning are precisely what can be so easily lost in
translation. That loss is the topic of my talk this evening. To start, however,
let me make a few generalizations about the two languages in question.
English
is an incredibly flexible language. A single spelling of a word can be used in
different syntactic situations, most commonly verb and noun. See or hear the
word out of context and you cannot tell which is which. Run. As a verb, I run,
she runs; as a noun, six runs scored, or a run on the stock market. English is
both concrete and picturesque, and loves to use vivid, descriptive terms in
figurative senses.
French,
on the other hand, has specific and easily recognizable forms to distinguish
nouns and verbs: courir is to run; elle court, she runs; les
courses means running around, doing errands, or horse races. True to its
Gallic culture, French prefers abstractions over vividly descriptive words.
French has traditionally prized logic and clarity and shunned the confusion
that figurative language can produce. French has remained remarkably faithful
to the vocabulary bequeathed to it by Latin, while English has willingly and
easily incorporated words from many divergent sources. The logic, clarity, and
strict grammatical rules of French once gave it claim to being the universal
language that replaced Latin. Today English (really American English) is de
facto the world’s lingua franca because it is so open, so flexible,
so user-friendly.
Given
such differences, it is inevitable that something will be lost in translation.
But what? And why? Translations that are faithful to the exact meaning of the
original can be inadequate in conveying the figurative dimension of that
original. The American idioms I will cite in my paper are all common and
everyday expressions, to the point that we do not usually recognize their
poetic reverberations. Once we try to translate them, however, we confront the
problem of how to deal with that extra bit of meaning, the evocative supplement
that is lost in translation. Nonetheless, only by trying to translate them can
we discover and then fully appreciate what that supplement is.
Expressions
that incorporate animals are some of the easiest to lose in translation.
We
all know about cock and bull stories, which are fanciful and imaginary; neither
coq nor taureau, the French equivalents, hints at the possibility
that such stories are straight-out lies or just bull. The closest French comes
is un coq à l’âne (from a rooster, or a cock, to the donkey) which
designates a non-sequitur: you cannot pass logically, at least in the Gallic
mind, from one of those animals to the other. The bull’s female counterpart,
however, is another kettle of fish. Harry Carey’s “Holy cow!” is merely an
expression of surprise while I’m not sure what to make of Bart Simpson’s “Have
a cow!” La vache is an expletive that denounces a disagreeable person or
situation. Vacheries refers to nasty behavior, dirty tricks, and other
such bad conduct. For some reason, in French to be called a camel is an insult.
“Quel chameau” resembles “ô la vache” not as a mammal but as invective.
The
following sentences all contain animals whose figurative or idiomatic
significance is lost in French. We wolf down food when we are very hungry. We
might pig out when we hog all there is to eat. Informers rat on their enemies,
even on their friends. We dog someone’s steps when we follow her too closely;
dogged and doggedly mean relentless. A dog is something that disappoints: a
stock that falls, a business project that fails. In slang, it refers to our
feet: my aching dogs! It also designates a particularly homely person, most
often a woman. Alas for male gallantry! We probably should hound those guys out
of our clubs. Huskies draw sleds in the Artic. The word also signifies a
stocky, muscular build or a voice that is placed low in the throat. In French
they are simply Esquimo dogs (chiens esquimoux). Wisconsinites are not
the only ones who badger us about this and that. We skunk a team that we beat
by a wide margin. Whenever we lose a bet, especially with friends, we should
pony up immediately. A foxy broad is an attractive woman. Anyone who is clever
and cunning, or a sharp-dealer, is foxy. Renard is not the original
French word for fox, which was goupil. In a series of medieval stories,
one particular goupil named Renard became popular as a master trickster,
a cunning schemer who was the most clever animal in the forest. His proper name
replaced the Old French goupil and became the common noun to designate
that red carnivore in modern French.
In
America ace salesmen and regional managers are often called upon to make
inspirational or informational presentations to their colleagues at business
conventions. They refer to these presentations as “dog and pony” shows. One
staple of circuses around the world is the act that combines horses running in
formation with dogs weaving in and out among them, jumping on and off their
backs. Despite such international exposure, the businessman’s dog and pony show
is exclusively and untranslatably American. The phrase would provoke nothing
but profound incomprehension in France.
We
mentioned pig before as a verb and an eating disorder. As a noun, a pig is
dirty, slovenly, and thus disgusting. In French, un cochon is immoral
and disgusting because of his poor conduct. English emphasizes the physical,
French the (im)moral side of the animal. Cochonneries (piggy behavior is
a weak, insufficient translation) are ribald stories, unfair tactics in
interpersonal relationships, or vile conduct. French pigs, camels, and cows
belong to a very similar semantic register as insults. A theatrical and
pretentious individual is a ham; but even an actor can bring home the bacon.
In
English we monkey around when we are having (usually innocent) fun. In French,
to monkey (the verb singer) means to imitate, but pejoratively. As a
rough equivalent, we ape our betters; when we lose control, we go ape. However,
to be malin comme un singe (clever as a monkey) is a high compliment.
Monkey business refers to vague manipulations and other shenanigans that are
surely illicit. Singeries is more restricted to the social domain and
designates gestures that are hypocritical or awkward. In both languages
gorillas are the tough guys who surround and protect celebrities and other
VIPs.
Duck
is the generic term in English for a specific type of waterfowl, although it literally
designates the female of the species. A fortunate individual can be designated
as a “lucky duck” even if the expression is a bit passé now. As a verb, duck
means to lower your head quickly. According to my Webster’s Ninth New
Collegiate Dictionary, both verb and noun derive etymologically from the
Old English duce. By metonymy the action (duck) gave a name to the
animal that is most closely associated with that dipping motion. The French canard
is equally generic but refers to the male, the drake. In addition to the fowl,
it indicates (1) an egregious mistake (a meaning that we also have in English,
although it is not a word commonly used), (2) a cube of sugar dipped in coffee,
and (3) a tabloid or more generally any newspaper. Hence the mirth and ambiguity
for French readers in the title of the political and satirical newspaper, Le
Canard Enchainé (The Duck in Chains). A line drawing of a duck with a
shackle on one foot but with a broken chain figures on the front page of the
newspaper and accurately represents the paper’s ambition to be totally free in
what it reports and how it does so. There are no sitting or lame ducks in
French. Cold duck is an American beverage; duck cold (un froid de canard)
refers to the weather and low temperatures.
Now
we really are for the birds: we parrot words and phrases that we do not
understand or that we have learned by rote. We snipe at friends and enemies
when we gossip about them, or criticize them sharply, or otherwise indulge in
back-biting. Cowards chicken out while the vain crow about their
accomplishments. Both of them get my goat. Many of us, unfortunately, work for
chicken feed even when we are paid in dollars. A poule is the female of
the rooster but is rich in other senses. It can mean a woman of easy virtue,
which is much, much more than simply being a chick. In addition, it indicates
the purse you can win on a sports bet while also referring to a round of
competitive matches whose winner will advance to the next level, like a round
robin. An unscrupulous salesman will goose the tally on his monthly sales
report just to please his boss. Try to convince a Frenchman of the logic in all
that!
We
bug people when we annoy them, although the term also refers to eavesdropping
devices. A bug prevents computer software from functioning correctly. French
has simply imported the pronunciation and meaning of that term (un bogue).
Someone who bugs out departs quickly and without warning. A bugger is a
catamite. Closely related (through a four letter expletive), “bug off” is a
violent injunction to get lost even though it has a distinctly literary or
British sound to it. A buggy is a perambulator or a small, old-fashioned
horse-drawn carriage. A young lady with a bee in her bonnet is visibly upset.
In France she would probably have a flea in her ear (une puce à l’oreille),
which emphasizes restlessness more than annoyance. A puce is also a
computer chip. Given the prevalence of micro radios, Ipods, Iphones and other
such devices, soon we will all have a chip in our ear. Better that than on our
shoulder.
Boys
having fun are horsing around; grown men out on the town and seeking loose
women are catting around. Both groups are having a whale of a time! A fluke is
only a portion of that sea-going mammal, but its figurative meaning is complete. Less serious amorous feelings
are dismissed as puppy love. There are no kangaroos in a kangaroo court. A cat
burglar does not steal cats. The term
describes the MO of a thief who works silently and stealthily. He avoids
contact with his victim, in contrast to the strong arm robber who is prepared
to inflict violence on his. A cat’s paw denotes a pawn, a shill, an
intermediary who serves another’s project, an individual who is used and
manipulated by others. It is also a certain condition of surface water that
sailors are always wary of, since it is unpredictable. An overly timorous
person is a fraidy cat; one who is kind, gentle, and easy to deal with, a pussy
cat. A copy cat imitates. A cool cat is … well, hot stuff. Women, never men,
are involved in cat fights. Only women can be catty and display cattiness in
their behavior. Catty in French is sournois (sneaky) or rosse,
which means a small horse or nag. To nag, however, is chamailler.
Kitty-corner has different regional forms that include catty-corner and
catty-whumpus. It translates as the quite simple and logical en diagonale.
A kitty designates the stakes in card games or a sum of money we have put
aside, or even the receptacle we place that money in. One-a-cat describes a
ball game in which there are three rather than the usual two opposing sides.
The single player is on offense against the other two on defense. The players
rotate and each takes his turn alone. With no exaggeration it also goes by the
name cut-throat. One-a-cat doesn’t translate, cut-throat (coupe-gorge)
does.
One
small carnivorous mammal gives us two divergent significations. An individual
will try to weasel out of a deal he doesn’t like, but will ferret out the
information he needs to do so. The standard translation of ferret is furret.
A fouine belongs to the weasel family but in English is known as a
marten; the verbal analogue, fouiner, means to investigate, to poke your
nose around, ... to ferret out something. Referring to a much larger carnivore,
we say “what a bear!” when we face an ungainly, troublesome, or potentially
dangerous task. A bear of a man is large, clumsy, and unkempt. In French, that
rumpled and untidy bear is an ours mal-leché (literally badly licked)
who principally lacks social skills.
In
both French and English, a person can snake through a crowd just as a road
snakes through the foothills. Only in English do we worm ourselves into a
comfortable situation or worm our way out of a jam. The French do not eat their
words when they have to retract a statement or suffer a rebuke; they swallow
serpents (avaler des couleuvres). A lounge lizard is a smooth and slimy
creep. Like a reptile basking in the sun, he rarely moves from his favorite
habitat, but rather waits for his prey to come to him. The type might be
equally common in France, but the reptilian designation is not. We fish for
compliments in both languages: English suggests the before, process of looking
for the compliment, French the after, the fact of having gotten it. In the
context of trolling the web, phishing is only English. A recent neologism, it
would gladden the heart of George Bernard Shaw with its sly recall of his
quixotic efforts to reform English spelling. To drink like a fish means to
drink excessively, continuously. French fish only swim; an excessive imbiber “boit
comme un trou“ (drinks like a hole), analogous to our expression having a
hollow or wooden leg. A snake in the grass becomes in French une anguille
sous roche (an eel under a rock). A culinary term, une andouille is
a sausage or chitlin. Applied to people, it is a grave insult: quelle
andouille! What a jerk! A red herring is a willful distraction, a conscious
attempt to divert attention from the main issue. Such a strategy often sticks
out like a sore thumb. In French, that would be cousu de fil blanc (sewn
with white thread). The assumption is that the white thread stands out
glaringly from the rest of the material under repair.
A
turkey is an imbecile, a mindless, hapless fool just like a dinde or dindon
in French. While the bird’s stupidity does seem like an international given, do
not forget that Benjamin Franklin proposed the wild turkey as our nation’s
symbol because it is, in fact, quite clever. The bald eagle eventually
prevailed as our national logo. The French national emblem is the rooster, le
coq gaulois. In English, a rooster says “cock-a-doodle-do!” in French cocorico,
a word sometimes used to point out a vain boast or brag.
Donkeys
are also synonymous with stubbornness and stupidity. It was the traditional
term applied to Irish immigrants like my grandfather when they first began to
work in the US. On the northeastern seaboard, mackerel-snappers was the
anti-Catholic, anti-Irish slur in favor. It was used throughout the first half
of the 20th century even in reference to affluent and educated Irish
like the late Bill Buckely and his family. It probably referred to the Catholic
church’s injunction against eating meat on Fridays and during Lent so that
fish, especially the cheapest kinds, became the alimentary replacement. (Cf
Evan Thomas, “He Knew He Was Right,“ Newsweek 10 March 2008, p. 28).
Only in English does coyote indicate those who smuggle people across the
Mexican-US border. Those who helped refugees cross the French-Spanish border
during the Nazi occupation were simply called passeurs (passers).
Squirrels
are almost as much fun as ducks. They hide nuts underground all summer long but
don’t always find them when winter comes. Their prudent but ineffective gesture
inspires us to squirrel money away, hopefully where we will find it. Squirrelly
is an adjective that denotes any one exhibiting eccentric or erratic behavior.
The French écureuil has a much longer tale to tell. It is the
nation-wide logo for all the savings and loan institutions in France, called caisses
d’epargne and which are not full service banks. The image is seen on their
front windows and on the cover of their savings account pass books.
Historically, the squirrel was the totemic animal of Nicolas Foucquet, a
Minister of Finance in the seventeenth century. Foucquet was a Breton, and in
Breton, a regional non-French language close to Celtic, fouquet means
squirrel. The animal figured prominently on his official coat of arms along
with the motto, How high can I climb? Venal, corrupt, and wildly ambitious,
Foucquet was more positively an astute Maecenas who supported the best writers
and artists of his time and who built the chateau Vaux-le-Vicomte, which was
the model for Versailles. His meteoric rise ended when he was imprisoned for fraud,
fiscal malfeasance, and theft by Louis XIV in 1655.
If
animals are idiomatic and possess characteristics that are so easily lost in
translation, what about nations and nationalities? To indicate someone’s total
and perhaps unexpected pardon, we say he is going scot-free. The Scots have
been under English domination for centuries and so offer a poor example of
freedom. Unfortunately for my thesis tonight and contrary to what we might
expect, the key word here does not refer to the Scots people. It is an archaic
term, derived from Old Norse, and refers to a monetary payment or obligation;
it exists today only in this one expression. When we deny a rumor effectively,
we scotch it. In a French office supply store, scotch means transparent tape
for wrapping; in a bar, it designates a particular type of whisky. If you order
scotch, your Anglophone barstool companion might ask for Irish. If your friend
asks for Irish coffee, he will still get his dollop of booze. Unscrupulous
individuals have no compunction about welshing on a deal. In billiards, english
is backspin that is put on the cue ball to make it stop after hitting another
ball. When each person in a couple pays his or her own way, they are going
Dutch or Dutch treat. Holland is known for thrift, but does no one else possess
that virtue? There is an alternative possibility: this phrase might be a
corruption of Deutsch or German, another frugal nation. Greece, the country, is
unfortunately a homophone in both French and English for fatty substances we want
to eliminate from our diet.
French
has meanings in English that French does not know. Taking French leave (British
usage) means going AWOL (American usage) while the French say “leaving in the
English manner” (filer à l’anglaise). A French kiss is … well, I won’t
explain that, you all know what it means. When I was a kid hanging around the
school yard, the older guys would show off by demonstrating a French drag. No,
it had nothing to do with cross dressing or transvestites. They would exhale
cigarette smoke out of their mouth and simultaneously inhale it through their
nostrils. French is sometimes a useless adjective without a precise meaning but
nonetheless denoting a vague idea of elegance or exclusiveness: French vanilla
ice cream, French dry cleaning, French vanilla extract, French cut as in string
beans. In French, French toast is pain perdu (lost bread), that is stale
bread which would be thrown away if it were not prepared in this manner. It is
not common in France and it certainly is not a treat. French fries are simply
fries in French; so much for the ludicrous attempt of our brilliant legislators
to re-designate them “freedom fries.” What a withering diplomatic insult that
was! The French usually consider frites Belgian, especially when served
with mayonnaise.
Diet
makes me think of one untranslatable vegetable: the couch potato. What a
plethora of suggestion and allusion! And all impossible to capture in
translation! The person so indicated like the tuber is immobile, rooted deep in
couch or soil. The plant itself is humble, ungainly, unglamorous, just as the
person is listless, bland, and dull. However, in an effort to spruce up its
image, the UN declared 2008 as the International Year of the Potato (see The
Economist, 1 March 2008). The overall implication is indolence and
inactivity: the couch potato sits passively watching TV, never reading, never
writing, never actively engaged in doing anything on the computer. This spud is
a dud.
A
related story about tubers. Agatha Christie invented Hercule Poirot, the famous
Belgian detective. His surname sounds just like poireau, a plant related
to onions and scallions. Translating his name into English gives us the pompous
and comic Hercules Leek. In popular argot, the verb based on that edible, poireauter,
means to wait, to hang around with nothing to do.
Staying
in the French kitchen we find that pickles or cornichons are foolish
individuals, rubes, dupes. You are “in a pickle” in English when you face a
dilemma that has no single, easy solution, when you are caught between two
distasteful alternatives. In baseball, “caught in a pickle” means a base runner
is trapped in a run-down between two bases. The term egg-head (tête d’oeuf)
in both languages designates intellectuals. When English admires a fellow, he
is considered a “good egg” while sois pas un oeuf (don’t be an egg)
means “don’t act like a jerk!” Now we can review our repertory of French
insults which lose all their invective and become ludicrous in English: You’re
a cow. What a camel he is! You’re a pickle. She’s a chitlin. Don’t be an egg.
Before
closing, allow me just a few words on untranslatable colors. Blue in English
describes a mood or in the plural a musical genre, functioning as an adjective
(I’m blue) or a noun (singing the blues). French does not even bother to
translate and just uses the English pronunciation and spelling. A slap on the
face leaves a black and blue mark; in French it is only blue. The most famous “blue”
in French is surely sacré bleu, a term I first encountered in the comics
with the Thunderhawk jet fighter pilots. Phonically this phrase wobbles in
sound and sense between “holy blue” and “God damn.” Bleu is a phonetic
corruption of Dieu (God). Sacré changes meaning depending on
context and its position before or after the noun it modifies. Thus, un
endroit sacré is a holy place; un sacré endroit a hell of a place.
The American flag is always and invariably the “red, white, and blue” while the
French drapeau is an equally unchangeable but reverse sequence bleu, blanc,
rouge. We experience black moods (more serious than the blues) and exhibit
black eyes, which in French become poached (un oeil poché) or buttered (un
oeil au beurre). Censors black-out words they don’t want you to read. Black
mail has no color in French. It is chantage (singing) and to blackmail
someone is to make him sing (le faire chanter). A cut-off in electricity
is called a black-out as is an individual’s loss of consciousness. In strong
contrast, a white-out describes an intense snow storm with no visibility.
Thanks to computers we have lost the once prevalent reference to correcting
mistakes on a typewritten page with a pasty fluid called white-out. In
baseball, a sport unknown in France, a white-wash means that a team has failed
to score any runs. Blanchissage is laundry, usually the white wash,
while blanchiment is money laundering.
One
final example, illustrating how meandering translations can come surprisingly
close to their point of origin.
In
English to indicate a person who is not at all sound mentally, we might say “he
has bats in the belfry.” The idiomatic equivalent in French would be “he’s got
a crack in his bell” (il a la cloche fêlée). At first glance not too
close if we go word for word. But what about the underlying concepts? The French
bell in question is surely in a bell tower, a structure not too different from
the bat-inhabited belfry. Both idioms reference high structures (with a subtle
nod at the head atop the human body: cloche is frequent synonym for
head) where something is amiss: the presence of bats indicates the bell is not
working while the crack also tells us it is broken. Another idiomatic expression for the mentally instable is “he
has a spider on the ceiling” (il a une araignée au plafond). Now across
the two languages we can match animals (bats and spiders), but we lose the
tower. At a certain distance, a spider’s web can look like a series of fine
lines against a bright background, and so we are back, in French, to cracks,
which hooks up with the English expression to be “cracked” or crazy.
Voilà, as we say in English, two cultures, two
languages, two mind-sets. Nonetheless, we can find in translation as much as we
have lost. Not exactly the same meanings, but new ones that are just as much
fun. No need to choose, we’ll keep them both. And again as we say in English,
vive la différence!