Le mot juste en anglais

table

 

 

Anglais de pacotille	Manship, suffixe anglais à tout faire
14/10/2018	22/07/2017
Veni, vidi, vici : les dictionnaires visuels	Le 23 octobre – le 200ème anniversaire de Pierre Larousse
18/05/2017	21/10/2017
Créancier de l'anglais, le français s'est payé en nature	La grande aventure du mot « peradventure » racontée par lui-même
09/10/2016	14/04/2016
Cent un ans de gestation pour un dictionnaire
01/09/2014

Pascale Petit - linguist of the month of January 2018

INTERVIEW

 

Poet Pascale Petit, our interviewee,  was born to a Welsh mother and French father and grew up between Paris and Wales. Four of her seven poetry collections were nominated for the T.S. Eliot Award. Poems from Fauverie won the Manchester Poetry Prize and she was also granted a Cholmondeley Award. Pascale has been the judge for many major prizes and her work has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, French and Serbian. Pascale lives in Cornwall but travels regularly to France. Her website is www.pascalepetit.co.uk

 

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Our interviewer, poet and critic Alice Hiller holds a Ph.D. from University College London in transatlantic writing. She has been mentored by Pascale Petit under the Jerwood Arvon scheme. Author of The T-Shirt Book, she reviews for the Times Literary Supplement  and Poetry Review and was shortlisted for the 2017 Bridport Prize. Alice divides her time principally between London and Oxford. 

 

In the interview that follows, Alice speaks to Pascale about growing up between two languages, why she writes in English about France and the Amazon, and her most recent collection, Mama Amazonica, published by Bloodaxe in 2017.

 

  

Alice. Can you tell me about your links to France? You were born in Paris and you hold a French passport?

 

Pascale. I am about to become a British citizen because of Brexit, but all my life I've been a French citizen. I was born in Paris in 1953, then sent to live with my grandmother in Wales. From two and a half to seven I lived in Paris so I spent my early childhood mainly there. As an adult I never went back to Paris until my father made contact because he was dying. I went to see him in the Latin Quarter. Over the two years that I visited him I grew to know Paris, having hated it as a child. After my father died, and I started going to Paris on my own for writing retreats, I really fell in love with the city, the Latin Quarter, the museums, Notre-Dame.




Alice. You spoke French as well as English growing up?

 

Pascale. I'm not really sure which was my mother tongue. I think that what happened was that I would forget one. As a child you learn a language so fast. When I was going to be sent to my grandmother in Wales aged seven, I didn't know any English. Just before we went, my father and mother were trying to teach us a few words. When we arrived and sat on my grandmother's settee, my poor aunt, who was sixteen, was trying to speak French with us. We constantly forgot a language, my brother and myself, and then learnt it again.

 

Alice. I've noticed that while you always write in English, your poems are often set in the landscapes of South America and France. Does your imagination go there instinctively?

Pascale:  Yes. I lived in London almost all my adult life, and I haven't written a single poem about London that I would put in a collection. I love Paris as a city. I don't love London. It was a great place to live when I was young - if you're trying to become a poet or a sculptor, as I was. I love London's multiculturalism, though.

 

Alice. In The Zoo Father, which was your breakthrough collection from 2001, in addition to your Amazonian poems about re-meeting your father in Paris, there were also poems about the Midi. Is that area important to you?

Pascale: The Languedoc, and the causses in particular, and the dry stone walls, were my first Amazon.

 

 

 

Alice. I also spent time in the Causse (causses) as a child. There is something about the solitariness of the landscape and the light that is extraordinary.

Pascale: My mother bought a vineyard when I was twelve, where we camped in stone huts. It was on a steep slope, so mountainous, just under the Larzac and the Grézac plateau. It was overgrown, very lush, and when we would arrive at the beginning of the summer holiday we'd have to get the scythe out, and cut a path between the two mazets. One was the sleeping mazet and one was the kitchen, at the top, right in the sous-bois. You would walk along the path and these snakes would move in front of you. Then there'd be the lizards and the huge insects. I've been back many times since then. It's now no longer a vineyard, just a patch of wild land, but the insects never seem so big as when I was twelve. Then they seemed absolutely enormous.

Alice: I think there's a sort of hyper-realism about how you see things as a teenager. In The Huntress, the collection which followed in 2005, you explore your Welsh mother in terms of the cave systems of the Languedoc, and you write about excavating painful memories through the medium of beautiful crystals.

Pascale: I was haunted by my mother. I loved looking at the Grotte des Demoiselles - the suggested shapes of the stalactites and stalagmites - and the formations of the crystals in the ceiling. I can't help thinking about the inside of a mountain in terms of the inside of my mother. I was living with my grandmother in rural mid-Wales when my mother bought the vineyard. I remember the summer holidays there as being rather exciting and fun, and her being ok. Although she had suffered from mental illness as a child, it was only when I went to live with her when I was thirteen that she became quite mad. The Larzac was also an Eden – where I was scared of her, but not terrified. My next book will return to that area.

Alice: The French language can also be a site of memory for you? I'm thinking of 'The Dragonfly Daughter' when you wrote "I know her by her French name, libellule".

Pascale: That's from being in the vineyard with my mother. She spoke French absolutely perfectly. She was completely bilingual. She would have told me what it was called in French. She used to try to keep our French up. We used to have to speak French at meals in Wales. When I went to live with her in Wales at thirteen she would have called things by both their French and English names. The memory is locked in the French word.

 

Alice: There's a terrifying poem in your collection The Huntress called 'Lunettes' where you describe seeing your father's "lunettes" when he came into your girlhood bedroom in Paris. The word unlocks a Pandora's chest of memory. You realize the poem – about the rape of a child - through the progressive dictionary definitions of its meaning.

Pascale: It's almost totally a found poem. Obviously I moved it around and adjusted it.

 

 

Alice: Responding to a more positive element within your French heritage, as someone who originally trained and exhibited as a sculptor, was the Midi a key part in awakening your visual sensibility?
I'm thinking of the poem 'My Larzac Childhood' in The Treekeeper's Tale of 2008, when you remember the "grass-snake-flashing paths" and the "museum of the dragonfly's abdomen". You describe the dragonfly wings as if the light is coming in through museum skylights.

Pascale: I have a thing about glass. I think it was because I was placed in an incubator when I was a baby. I think of my mother in terms of a glass mother because she was very brittle and otherworldly. She was strange to us. I think that brought this obsession with glass to my looking at the glass wings of the dragonfly. I became a visual artist through drawing. It happened when I was deeply unhappy at home in Paris and I would be left in school in the evenings. It was a horrible school. I don't think I was any good at school because of the language. I would draw, and I found I could escape. I had a total facility. I drew submarines in the ocean. It was a way to make an alternative world for myself. Later in Wales I became very good at school, and there was a lot of pressure for me to go to university, but I chose to go to Art School.

 

Alice:  Art can be a place where we are able to realize ourselves if we come from backgrounds which don't allow us to say who we are. We become ourselves in the art that we make and then take that self forward.

Pascale: As a child I was deeply withdrawn. In my art I wasn't withdrawn. I was an extrovert in my art.

 

 

Alice:  Your poems are not shy poems.

 

Pascale: People are often surprised when they meet me because I am so shy and quiet and my poems aren't.

 

 

Alice: In Fauverie, your last but one collection, you engage with Paris in much more detail. This comes from the time you spent reclaiming the city?

Pascale: I began discovering Paris like a tourist. I fell in love with Notre- Dame. I spent every day going in there. There were also the sparrows outside I could hand-feed. That was such a wonderful draw.

Alice: You had a living, nurturing transaction in the city.

Pascale:  I rented short-term lets in the Latin Quarter as close to the Jardin des Plantes as possible. Usually facing the gate. I would walk in the gardens every day. And discover new things about Paris each time. It was wonderful.

 
Alice: The Fauverie poems are very powerful. Having a creative engagement with a place where you have suffered, and making good work, even if is complex or has difficult themes, gives the work deep roots.

Pascale: I did those very pleasurable things, but also went back to the Boulevard de Grenelle, in the 15th arrondissement, where we lived. My father had given me the address. I went there and twice I was let into the cellar where I was locked as a child. I'd had so many dreams about it when I was a child and then a teenager. I made an installation when I was on my BA course – of being in that cellar. In my memory the main feature of this cellar was a window. Afterwards I told myself I must have imagined this because cellars don't have windows. I went into this cellar, and there was a window. It was at the top of the stairs, looking over the courtyard, very high. It was one of those small courtyards which I remember so well as a child. There was the cellar then you went down the steps and there was the earthen floor. It was the most terrifying cellar I've ever seen. The first time I told the concierge why I was coming. He let me in and the light went off and it was terrifying. Every detail comes from that visit.

 

Alice: In Mama Amazonica, your current collection, which was published by Bloodaxe in September 2017, there is a poem 'Square de la Place Dupleix', which takes the reader to the Paris square of chestnut trees and pigeon gods, and then lets them fall back into the "coffining dark" of your childhood.

Pascale: That poem should have been in Fauverie. Although Mama Amazonica is about the abuse and rape of my mother by my father, at the kernel of it is a sequence of poems about how that trauma also permeated to his children. I really wanted to write about finding this park. I tried on several occasions but I could not find it. Nothing matched my memory. Then I went behind our block and there it was. It was incredible. There was the church. There was the school with the infant school next to it. I had to find my own way to school and back and I always got lost even though it was very close. I remember my mother telling me off, saying "It's just around the corner." I have no sense of left and right. I just went in the wrong direction. I would play in the sand in the square, which I also see as a precursor to being a sculptor, and then the gendarme, who was in his little hut, would put me on a stool, and phone my mother, and say "She's here."

Alice: In Mama Amazonica, although many of the poems are based on two recent trips you made to the Amazon, and have vivid descriptions of being in the Amazon and the creatures you saw there, there are also more poems about Paris. I was interested in 'Bestiarum' which takes as its starting point Walton Ford's 'Bête du Gévaudan' at the Musée de la Chasse et Nature. It seems to be informed by the French idea of the loup-garou.

Pascale:  The legend is from the Lozère, just above the Languedoc. I discovered the Musée de la Chasse quite late. They have contemporary artists among the permanent displays. It is such a beautifully curated museum. I loved Walton Ford's paintings. There are two poems in Mama Amazonica based on his work. 'When My Mother Became A Boa' comes directly from one of his paintings.

Alice: The Seine and the Amazon are flowing in and out of each other?

Pascale: In the Musée there are stuffed wolverines, for example. There are lions. They do things in Paris not allowed in the UK. Quite a lot of stuffed animals in shops. The French imagination is much more open to the Amazon. In England, if you write poems about India or Africa, places where there have been colonies, there is more empathy, whereas South America is too removed. Before the day of researching online, I found that Paris had all the ethnographic books I could not get in the UK.

Alice: The jaguar is a central beast in Fauverie and Mama Amazonica, but your close encounters with jaguars came in Paris initially?

Pascale: When I used to visit my father, at the end of his life, he was living just by the zoo in the Jardin des Plantes. There was a black jaguar, and a gold female jaguar. They were in very small cages at that point.

 

 

Alice: You finally saw a jaguar in the wild from a boat on the Amazon, leading to the extraordinary, healing poem, 'The Jaguar' which closes Mama Amazonica.

Pascale: The experience was one of the highlights of my life. I absolutely worship them. I have read everything you could possibly read about the jaguar. When I stayed in Paris I would go to see Aramis the jaguar and Simara, his young girlfriend, every day, not long before closing time. They would feed them, then he would spring into action.

Alice: One of the pleasures of Mama Amazonica is that you translate the experience of the Amazon into words that make a 5D environment for the reader. Do you think the fact that your mind has had to move through different languages has helped you in the way that you are able to realize yourself as a poet?

Pascale: Thank you for saying that. I do aim to do that. I had never thought of it being to do with the fact that I had to move from language to language when I was a child. I always thought that it was because I was an artist, and I still need to make sculptures in my books, and installations, and environments that people walk into. I need to make them very physical and very real. That is always a tussle with language. Language has to be strong enough to reconstruct the images and sounds and sensory details to surround the reader.

Alice: Finally, I know you're deeply engaged in judging. You've just judged the Manchester Poetry Prize. You're judging the National Poetry Competition. But what lies beyond this in 2018 in terms of plans for your own works?

Pascale: I have a project on the go. I think all that I would say is that one of the main themes is foreign-ness. It partly comes out of Brexit. It's partly because I had to get British nationality. It partly comes out of my Welsh grandmother, who brought me up. She was born in India. She was half Indian but it was a family secret. It's hard to get any facts at all about this because it's very covered up. But those are my plans for this year.

Alice: And I gather there will be a French translation of Fauverie in 2018?

Pascale: Yes Valérie Rouzeau, an absolutely wonderful poet, the ideal translator, has translated Fauverie and it will soon be sent out to the publisher.

 

problems with table

Contributions precedentes de René Meertens :

Anglais de pacotille 14/10/2018	Manship, suffixe anglais à tout faire 22/07/2017
Veni, vidi, vici : les dictionnaires visuels 18/05/2017	Le 23 octobre – le 200ème anniversaire de Pierre Larousse 21/10/2017
Créancier de l’anglais, le français s’est payé en nature 9/10/2016	La grande aventure du mot « peradventure » racontée par lui-même 14/04/2016
Cent un ans de gestation pour un dictionnaire 01/09/2014	Critique de livre lexicographique 19/12/2011

The Novel of the Century

Review

 

David Bellos The author

Geraldine Brodie The reviewer

David Bellos is the Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French and Comparative Literature  and Director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University. He is the author of Romain Gary: A Tall Story (published by Vintage Digital, 2010), and Georges Perec: A Life in Words (published by David R. Godine, 1993) (Prix Goncourt for biography), amongst other books, and the translator of Chronicle in Stone: A Novel by Ismael Kadare (Arcade Publishing, 2011), amongst other translations.

Geraldine Brodie, our Linguist of the Month of August 2016 and since then a regular contributor to this blog is Senior Lecturer in Translation Theory and Theatre Translation in the Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry, where she convenes the MA in Translation Theory and Practice.

 

The cover illustration of David Bellos's latest book shows a dusty-coloured tome partly obscured by a ribbon bearing the legend, 'The Novel of the Century'. This image also provides a graphic introduction to the contents, promising to reveal some surprises. Subtitled 'The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables', this volume invites the reader on a voyage of discovery of Victor Hugo's best-known work: its creation, content, context and subsequent translations and adaptations. Bellos is our tour guide; his encyclopaedic knowledge provides a constant source of unexpected information, and his evident enjoyment in the exploration is infectious. This book is not only informative – it's fun. But, most of all, Bellos sets out to examine the reputation of Les Misérables, a book more recognized these days for its spin-offs in the form of film, theatre and musical productions, and make a case for its significance as an enduring literary force, both in its own time and today.

Bellos's affection for Victor Hugo and for his oeuvre exudes from the pages, but he writes for a wide audience, recognizing the range of perspectives and levels of familiarity with which his readers may approach Les Misérables. An engaging author's note admits that even he, a professor of French, first read the book later in life and discovered that he had 'never before read a work so extraordinarily diverse yet so tightly wound round its central thread'. Bellos suggests to neophytes that as Les Misérables is composed of 365 chapters it can be read one chapter a day for a year. I began by following his recommendation, but came to the conclusion that it's better to take the approach of Bellos himself: total immersion. Nevertheless, one of the ways in which Bellos pays tribute to Hugo's composition is to organize his study in five loosely chronological parts, echoing the structure of the novel. Between each of these parts, Bellos inserts a short 'interlude' examining an extraneous aspect of the novel, such as 'Inventing the Names' or 'High Style, Low Style, Latin and Slang'.

This theatrical reference is particularly apposite in a work that discusses the film and theatre legacies of Les Misérables. Bellos points out that an 1897 clip by the Lumière brothers of an unknown performer representing key characters from the book (and Hugo himself) was the first cinematic recording of any kind of fiction. Since then, 'Hugo's novel has fed the film industries of almost every country in the world, and Les Misérables has become the most frequently adapted novel of all time'. Bellos is generous in his assessment of these adaptations, taking the view that anachronisms and invented scenes, such as the courtroom dramas depicting Jean Valjean's conviction to hard labour, 'are not contradictions of what Hugo expected his readers to understand'. Bellos himself takes up the challenge of adaptation, composing a film script for an imagined adaptation that would begin on the battlefield of Waterloo, an event that Bellos considers to be of vital significance for both Hugo and his novel, but which is frequently overlooked in its retellings.

Bellos's filmic vision asserts itself throughout his book, drawing a series of colourful pictures of Hugo's life and surroundings. Descriptions of the furniture in Hugo's apartment in Paris provide a key to Hugo's political and professional activities. Bellos is unimpressed by Hugo's interior decoration proclivities at Hauteville House in Guernsey, but his detailed descriptions portray the extent to which Hugo made a settled home for his family, himself and his wider entourage in exile. Bellos's visual interests extend to the insertion of a guide to colour codes , intended 'to help with the reading of all fiction written in France before around 1865' and typical of the erudite attention to detail that makes the book so enjoyable but can also transform an understanding of the subject text itself. The documentary film approach to the topic is established in the first lines of the introduction, with the opening scenario of the modern-day Commodore Clipper ferry travelling from Portsmouth to Guernsey, interweaving with Hugo's arrival in 1855. This is also the beginning of a detective adventure for the reader; how and why was this book written in Guernsey?

Bellos's discussions of translations of Les Misérables are as wide-reaching and entertaining as his hugely successful Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (a book that I recommend to my own Translation students). He discusses the variety of translations of Les Misérables over time, including an 1863 pirate edition launched in Richmond, Virginia which was prefaced with the words, 'the absence of a few anti-slavery paragraphs will hardly be complained of by Southern readers'. Among other remarkable features, Bellos notes that 'the full text of Les Misérables in the right order of reading was not available to British readers until 2008',  23 years after the complete Chinese translation. From a lexical perspective, Bellos demonstrates how translation can have unintended consequences; scenes of Valjean as a galley slave in Boleslawski's early film adaptation, retained in Boublil and Schönberg's Broadway musical, stem from the 'maritime mistake' whereby the French term for 'hard labour', la peine des galères, had been long divorced from its original connotation with convict oarsmen, even when used by Hugo. Nevertheless, galère does indeed mean 'galley' and this early translator's decision has dictated one of the lasting images of Valjean.

Bellos also draws on his close acquaintance with terminology and definition to discuss the ideology of the Les Misérables. In his view, it is a progressive book but not left-wing, a label that has come about due to a shift in the meaning attaching to 'proletariat' (Marx, Bellos points out, was not as well versed in Roman political structure as Hugo). He explores the sometimes opposing stances taken by Hugo in the novel with regards to religion and politics, seeing them not as contradictions but as panoramic views of these topics. With regard to the polemics of religion Bellos writes, 'Les Misérables is intentionally designed to be equally irritating to both sides. How else could it seriously promote the great reconciliation between factions and classes whose lamentable and often bloody disputes were contingent and not necessary parts of social life?' From a political perspective, Bellos asks, 'Where, then, does the novel really hang on the great washing-line of political convictions stretching from the far left to the far right?' It is this panorama that makes Les Misérables worthy of its accolade 'Novel of the Century', a book that engaged mightily in the debates of its era, but was also a force for transformation. Bellos considers that Les Misérables was instrumental in the change of social perception about the status of poverty. Hugo's convictions continue to reach out to us today through the many proliferations of his work, says Bellos: 'There's a sense in which we are all Hugolians now'.

The Novel of the Century is less a study of the content of Les Misérables than an examination of its context and influence, while also providing insights on how the book was written and prepared for publication. In imparting this information, Bellos supplies a wealth of enjoyable comment and information for readers who have read or may read the book, or who have simply had some experience of its characters and story in some form. He is convincing on the significance of Hugo's novel and liberal in the myriad ways we might approach it. Les Misérables is a rich book, and perhaps like the menu for the banquet celebrating its publication, which Bellos reproduces in all its detail, it can be sampled or gorged on, but remains a tour de force.

Robert Killingsworth - translator of the month of February 2012

Jonathan : You were born in the United States. Where and when did you learn French ?

In high school I had four years of traditional instruction in French. Years later, I realized my teachers had taught me all the French grammar I would ever need to know (more than all, in fact: I have never had to translate the pluperfect subjunctive!). But I could hardly speak the language. Reasonable fluency in conversation did not come until after college, when I found myself in a former French colony, Senegal, serving as a Peace Corps volunteer. I’ve lost the little Wolof I learned there, but French has stayed with me.

 

Jonathan : How did you become a translator ?

By chance, and relatively late in life. In 1990 my wife’s employer offered her a two-year expatriate assignment in Paris, and I knew it was too good a deal to pass up. I quit my salaried job, we moved to France with our two young daughters, and I became a stay-at-home dad a.k.a “househusband”. After a few months, I cast about for something gainful to do while the kids were in school. I had a computer, good keyboard skills, and familiarity with Microsoft Word. A friend of a friend had started a translation company in the city. I was presumptuous enough to think I could translate from French to English. I asked that person to let me try. She did, and that is how I got started – at 0,35 FRF a word. I was a generalist then: I would translate any text I was offered.

 

Jonathan : What are your fields of specialization ?

Only one: financial. Within six months of starting out as a translator, I had found that I could specialize in what I knew from my previous life. I had a graduate degree in economics and a CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) credential in investment management. There was much that I still had to learn about banking, law, accounting and so on, but I was better positioned than most to acquire the knowledge I would need.

 

Jonathan : Do you prefer to translate or interpret?

I do not do interpreting at all. I would not be good at it, and it does not suit me. One thing I like very much about translating is that I do not have to leave the house to do it!

 

Jonathan : Who are your  clients ?

At this point I have just two. Both are smallish translation companies in Paris that I have been working with for fifteen years. The market for what I do is mainly in Europe, not in North America. I am happy not to work directly for end customers. From nine time zones away, I am not going to keep Paris office hours; I want an intermediary to do that for me.

 

Jonathan : Do you use machine translation (MT) software?

I do. For every translation. I am now so used to a translation-memory environment that I have difficulty going back to the old way. For translating, I have been using one CAT tool in particular for some nine years. For aligning and generating bitexts, I use a different program. My project for the next few months is to become proficient in one of the newer CAT tools that handles both tasks well. I’ve owned the new software for several months but haven’t had time to learn it.

 

What do you find to be the most difficult aspect of translating financial texts?

Without question, the greatest difficulty is getting the terminology right: choosing the appropriate terms and wielding them correctly. For me, this is the definition of what a translator has to be able to do to be a specialist – in any field.

 

The trickiest challenges in financial terminology are often hidden behind common words and phrases. For example, take “consolidation” in the accounting sense. The very same word is used in both French and English, much of the time in the very same way – but there is one key difference in what the word is understood to mean in France. Suffice it to say that I know no way to state this meaning precisely in a phrase of fewer than eight English words. And that is a problem because where this difference matters, mistranslation can be a major error.

 

A different kind of challenge is posed by the French phrase « franchissement de seuil[s de détention] », common in securities law and regulation. Here, the equivalent term in English is the semantically unrelated phrase “notification of major holdings”. It is not strictly speaking a translation, but it is the term the translator will need to use in almost any text in which this subject comes up. In both languages, the term used is a shorthand reference to a disclosure obligation, but each shorthand focuses on a different aspect of the obligation.

 

Very interesting.  Very many thanks, Robert.

 

You’re welcome.

 

A new literary event

- the publication of another book based on a manuscript hidden for years

On this blog we recently announced (Actualités littéraires aux États Unis) the publication on 15 July of Harper Lee's second book Go Set a Watchman, which created an enormous amount of buzz not only in literary circles, and went straight to the top of the bestselling lists even before its publication.  This week witnessed a second major literary event, the publication on July 28 by Random House of What Pet Should I Get? by America's iconic author and illustrator of children's books, Dr. Seuss (whose real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel – 1904-1991).

 

 

Both authors have enjoyed enormous success. Lee's first book, first published in 1960, Go Kill a Mockingbird was translated into French and many other languages (and Watchman is due to be published in French by Grasset in October under the title Va et poste une sentinelle). The works of Dr. Seuss have sold 600 million copies [1], (including such French titles as Les Oeufs verts au Jambon, Poisson Un, Poisson Deux, Le Chat chapeauté). Neverthless, both of them may be less well known outside of the United States than they are to American readers.

This is a timely occasion to briefly compare and contrast these recent publications.

What the two books have in common is not only their proximate dates of publication, but the fact that the geneses of both were manuscripts written decades ago (Watchman in 1960 and What Pet Should I Get? somewhere between 1958 and 1962) that were only recently discovered.  Seuss’s widow found the manuscript of To Get a Pet shortly after his death but set it aside, and it was re-discovered only two years ago. It should be a source of encouragement to budding writers that Watchman, said to have been written before Mockingbird, was rejected for publication, and the same is true for Seuss's first book And to Think that I saw it on Mulberry Street - rejected by no fewer than 29 publishers.

Admittedly, Dr. Seuss  wrote for a very different readership, young children, than did Harper Lee, but it should be remembered that part of Harper Lee's success is due to the fact that Mockingbird has been assigned as a textbook to generations of schoolchildren in the United States. The Seuss books also have an important place in educational history in the USA, because they are credited with changing the reading habits of millions of American children and making reading into a fun experience.

As one review states (in verse);

Dr. Seuss helped us learn how to read,
Boomers, X-ers and millennials all.
He made up new words — like “lightninged” and “nerd,”
And also made reading a ball!

Mockingbird was made into a film, with Gregory Peck in the lead role. Four of Seuss's books have been made into films, many years after they were first published :

How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
The Cat in the Hat (2003)
Horton Hears a Who! (2008)
The Lorax (2012)

In April Random House increased their first printing of What Pet Should I Get? from 500,000 to 1 million because of demand.

The book was reviewed last week on the front page of The New York Times Book Review Section, which attests to the importance attributed to any new book written by Dr. Seuss, who died 24 years ago. [2] [3]

Rapper Tyler, the Creator, donned a full Cat-in-the-Hat suit on a popular TV show and rapped the entire new book.

 

But despite the importance attached to this latest publication of a Seuss book, it is unlikely to cause the same amount of brouhaha as the earlier major event of the literary scene, if only because What Pet Should I Get? will be Dr. Seuss's 47th book. [4] 

from What Pet Should I Get? 

It remains to see when a French translation will be published. Previous Dr. Seuss books have been translated into French by Anne-Laure Fournier Le Ray.

[1] compared with the Harry Potter books, which have sold 450 million copies.

[2] Three other books were published posthumously.

[3] Harper Lee is alive at 89, but lives a secluded life and by some accounts suffers from amnesia. Consequently it has not been possible to clear the fog of mystery or any of the conspiracy theories surrounding the pause in her career of 55 years before Watchman surfaced so dramatically.

[4] of which 44 were illustrated by Dr. Seuss himself.

 

Lecture supplémentaire :

Dr. Seuss Book: Yes, They Found It in a Box
The New York Times, July 21, 2015

Reading Aloud to My Daughter, From Prison
The New York Times, July 7, 2015

 

 Jonathan G.

The other Einstein

Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity in 1915. Initially we wanted to cover the anniversary of this event on the blog, but in searching for an original angle, not covered by the mainstream press, we came across a lesser-known but equally interesting member of his family, Lieserl, his daughter.

No-one is better qualified to present to our readers the unusual story of Lieserl and her relationship to the German scientist than Michele Zackheim, author of EINSTEIN'S DAUGHTER: The Search for Lieserl (and of other fascinating books [1]). For many years she worked in the visual arts as a fresco muralist, an installation artist, a print-maker, and a painter. Her work has been widely exhibited and is included in the permanent collections of The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. and in many other museums throughout the United States. She has been the recipient of two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts.  Michele teaches Creative Writing from a Visual Perspective at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Ms. Zackheim very kindly agreed to write the following article for the blog.

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The New York Times a fait état de la découverte d'une correspondance amoureuse entre Albert Einstein et Mileva Marić. On y apprit qu'en 1902, avant leur mariage, ils avaient eu une fille du nom de Lieserl. Jusque-là, il n'avait jamais été question de Lieserl dans la biographie d'Einstein.

 Mileva Marić et Albert Einstein

In 1987, The New York Times ran an article about the discovery of love letters between Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić. In that correspondence it was disclosed for the first time that in 1902, before they were married, they had a daughter. They named her Lieserl. Until these letters were discovered, she had not been written into the Einstein story.

    It intrigued me to think that hidden deep in the Balkans lurked the mystery of Einstein's missing child, a child whose fate remained unknown. Impetuously, naively, I decided to find her.

    It took me almost seven years to write Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl. My research took me on extensive trips to London, Berlin, Zurich, Bern, and Budapest, and three times to Serbia—twice while the country was at war; once when there was promise in the air.

Albert Einstein had always been my idol. In my small town in California, he was the only Jewish figure who didn't elicit anti-Semitic rhetoric. It never entered my mind that I would grow to dislike him deeply. But I did.

* * *

     Evelyn at the
        age of 18

One day in 1994, I drove along the freeway that edges San Francisco Bay to Albany, California. It was a foggy day and the saltwater scent of the bay was delicious. I had an appointment to visit Evelyn Einstein, Albert's granddaughter. That first visit prompted a turbulent fifteen years of friendship.

    Evelyn met me at the front door and then quickly sat down in a wheelchair that was decorated with garish plastic Star Trek gewgaws. She was a heavy, somewhat plain-looking woman with cropped brown-and-silver hair, and she wore black pants, tan Birkenstock sandals, and a bright crimson shirt. (Each time I saw her over the next fifteen years, she was wearing the exact same, clean, well-ironed shirt.) Attached to her collar was a silver Star Trek pin with a button.

    "I like pushing this button," she said to me as soon as we shook hands. "Look." She pushed it and laughed when I was startled by the loud noise.

As she guided me into the living room between piles of wet boxes, I was swept back in time to the rooms I had seen in her grandmother Mileva's houses in both Titel and Novi Sad, in Serbia. Evelyn's furniture was the same style—heavy and dark and uninviting. I couldn't tell if the upholstery was gray or just dingy.

A few days earlier, a water pipe had burst and flooded the living room. The tables were covered with piles of damp paper. The sofa was heaped with musty boxes. I was soon to become familiar with Evelyn's house: a chaotic, jumbled repository of history.

When I tried to sympathize with her about the disaster, she merely laughed. "Oh, don't be concerned," she said. "My house is always a bit upside down."

I was invited to move some boxes and sit on a clammy sofa while Evelyn faced me in her wheelchair.

"I have to apologize," she said, "for not dressing up for your visit. You see, my mother never taught me how to dress. And, as you can see," she said, making a sweeping motion with her arm, "I have inherited my family's slovenly behavior. I'm not elegant. You could shoot me before you would get me into nylon stockings. High heels have always horrified me! Anyway, I try not to stand out in company."

All of a sudden, a crowd of clocks began to chime.

"I have twenty Swiss pendulum clocks," Evelyn said over the racket, "and I love the cacophony."

Evelyn appeared to take a perverse joy in confusion. I soon learned that she would begin a conversation, whether on the phone or in person, cautiously. If I simply chatted about my family, she would begin to warm up. By the time we were halfway into our conversation, she was speaking freely and easily, with a wonderful, high-spirited humor. And I could always depend on hearing her lively—and cranky—reflections on world politics.

Evelyn was often difficult, yet I enjoyed her shrewd intelligence and her humor. When I visited, I could make her happy by driving her to her favorite sushi restaurant in Berkeley and treating her to whatever she wanted. One late afternoon, over an enormous amount of sushi, she said, "Most of the time, I'm alone. I'm quite a hermit. My problems drive my friends away. I feel totally abandoned. You'll drop out of my life at some time. Just wait and see."

Many years passed before her demands and her insatiable need for attention finally wore me down, just as she promised.

But in retrospect, she was the only one in that family who had a sense of humor.

* * *

Einstein's son Hans and his wife Frieda adopted Evelyn from an agency in Chicago, Illinois. She was told that her birth mother was a simple farm girl and her father a farm hand. But her adoptive mother told a close friend that Evelyn was actually Albert's daughter; that she was the result of one of his many dalliances. [2] Einstein insisted that Hans, even though his wife was ill by then, adopt her.

I don't know the truth, although I've heard this story from various sources.

Evelyn tried having Einstein's DNA tested with matter from his brain. "The great man's brain had disintegrated in formaldehyde, so it was useless. Anyway," she said, "One has to ask if two farm hands in the Midwest could have a daughter with my IQ." Evelyn Einstein's was 178.

    "Hans Albert, my adoptive father, may really be my brother—and my brother, Bernhard, may really be my nephew. And when I'm in a good mood, I enjoy a perverse delight in the entire scenario!"

Evelyn did not like the iconic image of Einstein sticking out his tongue. It was taken sixty-four years ago, after a birthday party honoring him at The Princeton Club. He was tired and didn't want another camera in his face. Understandable, yes. But why is this photograph considered a reflection of his humor? He was not being funny; he was being nasty. Sticking out one's tongue is considered a gesture of contempt, an insult. But the aura of saintliness that surrounded Einstein was solid. He had become an icon.

True, often he was funny and captivating and wise – but always with his friends and lovers and the general public. Not with his family. With his family he was gruff and unforgiving. I never heard a funny story about him from family members.

In 1997, when Evelyn's birthday was approaching, I asked her what she wanted more than anything in the world. "I want to meet the actor Robin Williams. He's the most intelligent, funny, intuitive person I have ever seen."

    I wrote him a letter and within two weeks had scheduled a meeting between Evelyn and Robin Williams, who lived in the San Francisco area. On the appointed date, he drove to Evelyn's house with his assistant. They spent two hours together. She was thrilled. Over the telephone after the visit, her voice sounded more hopeful than it ever had. I asked her how the meeting went.

    "I don't remember ever meeting a famous person," she told me. I reminded her about her grandfather, about Robert Oppenheimer, about Churchill's daughter, about the attempt to make a love match between her and Edward Teller's nephew.

    "They were not anywhere in the same league as Williams!" Evelyn exclaimed. "He's special; they're ordinary."

Michele Zackheim

[1] Michele's first novel, Violette's Embrace, is a fictional account of an American artist on the trail of the French writer and cult heroine, Violette Leduc. Broken Colors, a novel, traces the path of the painter, Sophie Marks from England of World War II to postwar Paris and the Italian countryside and then on to the American Southwest. Michele's most recent novel Last Train to Paris tells the story of Rose Manon, posted as a foreign correspondent to Paris, who finds herself caught in a web of terror and decades later must come to terms with the consequences of a heart-wrenching decision. The novel is in the tradition of bestsellers such as Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky.

 

       

Violet's Embrace                            Broken Colors                     The Last Train to Paris

 

 [2] The daughter of Albert Einstein and Mileva Maric’s , Lieserl was born in 1902 in Titel, in the Vojvodina, before the couple married. Albert was in Bern when she was born and never saw his daughter; indeed he refused to travel to Titel to see her.  Mileva stayed with Lieserl for a year in Vojvodina and then joined Albert in Bern where they were married. Lieserl was left with her grandparents and died in a scarlet fever epidemic when she was about three years old.  No grave was registered or found.

In my interviews with Evelyn Einstein, she often raised the idea that she was the result of a love affair between Albert Einstein and a dancer from New York.  However, the only material I could find about Evelyn was her birth certificate stating that she, in 1941, was born “out-of-wedlock” to a young couple in the midwest.  Hans Albert and Frieda Einstein adopted her from a foundling agency in Chicago.  Evelyn’s theory was that Albert Einstein thought that his son and daughter-in-law should adopt her because (1) they had just lost a child and (2) he felt guilty about abandoning Lieserl in 1902.

 

Marjolijn de Jager, literary translator - linguist of the month of October 2014

The following interview was conducted in English by Skype between Los Angeles CA and Stamford, Connecticut.

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                 
                            

M. de  J. - l'interviewee                      J.G. - l'interviewer

 

 

 

Connecticut in fall                                California in fall                             

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LMJ: You were born in Indonesia, which at that time was the Dutch East Indies [1]. What brought your parents there?

 

Marjolijn: We are talking about MANY generations back, on my father’s side at least 5 generations back to the mid-nineteenth century; on my mother’s maternal side at least 3 generations back.

LMJ: So your mother language was Dutch? Were you schooled in Dutch?

Marjolijn: I was born on Borneo where my father worked in the Royal Dutch Oil fields. In March of 1942 when the Japanese invaded the then Dutch East Indies we were living on Java. (The book Song of Survival: Women Interned, written by Helen Colijn, which tells the story of the British missionary, Margaret Dryburg, takes place in one of the camps on Sumatra.)  The Japanese incarcerated all non-Indonesians into camps of women and children only (boys until the age of 10) and men’s camps. Women were made to work in the banana plantations, herding swine, or digging pits; children were to tend the vegetable gardens, the produce of which went to the Japanese commander’s house. Education was strictly forbidden.

My mother, at great risk, had decided she didn’t want an illiterate child and began to teach me and a small group (4, 5?) of other children with a stick in the sand, as there weren’t any paper, pencils, or books. She was not a teacher but simply improvised, taking things a step further when we appeared to be ready to move on. Miraculously, all but one of us entered 4^th grade after the war was over. When we arrived in Melbourne I was 9 years old and very warmly dealt with at St. Michael’s Anglican school. I did end up repeating 4^th grade in Amsterdam a year later because the material taught in Melbourne and in Amsterdam was too different and, of course, I had not had any Dutch history at all.

LMJ: Having been a survivor of WW2 at a young age, did you feel a special affinity to Anne Frank.

Marjolijn: Yes, to some extent but much of that was also due to my not having any friends in Amsterdam yet and to our being so close in age, that is to say the age I was when reading her diary and the age she was when writing it. In real time, born in 1929, she was 7 years older than I.  She seemed like a far-flung friend to me. My diary was similar to hers in that it talked about school and school friends and such. When I read through it a few years later I found it self-absorbed and I destroyed it, as I have done with every other diary I ever kept for any length of time, stopping that activity definitively when I was in my thirties.

LMJ:  You completed B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. studies in the USA. What were your majors? What was the subject of your doctoral thesis?

  Marjolijn: B.A. from Hunter College in NYC with a major in French and a minor in Classical Greek. M.A. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill with a major in French and a minor in Spanish. Ph.D. from the same university with a major in French Literature, a 1st minor in Spanish Literature and a 2nd minor (required) in Comparative Literature. My doctoral dissertation was a stylistic study of one of the books (“Les Feux”) of Agrippa d’Aubigné’s lengthy epic Les Tragiques, concerning the Huguenots and their suffering at the hands of the Catholic Church.

LMJ: You taught summer courses at New York University for 10 years. Tell our readers about that.

Marjolijn: I began teaching Literary Translation (French à English) in NYU’s SCPS program, which as an elective course was then offered for ten weeks only in the summer. If I am not mistaken all the courses are taught on-line these days and I must confess that I am happy I was still able to teach this face-to-face! The students were completing many required courses in specific areas (Legal, Medical, Commercial translation) and this was one of the few they could choose as an elective.

LMJ: You have a long list of honors and awards. Which one gave you the most satisfaction?

Marjolijn: The African Literature Association  has been and still is the most important professional organization to which I belong. For me it has been an education from the beginning in areas of literature and cultures of which I knew (and still do) all too little. After my membership of almost 28 years it has also become a community of friends for me, which I cherish. Receiving the Distinguished Membership Award from the ALA for my translations of Francophone African literature in particular was a crowning touch coming from an immensely respected and extraordinary organization.

LMJ: You were invited to be translator-in-residence at the Villa Gillet in Lyon. [1] Tell our readers a little about that.

Marjolijn: I found out that one could apply if working on a French or Francophone project of interest to them, so I did with Ken Bugul’s Riwan ou le Chemin de sable (1999). In September 2007 I spent an intensely satisfying month there, finishing about half the text and in the interim getting to know Lyon in many of its marvelous culturally rich aspects. Unfortunately, no publisher was ever found for the translation and I had to abandon the project when other (paying!) work came around.

LMJ: You first visited Africa in 1986 and subsequently made several visits to West Africa in the 1990s. What took you there?

 
Marjolijn: The purpose of my first visit was to visit my son, who had volunteered for the Peace Corps in Togo. Subsequent visits were to Togo, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana. On two such occasions I went on grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and on two others for African Literature Association Conferences. I did research in those countries, with the assistance of my husband who was a professional photographer and who videographed subjects of interest. He filmed one 75-minute documentary that I presented at an ALA Conference.

LMJ: Explain the connection between your family’s colonial background and your interest in Africa

Marjolijn: I have been an activist all my life and have always despised colonialism, so that having the ability to use my professional activities to bring the voices of some African writers to an English readership was, and remains, very much a political action for me, in addition to the love I bring to these texts, of course.

LMJ: Can you name two African authors whose works you admire and have translated, and whom you have come to know personally.

Marjolijn : Werewere Liking, originally from Cameroon, has been living in Côte d’Ivoire for most of her adult life. She established the Village KI-YI M'Bock (signifying "ultimate knowledge" in Bassa, Liking's native language) in 1985 on the periphery of the city of Abidjan. (The Village KI-YI can be found on-line in many different entries.) Its purpose is to protect and maintain traditional Pan-African culture in all its forms, ranging from theater, dance, music (both instrumental and vocal), the plastic arts, costume design to performances and classes for adolescents. Liking is a truly Renaissance person in that she is equally gifted in almost all of these arts herself. In addition she is a really fine painter and playwright and an exceptional novelist. Of her novels I have translated three: The Amputated Memory (The Feminist Press, 2007), It Shall Be of Jasper and Coral (Journal of a Misovire), and Love-Across-a-Hundred-Lives (University of Virginia Press, CARAF, 2000). Although I admire and love all of them, my personal favorite is Love-Across-a-Hundred-Lives for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which is the amazing character of the grandmother who weaves in and out of the narrative, spreading her wisdom (literally) across the ages.

The novelist and filmmaker Assia Djebar is from Algeria where she grew up and did her university studies, before moving to Paris. In June of 2005 she was elected to the Académie Française, the first Maghrebian author to receive this honor.

Her film Nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua (1978) is the story of an Algerian woman engineer returning to Algeria after a long Western exile. Women are always the main focus in her work – women in their relationship to society, to the men in their lives, to their professional and private worlds, to exile and to war – mixing historical truth and mythical material, as well as autobiographical and fictional elements. Of the many works she has written I have translated the following: Children of the New World: A Novel of the Algerian War (The Feminist Press, 2005), Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, (CARAF, University of Virginia Press, 1992), Algerian White, co-translator: David Kelley (Seven Stories Press, 2001).

   

Thanks to a great extent to the ALA and to university departments of African Studies and African Literature, among others, African literature and African writers individually have finally gained some of the prestige, recognition and attention that must be paid to them in the West. We need to get away from the Euro-centered world and these works are among some of the finest guides to get us there.

 

LMJ: What translating projects unrelated to African writers have you found to be particularly interesting or challenging?

 

Marjolijn :  In the past few years I have had the pleasure of working on several psychoanalytic books written in Dutch (two by Hendrika Freud and two by Antonie Ladan). Psychology and psychoanalysis have always been of great interest to me; the challenge lay in working on a text whose content is not all that familiar to me on a professional level. However, as with some of the African writers, I was friends (since childhood!) with the former and able to approach the other so that LMJs I had could be sent directly to them, always a blessing and – more often than not – a necessity.

LMJ: Finally, of all the works you have translated, can you mention any particular one to which you feel a special affinity.

Marjolijn: One of my own favorite translations is Myriam Antaki’s Verses of Forgiveness, a small, supremely lyrical novel that takes place in the Middle East, whose theme is the tragedy caused on so many levels by Judaism, Christianity and Islam’s misunderstanding of each other.

   

Marjolijn de Jager's contact details :
(203) 322-0706, [email protected]

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Footnotes  by Jean Leclercq:

 

[1] Thanks to its hardy navigators – whom we sometimes tend to forget – the tiny royalty of the Netherlands was able to carve out (and to preserve until the 20^th century) a vast colonial empire in Asia and in the Americas. In the East this enterprise was the achievement of a commercial company, the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (the VOC), created by the Dutch Republic of the Seven United Provinces in 1602. The VOC also maintained a monopoly over Japan’s commerce with the West. Before being dissolved in 1799, the VOC was the instrument of Batavian capitalism and imperialism over two centuries. Subsequently, the colony of the East Indies was managed as a separate entity. Its defense was ensured by a private army of mercenaries, and it was independent of the Dutch metropolitan forces. The poet Arthur Rimbaud signed up to serve in the East Indies, and after undergoing basic training in Den Helder (in Zeeland), he was sent to Java. He took very poorly to military life; he was quick to desert and returned to Europe by working on a cargo ship. That fleeting experience in the Far East must certainly have been a revelation for the young man from the Ardennes.

 

[2] Aubigné (Agrippa d'),1551-1630. « French poet, born close to Pons, in Saintonge (a former French province) a childhood friend of King Henry the Fourth, who remained an avowed Protestant all his life. Extremely precocious, he could read Latin, Greek and Hebrew before the age of eight years. (Dictionnaire des littératures, published under the direction of Philippe Van Tieghem. Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1968, pp. 258-259).

   

Agrippa d'Aubigné lived and died in the Maison de la Rive, Hotel de ville Street, Geneva.

He was the grandfather of Françoise d'Aubigné, Marquess of Maintenon, second wife of King Louis XIV

 

[3] A deformation of the German word Eidgenossen (name of the Genevan partisans of the confederation opposing the Duke of Savoie), which the French Catholics ended up using (originally pejoratively) to refer to Calvin Protestants in France. The wars of religion opposed the Papists and the Huguenots. French synonym: parpaillot(ote).

 

[4] La Villa Gillet, located in the Cerisaie Park at 25, rue Chazière, Lyon, aspires to be a laboratory of ideas. Artists and thinkers meet there periodically to contemplate together the problems of the contemporary world. The building was constructed in 1912, designed by the architect Joseph Folléa for the Gillet family, rich local industrialists. In May each year, the Assises internationales du Roman are held there. It is worth noting that since 2011 the Villa Gillet organises "Walls & Bridges – Transatlantic Insights" in New York. This festival is designed to facilitate a dialogue between French and American thinkers and artists.

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Additional reading:

Literary Translation by Marjolijn de Jager, Ph.D. 

Paradise Road (1997 film)

 

Professor Wendy Ayres-Bennett –

 

E X C L U S I V E    I N T E R V I E W

linguist of the month of February 2017 

Jonathan Goldberg interviewed Professor Ayres-Bennett by Skype from Los Angeles 

 

Echo Park, Los Angeles	The Cam River, Cambridge

Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Professor of French Philology and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, [1] works on the history of the French language and the history of linguistic thought, particularly in seventeenth-century France. Her major research interests include questions of standardisation and codification, linguistic ideology and policy, variation and change, from the sixteenth century to the present day. A bibliography of the selected works of Professor Ayres-Bennett, appears after this interview.

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LMJ : For how many years did you learn French at school and at what point did your interest in French become so rooted that you realized it would become the cornerstone of your career?

W A-B : As was typical for my generation in the UK, I began studying French at the age of 11. I continued studying it at school for 7 years, and completed high school with Latin as my second language, and German as my third. My parents and sister were keen mathematicians, but I was drawn to languages, thanks to an early fascination with words, crossword puzzles, dictionaries, etc. I did my undergraduate degree in French and German at Cambridge and then went on to do postgraduate studies leading to a DPhil. at Oxford. I am currently a Professorial Fellow of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge.

   

LMJ : What was the subject of your doctorate?

W A-B : As an undergraduate I loved the history of linguistics, the history of the French language and seventeenth-century French literature. As a result I became fascinated with the mid-17^th century linguist, Claude Favre de VAUGELAS. He established a reputation as an influential commentator on the French language but the specific contents of his work, Remarques sur la langue françoise utiles à ceux qui veulent bien parler et bien escrire, Paris, 1647, were less known. They intrigued me and I wanted to study them in detail.

LMJ : You were the lead researcher on a project on the genre of observations on the French language. The Corpus des remarques sur la langue française (XVIIe siècle) was published by Classiques Garnier Numérique in 2011 and constitutes an important part of the Grand Corpus des grammaires françaises, des remarques et des traités sur la langue (XIVe-XVIIe siècles).

What were the stepping stones that led you to that particular field of research?

W A-B : Vaugelas's observations generated a whole series of other works of a similar kind. These volumes of observations are typically French, and complement dictionaries, grammar books and more formal teaching manuals. For those who are familiar with the contemporary French linguist, Bernard Cerquiglini, his book "Merci Professeur," and his popular video segments under that title make him a modern-day equivalent of the 17^th-century writers of observations.

In 1635 when the French Academy was founded, the Academicians promised to publish a dictionary, a grammar, a work on poetics and a work on rhetoric. The first edition of the dictionary did not appear until 1694, and the Academy was slow to make progress on the other works. Instead, Vaugelas's observations took the place of the grammar, a series of observations on good French usage or, le bon usage, the title adopted by Maurice Grevisse for his famous grammar in the twentieth century. It is hard to imagine the influence that Vaugelas's remarks had in his day. For instance, the playwright, Pierre Corneille revised his plays in the edition of 1660 to bring the use of French more in line with Vaugelas's grammatical pronouncements. And Racine was supposed to have taken his copy to Uzès in the south of France to prevent his good French usage from being corrupted!

     

LMJ : Does anything exist within the French Academy or independently of it that may be regarded as the 20th century version of those observations?

W A-B : Yes, the French Academy's website now has a column called, "Dire, ne pas dire" which contains such linguistic "dos and don'ts". French national and regional newspapers with language columns or chroniques de langage are another source of guidance on matters of the French language. As mentioned, linguists like Cerquiglini are also in some ways successors to Vaugelas and what we call the French remarqueurs.

   

LMJ : One of your fields of study has been diachrony. Can you explain that field to our readers and how etymology relates to it.

W A-B : This is basically a simple concept: diachrony considers how and why language changes over the course of time. Etymology deals essentially with the origin of particular words or the historical development of their form and meaning. My own interest is principally in the history of particular French constructions, e.g. the history of French word order or of negative constructions.

Traditionally the history of French relied on looking at literary texts, but I have tried to trace changes in more common usage or the vernacular by looking at other types of texts. It is not really until the 20^th century that we get recordings of speech, so we have to be ingenious as historians of a language to try and find sources that best reflect more informal and spoken styles.

   

LMJ : From Cambridge, the centre of your work since 1983, the influence of your research has gained recognition in France and beyond. Can you mention some of the awards and prizes you have received?

W A-B : I was fortunate to be awarded the Prix d'Académie by the French Academy in 1997 and then again the Prix Georges Dumézil in 2013 for my work on Vaugelas and the French remarqueurs. In 2004 I became an Officier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques for my services to French education and culture.

 

LMJ : One of the two most recent works that you edited was Bon Usage et variation sociolinguistique: Perspectives diachroniques et traditions nationales (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2013). Which sociolinguistic aspects do you think are of the greatest interest to the layman.

W A-B : Sociolinguistic variation looks at how language changes according to the sex, age, education or socio-economic status of the speaker. I have looked at this type of variation historically for French and have been interested, for instance, in exploring how men and women's language differed in the past or whether we can see the direction of future change in the speech of young people.

In seventeenth-century France there was a movement against grammar being too formal or pedantic and that is why the volumes of observations did not follow the format of part of speech grammars but were intended to deal with points of doubtful usage in a pleasing way (just as Cerquiglini does today). At this time, women came to be seen as the arbiters of good usage, because their view of "good" French was not "contaminated" by any knowledge of Greek or Latin grammar.

 

LMJ : Your latest project is the MEITS research project, of which you are the Principal Investigator, leading teams from four prominent British universities and comprising about 35 researchers. Can you describe it in a nutshell?

W A-B : MULTILIGUALISM: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies, launched last year on the European Day of Languages, is a major interdisciplinary research project funded under the Open World Research Initiative of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The Universities of Cambridge, Queen's (Belfast), Edinburgh and Nottingham are the partners conducting it. We are also working with a whole range of non-academic partners, ranging from small grassroot bodies such as the Cambridge Ethnic Community Forum to major bodies such as the British Chambers of Commerce or Age UK. Linguistic competence in more than one language – being multilingual – sits at the heart of the study of modern languages and literatures, distinguishing it from cognate disciplines. Through six interlocking research strands we investigate how the insights gained from stepping outside a single language, culture and mode of thought are vital to individuals and societies.

 

LMJ : The MEITS research proposal appears to be very ambitious in its vision, its goals and the different aspects of multilingualism set down. We cannot cover all these aspects within this interview but we will encourage our readers to access the material available digitally. 

Some of those goals are at a macro level, e.g. "To create a cultural shift in the conception and practice of language learning." At the micro level one of your aims is "to have a transformative effect on language learning at the level of the individual."  How will all the conclusions and fruits of your research filter down to the prospective multilingual student or practitioner?

 

W A-B : MEITS seeks to show how languages are important to key issues of our time, such as social cohesion, conflict resolution and national security. Instrumental arguments in favour of learning a language have tended not to succeed because English speakers know that they can 'get by' in many places in the world without knowing the local language. So we are looking for other reasons to encourage language learning. For example, we are beginning to discover that learning other languages offers enormous cognitive benefits. Research is showing that the study of languages by people in their 60s or older can improve their attention span or indeed help slow down the onset of dementia, and such findings will be important for an aging society. We plan exciting new research conducted through a holistic prism. We hope that people will come to realise the beneficial and intrinsic value of learning languages. The scale and scope of MEITS will hopefully make it transformative, and we are going to work with schools and other bodies to ensure our results are widely disseminated.

 

LMJ : Which other bodies will be brought in?

W A-B : We plan to have an outreach programme that will involve schools, policymakers, charitable bodies, and other non-academic partners, who will all disseminate the results, and help elevate the status of language learning in the public perception. To give you an example, my team will be working in Northern Ireland with Co-Operation Ireland (an all-island peace-building charity) and particularly its LEGaSI project which seeks to develop leadership skills and confidence in disenfranchised loyalist communities. The alienation felt by this community towards Irish language and culture is being tackled in two ways. First, through the study of place names. In showing that Irish is part of the shared 'linguistic landscape' of Northern Ireland, greater awareness of the rootedness of the linguistic traditions is promoted across the whole community. Empowerment of loyalist communities, including former paramilitaries, is also being facilitated through language training in Irish. This allows them to feels some ownership of the language as well as developing the soft diplomatic skills which will help them to negotiate respectfully across the community divide. This then is a good example of how learning languages can help build bridges.

   

LMJ : You mentioned that you discovered museums in Britain for things as uncommon as lawnmowers, but none for languages. Please elaborate.

W A-B : As a further step in bringing the benefits of MEITS to the wider public, we are going to set up pop-up museums in various high-street shops across the UK which will have fun and interactive displays and activities explaining our results to the general public. When I started putting the project together, I was astonished to find that the UK has a museum for dog collars and another for lawnmowers, but not for languages, despite their centrality to so much of human activity. We hope that these temporary exhibitions will in time lead to a permanent national museum.

 

LMJ : We have published two articles on this blog that take up issues raised by Professor Claude Hagège, an articulate "defender" of the French language, who has written books and articles and appeared on TV shows, expressing strong views opposing the domination of English. As my closing question for the benefit of those readers who may have followed this debate and who may have strong views on this subject, what is your view?

W A-B : At French and other Universities where I have been a guest speaker or visiting professor [2] I have found my French colleagues to be torn between the desire to protect their own language and the need to have their research published and read globally, which can be easier if they write in English. Across Europe there is a move to offer university courses in English to attract more international students, but this cannot be at the expense of French and other European languages. It is vital, in my view, that linguistic diversity is maintained and that we protect and promote all languages. This is why in my project we are also looking at 'minoritized' languages such as Irish or Welsh in the UK, Occitan in France or Catalan in Spain. Whilst it is undoubtedly valuable to speak English, this is not enough. That is why the promotion of multilingualism, both for the individual and for societies is crucial.

 

Footnotes:

[1] the renowned British collegiate public research university, founded in 1209.

[2] Professor Ayres-Bennett was Pajus Distinguished Visiting Professor, at the University of California, Berkeley in 2012.

 

 

 

Ayres-Bennett, W. (1987)
Vaugelas and the Development of the French Language.  
London, MHRA

Ayres-Bennett, W. (1996)
A History of the French Language through Texts.
London, Routledge

Ayres-Bennett, W. (2004)
Sociolinguistic Variation in Seventeenth-Century France.
Cambridge, CUP

Ayres-Bennett, W. and Seijido, M. (2011)
Remarques et observations sur la langue française: histoire et évolution d'un genre.
Paris, Classiques Garnier.

Ayres-Bennett, W. (2011)
Corpus des remarques sur la langue française (XVIIe siècle).
Paris, Classiques Garnier Numérique.

 

Additional reading:

Le bon usage: using French correctly
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

Audio:

Introducing MEITS Part One
Introducing MEITS Part Two