All I Want for Christmas Is You - Nataly Dawn, Cyrille Aimee
Although you can’t tell from the title, this song is a French translation of the Mariah Carey classic. I went looking for a translation because I’ve been biking around town singing the tune with obviously bad French lyrics (one way I practise languages is by attempting to translate whatever song is stuck in my head). Not all of my lyrics were wrong! I managed « Tout ce que je veux pour Noël, c’est toi », but « n’importe les cadeaux au-dessus du pin » is garbage. In my defense, dessus (above) and dessous (beneath) shouldn’t be such similar words.
One thing I particularly like about this song is that it’s chosen beautifully indirect translations in a few places:
Je n’y mettrai pas mon soulier pour petit papa noël
Il peut oublier mon jouet, c’est pas pour lui que je me fais belle
Apparently French people leave shoes by the fireplace for santa claus, which certainly makes no less sense than leaving out a large sock. This couplet does make me annoyed that my Ontario elementary school only taught me the word chaussure for shoes. In Metropolitan French, soulier is kind of formal/archaic/soutenu, but it’s a regular word in Quebec French. Speaking of variations in French, did you know that, before the 20th century, most people in France didn’t speak French?
In 1794, Abbé Grégoire presented a report to the French National Convention based on a survey of all the country’s town halls and concluded that (quoting from pull-quotes of The Discovery of France by Graham Robb, a book I have not myself read):
News of important events and government decrees left the capital on the broad river of French only to run aground in the muddy creeks of patois… According to his estimate, more than six million French citizens were completely ignorant of the national language. Another six million could barely conduct a conversation in it. While French was the language of civilized Europe, France itself had no more than three million 'pure' French-speakers (11 percent of the population), and many of them were unable to write it correctly. The official idiom of the French Republic was a minority language.
It feels important to note that we’re not just talking about mutually incomprehensible dialects here. The muddy creeks of patois aren’t all romance languages: Breton is Celtic, Alsatian is Germanic, and Basque is a language isolate. France’s linguistic standardization didn’t gain much traction until almost a century after Grégoire’s report, when the Third Republic established public schools and forbade the students within from speaking anything but Metropolitan French.
The past few months have reminded me how much of school is oriented around learning the right words and symbols for things. I was looking at some statistics problems with my roommate and was like, “uh… I can get you to the right numerical answer, but I don’t know how to pattern-match my approach to the formulas you were taught in class”. Earlier this week, I was trying to translate a math worksheet for my other roommate, who is teaching a recently-arrived student who doesn’t yet speak English, and a part of me was like, “sure, but… Who cares what these six kinds of graphs are named?” It wasn’t a bad worksheet or anything, it’s just weird how differently I learned things in school, compared to how I study now.
I’ve written in this newsletter before about my ambivalent Feynman feelings, but this quote seems relevant:
One kid says to me, "See that bird? What kind of bird is that?"
I said, "I haven't the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is."
He says, "It's a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn't teach you anything!"
But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: "See that bird?" he says. "It's a Spencer's warbler." (I knew he didn't know the real name.) "Well, in Italian, it's a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it's a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it's a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it's a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing. That's what counts."
Then again, it’s useful to know the names for things so that you can easily talk to other people about them. I think that counts for something!
In search of beautiful translations,
- Tessa
PS if you want to enjoy a much more unhinged French xmas song, may I recommend to you Le père noël c’t’un québécois by the Boum Ding Band.