My son picked up something very cool in Canada.

[NNadir]

As I noted elsewhere, my son spent a few days in the Canadian Province of Quebec a few days back.

I only got to spend an hour or two with him, when he came to pick up his car when his friends dropped him off.

He showed me something very cool, a translation of George Orwell's 1984 into French. Certainly, in English, a book for our times, no longer unimaginable.

He offered to give it to me, and I was tempted to take it, but since he may want to emigrate to France after finishing his Ph.D. - I think it better that he keep it.

It turns out that my son is "a chip off the old block," as they say, a bibliophile. (He was texting me about rare books he was looking at today.)

Anyway, during his brief visit, we discussed the awkwardness of translation, and I related to him a kind of sexist translator's note I saw when I was a kid reading a translation of Dostoevsky's The Possessed, which went like this: "A translation is like a woman. If she is true, she is not beautiful, and if she is beautiful, she is not true." It's an awkward note in a more modern world to be sure and not, in fact, true for me, if I consider my own wife, but it stuck in my mind.

It would be fun to translate, on one's own, the French translation of 1984 back into English without peeking at the original English, and to compare the translation of the translation with the original. (I will not have time to do that in what remains of my life.)

I was very unhappy with the English translation of Camus' La Peste (Translated as The Plague) and during the Covid event I tried, in part to emerge from my very bad French, to translate it into better English. I realized it's very, very, very hard.

From the opening:

...Une manière commode de faire la connaissance d'une ville est de chercher comment on y travaille, comment on y aime et comment on y meurt. Dans notre petite ville, est-ce l'effet du climat, tout cela se fait ensemble, du même air frénétique et absent. C'est-à-dire qu'on s'y ennuie et qu'on s'y applique à prendre des habitudes. Nos concitoyens travaillent beaucoup, mais toujours pour s'enrichir. Ils s'intéressent surtout au commerce et ils s'occupent d'abord, selon leur expression, de faire des affaires. Naturellement ils ont du goût aussi pour les joies simples, ils aiment les femmes, le cinéma et les bains de mer. Mais, très raisonnablement, ils réservent ces plaisirs pour le samedi soir et le dimanche, essayant, les autres jours de la semaine, de gagner beaucoup d'argent. Le soir, lorsqu'ils quittent leurs bureaux, ils se réunissent à heure fixe dans les cafés, ils se promènent sur le même boulevard ou bien ils se mettent à leurs balcons. Les désirs des plus jeunes sont violents et brefs, tandis que les vices des plus âgés ne dépassent pas les associations de boulomanes, les banquets des amicales et les cercles où l'on joue gros jeu sur le hasard des cartes.

On dira sans doute que cela n'est pas particulier à notre ville et qu'en somme tous nos contemporains sont ainsi. Sans doute, rien n'est plus naturel, aujourd'hui, que de voir des gens travailler du matin au soir et choisir ensuite de perdre aux cartes, au café, et en bavardages, le temps qui leur reste pour vivre. Mais il est des villes et des pays où les gens ont, de temps en temps, le soupçon d'autre chose. En général, cela ne change pas leur vie. Seulement, il y a eu le soupçon et c'est toujours cela de gagné. Oran, au contraire, est apparemment une ville sans soupçons, c'est-à-dire une ville tout à fait moderne. Il n'est pas nécessaire, en conséquence, de préciser la façon dont on s'aime chez nous. Les hommes et les femmes, ou bien se dévorent rapidement dans ce qu'on appelle l'acte d'amour, ou bien s'engagent dans une longue habitude à deux. Entre ces extrêmes, il n'y a pas souvent de milieu. Cela non plus n'est pas original. A Oran comme ailleurs, faute de temps et de réflexion, on est bien obligé de s'aimer sans le savoir...

My translation:

A simple way to get to know a town is to look for how one works there, how one loves there, how one dies there. In our small city, these are all done together, an effect of the climate, in an atmosphere that is both frenetic and indifferent. One gets bored there and one starts to take on habits. Our citizens work a lot, but always to enrich themselves. Above all things, their primary interest, as one can see in their faces, is in commerce and in doing business. Of course, they have some taste for simple joys; they love women, films and swimming in the sea. But quite reasonably they reserve these pleasures for Saturday night, and Sunday; the other days of the week they work to get lots of money. In the evenings, when they leave their offices, they gather at a regular time in cafes; they walk the same streets, or happily set themselves on their balconies. The desires of the young are violent and brief, while those vices of the older ones go little beyond shooting clubs, friendly banquets, or gambling in high stakes card games.

One will be compelled to say that this is not particular to our city; many of our contemporaries are this way. Without a doubt, nothing is more natural, to see people working from morning to night and then, afterwards, squandering, on cards, in coffee shops, on gossip, the time they have left to live. Yet there are cities where there are people for whom, from time to time, there is a glimmer of other things. In general this doesn’t change their lives. There is only this glimmer, and this is what always triumphs. Oran, by contrast, is a city without such glimmers, that is to say, it is a totally modern city. It is not necessary therefore to specify how we love at home. The men and the women either rapidly devour one another very quickly in what is called an act of love, or they engage in long lives as a couple. Between these extremes, there is often no middle. Neither is this unique. In Oran, as elsewhere, we are compelled, for a lack of time and reflection, to love one another without even knowing it.

Neither beautiful nor true, but I did like the last line and felt maybe I got to it...

"...as elsewhere, we are compelled, for a lack of time and reflection, to love one another without even knowing it."

I gave up on the project, for a "lack of time and reflection."