Category — French language

I’ve just been listening to Yvan Amar’s Danse des Mots program on Radio France (about which I’ve blogged before), in which he interviewed Afghan/French writer and film maker Atiq Rahimi. Rahimi has just won the Prix Goncourt 2009 for his latest book Syngue Sabour (pierre de patience). Syngue Sabour is Persian – his mother tongue – for ‘stone of patience’. Rahimi took the idea of the ‘stone of patience’ from ‘a folk tale about a black stone that absorbs the distress of anyone who confides in it’, according to an article in the International Herald Tribune.

The Prix Goncourt has been running for 105 years and has been awarded to many great French and non-French writers. Among the former group are Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, and Marcel Proust.

The most fascinating part of the interview, for me, was when Rahimi talked about writing in French, his second language. He said that writing in French was liberating, but also imposed certain obligations. For example, he has to concentrate on each word, and also on the rhythm and sound of the words. He has to write and re-write, to check each word in the dictionary. In this way, it was like poetry, he said, because in poetry you must work on each word, each phrase, each comma. You have to be both precise and concise with each phrase, each image.

If you’d like to listen to or download the interview yourself, you’ll find it here.

I’m not in favour of beauty contests, but since no one seems to have managed to stop them, I will say that I think the new Miss France, Chloe Mortaud, is beautiful (am I the only one who thinks it ridiculous that it’s not Mademoiselle France?). There has been, however, a certain amount of ‘backbiting’ that would seem to be an inevitable part of such competitions (I do hope Aussie slang is understandable to my non-Aussie readers! If it’s not, please leave comments below).

To counter the gossip, Le Poste has interviewed Mademoiselle Mortaud, to give her the right to respond to the nastiness. Certainly not the most in-depth article of the week in the French media, I know, but one which gave me the opportunity to learn a few new phrases. At least I hope I have learned them correctly. Idiomatic expressions in a foreign language can be very difficult to get right. Please do correct me if I am wrong, using the comments section below.

First, there is the title of the article:

Miss France: “Je n’ai été méchante avec personne” = I’m not nasty to anyone.

Méchant/e = nasty, mean, bad, spiteful

Huer = to boo or jeer

Mettre en avant = to advance something, e.g. an argument

le côté = direction, way

metisse = mixed race

ringard = literally ‘fire iron’, so this sentence — ‘Certains attribuent un petit côté ringard à Miss France…‘ quite likely means : Certain people assign/impute a troubling side to Miss France [the contest]…