EUROPHRENIA

French is just too provincial

Published on 18 Feb 2010   |  

One of the most consistently informative and entertaining blogs about the European Union has to be Jean Quatremer’s Coulisses de Bruxelles. However, a recent post (for relevant English extracts click here) has caused some Czech, German and indeed Irish ed hackles to rise. Monsieur Quatremer was griping about the predominance of native English speakers working as spokespersons at the European Commission. Maybe he has a point that the perifidious English have chalked up another victory, and they’re not in the euro etc etc, but the following sentence really clinches it for this blogger here. “While most of them speak French perfectly, some of them mangle the pronunciation – even though French is, after English, the second language in the press room.”

“Mangle” is the key word here. In a city like London, for instance, you’re likely to hear “hoyse”, “hoose”, “aahs”, “aousse” to denote the building which you live in. This is not called mangling pronunciation. This is called having an Ulster, a Canadian, a London, or God forbid, a French accent. The French, however, still bewilderingly cling to the belief that in a polyglot world there is such thing as an “accentless”, universal French, failure to attain to which leaves you in a kind of social limbo, intelligent but somehow pitiable like a sort of performing monkey. This is not a law only applicable to non-French, and God knows, I’ve been hearing the patronising “vous avez un petit accent” for what feels like six hundred years. Even if from Lille, Marseilles, or Rennes, you’re expected at some point in life, though as yet no initiation rite like a circumcision ceremony exists, to begin speaking “without an accent”. This idea is so deeply rooted that when you make the obvious point that there is no such thing as a language without an accent you see eyes glassing over with incomprehension.

To understand this is crucial to understanding the French outlook on the world, but also the decline of French language and culture globally. Paradoxically, the obsession with a pure universal French that doesn’t mangle pronunciation is just another sign of pure French provincialism, like its ridiculous debate on national identity. The genius of English is that there are a hundred ways to call a house a hyse, and no-one really cares. French might still be the second language at the Commission, but given the prissy delicacy of some French ears, it would be less stressful for all concerned if it were Spanish, Italian, or for that matter, Greek, whose peoples are more than delighted when you drag their subjunctives and articles and conjugations backwards through a bush.

Gerry Feehily 

Europhrenia

Losing Angela in translation

Published on 05 Feb 2010   |  

When presseurop.eu was launched in May last year, one of its guiding mottos was Umberto Eco’s “The future of Europe is translation.” But sometimes I’m inclined to think that the future of Europe is lost in translation. I recently checked a statement by Angela Merkel concerning the CD-rom nabbed by HSBC supergrass Hervé Falciani containing data on Germans who have siphoned off their money to Switzerland in order to avoid taxes back home. This has created a hole in the German treasury of some €200million, but in order to get the data, the German government has to cough up €2.5million. While some wring their hands as to whether it’s right to chase up tax evaders by paying a thief, the French language press widely relayed Merkel’s statement on the matter as “Il faut tout entreprendre pour obtenir ces données" i.e. Everything must be done to obtain this data.

However, if you look at the original German statement, "Vom Ziel her sollten wir, wenn diese Daten relevant sind, auch in den Besitz dieser Daten kommen", you realise she didn’t quite say that. In transliterated English this goes – “An objective should be aimed at, if this data is relevant, then we should take property of the data”. Ok, German syntax is knotty, but nevertheless this is a typically Merkelian clunker, grey as dishwater, dry as dust, that plods around the subject until it sort of dies of boredom. Now contrast this with the zippy French rendering of the statement and actually it seems as if it got an edit from the hyperactive Nicolas Sarkozy, who says “must” every time he opens his mouth.

But what’s good translation? On the literary front, having recently dipped into the new Penguin version of the Arabian Nights, I’m more and more frustrated by this very contemporary quest for ultimate precision. The editors are keen to bury the definitive Burton translation, full as they say of “mistakes” and “archaisms”, but so far I’ve been less than thrilled to come across words like “managers” and “skills” and even the adolescent “kind of”. They sound much more like 21st century Angela Merkel than 12th century Bagdad. Which gets me thinking, to twist Nietzsche to some foul ends, that it might be better if accuracy perish rather than life. When Merkel is translated with a bit of fantasy, we listen up. We only need now enliven the Union entire by translating Van Rompuy, Barroso et al as if they all weren’t trying to make us fall asleep.

Gerry Feehily

Europhrenia

The world last week

Published on 04 Feb 2010   |  

I was on the France 24 World This Week debate with John Vinocur from the IHT, Judah Grunstein of World Politics Review, who wrote this blog on the discussion, and Pierre Rousselin from Le Figaro. For Part One, click here... and for Part Two, here... We discussed Tony Blair's appearance at the Chilcot inquiry on Iraq in which I made the point that Iraq was always a war looking for a cause, and so there's absolutely no point, (indeed, it's somewhat surreal) to seek to nail him on the existence or not of the WMDs he used as a pretext. Since only those born in the last shower would have ever believed they existed in the first place. In the appalling light of the number of civilian casualties in Iraq since 2003, it also strikes me in passing that the whole thrust of the Chilcot inquiry, to determine whether the Iraq war was "illegal", is somewhat obscene. It suggests that had the war been "legal" - with French involvement? a nod from the UN? - that mass murder could have gone by a different name. Such staggering logic like the above is not beyond George Monbiot, though, if his crusade to have Blair arrested, and who knows, thrown into the Tower of London, is anything to go by.

We also talked about the burqa in France, but you can read my thoughts on that here, and finally about Afghanistan. Like Iraq, I argued that there was never any clear reason for going into Afghanistan either. And for this reason permanent mission drift is completely inevitable. The war started as a response to 9/11 (i.e. attacks mainly carried out by Saudis and Egyptians) then the flushing out of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, with the emancipation of women bunged in for Western public consumption. Then it was the elimination of the drugs trade, and now there's talk of creating democratic institutions, which in reality means the propping up of the hopelessly corrupt Karzai government that admits that it needs foreign troops on its soil at least fifteen more years. Fifteen years is the same as admitting the Afghan state will never be able to stand on its own legs, ever. As to arguments that Afghanistan would descend into civil war if Nato left, the answer is simple. Afghanistan is already in the throes a civil war, as continued Taliban attacks on Kabul make obvious. In any case, absolutely none of the so-called mission objectives have been achieved. Judah Grunstein made the valid point that the Taliban don't have much of a mission either, and that they're hardly winning hearts and minds. This is true, but in the case of a long war of attrition, the old maxim "better the devil you know" usually wins the day. In the end, countries just don't like being occupied, no matter how benevolent the intentions of the occupier might be.

Gerry Feehily

Europhrenia

Burqa barbarous, but a ban is wrong

Published on 03 Feb 2010   |  

Le Figaro reports today that Immigration Minister Eric Besson has refused citizenship to a Moroccan man on the grounds that in his application he stated he would never allow his wife to leave the home without a burqa. Prime Minister Fillon has weighed in declaring he will sign said decree, with Deutsche Welle noting that the man also believed woman is “an inferior being”. Adding insult to injury by refusing "to shake women's hands", he invalidated his request because, according to Mr Fillon, citizenship can be denied “to anyone who does not respect the values of the Republic” and that clearly the applicant did not respect French values of secularism and equality of the sexes. “Clearly” clinches it here.

Mr Fillon and Mr Besson’s republican values on the merits of handshaking are to be commended, because the applicant is obviously an idiot, who could have been slagging off les bonnes femmes like any true-born native at the bistrot if he'd kept his opinions clear of the fateful form. However, looking more broadly at Mr Besson’s republican values and it all goes a little cloudy. This, after all, is the same man who declared himself “delighted” after sending 500 riot squad to flush out 256 asylum seekers from the refugee camp of Sangatte in 2009. Having declaring the living conditions of the immigrants insanitary, he left them to run vagabond in the French countryside where one imagines all that fresh air and trees taught them some lesson in hygiene. Sometimes it seems that bits of Mr Besson’s brain co-exist in peaceful contradiction with each other in providing dignity to some in accordance with the “values of the Republic” and destitution for others.

The point about this long-running and pointless debate about the burqa, an excrescence itself of Mr Besson’s naval licking debate on French national identity, is that it’s fundamentally dishonest. True, the burqa is a barbarous piece of clothing, but the idea of tackling it by criminalising women who wear it or by scapegoating their husbands is a piece of nonsense. The real question no-one’s asking is why, even if there only 1900 officially recorded, more and more women of Muslim faith wear burqas when their mothers’ generation didn’t and don’t. One answer to this is that the French model of integration is a failure. As author Josie Appleton has noted, the French government's republican values are now so shaky that rather than "making immigrants French, this is an attempt to make them look French." A nation that had any confidence in itself would consider the unfortunates who freely walk around with a two-man tent over their heads as socially unadapted and move on. One republican value that should be listed in any constitution is one’s right to ruin one’s life as one pleases. Don’t hold your breath on this, though. Governments all over the west are increasingly taking to micromanaging what people say, eat, drink and now wear. A burqa ban is not just a clamp-down on a backward vestimentary tradition. It’s an attempt to make us all keep up appearances as truly republican values become all too scarce.

Gerry Feehily