Review: Grammar is a Sweet, Gentle Song

I am already a confirmed lover of grammar. I have studied five languages besides my own and taken three linguistics classes, I've been writing for years, and I've edited many an essay. For the most part grammar comes instinctively to me. This book, therefore, is for me not so much a discovery as an affirmation.

Grammar is a Sweet, Gentle Song, by Erik Orsenna, translated from French by Moishe Black, is the story of two children shipwrecked on an island. Fourteen-year-old Thomas and ten-year-old Jeanne, the narrator, are on an ocean liner to New York to visit their father when a storm sinks their ship. The storm leaves them in shock, and when they wash up on the island they are unable to speak. They are taken in by an islander, who shows them the sights of the island--at the Word Market they look for rhymes to buy, at the town hall in Word City words are married. At the "most vital factory of them all," sentences are made. By visiting these sights and discovering the wonder of grammar, Jeanne and her brother regain their ability to speak.

The blurb on the back of the book compares it to The Little Prince, and it does have distinct similarities. Both books are about discovering the wonders of life. It also reminded me of The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Aside from having that indescribable quality common to all the French literature I've read, Jeanne's voice reminded me a lot of Paloma's in The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Two smart, matter-of-fact preteen girls.

I can see this being assigned in a French class, because it does a very good job of explaining basic French grammar. This is occasionally odd in translation, because the gender of words is part of the story and English words have no gender. The translation is never particularly jarring, though.

I loved this. It's short, sweet, French, grammatical, and wonderful. My favourite bit was the answer to the question, "What is a great writer?":

"Someone who, with no regard for trends and modes, constructs sentences solely to help him explore truth."

Review: Le Petit Prince

Possibly everyone but me has already read this. To fully excuse myself, I have to say that I was intending to study French, so I was putting it off until I could actually read it in the original. But then that didn't pan out, and who knows if I'll ever be able to read that much French, so I'm reading it in English.

A pilot stranded in a desert in Africa looks up from mending his plane one day to see the little prince. The sole resident of Asteroid B-612, the little prince has left his tiny planet to explore. He asks the pilot to draw him a sheep--"Dessine-moi un mouton." The little prince sees the world differently from adults, and I think it's totally impossible to read this book without seeing from his point of view for a while.

I read this in my warm living room with the rain absolutely pouring outside, already in a certain odd mood, and it was the perfect moment for such a book. The Little Prince is a children's book which easily reminds adults of their childhood, whether or not they read this in childhood. It's lovely. There's nothing more to say about it.

It's an apt title even if I don't quite remember what the title came from...

Some time last week I finished reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, which I got for my birthday in May. It's translated from French, and now I've read it in English I kind of want to read the French.

There is a certain quality particular to a lot of French literature, which I once failed utterly at explaining, but which I really enjoy. It's a clarity, an ability to be profound without being frilly and using too many words or too obscure words. I wonder if it's got to do with French having much less vocabulary than English, so there's no need to use excessive quantities of synonyms. Anyway, this quality works especially well for this book, which talks a lot about Japanese culture and art and whatnot, and there's a certain similarity between simplicity in Japanese art and this slightly indefinable quality of French writing.

The book is about people who hide what they are--Renee, a concierge in a posh apartment building who is really very intellectual but puts on a front of being a typical dull concierge, and an inhabitant of the apartment building, Paloma, an extremely intelligent twelve-year-old who pretends to be merely average, and who is so fed up with what she sees as the meaninglessness of life that she's decided to kill herself on her thirteenth birthday. The book is told by these two characters, alternating between Renee's chapters, and Paloma's Profound Thoughts and Journals of the Movement of the World. Eventually, someone new moves into the building...

This is a terribly well put together book. Some books I like because they are sort of dumbly satisfying, with happy endings and whatnot, but this I like because it is very true, and it doesn't all go the way you want it to but that's what life is like. All together, I liked it a great deal.

Mr et Mrst Dursley, qui habitaient au 4, Privet Drive...

I was sitting around at school today waiting for a teacher, and having nothing else to do I picked a book off a shelf. It was A Book of Surrealist Games. It was full of word games (things like Exquisite Corpse and Telephone, and variations on these plus a lot of others), drawing games, and various brain games. A lot of the word games were really interesting, and I kind of want to borrow the book and do a lot of them, but there was one in particular that I liked. Here's how it goes:

One person writes a short story (a paragraph or two), or finds one. They send it on to someone else, and this person translates it into another language. That person then sends their translation on to someone else, who translates it into another language and sends it on again. You keep sending it on and translating it into different languages, until eventually someone translates it back into English (or whatever the original language was), and you see how much it's changed.

I've done this sort of thing just using Google Translator and a random paragraph, but I think it would be more interesting if you're really translating it properly. The whole thing is especially interesting to me as I have vague career plans of becoming a translator, and translation in general is rather interesting. Word play doesn't translate, but maybe in translation new word play will appear. Cultural things don't translate well--like the Russian word for the main meal of the day, which would probably be translated as lunch but which is more important than lunch, or Finnish "sisu," or German "fremdsprachenfeinheitseifersucht" which as I understand it means basically "envy of a language that has a word as cool and completely nebulous as this word" (that last one totally convinced me I should learn German).

I've read three things in translation this year. The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson (of Moomin fame), translated from Finnish, and two Greek plays--Lysistrata and The Bacchae. I suppose technically I've also read part of another book in translation--Harry Potter, only in French. That was by far the most interesting experience with this. I know Philosopher's Stone pretty much back to front nearly by heart, to the point where I anticipate words really accurately, so despite the fact that my vocabulary in French is iffy I hardly ever had to stop and look things up. There were some interesting translations though. Snape is called Rogue, which struck me as rather too obvious, Draco Malfoy has become Drago Malefoy, Filch is Rusard and his cat Mrs. Norris is Miss Teigne (why did she stop being married, I wonder)--it's interesting how titles aren't always translated. Nearly-Headless-Nick is Nick-Quasi-Sans-Tete, which I like. The four Hogwarts (Poudlard) houses are Choixpeau (Ravenclaw), Gryffondor, Poufsouffle (Hufflepuff), and Serpentard.

I would love it if someone would tell me why French lemon drops are lemon Eskimos.

Johnny Got His Gun

I took the SAT Subject Tests this morning in Literature and French, which was interesting. I have to admit I guessed on half the French, as my overall comprehension of French is better than my specifics. The literature was interesting too. It bugged me that they didn't tell you what any of the excerpts were, because they were all really interesting. There was a paragraph about books from 1625 (I think) that was especially interesting, and I could probably find it if I really wanted to but no doubt it will never happened. There were a couple of poems I liked, too.

The book we're now reading for Senior Lit is Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo. It's very interesting, if rather disconcerting, also. It's a World War I novel, written and originally published not long before World War II, and banned for its anti-war sentiments. The style reminds me a lot of Virginia Woolf, and the subject matter reminds me of Mrs. Dalloway (which I still haven't finished). I may read that as a sort of tie in.

I've got a lot of homework at the moment. My only other reading is my US History textbook.

I am back from California. It was very sunny, and frankly I'm glad to get back to the cloudy Seattle weather.

I discovered in the course of the trip, much to my delight, that reading in cars no longer makes me ill. Accordingly, I finished Le Ballon Rouge and The Pursuit of Love. The Pursuit of Love was excellent travel reading, as it didn't require too much work but was invariably fun, wonderfully anecdotal, and besides, rather interesting characterwise. Now I've got to read Love in a Cold Climate, as I have them both compiled in one book. I've started it, and so far I'm not sure I like it quite so well, but it may simply take a while to get into it.

Incredibly, I only bought one book in the course of the trip, and it wasn't even in a used bookstore, and it was on the very last day. The Story of French, by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow. I started reading it in the car on the last stretch home, and it looks like it'll be really very interesting. I love historical linguistics, and that's a lot of what this is, so I'm sure I'll enjoy it.