French Thrifting: John's Take

For the last two weeks, Stephanie has caught you up on our initial activities in the Quillan region, emphasizing her passion for thrift stores, brocantes, and vide-greniers (whole village garage sales at a central site). While she’s currently back in the U.S. for work, and with her permission of course, I thought I would add my own personal spin on these markets.

You never quite know what you are going to find at a thrift store or a brocante–it could literally be anything–and I suppose that most people who visit them are hoping for good deals on intriguing home decorations, or novelty items, or clothes, or cookware; even tools. And in just a couple of weeks we’ve found several such items, including three attractive and original oil paintings that combined only cost €15. But when I’m at one of those places I always make my way with mule-headed focus to two sections: books and CDs.

Yeah, I know, CDs are a dead technology. You don’t need to remind me. But our home here happens to have come with a CD/DVD player already hooked up to the television, as well as an old school portable CD player/radio, in flaming red no less! Hey, why not make use of what we have? Better still, unlike in the U.S. it is not at all unusual to find a generous selection of classical music CDs at such outlets. The most you will ever pay for one is €1 and sometimes you’ll happen on a 3/€1 bargain. As we have limited space here, for me the CD hunt is mostly just for the fun of looking, but I have purchased some Dvořák, Shostakovich, and Glenn Gould, as well as a CD by Mary-Chapin Carpenter. Here, I thought the purchase of our French home meant the end of CD-hunting days, yet it’s only started. 😀

What’s more intriguing, though, given my background, is when I happen upon a French translation of a classic that I know well. Three of those came into my hands recently. One is a collection of aphorisms by Oscar Wilde (appropriately titled Aphorismes); another of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, which curiously carries the title in French of Paris est une fête. Well, yes. That is true. It is. But the translated title completely bypasses Hemingway’s obvious reference to Easter Sunday, the kind of double meaning and solemn overtones that he liked to mine with all his designations. The last one is Joyce’s Dubliners, one of the more formative collections for me as a young-and-aspiring fiction writer, and one I still hold very dear to my heart.The French translated title is Gens de Dublin (“People of Dublin”), which gets at the core idea I guess, but . . . well . . . how do you translate the word “Dubliners” quickly and charmingly? Maybe you can’t.

I’ve been looking into the Wilde and the Hemingway so far. Both translations seem solid, and true to the spirit of the originals, which comes as a relief. Last fall, for my own entertainment, I translated a book of Wilde short stories that I picked up in Beziers. The collection was mostly of his fairy tales, which can be enjoyed for their unique combination of gently lyrical language and surprisingly grim socio-political insights. I loved the exercise, but at times I had to marvel–if that’s the right word–at how tortured the French translation was. I couldn’t know, not yet, if this was on account of an academic bent on the behalf of the translator, or an overly literal, word-by-word rendition, or if it was simply in the nature of turning a piece written in one language family (Germanic, essentially) into something written for a drastically different language family (the Romance group). But I did find myself pausing once in a while to think, “Seriously, it took them that many words just to say that?” No such issues so far with Wilde’s aphorisms or Hemingway’s Paris.

I look forward to translating both in the coming months of my French retired life, possibly while listening to garage sale CDs, and certainly while drinking some serious café and looking out at the tantalizingly close Pyrenees.