The work of a professional translator is a remarkable one, as no two languages are the same. At school, taking our first steps towards babbling in odd and novel sounds, we play this game where we pretend that one word can seamlessly be pasted onto another.
If he is fatigué in French then he must be tired in English. You can thank someone in Spanish by saying gracias and in Italian by saying grazie. Should you yearn for some honey in German, you will simply have to ask for honig. Across the world, billions of people are using billions of vowels and consonants to express themselves, but really, they’re all saying the same things.
This isn’t true, of course, as anyone who persevered will know. The first word I choked on was “awkward”, as a teenager: I stumbled upon it and found it to be perfectly formed, and ideal to describe, well – myself. The only problem was that French had no word for it. I knew what it meant from context but, when friends asked me to explain, I could only point to adjacent terms. Unable to tell them what awkward meant, I merely showed them awkward’s friends and neighbours.
Another noticeable roadblock was “pudique”, which is what you are in a French-speaking country if you’d rather not get undressed in front of anyone. “Pudeur“, the noun it derives from, is both useful and wonderfully evocative. You can imagine someone fleeing to a private changing room, so you can picture someone struggling to remove metaphorical clothing and bare their naked soul in front of others. Though English has “shy”, it just isn’t the same thing. Inside pudique lies shyness, yes, but also shame, perhaps a more fundamental introversion, and a person unwilling to give themselves to others.
Because I live between languages and I write for a living, the above represents a lot of my internal monologue. Am I using the right words in the right order? Am I precisely saying what I mean and if not – why not? Could I remove some of the distance between my intended meaning and what’s on the page, or coming out of my mouth? It’s a challenge that never ends, as I can never definitively win or lose. It makes my life richer, even if, sometimes, it sets my teeth on edge.
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Take “sales connes“, the insult. It recently made its way to British newspaper headlines, but no-one could quite tell how to translate it. Someone who is con or conne is stupid, that much we can all agree on. Putting “sale” behind a noun compounds it, somehow. It means “dirty” but, really, it just makes whatever follows it sound that bit more insulting, even if the word is fine by itself.
It is true that, technically, you ought to be able to take “sales connes” and turn it straight into “dirty bitches”, as Fleet Street has done. It just doesn’t pass the smell test, is the problem. “Sale conne” is what you’d screech at a bad driver who very nearly ran you over on your bike. It’s what you’d call an especially mean and useless colleague behind her back. It’s entirely impersonal and quite amazingly dismissive. A sale conne isn’t your equal, and isn’t someone you feel should be able to get to you.
Why am I bothering to tell you all this, and force you to come down all the way there into the linguistic weeds with me? Because earlier this month, Ary Abittan, a comedian once accused of rape but whose case was dropped due to lack of evidence, performed at a club in Paris and had his set interrupted by feminists protesting against him. Because the next day Brigitte Macron, the wife of the French president, went to watch Abittan and spoke to him before the show. Because he told her he was “scared” that the awful, mean women would return and she, the First Lady, told him not to worry about the “sales connes“; that they would get tossed out if they turned up again.
Words matter and not all insults are equal; in saying what she said, Macron made it clear that she couldn’t possibly think less of those campaigners. They were beneath her and beneath Abittan – somewhere a long way away from the club which the two of them are members of. Within a few syllables, she was able to spell out an entire worldview.
Since the incident, dozens of high-profile women – comedians, actresses, singers, politicians – have joined the de facto movement and proudly called themselves sales connes. It’s been heartening, but it’s tough to be optimistic. Though MeToo mostly failed in its long-term goals everywhere, there are few places in which it refused to stick in the way that it did in France.
The Pelicot case looked like a wake-up call for the country – better late than never? – but Macron’s two nasty little words showed that, again, there is still a long way to go. This doesn’t mean that French women will give up, however. We may be connes, but we’re stubborn, and we’re not going anywhere.
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