Extract from Sorbonne Confidential: in which our heroine, Alice Wunderland, confuses pig’s feet with pig’s trotters and narrowly escapes a negative grade on her homework.
Pig’s feet
The agrég written exam includes two translations: a translation from English into French, called the version, and a translation from French into English, called the thème. On my first version—a text by Virginia Woolf— the professor awarded me zero out of twenty. So I was hoping for a bit of encouragement from the Professor who teaches thème. He looked OK. About forty, salt-and-pepper beard, nicely turned out in a tweed jacket and stylish tie. He bounced lightly on the balls of his feet as he returned our homework. I had worked pretty hard on this one, an excerpt from a novel called Les âmes grises. I had thought the writing so admirable that I checked out the novel at our local library and read the whole thing.
He called each student by name. Mathilde had received hers and was smiling. Only two papers remained. Even from my place I could see they were both covered in red. “Mademoiselle Wunderland?”
My score: four out of twenty. In English! “Lecture superficielle, grammaire peu sûr,” announced the red comments, “superficial understanding, uncertain grammar. You must be more rigorous if you are to progress!” Four out of twenty—in my native tongue. Around me, the other students ceased to exist. I didn’t know their grades and didn’t care. I removed my glasses from their hard black case and bent over my copy to study the swirls of red ink. True, I had made some dumb mistakes, but overall, the text didn’t seem as bad as all that. I raised my head, cheeks still hot with humiliation (or lack of ventilation).
The professor was proposing his own translation. Though French, he had a great British accent and a rich and subtle vocabulary. I listened carefully, wrote down everything.
“Pig’s feet,” my translation for “pieds de cochon” had been circled with red.
“Pig’s trotters,” announced the professor. “Pigs feet are what they walk on, pig’s trotters are what you eat.” “Office” was rejected in favor of “study” for the French word “bureau.” I was feeling a little off balance. Maybe I really didn’t know English? But then we came to the word “dépendu.”
Dépendre is a terrific French verb which means to take down someone who has died by hanging. There is, despite a crying need, no direct English equivalent. It’s a terrible scene in Les âmes grises. The village worthies—the mayor, prosecutor, police chief—are gorging themselves on a huge feast while two young deserters from World War I who have been accused of murder are being tortured. One is tied naked to a sickly tree in the freezing courtyard. The other, locked up in the basement, has hanged himself. Thus the urgency of the magnificent: “dépendu.”
How to describe the gestures required to untangle the corpse of a human being who has wrapped a cord, or a belt or a sheet around his neck and jumped? In French the concept exists, thanks to the use of the prefix: “dé”: pendre (hang), dépendre (unhang).
So what to do in English? My own proposal “take down the body” had been circled with red. The Professor offered his solution: “hanged down,” or “hanged off.” I perked up at this since I was pretty sure neither of these expressions existed. Now, I’m no expert on hangings and their opposite during the First World War, and the British were devilishly clever in some areas they did not boast about—maybe they hang off all the time over there? I searched for the other Anglophones in the class. What did they think?
Rebecca, always outspoken, raised her hand. “I’m a bit uncomfortable with ‘hanged off’,” she said in her articulated English. “What if we said, ‘took down the body of the hanged man’?” She was straining to be polite, but the dismay in her eyes said it all: even the Brits won’t “hang down.”
The next morning I looked up “trotters” in Webster’s. What did I find?: “trotters: pig’s feet when eaten,” just like the Professor had said. I called a girlfriend.
“What do you call ‘pieds de cochon’ in English,” I demanded.
“Hello,” she said. “Everything all right?”
“Yeah, yeah. Well?”
She hesitated a moment, thinking. “Pig’s feet?” she said finally.
“Hah!” I exulted, “Thank you!”
And I hung up. It was ten p.m. in Paris. In Arizona it was the middle of the afternoon. I dialed Mom. She answered.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Oh, hi!”
“Hey, Mom, I have a question for you. If you were to eat the feet of a pig, what would you call it?” (The question could be more open, but Mom doesn’t speak French.)
“I don’t eat pig’s feet,” she said, “but that’s what I’d call it.”
“Not trotters?”
“What?”
“Trotters. You know that word?”
“Never heard of it.”
I should add that my mother grew up on a farm in Minnesota. She knows pigs.
“Never heard of trotters, huh?” I crowed.
“Is this important?”
“Thanks, Mom! Gotta go now.”
“Girls alright?”
“Fine. Great. Thanks for the info. I’ll talk to you later. Bye!”
Mom had never heard of trotters either! It was ridiculous, of course, and I knew it. Webster’s agreed completely with the Professor. Trotters, not pig’s feet. So big deal.
In bed that night, I couldn’t sleep. Why were we learning words that no one knows—not I, not my friends, not my own mother? The hopelessness of the situation took my breath away. My only advantage was my mastery of English. When I speak, other English speakers listen and understand. When I write, other English speakers read and comprehend. We manage to communicate through our common language.
But if, as it seems, the objective was not to communicate, what happened to my advantage? It ceased to exist. Worse, if the only arbiter is a dusty dictionary, interpreted by a Sorbonne-trained Frenchman, what remains for me? My living language has no legitimacy against the repository of past usages, bound in leather (pig’s skin?).
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