I'm getting back into studying French. Partly in preparation for living in Paris for a few months, partly to relearn what I had forgotten from years back, and partly - and this might be the key reason - to be able to read French literature and French writing in its original form.
I've come to see writing as not simply a transmission of information. There's something to be taken from the presentation of words, the rhythm of exact words one after another, collected into bundles of sentences. Each word, chosen with precision, creates a subtle effect. Some words have barely perceptible nuances to them - it seems nobody really likes the way 'moist' sounds; conversely, words like 'sparrow' and 'melody' have a warmth to their ring.
Last week I picked up a hefty thousand page copy of Joan Didion's We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, a collection of her nonfiction work, and in the introduction, John Leonard writes "I have been trying forever to figure out why her sentences are better than mine or yours ... something about cadence. They come at you, if not from ambush, then in gnomic haikus, icepick laser beams, or waves."
Here's an excerpt from Didion's essay, Goodbye to All That:
“It’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.
[...]
It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.
[...]
I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of it would count.
[...]
That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it. ”
Something does not carry over in the attempt at translating the French phrase je ne sais quoi literally into the English I don't know what.
It's the lyricism, the style, the holistic essence - it's these artistic elements that are so often lost in the translation of foreign words and passages.