Renaissance Theatre in France

January 27, 2016 simonrkemp 1 Comment

When thinking about the Renaissance, one of the first figures to
come to mind is Shakespeare. Most of us can name several of his
plays and even quote a few of his most famous lines: ‘Wherefore art
thou Romeo’, ’To be or not to be’, ’Now is the winter of our
discontent’. Sound familiar? Well, how about Robert Garnier? Jean
de la Taille? Étienne Jodelle?

Probably not. People are often surprised to learn that France also
had its Shakespeares. This is not to say, however, that French
playwrights were unimportant. Théodore de Bèze was one of the
first European authors to use theatre as a vehicle for political and
religious propaganda, with his polemical tragedy Abraham sacrifiant
(c. 1550). Figures such as Jean-Antoine de Baïf worked tirelessly to
popularise Plautine and Terentian drama in the early modern period,
producing and circulating modern translations of classical plays.
Pierre de Larivey wrote a sellout collection of comedies in 1579,
which continued to be reprinted throughout the century, and
Parisian dramatist Alexandre Hardy (c. 1569-1631), is said to have
written around six hundred plays.

Farce was a well-known genre in France even before the dawn of
the Renaissance. Le Garcon et l’Aveugle, telling the tale of a young
boy who tricks his master out of a large sum of money, was written
in the thirteenth century, at least a hundred years before the first
farce appeared in Britain. The anonymous Farce de maître Pierre
Pathelin (c. 1457), recounting the fate of a cunning lawyer, was then
the first European farce to generate widespread interest: it was
translated into several languages and published all across France
for well over two centuries. French playwrights also produced many
acclaimed mystères (portraying scenes from the Bible), moralités
(depicting a fight between good and evil), and was also renowned
for its sermon joyeux: a parody of the sermon from a Catholic mass,
narrated by a comic actor.

With the arrival in the French court of eminent Italian figures such
as Catherine de’ Medici and Ippolito d’Este, France was exposed to
neoclassical drama, which had started to be produced by Italian
humanists during the last years of the fifteenth century. This was to
be a turning point in French theatre. In 1554, the queen Catherine
de’ Medici commissioned a translation of Giangiorgio Trissino’s La
Sofonisba, which was to be the first humanist tragedy to appear in
the French language. The play encountered great success and
many French playwrights endeavoured to retranslate or to imitate it.

Catherine also sponsored the first neoclassical comedy (known as
commedia erudita) to appear in France: the Cardinal Bibbiena’s La
Calandra. This was the first time that France had seen a comedy
with a real stage, musical interludes, lavish costumes and a
professional acting troupe: it was enjoyed by thousands of
bewitched spectators and set an entirely new standard for theatre.
In fact, Catherine enjoyed the performance so much that in later
productions she often joined in the acting herself!

Later French monarchs were eager to enrich this new theatrical
tradition. King Henri II ordered the dramatist Jacques Grévin to
write La Trésorière, a widely successful comedy based on the
Italian style, and Henri’s successor, King Charles IX, was a great
supporter of the many Italian acting troupes who sought work in
France. Marguerite de Navarre, princess of France, also helped
introduce the writings of Matteo Bandello into the rest of Europe.
Bandello was to compose a novella elaborating a tragic love-story
between two young Italians, Romeo and Giulietta. Any guesses as
to what this later inspired?

In short, it is a shame to gloss over this rich theatrical past, which
formed an innovative and exciting part of sixteenth-century French
literature. If you have any questions, please get in touch with me at
lucy.rayfield@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk. I am always pleased to talk
about Renaissance drama!

Applying to study modern languages, Events and Competitions

Thinking about a degree at Oxford? Why not try us out for a week this summer?

January 20, 2016 simonrkemp Leave a comment

1170e

posted by Simon Kemp

Would you like to spend a week with us this summer, living in an Oxford college, learning about a modern foreign language and its culture, and getting a taste of what it’s like to study here as a student? All entirely FREE of charge, food and accommodation included? (We’ll even pay for your train ticket to get here.)

If you’re currently in Year 12 of a state school, and have some free time in July this year, please do think about signing up for the course, or for one of the dozens of others on offer, including German, Spanish, or ‘beginner languages’ to give you a little experience of Russian, Portuguese and Italian languages and cultures. The French summer school runs from 2-8 July this year, the German summer school and the Beginner Languages school both run from 16-22 July, and Spanish is 23-29 July.

Here are the details of the French week:

This UNIQ course is a chance to immerse yourself in the literature, theatre, poetry, film and linguistics of the French language.You will spend daily sessions at the Language Centre practising and improving your existing language skills, followed by fascinating lectures and seminars, and the chance to use the world famous Taylorian and Bodleian libraries for private study.

Our aim is to give you a taste of what it is really like to read French at Oxford, and to give you a sense of the unrivalled breadth of our course. Throughout the week, you will have the opportunity to hone your language skills and consolidate your knowledge of French grammar. You will also participate in classes introducing you to an exciting array of topics, ranging from Linguistics and 17^th-century tragedy to French-language cinema and 19^th-century poetry.

You will be expected to do some preparatory reading before the course so that you can make the most of the week you spend here: we’ve chosen Annie Ernaux’s 20^th-century classic autobiographical text La place. We will post a copy of the book to all successful participants in early June. Following a lecture that will explore some of the key themes and contexts surrounding Ernaux’s book, you will have the chance to test out (and flesh out) your ideas in a seminar. On the Friday, you will even experience an Oxford-style tutorial, in which you and three other students get to discuss your close reading of a poem with a specialist.

Student Experiences

“I really enjoyed the intimacy of the Alumni Dinner. Also, I enjoyed the morning grammar classes and the 17th Century French Theatre lecture as I was not expecting to enjoy it but really loved it!”

“The mentors were really friendly and easy to relate to, and the tutors were not as scary as I had thought they would be! It was a real adventure and one I wouldn’t hesitate to do again.”

You can find details of all the courses on offer here, along with information about how to sign up. The deadline for applications is February 3rd, so you don’t have long to think about it, I’m afraid. We hope to see you in July!

Events and Competitions, French literature, Recommended Reading, Translation

Tolerance: Beacon of the Enlightenment

January 13, 2016 simonrkemp Leave a comment

posted by Caroline Warman

You might have seen that in the vigils and marches that followed the Charlie Hebdo assassinations on 7 January 2015, posters of Voltaire like this one appeared everywhere, along with some of his polemical slogans about the importance of religious tolerance.

Dozens of university lecturers in France who teach Voltaire and other eighteenth-century writers, and who were all as distressed by the events and by the increasingly polarised politics that followed as anyone else, decided to put together an anthology of texts from the Enlightenment. This anthology would make available to everyone what writers of the time said about liberty, equality, and fraternity, about the importance of religious tolerance, about the rights of women, about the abomination of slavery, about the exploitation created by a system of global capitalism, and so on. It would contain the original text of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, enshrined in the French Constitution since 1789, and it would also contain the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen drawn up by Olympe de Gouges, which was roundly rejected in an atmosphere of general hilarity. Some of the extracts would be witty, some would be serious or even tragic, some might even seem objectionable to us now, but all would be arguing their point with great passion, and the collection as a whole would shine a light onto a world and a century which have many more connections with us than we would ever have thought. This anthology, entitled Tolérance: le combat des Lumières, was published in April 2015 by the Société française d’étude du dix-huitième siècle.

We in the UK wanted to support and applaud this initiative, and we wanted to extend its readership. So we decided to translate it. And we thought, who better to translate this texts than our students? They are the citizens, female and male, of today and tomorrow, they are deeply engaged in our world, and they are brilliant at languages.

At Oxford we do a lot of translation anyway – we translate about half a page of French into English, and the other way round, every week. We do that because it develops our language skills immensely – it challenges us to be linguistically inventive while never letting us off the hook in terms of grammatical accuracy and syntactical fluency. It is quite hard, but we love it, not least because we all do it together in college classes. You’d never believe how many different ways of translating a single sentence there are. Translation is also a particularly intense way of reading, because to translate something you really have to get inside the text. It’s incredibly stimulating, because you’re both reading and writing at the same time.

So, one hundred and two of us – tutors and their second-year students (who don’t have any exams) from lots of different colleges – translated the anthology this past summer term. And we published it on 7 January 2016, the first anniversary of the shootings. We launched it at the annual conference of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, which supported the project, and it has received some nice coverage in the press and online. On the first day it was downloaded more than 4000 times. We were amazed!

So here it is, free to download. Every single text has a link to the original French, sometimes in the original eighteenth-century edition. Have a look! Because if there’s one audience we really want to reach, it’s you! You are our future, and our future needs open-minded thinkers, and it needs linguists. Go for it!

TOLERANCE: BEACON OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

French life

La Galette des Rois

January 6, 2016 simonrkemp Leave a comment

photo [8485]

posted by Catriona Seth

Whilst France is proud of its republicanism with ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ as its motto, and of its secularism or ‘laïcité’, many of its traditions go back to the ‘Ancien Régime’, the pre-revolutionary catholic monarchy. One of these is derived at once from marking Epiphany or Twelfth night (‘l’Epiphanie’ or ‘le jour des Rois’) when the three wise men (‘les rois mages’ or magus kings as they are known in French) are said to have bestowed gifts on Jesus, and from carnivalesque celebrations in which social hierarchies could briefly be reversed, in the spirit of the Roman Saturnalia. The ‘galette des Rois’ is the sweet pie served on the ‘jour des Rois’. Like Victorian Christmas puddings, it contains a charm. Originally ‘galettes des Rois’ were baked with a raw broad bean or ‘fève’. Whoever found it in their portion became king or queen for the day. Modern boulangeries and pâtisseries offer a bewildering variety of ‘galettes des Rois’ with little china or earthenware charms called ‘fèves’ after the more prosaic pulse used in bygone years. The first of these porcelain charms are thought to have been in the shape of babies meant to represent Jesus. When the Revolution briefly renamed the ‘galette des Rois’ ‘galette de l’Egalité’, the republican ‘bonnet phrygien’ or Phrygian cap was the inspiration for the shape of the ‘fève’.

photo (28) [8487]

The most usual recipes for ‘galette des Rois’ are of ‘pâte feuilletée’ (puff pastry) filled with ‘frangipane’ (frangipani or almond stuffing), except in the South of France where the ‘gâteau des Rois’ is a brioche flavoured with orange blossom (‘fleur d’oranger’).

When the pudding is served, chance plays its part in the selection process which is called ‘tirer les rois’: the youngest member of the party, ‘le benjamin’, squats under the table and calls out the name of the person to whom each piece of the ‘galette’ is to be given. You become king or queen, can choose a consort and are allowed to keep the ‘fève’ if it is your piece of pie. Collectors of ‘fèves’ are known as ‘fabophiles’. Nowadays, pâtisseries and boulangeries supply paper crowns when you purchase a ‘galette’ and the ‘fèves’ come in many shapes, from cartoon characters like Astérix or Tintin to famous people like Marie-Antoinette or Napoleon, from Provençal ‘santons’ to cars, planes or all manner of other things including rings—which may allude to one legend: that the inspiration for the first ‘fève’ was the heroine of Perrault’s fairytale, ‘Peau d’âne’, losing her ring in the cake she baked.

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, before the Revolution, when republican ideals were being actively discussed by some intellectuals, the ‘philosophe’ Denis Diderot (1713-1784) wrote occasional verse when he became ‘roi de la fève’ two years running. Here is the beginning of the ‘Complainte’ in which he refers to ‘les embarras de la royauté’, the particular troubles one has to face when one is monarch.

Quand on est roi, l’on a plus d’une affaire,

Voisins jaloux, arsenaux à munir,

Peuple hargneux, complots à prévenir,

Travaux en paix, dangers en guerre,

Ma foi, je crois qu’on ne s’amuse guère

Quand on est roi.

The stanza uses different types of lines (‘vers hétérométriques’). In French verse, stresses are not counted but syllables are and, on the whole, give their name to the lines (the exception being the twelve-syllable line more often called ‘alexandrin’ or alexandrine than ‘dodécasyllabe’, and of which there are two in the last quotation infra). Here you have examples of ‘décasyllabes’, ‘octosyllabes’ and a final ‘tétrasyllabe’ (which acts as a refrain in the rest of the poem). Diderot was a famous thinker and writer, but did not go down in history as a great poet. This is a piece written for fun rather than for posterity. A little further along Diderot says that when he fell asleep during his term as king, in his dreams he carried out heroic exploits and made new laws of a particular kind:

Vraiment, je fis des lois, je les fis même en vers.

En vers mauvais ; qui vous dit le contraire ?

But then writing bad verse, he adds, is not a cardinal sin, even if you are a king!

Avoir une affaire: nowadays ‘affaires’ refer to business. A businessman or woman is ‘un homme ou une femme d’affaires’, if you work in business you are ‘dans les affaires’. If you say ‘j’ai une affaire en ville’ it means I have some business to sort out in town. In the poem ‘avoir plus d’une affaire’ means to have a lot on your plate which you need to sort out.

Arsenaux à munir: ‘arsenaux’ is the regular plural of ‘arsenal’, which was originally where warships were built and armed. It is also, as in English, a weapons depot—and that, incidentally helps explain why Arsenal footballers are known as ‘the gunners’. ‘Munir’ here has the same root as ‘munitions’ (the noun exists both in English and in French). It basically means to stock up or equip. It can be used simply to say that you have what you need for a particular purpose: ‘pour faire mes courses, je suis muni(e) d’un gros sac’ means you are well prepared with a big bag to go shopping.

Hargneux is an adjective formed on the noun ‘hargne’, spite, so it means spiteful or aggressive.

Un Complot : a plot

Prévenir : Here it means to prevent, as in the popular saying ‘mieux vaut prévenir que guérir’. Often it is a synonym of ‘avertir’, to warn.

galette

Here is a 1774 painting called Le Gâteau des Rois, housed in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier. It is by one of Diderot’s favourite artists, Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805). It is a ‘scène de genre’ or ‘genre painting’ showing ordinary people in a domestic setting and is a far cry from some of the grandiose mythological pictures which other contemporary painters produced. Greuze made a point of representing family members in their homes, usually wearing their everyday clothes. Here, our attention is drawn to the expressions on the characters’ faces: something special is obviously happening. One piece of the ‘galette des Rois’, in the middle of the picture and of the table, has been set aside. It is probably the ‘part du pauvre’ (literally, the pauper’s share), traditionally kept for anyone who might walk in. The youngest child is not hidden under the table as he would be nowadays. He is pulling the pieces of cake out of a white napkin held by the paterfamilias as the names of the people present are called. Greuze shows how a simple event can turn into a ritual and a moment of domestic harmony. It suggests that you do not need wealth and luxury to enjoy moments of peace and happiness.

galette2

French life

End-of-year round-up

December 16, 2015 simonrkemp 1 Comment

posted by Simon Kemp

Adventures on the Bookshelf is about to head off for its Christmas break. There’s just time for a quick look back at 2015 before we go.

For France, 2015 opened with a tragedy and has closed with another one. In January, we looked at responses in the French press to the shootings at Charlie Hebdo.

Last month, we found ourselves witnessing another massacre, this time on a much larger scale, with the attacks on the Bataclan concert hall, the Stade de France, and diners and drinkers of Paris’s cafe culture. Again, we looked at some of the responses to the events in the French media.

In between, though, there was much to explore in French language, literature and life. We learned how to make grammatically correct chocolate cake with the aid of glamorous French movie stars, discovered why Terry Pratchett causes trouble for French gender rules, and uncovered the complex secrets of the mysterious Mrs Vandertramp.

Expanding our vocabulary, we encountered the gripping etymological drama of the unicorn and the crayfish, found out what the cool kids on the street are saying these days, and learned the hidden connection between limousines and bayonets. Plus, there was the opportunity to laugh at hapless French sign-writers struggling with their own language, or try your skills in our fiendish faux-amis quiz.

Guest appearances were made by two more heroes who gave their lives to the service of the French nation and their surnames to the service of the French dictionary: Joseph-Ignace Guillotin and Etienne de Silhouette.

We also discovered what the students at Oxford have been up to lately, from turning parchments into webpages to falling in love with the Montmartre district of Paris.

As ever, there were suggestions of books and films you might like to if you want to explore French culture in a little more depth.

And, snuck in among the other posts, were a few reasons why you might like to think seriously about doing a degree in modern languages, and a little advice on how you might go about it if you wanted to apply to study the subject with us.

Merry Christmas to you from the Oxford Modern Languages Faculty. Thank you for reading, and we’ll see you on the first Wednesday in the New Year.

French life

From Saint Nicolas to Petit Papa Noël

December 9, 2015 simonrkemp Leave a comment

posted by Catriona Seth

In places like Lorraine, the former sovereign duchy which became a part of France in 1766 and is now a ‘département’, or in Fribourg, in Switzerland, one of the earliest signs of the festive season is the presence, in the local ‘boulangeries’, of figures made of ‘pain d’épices’ (gingerbread)—which the Swiss sometimes call ‘biscômes’—in the shape of a bishop, complete with a crook or crozier (‘une crosse’) and a mitre (‘une mitre’—the word for the episcopal headgear is the same). He is Saint Nicolas (there is no ‘h’ in the name in French), a 3^rd century Turk who is the patron of Fribourg and of Lorraine, but also, amongst others, of sailors, physiotherapists and children. His feast day on December 6^th is celebrated with public processions in which he walks the streets, with his donkey, sometimes accompanied by a darkly clad individual, the ‘Père fouettard’, literally the whipping father, who is supposed to chastise badly behaved boys and girls. Saint Nicolas, on the other hand, carries a long basked strapped to his shoulders like a backpack—it is called ‘une hotte’ and is similar to the one used by grape-pickers. In it he has presents and sweets for those who have not been naughty.

Because he was considered to be a major figure of the early Church, Saint Nicolas’ relics were revered in different places of worship like Bari in Italy, Fribourg—where his right arm is preserved in a jewelled reliquary—and Saint-Nicolas-de-Port, South of Nancy, in Lorraine, where one of his finger bones—a ‘phalange’ or phalanx—is still kept in the treasure-house of an important gothic basilica. The modern pageants grew out of religious ceremonies.

The name ‘Santa Claus’ is a deformation of Saint Nicolas or its Dutch version, Sint Nicolaas, and in many French-speaking regions the bishop has been overtaken by the jolly figure of Father Christmas as the purveyor of gifts to be opened no longer on December 6^th, but on the 24^th or 25^th. ‘Le Père Noël’ is called upon to leave presents not in stockings, but in shoes left out at the foot of the tree—‘le sapin de Noël’. Whilst the tradition of singing carols is much less prevalent in French than in English, many French-speakers know the words to the musical equivalent of a letter to Santa, Petit Papa Noël—said to be, in Tino Rossi’s original version, the best-selling French single of all time. The singer (in fact a father giving voice to his sleeping son) asks Father Christmas not to forget his ‘petit soulier’ when he comes down from the skies to deliver thousands of toys—‘des jouets par milliers’. The request comes, even though he admits ‘je n’ai pas été tous les jours très sage’, but then again, hands up anyone who can claim only ever to have been good!

For a time-warp experience, you can find the original Tino Rossi recording of ‘Petit Papa Noël’ taken from the 1946 black and white film Destins here:

And Vincy’s lyrics here.

This is the chorus (‘le refrain’) of Petit Papa Noël:
Petit papa Noël
Quand tu descendras du ciel,
Avec des jouets par milliers,
N’oublie pas mon petit soulier.

And here is some vocabulary for the rest of the song:

La paupière : the eyelid.
Quelque chose me tarde: I am impatient for something to happen. The verb ‘tarder’ has the same root as ‘tard’ and ‘un retard’, meaning late and a delay.

Un joujou: a toy. Remember, ‘joujou’, which is a familiar term derived from ‘jouet’ is one of the words ending in ‘ou’ which has an irregular plural (not an ‘s’, but an ‘x’): des joujoux.

The following words all have irregular plurals with ‘x’: bijou, caillou, chou, genou, hibou, joujou & pou. Some French-speaking children learn the following mnemonic: ‘Viens mon chou, mon bijou, sur mes genoux, laisse tes joujoux et jette des cailloux à ce vieil hibou plein de poux.’

In the mnemonic, ‘chou’ is not used to mean ‘cabbage’ but as the equivalent of ‘dear’. ‘Un pou’ is a louse and ‘un hibou’, an owl.

‘Le marchand de sable’, literally ‘the sand merchant’, is the sandman who is said to sprinkle sand in children’s eyes to make them sleep and dream sweet dreams.

‘faire dodo’ is a familiar expression meaning to sleep. You sometimes encounter ‘dodo’ as a noun: ‘J’ai fait un bon dodo après le déjeuner’ is a way of saying I had a good sleep after lunch.

Events and Competitions, Film

French Film Competition 2016!

December 2, 2015 simonrkemp 4 Comments

posted by Kate Rees

As in recent years, the Oxford University Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages is organising a French Film Competition, run with the help and generosity of Routes into Languages (South).

The competition has been a successful and entertaining way of getting young people interested in France and French culture, and has attracted hundreds of entries over the last few years. The challenge is to re-write the ending of a film in no more than 1500 words. It is open to all students of secondary-school age, from years 7-13. We’re also very keen to encourage filmed entries via Youtube submissions, so please feel free to re-imagine the endings of the chosen films in as creative a way as you can.

This year we have chosen two films directed by Céline Sciamma, an up and coming French director. Pupils in years 7-11 are invited to re-write the ending of Tomboy (2011), which sees a young girl moving to a new Parisian neighbourhood and exploring her own identity.

Those in years 12-13 are encouraged to look at Sciamma’s most recent film, Bande de filles (2014), which depicts the life of a group of young black girls coming of age in the suburbs of Paris. Raising issues of gender, race and class, this is also a film about friendship and conflict.

We very much enjoy judging the competition and are always impressed by the imagination and wit of the submissions. Entries should be submitted by email to french.essay@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk by noon on 31^st March 2016.

A first prize of £100 will be awarded to the winning student in each category, with runner-up prizes of £25. For further details about entering the competition (including the points in each film where we’d like you to take up the story), please see the questions below, and go to http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/film_comp to find the link to the cover sheet for your entry.

We’re looking forward to reading your work!

What counts as ‘the ending’ of the film?

We’d like you to start your re-writing from the following points:
Tomboy: from 1:06:03, when Laure’s mother says “Lève-toi tu dois t’habiller”

Bande de filles: from 1:16:59, when Marieme/Vic says ‘J’ai un plan’ to her friends.

Does ‘re-writing’ mean I have to change everything?

There is nothing stopping you from watching the ‘real’ ending and then modifying it as you see fit. Indeed, you might find this helpful. Please note, though, that we’re looking for creative, entertaining and inventive new endings, which address as fully and plausibly as possible the strands of the story that are left unresolved at the end-points we’ve specified above.

What form should the essay take?

There is no particular expectation as to how you submit your entry – you might like, for example, to submit it in screenplay format (with descriptions of camera angle, voice-over, lighting etc.), or as a play (with speech-prefixes and dialogue) or in prose, as in a novel. You might even like to submit your ‘new’ ending via YouTube or other social media..! If so, email us the link with your attached coversheet. The form should be the one you feel shows your creativity in the best light.

Where can I or my school/college get hold of the films?

The DVDs are readily and affordably available via Amazon (http://www.amazon.co.uk or http://www.amazon.fr).

Is there a limit to the amount of entries any one school can make?

Yes. There is a limit of 15 entries per school per age group.

Should I enter as an individual or can I enter as part of a group?

We would ask you to keep to individually-named submissions, please: this is just to ensure as much as possible parity and fairness between entries, and to avoid any distinction between smaller and larger groups.

French life

Two Responses

November 25, 2015 simonrkemp Leave a comment

posted by Simon Kemp

This week, two responses to the Paris attacks that you may not have seen.

Firstly, an interview with a teacher at a school around the corner from the Bataclan, which is also not far from the Charlie Hebdo offices where this year’s earlier attack took place. Marie Piquemal, a journalist with Liberation went to talk to her over the weekend after the attacks to talk about how she would face her pupils on Monday morning. The full article is here.

«Je veux les aider. Etre avec eux, le plus disponible possible.» Cette maîtresse de CM2 enseigne à Paris, dans une école voisine du Bataclan. Elle ne tient pas à ce que son nom apparaisse de peur que ses élèves (ou leurs parents) lisent et que cela les perturbe «encore plus». Elle fera classe ce lundi matin, comme dans toutes les écoles. Le ministre de l’Intérieur a annoncé samedi soir que tous les établissements scolaires et universitaires rouvriraient lundi, après avoir été fermés samedi.

disponible: literally, ‘available’, but here in the sense of ‘I want to be there for them’

CM2: top year of primary school, for 10-11-year-olds

Elle ne tient pas à ce que son nom apparaisse: she does not want her name to appear (in the newspaper)

Le ministre de l’Intérieur: equivalent post in Government to British Home Secretary

Tout le week-end, elle a essayé de se préparer au maximum. Elle a imprimé des images qui lui serviront de support pour les échanges en classe: un drapeau en berne, la devise de Paris, ce dessin de Joann Sfar avec cette bulle: «Les gens qui sont morts ce soir étaient dehors pour vivre, boire, chanter. Ils ne savaient pas qu’on leur avait déclaré la guerre.» Elle a aussi pris un stock de bougies, la chanson Imagine de John Lennon. «Je verrai avec mes collègues ce qu’on utilise ou pas. Mais j’ai préféré prévoir, pour ne pas me sentir démunie.» Elle ajoute: « On a beau essayer d’anticiper, il va falloir gérer sur le moment. J’espère surtout ne pas avoir de grosse mauvaise nouvelle. On a tenté de joindre toutes les familles, mais il n’a pas été possible de savoir pour tout le monde.»

les échanges en classe: class discussions

en berne: at half-mast

la devise: motto. The motto of Paris is ‘Fluctuat nec mergitur’, which translates as ‘It is tossed in the waves, but it does not sink’. It accompanies the city’s coat of arms, which has the image of a ship:

démunie: at a loss, without resources

gérer sur le moment: play it by ear

Elle raconte aussi que beaucoup de parents, angoissés, ont appelé le directeur pour savoir si la sécurité serait renforcée. La demande a été transmise au rectorat. Une cellule psychologique sera par ailleurs opérationnelle dès lundi matin pour aider les enfants et les parents. Ce sera aussi le cas à l’école du 155 avenue Parmentier, dans le quartier voisin où se trouvent Le Carillon et Le Petit Cambodge, également attaqués vendredi. Et dans tous les établissements «où les élèves, leurs familles et les personnels de l’Éducation ont été particulièrement affectés», précise un communiqué du ministère. Mais aussi dans ceux où l’équipe pédagogique en formulera la demande.

angoissé: anxious

le rectorat: local education authority

la cellule psychologique: psychological support unit

l’équipe pédagogique: the teaching staff

«Les psychologues seront là, c’est précieux», dit encore l’enseignante. Son école est près du Bataclan mais aussi des anciens locaux de Charlie Hebdo. «On a vécu les attentats de janvier. C’était au moment de la sortie des classes, un mercredi midi. Les enfants ont été confinés à l’intérieur, ils s’en souviennent.» Jeudi dernier, l’école a fait l’exercice d’entraînement annuel du «plan de mise en sûreté des écoles face aux risques majeurs» (PPMS). «Les élèves ont posé plein de questions: “Est-ce que ca peut se reproduire?”. Je les ai rassurés du mieux que j’ai pu. Je leur ai dit qu’ils ne risquaient rien. Mais là, cela va être plus difficile. Qu’est ce que je vais leur dire?»

l’enseignante: teacher

les anciens locaux: the former premises

le plan de mise en sûreté des écoles face aux risques majeurs: the security action plan for schools in case of major risk

du mieux que j’ai pu: as best I could

Secondly, a short video. It’s called Cent Maux, which means ‘A Hundred Bad Things’, ‘ A Hundred Evils’ or ‘A Hundred Hurts’. It’s also homophonic for ‘Cent Mots’, ‘a hundred words’, and the video consists of a hundred words (in French and English) responding to the attacks. If that doesn’t sound very engaging to you, then I suggest you give it two minutes of your time and be proved wrong.

[The video seems to be resisting my attempts to embed it in the blog, so you’ll have to go and visit it on its Facebook page here. It’s worth the trip.]

French life

Paris

November 18, 2015 simonrkemp 1 Comment

posted by Simon Kemp

Usually this blog tries to give you things that will help you better understand what’s going on in France, and language tips that will help improve your French.

This week, though, I can’t help you understand what happened in Paris last Friday night, as I don’t understand it myself. And the only French word I have for you is one that, if it hasn’t been part of your vocabulary up to now, you won’t be able to use in normal conversation for a while:

BATACLAN, noun, masculine
Familiar. Attirail encombrant composé d’objets dont on veut se dispenser de donner le nom.

Cumbersome materials made up of things one does not want to take the trouble to name. ‘Gear’, ‘clobber’.

USE IN QUOTATIONS:

1. ‘Ta bonne maman ne pourra pas être à Dieppe dimanche. Il lui faudra, au moins, un jour ou deux pour resserrer tout son bataclan.’
FLAUBERT, Correspondance, 1866, p. 221.

Use in phrases: (Et) tout le bataclan. Et cætera, et tout le reste. Etc., and all the rest

2. Ah! si l’on n’avait pas la religion, la prière dans les églises, (…), si l’on n’avait pas la Sainte-Vierge et saint Antoine de Padoue, et tout le bataclan, on serait bien plus malheureux, ça c’est sûr…
MIRBEAU, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, 1900, p. 21.

Etymology: Origin obscure. Possibly onomatopoeic.

Normal blogging again from next week.

French language

Sometimes French is hard for French people too

November 11, 2015 simonrkemp Leave a comment

posted by Simon Kemp

Poor French people! With so many silent letters and homophones (words that sound the same but are spelled differently) to contend with, it’s no wonder that written French can sometimes be a tricky area even for fluent speakers of the language. Here are some examples of native speakers coming unstuck with some embarrassingly high-profile written French. See if you can spot the errors, and if you can see the difference between the kinds of mistakes native speakers make from the ones language learners make:

All the images are from here, a website I hesitate to link to as so many of the other grammar and spelling mistakes they feature turn out really quite rude. Still, you can’t get the rude jokes unless you can understand the French, so I suppose it’s all educationally sound.

As for native-speaker mistakes, you may notice that all the sentences above make perfect sense if you read them out loud. The wrong words are all homophones for the correct ones, e.g. ‘encre’ (ink) for ‘ancre’ (anchor), ‘retirer’ for ‘retirées’. Like native English speakers muddling ‘there’, ‘their’ and ‘they’re’, French speakers know how it’s meant to sound, but not necessarily how it’s meant to look, which leads them to make quite different slips from the ones foreigners learning French tend to commit.

A blog for students and teachers of Years 11 to 13, and anyone else with an interest in Modern Foreign Languages and Cultures, written by the staff and students of Oxford University. Updated every Wednesday!