One of the most rewarding parts of reading Jane Eyre as a thirteen-year-old Midwesterner is taking a wild shot in the dark at the meaning of all of the untranslated French passages. These might seem baffling and unnecessarily obfuscatory, but someone once said, “The numbered occurrences of French in Jane Eyre might read as merely ornamental and circumstantial, but closer analysis reveals that they are eloquent in encoding issues of gender and education, and in voicing the conflict of individualism and conformity in a Victorian context,” and right, they probably are, -ho. Anyhow, I knew comparatively little French, not coming into regular need for it during my regular rollerblading trips to Subway, so here are some of the translations I made up for myself. I found them fairly useful. Perhaps you will too. Someday they may come up with a method for putting French into words, but in the meantime I hope this will suffice.
“Mesdames, vous êtes servies!” adding, “J’ai bien faim, moi!”
“Madames, you are servants!” adding, “I am family, I!”
Having seen Adèle comfortably seated in her little chair by Mrs. Fairfax’s parlour fireside, and given her her best wax doll (which I usually kept enveloped in silver paper in a drawer) to play with, and a story-book for change of amusement; and having replied to her “Revenez bientôt, ma bonne amie, ma chère Mdlle. Jeannette,” with a kiss I set out.
“Bring me back a bientot, my good Amy, my cheesed Mdlle. Jeannette.”
“Et cela doit signifier,” said she, “qu’il y aura là dedans un cadeau pour moi, et peut-être pour vous aussi, mademoiselle. Monsieur a parlé de vous: il m’a demandé le nom de ma gouvernante, et si elle n’était pas une petite personne, assez mince et un peu pâle. J’ai dit qu’oui: car c’est vrai, n’est-ce pas, mademoiselle?”
“And celas aren’t signified,” said she, “and your aura is dead on a gift for me, the littlest thing you could do for Aussies, madam. Mister here isn’t talking to you, I’m going to demand the name of his government, and if she isn’t going to be a tiny person, I’ll mince them up pale. I’m here and without, you can’t stop it, get me, mademoiselle?”
“N’est-ce pas, monsieur, qu’il y a un cadeau pour Mademoiselle Eyre dans votre petit coffre?”
“Nest-pas, mister, quilt and a guest for Mademoiselle Eyre, or else a little coffee?”
“Est-ce que ma robe va bien?” cried she, bounding forwards; “et mes souliers? et mes bas? Tenez, je crois que je vais danser!”
“It’s my robe of goodness?” cried she, bounding forwards. “And my soulmate? And my bas? I’ve got it, I’m croying the most dancers!”
“Monsieur, je vous remercie mille fois de votre bonté;” then rising, she added, “C’est comme cela que maman faisait, n’est-ce pas, monsieur?”
“Monsieur, I’ve got to give you Millie’s foist on the other bonnet;” then rising, she added, “It’s almost like my mom phased out, nest the pas, mister?”
“Qu’ avez-vous, mademoiselle?” said she. “Vos doigts tremblent comme la feuille, et vos joues sont rouges: mais, rouges comme des cerises!”
“What’s with you, missy?” said she. “Your two things are trembling like a feuille, and your youngsters are read: man, red like two cerises!”
“Elles changent de toilettes,” said Adèle; who, listening attentively, had followed every movement; and she sighed.
“They’ve changed the toilets. Ugh.”
“Chez maman,” said she, “quand il y avait du monde, je le suivais partout, au salon et à leurs chambres; souvent je regardais les femmes de chambre coiffer et habiller les dames, et c’était si amusant: comme cela on apprend.”
“Don’t you feel hungry, Adèle?”
“Mais oui, mademoiselle: voilà cinq ou six heures que nous n’avons pas mangé.”
“Mama’s house,” said she, “was the most of the world, and I was always part of it, with a salon and a room for leurs; I always watched the women in chambray coiff each other’s hair, and it was amusing: now I’m learning how.”
“Don’t you feel hungry, Adèle?”
“Heck yes, ma’am, voilà! Five or six hours since I’ve even had a manga.”
“Est-ce que je ne puis pas prendrie une seule de ces fleurs magnifiques, mademoiselle? Seulement pour completer ma toilette.”
“Can you believe or not the believement of how complete the flowers are magnificent, ma’am? We are completely done with the toilet.”
New go-to phrase: I’m going to mince you up pale.
I always tried puzzling those bits out with help from my rudimentary middle-school Spanish. Something as small as figuring out “Seulemente pour completer” = “solamente por completar” = “only to complete(?)” took like 5 minutes and an inordinate amount of Wordreference.
Oh, Adele — so perceptive and so concerned with the toilets in Thornfield, as are we all.
When I visited Quebec I was stopped and asked directions (I think), and I was happy to know that I speak enough French to be able to say, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak French.”
That is one of the only things I can say in French, but thanks to the brief time I did Michel Thomas tapes, I can say it in a perfect French accent.
Thanks to the 7 years I spent watching Michel on Gilmore Girls, I also have what I am pretty sure is a flawless French accent
An important skill! Someone once tried to ask my dad for directions in Spanish and he told her he did not exist (“yo no soy” — I assume he was going for “yo no se” please imagine the accent I don’t know how to make it). Although that was effective at communicating that he was the wrong person to ask, at least.
When my dad gets tan he could pass for Hispanic (he’s Russian Jewish). When we lived in Arizona, a kid came up and started speaking to him in Spanish and he answered “No hablo Espanol” and the kid looked at him like he was a CRAZY PERSON because he had just spoken to him in Spanish so how could he not speak it?
This is such the greatest tourist!Dad story, the level of Dad-ness to which we can all only hope to aspire someday
I attempted to speak French in Quebec (ok, I said “bonjour”). The gentleman who had stopped me to ask for directions immediately exclaimed “ah, you speak English!” and switched to English. I was 16 and moderately offended by this. I’d been practicing!
I went to college in Montreal, thinking as a decent student of French, that this would accelerate my learning. It did not. People in my classes would come in saying “I was trying to practice my French in the coffee shop but the guy knew I wasn’t a native speaker and would only speak to me in English,” etc.
So don’t be offended–most French-Canadians switch to English with anyone but French-Canadians.
Also, what they speak in Quebec is almost another language in itself. There’s so much slang and the accents and pronunciation are very odd.
That happens to me everywhere I go. I’ve been studying Spanish for years, so any time I go to a Spanish-speaking country, I try to practice it, but I say anything to anyone in Spanish and they’re all, “oh, you’re American!” and they switch to English and refuse to entertain my attempts at Spanish. It’s nearly impossible to really learn another language when no one will let you practice it. Just pointing that out for anyone who complains that Americans don’t speak multiple languages.
In my limited experience, they like you much better in shops if you say “bonjour” or “bonsoir” in response to same, though, even if you then switch to English. It’s kinda rude to answer “bonjour” with “Oh, hi.”
A few years ago I was in Paris and attempted to ask the concierge at the hotel if we could leave our bags at reception, even though our rooms wouldn’t be ready for a few hours. (We had been travelling for hours and were very tired.) I made a spirited attempt; at the end of my very long sentence, she asked if I would prefer to speak in English. I was slightly hurt. I have a French A Level!
I went to Montreal recently and found that my brain only has room for 1 non-English language so I was speaking this horrible mix of Japanese-English-French EXCEPT for “you have a beautiful dog” + petting motions. My brain knew what was important.
I’m taking a Spanish conversation and trying to learn German via Duolingo, and I can’t even count how many times my Spanish teacher will say “Como estas?” and I almost blurt out “Sehr gut!”
I’m switching between Spanish and German on Duolingo right now, and the struggle is real.
I went to Italy several years ago with zero knowledge of Italian, but my brain processed that Foreign Language was happening and kept trying to make fractured German come out. I confused many baristas.
My sister mainly did German at school, and did GCSE German, but spoke a very small amount of French as well. In her German oral, she used the word “fromage” for “cheese”. Right at the end she suddenly remembered and shouted, “Käse!”.
It’s weird! All the foreign language bits of the brain must be cross-wired, because this always happens. I’m sure smart people have done studies, but I’m too lazy to do more than throw around conjecture right now.
I feel like it’s about starting young?
I’m bilingual in English and French, and I couldn’t mix those up if I tried, and when I picked up Latin from about 8 onwards and German at 12 I consciously used French to help but it all felt seperate, you know?
Anyway, now I’m learning ancient greek at 19, and it’s killing me to try and keep it apart from Latin in my head. (I dropped german a while ago, so I only have to deal with dead languages)
Basically I’m pretty sure your brain reaches a point sometime in your teens when it refuses to accept the existence of new languages.
Ooh – as another point about dead languages, learning to move from your own language into latin can feel like relearning the whole language if you’ve only translated out of it before.
I took French in high school and Russian in college, and now any time I attempt to speak French I lapse into Russian (to the little extent I remember it). There are actually a lot of French words in Russian so it makes some sense that they’d be cross-wired, but it’s hard to keep straight.
This is exactly me. Except that when I was learning Russian in college, my brain kept trying to make French come out, like you already know this phrase in Other Language! Quit trying so hard!
Sentences I am perfecting for my trip to Paris:
“I’m sorry, my French is terrible”
“I speak a little but I can’t understand”
“I’m sorry, I’m lost, do you speak English?”
My version was “I’m terribly sorry, I don’t understand.” But yeah. That is pretty much the limit of my French, along with please, thank you, excuse me, hello, goodbye, vegetarian, today, tomorrow, “Do you have a table for two?,” and “That perfume smells good.”
Priorities, I haz them.
Thank god for Babelfish:
“Sir, thank you thousand times your goodness;” then rising, she added, “it is like that MOM was doing, is it not, Mr?
I’m glad that Adele got in some passive aggressive French jabs in this version
“your aura is dead on a gift for me’
New pick-up line. Thanks, Mallory!
The original French really doesn’t capture the music of “I’ve got it, I’m croying the most dancers!”
So, wait, is this NOT what French means?
It is DEFINITELY exactly what French means. I have a degree in it so I speak with boundless authority.
Obviously, you are Monk #2 of French.
LIFE GOAL.
i mean, duolingo says i am 1/3 fluent in french and this sounds right to me
Are… are you me? Because this is exactly how I read it as a thirteen-year-old Midwesterner.
Villette is even worse for this. Fortunately I knew considerably more French by the time I read that one.
I’m not going to lie, I bought the Mallory-prefaced Vilette and was super disappointed there weren’t even endnotes. Spanish only takes you so far. I ended up using the Google Translate app, since it translates any text you point your phone camera at.
Get me, mademoiselle? = new best translation of n’est-ce pas, mademoiselle?
It’s a bit noir, isn’t it?
I was about to reply that “Get me, sister?” (imagined in Humphrey Bogart’s voice) would be even better, then saw your reply. Synchronicity!
Pretty accurate, even
I ran these through Google Translate as follows: French to Spanish -> Spanish to German -> German to Romanian -> Romanian to Italian -> Italian to English. These are my results:
* “Lord, served!” Adding: “I’m hungry, yo!”
* “And that means,” he said, “for me is a gift, and perhaps for you, talk ra reign over you. He asked me the name of my government, and if it was not a small man, very thin and a little ‘I pale. I said yes, because it’s true, is not it, miss? ”
* “Chez Mom,” he said, “though fully what the stay following him everywhere, and the rooms, I saw combing des race and women dress, and it was fun as you learn.”
* “Can I take one of these beautiful flowers, I miss? Just to finish my bath.”
A++ translating
“Can I take one of these beautiful flowers, I miss? Just to finish my bath.”
I have so many thoughts about the scenario surrounding this one
I’M HUNGRY, YO!
I don’t see the problem. I mean, can you even imagine someone who reads books but doesn’t know French? What sort of an education would that be? Completely impossible.
I’m especially annoyed by untranslated French in Dorothy Sayers books. I refuse to believe that the mid-2000s Mystery Guild readers were so much better at French than me that they didn’t want footnotes.
I believe they were all dirty, so there is that.
Especially whenever the lecherous Uncle pops in…
By the time I’d gotten to lecherous Uncle Paul, I actually did know enough French to read all the hilariously filthy things he said. I read Clouds of Witness before I could read French, or figure out any of the subtext, and didn’t like it. Reread it decades later as an adult, with French, and it was A WHOLE DIFFERENT BOOK. Much funnier, in a dark comedic fashion.
This. “He is singing songs in the French language” = “He is lost in a haze of sexual longing and/or satiation”
I always thought the coolest thing about him and Harriet singing “Aupres de ma blonde” together is that PETER IS THE BLOND ONE IN THAT RELATIONSHIP.
Came here to post exactly that! I *knew* they were putting all the good bits in French >:(
Random French Phrases in Old Novels – a definite phenomenon, and somewhat baffling to Young Me.
My 19-century novel loving self has been waiting for this article since I was 12 years old and completely lost while reading classic lit.
A plug — I love Sensagent.com for online translation — offers a lot of alternate translations and resources so you can kinda figure out what makes the most sense. It’s been especially helpful for me doing specialized and academic translations — I’ve used it for texts ranging from educational theory, to weird Puerto Rican laws, to lists of fish diseases. My job is weird.
WAIT what is your job, tell us more! (Vaguely, even!)
Leo.org is similar, also good.
This was me for the entire 2.5 months of last year that I worked in Quebec (Montreal and QC). I speak no French, and I can’t even count how many times I politely laughed along with a cashier telling me something amusing that I couldn’t understand at all.
To be fair, polite laughter in agreement is like 90% of experiential language learning.
That always scares me though because what if they suspect I don’t understand and are saying something ludicrous that no one would agree to in order to test my comprehension? What if I’ve just politely nodded and concurred that yes, elephants ought to have full voting rights?
Then you become a delightful story for someone you’ll probably never see again!
This is me but with Spanish, last fall I spent some time in South America, many times I got confident and started thinking I was getting the hang of this language, only to get crushed when I went out to buy something and the cashier asked me a question that I did not get at all.
My neighborhood is predominately Hispanic and most of the cashiers speak to everyone in Spanish, but when they get to me they always switch to English before I say anything. I’d be insulted except that I speak exactly zero Spanish.
this is also me right before I’ve had lunch, to be honest
This is me but in Mandarin Chinese! Buying gift chopsticks for my mom in Shanghai, nodded and noncomitally grunted my way through a conversation about various features. So much fun!
I have to congratulate you, Mallory, for knowing exactly what odd little things will perfectly troll the Toast readership. This week has been outstanding, brava.
(I am unable to actually read this post, after seeing the tweets last night that made me cringe so hard.)
“It’s almost like my mom phased out, nest the pas, mister?”
brb, sending this to my French-class-taking-Jane-Eyre-loving mother
Grade 10 me was insufferably smug about her grade 10 French skills allowing her to understand some of this. #englishcanadiandirtbag #socultured #hwaetever
English Canadian Dirtbags unite! Grade 10 like, “It’s okay, I got this.” Cut to a day in Paris 10 years later… “Non, I have not got this.” le facepalm
Yeah, that was Grade 10 me too. And then, a few years later, College me discovered Dorothy Dunnett. I’ve felt invincibly ignorant ever since.
OMG, “hwaetever”! I’m going to miss The Toast SO MUCH. :sobbing:
I enjoy the fact that the same word is translated multiple different ways throughout this piece. Also, the River sisters probably had a similar experience learning German with only a grammar book to help them.
Yes, and some are correct in some places and wrong in others!
Does anyone remember if St. John actually knew any Hindustani when he ordered Jane to learn it?
Pretty sure ‘Hindustani’ isn’t a language – it literally means ‘Indian’, and there are many, many languages in India; no-one speaks ‘Indian’! So it sounds like he was a particularly ignorant missionary…
At the time of the book, Hindustani was used to mean both Hindi and Urdu (Hindustani had two forms, Modern Standard Hindi and Modern Standard Urdu). So… yeah, I guess it both is and isn’t a language, given that its two composite parts are definitely languages.
This speaks to my VERY SOUL (an appropriately Brontean reaction, yes?)
I first read Jane Eyre when I was like, 12, 13? And I don’t remember there being any translations in my cheap little Barnes and Noble paperback and this being in the Year of Our Lord 2000, there was no Google Translate, so it was just a guessing game. Or mostly, letting my eyes skim over the French and just trying to puzzle things out via context clues.
Same for Villette, which I read in high school. I took Latin (not French or Spanish because that would’ve been too useful) so I kinda had some ideas about what things might’ve meant? But not really?
That is still how I read Umberto Eco, God rest his brilliant soul. Though I love Salvatore in The Name of the Rose, qui parle con some tipi del lingue of his own che non existe in vero, mais ce que resemblar cueli differenti langui da regiones nearby, e puoi the reader puo mostly comprendi son speech.
“Get me, mademoiselle?” is my new catchphrase.
Sort of related: Has anyone read the sci fi version of Jane Eyre– Jenna Starborn by Sharon Shinn? I need someone else to bask in its weirdness with me.
Oooh Sharon Shinn is weird and awesome and a recent find in my trove of female science fiction writers. Thank you for adding this to my list of books to be read!
No, but I can totally see how that might work in a weird way?? Like, instead of wandering around the moors, she wanders the galaxy.
BUT…Amazon told me I might like Jane Steele which is some kind of “what if Jane was a serial killer?” thing, which, uh…….what???
Has anyone read this?
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25868918-jane-…
“Reader, I murdered him.”
Yep. Absolutely adding that to my to be read list.
For interested parties (because my phone didn’t want to copy and paste earlier) Jenna Starborn: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/337017.Jenna_S…
It is very, very weird, but I think Jane Eyre adaptations have to be. So much of what drives the plot of the original is specific to the time period, so a note-for-note recreation set in the future would feel off. Better to just go totally bonkers. I did put down Jenna Starborn feeling concerned about the state of cyborg rights in that universe, though
I eat manga all the time, I can relate
The fiber is very good for digestion.
I called it.
I also had this problem for the Extremely Northern bits of Wuthering Heights. And I’m pretty northern!
I spent half of Wuthering Heights muttering to myself, “This is not a good use of transliterated Broad Yorkshire, Dickon Sowerby would not approve, Broad Yorkshire is supposed to be about nice birds and flowers and friendly ghosts and the power of positive thinking, this is– this is the OPPOSITE”
But that is Modern Broad Yorkshire, after all the Dismal Broad Yorkshires inbred and died out in the 19th century.
We had The Secret Garden read aloud to us by a very southern (USA) teacher when I was about 11, and it was quite strange to hear her read the dialect bits. That was also the age when I was starting to watch All Creatures Great And Small, and I knew something wasn’t quite right. Her York-Shire was not the same as James Herriot’s.
Confession: Jane Eyre is my favorite book and has been since I read it *cough*20 years ago in college, but I don’t know French and I’ve never had a translated copy, so this is STILL how I read the book!
“seated in her little chair by Mrs. Fairfax’s parlour fireside, and given her her best wax doll (which I usually kept enveloped in silver paper in a drawer)”
I’ve not read Jane Eyre. Does the best wax doll end up melting in the heat of the fireside, leading to tears and anguish in a predictable plot development that none of the characters could ever have possibly seen coming?
And may I suggest McSweeney’s French Class, 2241 ? (Oh, we’d better still have McSweeney’s come July.)
Ha, that’s so fun, thanks for the French Class 2241 link!
In answer to your doll question, ononono.
“Someday they may come up with a method for putting French into words, but in the meantime I hope this will suffice.”
As as grad student in French who is battling my own brain in a translation class right now (why bother translating when you already understand?) this hits on far too many levels. I am crying from laughing so hard.
Oh Lord, do I know those feelings. I voluntarily signed up for a class in advanced translation skills next year and I can already imagine how much of my hair I’m just going to pull right out during those 11 weeks.
Right? It finally hit me, like three weeks into the term, why translating was so difficult to me – I already understand it in French. My brain was refusing to translate into English because I just don’t need English to understand French! I told my professor, and he said, “Well, of course,” like it was totally obvious that was the problem…
That is when you translate it into an interpretive dance. Or a puppet show.
Totally a thing! Basically, anytime you are confronted with a language you don't speak fluently, your brain goes "oh, this must be the language that I know the least of, of all the languages I've ever studied!" As you become more fluent in the language(s) you're learning, the second- (or third-, or thirteenth-) language interference will gradually diminish.
Your friend, a person who studied second language acquisition in grad school.
Sentences I am perfecting for my trip to Paris:
"I'm sorry, my French is terrible"
"I speak a little but I can't understand"
"I'm sorry, I'm lost, do you speak English?"
When my dad gets tan he could pass for Hispanic (he's Russian Jewish). When we lived in Arizona, a kid came up and started speaking to him in Spanish and he answered "No hablo Espanol" and the kid looked at him like he was a CRAZY PERSON because he had just spoken to him in Spanish so how could he not speak it?
My neighborhood is predominately Hispanic and most of the cashiers speak to everyone in Spanish, but when they get to me they always switch to English before I say anything. I'd be insulted except that I speak exactly zero Spanish.
Francophone Toasties, you may come and laugh uneasily and cringe here on this comment-là.
Most of the French I have retained since retiring in 2014, from a francophone work group, sounds like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBk0-xTvjT0
Haha! Those are the most important parts.
I read Jane Eyre at the same age and this was my LIFE. Leave it to The Toast to understand small teenage me’s deepest literature problems when nobody else does.
Come to think of it, literature French was how 13-year-old me first started learning French, when otherwise I would not have started learning any foreign language until several years later when my brain was more ossified! So thank goodness I had a little tiny bit of a head start, since my school did not. (I was in 7th grade and checked out “Just Listen And Learn French” from the public library. I didn’t learn much, but it was at least a start.)
these are fabulous. Alas I grew up in a french speaking country so I knew what the phrases meant and missed out on making up all these fun possibilities
Google translate has taken all the magic out of life…
I learnt French in good part so I could read the random untranslated French common in older books. I regret nothing about this choice.
You spoke French very well for a 13 year old midwesterner. It’s almost like Subway phased out.
I did the same for Hercule Poirot novels, except his were easier because he only said the most unimportant throw-away phrases in French. Just like when I speak French now, I manage to speak an entire sentence, even paragraphs of crime-solving sentences, but I always add in English, “isn’t that so? Why yes!” just to remind other people that I am anglophone.
Bronte uses French in all her books. “The Professor” and “Villette” even take place in Belgium.
You guys, no word of a lie, the only time I read Jane Eyre, I read it in French. I did not know this was a thing until just right now.
Crying with laughter at work. Dear god, I’m going to miss you, Mallory.
Oh my goodness – I’m laughing so hard. I too, read Jane Eyre as a teen aged midwesterner and had to fuddle through the French parts. Fuddling being trying to fabricate sentences that made sense in the context… it never worked. This has finally solved the mystery. Brilliantly done!