I am not the only one who feels this way. French people totally agree, as manifested by their rampant and glorious over-usage of the semi-colon. It turns out that there is a reason for this. In her brutal review of the new Simone de Beauvoir translation, Toril Moi points out that:
French and English differ significantly in their tolerance of relatively vague connections between sentence elements. The translation theorist Jacqueline Guillemin-Flescher has shown that English requires more explicit, precise and concrete connections between clauses and sentences than French and, conversely, that French accepts looser syntactical relations. In other words, if French syntax is imported directly into English, sentences that work in French may come across as rambling or incoherent in English.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n03/toril-moi/the-adulteress-wife
Yes! This is indeed the case. French sentences are often conglomerations of many clauses that could stand on their own, but are instead stitched together with commas and semi-colons. In French, this seems elegant, suggestive, flirtatious. In English, this seems pretentious, misguided, and distracting.
Sadly, I found an example of this in a translation of one of my favorite French authors, and I am trying to decide how I feel about it. Is the translation merely offering the respect due the original? Rendering the delicacy and decadence of the prose in another language? Or is it weirdly attached to empty syntactic structures that weigh the English down instead of dressing it up?
The example I would offer involves commas. The original line is: "Je n'etais pas encore tombe tout a fait, c'etait mon premier poste, j'avais vingt ans." (Note: the accents are missing. I am not going to figure out the formatting nightmare that is inserting accents on blogger right now.)
Translated as: "I hadn't fallen yet, not exactly, it was my first post, I was twenty."
HMM. Thoughts?
5 comments:
bex: would you be creeped out if i told you that, approx 2 hours ago, i too was contemplating my love for semi-colons? true story. love you babe.
i would not be creeped out, i would be overjoyed. they are one of humanity's great inventions. i hope that you use them with joy and abandon.
I totally love the semi colon too, except I never know if I'm using it correctly because no one else I know uses it! And I'm guessing a lot of people who read what I write don't really care whether I use a semi-colon, as long as there's something in that space where they would naturally take a breath! (someone from work, for example, can't tell the difference between they're, there, and their.)
Cecilia, I am so glad to hear that! I actually think that semi-colons are much easier to use than commas, because they can join independent clauses; I don't think there's an obvious wrong way to use them. But recently this slate article on the em dash (http://www.slate.com/id/2295413/) made me totally insecure about my semi-colon usage...so it's helpful to have some encouragement!
Thanks for sharing! I had no idea that that the em-dash was called that, and that en-dash! Also just found out how to do the em-dash on a mac... shift option -, methinks.
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