Sharon Harrigan

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Four Things Lost in Translation

 

1. This picture, even though it’s translated in several languages, is still an enigma to Ella. The signs are everywhere in Paris. Since I never answered when she asked me what it is, she’s invented her own explanation. “There’s the funny hotdog man again,” she says, pointing, when we walk past. Each time I hope no one within earshot speaks English.

2. As I stood at the counter of a cafe to drink an espresso, the barwoman called Ella “poupée.” I know this means doll, but when I returned home I looked it up, to see if it’s a common endearment. My dictionary told me that the English translation is “toots.” I pity the poor French tourist in America, thinking he’s so au courant, “toots”-ing American children.

3. Ella has a French-French dictionary for beginners, a reference we’re told all young French children use. There are several maps at the end, including one of the United States, with pictures to help new readers. Imagine my surprise when I saw the White House placed in the upper left, in the state right above Oregon. Who knew our capital had moved to the Pacific Northwest?

4. Ella enjoys ordering herself, and every time, after she asks for a baguette or sandwich or chevre, the merchant responds, in French, “That’s all?” “Ca suffit,” Ella says (that’s enough), prompting a laugh. “Why do they keep laughing at me?” Ella asked me today. I told her ça suffit might sound funny coming from a kid. Maybe it’s what grown-ups say to kids who drive them crazy. “Arrete,” I can imagine them saying. “Stop. Ca suffit! Cut it out!”

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Paris Journal: Public Toilets

One of the quotidian marvels of Paris is its system of public toilets. These hygenic enclosures line the city streets, as efficient, uniform, and convenient as everyone had hoped the Euro would be.

So you can imagine my surprise, on arriving at the Bois de Boulogne, the Paris equivalent of Central Park, to find ourselves in a bathroom crisis. Maybe toilets really are like the Euro, after all.

The park is large, acre upon acre, and the map showed only one toilet, far from where we were, for what must have been thousands of parkgoers that day. We asked the woman serving frites at a kiosk. “None,” she said. We asked the man renting ponies the size of golden retrievers. “Aucune,” he repeated. Another vendor suggested we leave the park altogether. “Maybe we could find a nice tree to hide behind,” I said. My husband shook his head. “Remember Prospect Park,” my daughter said. I won’t tell you what happened in that leafy Brooklyn enclave, except to say that the memory clarified the need to find a real toilet, san aucune doute.

In New York City, I’d always played the kid card: “My child has to go to the bathroom,” I’d say at a bar or laundromat (even if I was the one). But this tactic didn’t work in the Bois de Boulogne. The French had a secret place to perform their private acts, surely, but no one would tell us where it was.

Finally, my husband came up with a brilliant plan.

 

We would rent a boat and row to the only bathroom. Afterwards, my daughter was sufficiently relieved to even do some rowing herself.

 

Look how strong she is. Hey, maybe there’s still hope for the Euro, too.

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Paris Journal: Kiko Le Chien

Living in another country is like traveling back in time. Not to another era, but another age. Childhood. We speak in syncopated sentences with super-simple vocabulary, while children rollerblading in the park sound as if they’re discussing the Euro crisis or Deconstructionism or maybe the meaning of life, more quickly and multi-syllablically than seems possible.

We start to read picture books. It’s odd that our daughter, who just finished The Book Thief and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in English, doesn’t know all the words of Kiko Le Chien in French. Stranger still, neither do we.

Here we are, reading about that silly dog who wants to skateboard in the park. “Can’t you read?” the park gardien asks Kiko, pointing to a sign that says dogs must be on leash. Of course I can’t read, Kiko thinks. I’m a dog!

Of course we can’t read everything in French yet. We’re Americans.

But here we are, sprawled on the sofa with a plucky pooch, tucking away all our experience and education, all our preconceptions about how we’re supposed to act and what we’re supposed to know. Here we are, seeing the world with kindergarten eyes, laughing at Kiko, and ourselves.

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Paris Journal: Doctor’s Visit

 

You don’t know how foreign a country is until you experience it with a sick child.

Last Friday, Ella had a throbbing pain in her right palm. She couldn’t sleep, and her face was red with fever.

Where would we go? Weren’t Parisian doctors at the beach for all of August? The whole city seemed emptied for les vacances.

We finally found a doctor, not the one recommended by our friends who lived here last year (she was on vacation, of course), but another, one Metro transfer away. She gave us an appointment for an hour later.

On the Metro we sat next to a girl clutching a flowered backpack, in shorts and sneakers, traveling by herself. Ella didn’t agree that the girl looked about nine. Maybe Ella thought if she admitted that girls her own age rode the Metro alone, I might make her do the same.

I was surprised when Dr. Masson greeted us herself, the receptionist perhaps at the beach with the rest of Paris. We waited only ten minutes, less than I would expect in the U.S. Dr. Masson asked a few questions and typed our answers into her computer. Ella explained (in English) that she will soon start attending a bilingual school, where she will learn French. “But surely you know some French,” the doctor continued, in French. “No.” That’s all she said, but I inferred, “Ask me to try any other day, when I’m not sick.” During our week in Paris so far, she had been showing off, talking to shopkeepers and waiters, asking for directions to the bathroom by herself. But not today.

“Has she ever had des verrus?” the doctor asked, examining Ella’s palm. “I don’t know that word,” I said, looking it up. “No, she’s never had warts. I think it’s an old splinter.” Une echarde. I’d looked up that word before I left our apartment. “I think the splinter caused an infection, c’est pourquoi she has a fever.”

The doctor pulled a few squat bottles and long syringes from a drawer. “It’s just like at the dentist,” she said to Ella, as if this would reassure her. “I’ll give you a shot, so you won’t feel a thing.” Ella has never gotten a shot from a dentist, since she doesn’t have cavities. But that’s not why she gave me a puzzled look. It’s because she didn’t understand a word.

So I translated. The doctor numbed part of Ella’s hand and pulled out a scalpel. “You feel my finger ici?” the doctor asked. “Does it hurt where she’s touching you?” I translated. “Yes,” Ella said. So the doctor gave her another shot, more local anaesthesia. Finally, “Ici? Ici?” asked the doctor. “Here? Here?” “No,” Ella said. Then she sucked in her breath and bit her lips at the sight of the knife: the same response in any language.

The doctor excavated two splinters and displayed them to us. “You want to take them home or put them in la poubelle?” “The garbage,” Ella said.

“When you take this to the pharmacy,” the doctor said, handing me the prescription, they might tell you it’s wrong, but it’s not. She needs a very strong antibiotic for a very bad infection.”

“It’s a very bad infection?” I asked, not translating for Ella, hoping she wouldn’t worry too much.

“It’s not so bad yet,” the doctor said, but it’s close to an artery that leads to the heart.”

We paid and thanked her, then walked out onto rue Violet.

“Close to the heart,” Ella echoed the doctor, leaning against me on the Metro, glad, I’m sure, to be with her mother and her mother tongue,  in a city so big, with a language so new and strange.

So she’d understood, after all. At least a little bit. Maybe she thought she’d be left on her own, like the little girl on the train, if she could follow the doctor’s words without help. “We caught the infection in time,” I said, hoping Ella inferred “I’ll never leave you alone,” as we sped above ground, the Tour Eiffel looming out the window, our breath synchronized, as I held her against my chest. Close to the heart.

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Paris Journal: Wildly Inscribed

On the plane, I saw what I thought I would be expected to look like in France: a woman my age, with a waifish coiffe and a waspish waist, cigarette pants with a zipper up the shin and skinny boots to her knees. She sat across the aisle from me, pulled on a cashmere shawl, nibbled lettuce from a plastic bag, then settled into cat-like repose.

But once we arrived, she disappeared, like the cigarette smoke that also seems to be nowhere here. Instead, at the airport, we saw people all sizes and shapes, using luggage carts as scooters. Wearing head wraps. Some even sporting shorts.

Our first introduction to French culture was through bread. Steven Kaplan, our landlord and a scholar specializing in the history of bread, met us at the apartment then took us to his favorite bakery: Dominique Saibron, on rue Alesia. Sitting at a sidewalk table, we ate tartines (a baguette sliced in half, with butter and jam on the side), while he explained to us that one of the reasons the bread was good was because it was sauvagement inscrit. Wildly inscribed. It didn’t have a honeycomb-like, regularly repeated pattern, but was unpredictable, some holes large, some small, all different shapes.

I didn’t think about it at the time, but now the Alesia Baguette, with its goal of heterogeneity and surprise, seems like an apt metaphor for Paris itself. Next time I’ll leave all preconceptions of what Parisians are like—and of what I’m expected to be like—on the plane.