Brilliant Posts

Ten great posts that I've read in the last few days

• Darlene (Roses over a Cottage Door) on favourite words - so good it made me want to do a top ten list of my favourite words, but I'm struggling to sort my ten
• Elisabeth Mahony on In Our Time (I loooove R4) h/t marbury
• Sally (Sow and Sew) with a brilliant stopmotion bookshelf reorganisation (I know, I know, sounds stupid, is actually brilliant) - also Sally's posting on 'discomfort' as a weekword was brilliant.
• #UkTownSongs - kicked off a couple of days ago, just brilliant.
• Joanna (Confident Writing) on 'what if' - a nice prompt to reflect on why and how I blog. 
• Claire (Paperback Reader) on her trip to see TV Book Club getting recorded
• A couple of goodies from Book Club Classics - passing on a list of 'best science writing of 2010' (following my recent reading of Henrietta Lacks) and a review of the Invisible Line (I've read a few things recently about race in the US...)
• Litlove (Tales from the reading room) with a thought provoking post on women and how we make things harder for ourselves and each other. 
• HBR on 30 things we need, and 30 things we don't - worky but also work-life-balancy
• OldSpice - there's a load of new ads up on youtube. Brilliant as ever.

Poudlard, Moldus and all that jazz

So - as part of my efforts to get back into the habit of reading in French, I just spent 10 days reading 'Harry Potter et l'ordre du phenix'. It's a fat old book - just over 1000 pages and in my cheapo edition with already-yellowing pages the print job wasn't great so every 15 pages or so there'd be loads of blobs of ink. But it really does crack along at quite a pace - and a couple of nights I pretty much resorted to reading under the bedclothes because I couldn't bear to stop yet and the lovely man needed his beauty sleep.


As I was reading it though, I realised why I've found watching the films slightly disconcerting - although I read the first few Harry Potters in English (I was at uni, what else was there to do??? other than a new author every bloody week), I've since read them all in French - and so I've got used to the French words for things. It's a great translation when the translator keeps the allusive and punning sense of language - so in Asterix we English bods have 'Getafix' the druid (he's called Panoramix in French), Dogmatix (for Idefix) and Vitalstatistix (for Abraracourcix).


In Harry Potter there's some lovely frenchifications in the original (Malfoy anyone? and what about Voldemort?) and then some great - and some not-so-great - translations.

Ce qui se concoit bien s'exprime clairement

et les mots pour le dire viennent aisement.

Brilliant, brilliant aphorism (? I think). My second landlord in Brussels made me learn it, and learn to pronounce it properly - apparently its the strapline for the Figaro newspaper though I've never checked that out.

It's almost impossible to translate into English with any style - something like "that which is well conceived, will express itself clearly and the words to say it will come easily". In English that's clumsy and I'd want to go for something more like "if you really understand what you want to say, you'll be able to do it clearly and the words will come easily". But it's a real shame to have to lose the focus on the idea itself.

Only other thing anyone insisted on my pronunciation over was learning to say "du the au lait" because the oo-ish sounds are very different and very hard. Still haven't got it nailed.