10 tips for a great romance in Paris - Clémentine Beauvais

Cheating a bit today, but since my book In Paris with you, translated by Sam Taylor, is now out in the US with Wednesday Books, I thought I'd republish an article I wrote for a magazine at the time when the British version came out.

I know that at least ONE person got a great romantic Parisian weekend out of it. So there.

Warning: Might not be devoid of some sarcasm.

10 TIPS FOR A GREAT ROMANCE IN PARIS

1. Don’t actually be a Parisienne

I was a Parisienne for 18 years and frankly, there was very little I found romantic when I lived there. Intense emotion occurred only when the bus stop was cleaned, or when my favourite kebab introduced a new sauce. However, now that I’ve been a Britannique for 12 years, going back to Paris fills me with joy and longing, and a dirty Abribus is lovely to behold.

2. Be in love amidst skulls

Not enough lovers visit the Catacombs, which is weird, because the perspective is appealing : kilometers of underground passages whose walls and ceilings are almost entirely made up of the skulls and bones of people who died of plague at some point. Go there hand in hand and meditate on love and death. It’s like drifting across a Dutch vanity painting, for hours.

3. Whatever you do, don’t lock your love to a bridge

There’s a special place in hell for the sad, absurd couples who do this. That place is dull, smells of cabbage, and the couples there are condemned for the rest of eternity to bicker about which way the toilet roll should hang. Love locks are ugly, what they symbolise is ugly, and they quite literally break centuries-old architecture. In lieu of that, here’s other things to tie to things if that’s your thing : your lover’s hands, to a bedpost.

4. Don’t go up the Eiffel Tower

The Eiffel Tower is too high. It bulldozes the beautiful Parisian cityscape into a greenish-grey flatland. Instead, walk up the escargot-like chalky staircases of Notre-Dame, and kiss right next to the bells and the Gruffalesque gargoyles. Much more romantic, much better views.

5. A quirky story to tell your lover, walking down the Seine, when you’ve run out of things to say.

Because there’s nothing like a story of drowning to revive a waning conversation. In the 1880s, a woman was pulled out of the Seine’s murky waters, drowned, but extremely beautiful indeed, to the extent that she was exhibited publically for all to see. A death mask was made of her fine features, which many people then acquired to hang on their walls (normal). She became known as L’Inconnue de la Seine. Many years later, in the 1950s, her face was used to create the first CPR mannequin. So, if you’ve ever done a first aid course, chances are you applied your lips to a face very much like that of this mysterious fin de siècle French beauty.

6. Don’t give them your 06

« Hey mademoiselle, tu me files ton 06 ? » - hey miss, give me your 06 ! – is what some catcallers used to shout at you in a desperate attempt to win access to mobile phone numbers (which mostly start with 06 in France). Catcallers today might ask for your snapchat or instagram handle instead, but whatever they’re trying to do, they are the plague of Parisian streets and the antithesis of romance. Don’t give them your 06.

7. Find a late-night alcove in a hotel bar

For instance, the tiny, beautiful bar of the Hôtel des Beaux-Arts in the 6th arrondissement. There’s never anyone there, they serve good cocktails, it’s all plump cuhsions and velvety armchairs, and the plush alcoves are good at keeping secrets.

8. 8 books to read before you go to Paris

Or during, when you don’t feel like talking to your lover, like, 24/7, because we all need space from time to time, don’t we ? L’inconnue de la Seine, conveniently, is a prominent presence in one of the most splendid love stories in French literature, Louis Aragon’s Aurélien. You should also read my book, I think : In Paris with You, translated by Sam Taylor. Another six facets of Paris : Emile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise ; Colette’s Claudine in Paris ; Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins ; Tardi’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec ; Tiphaine Rivière’s Notes on a Thesis ; and Virginie Despentes’ Vernon Subutex.

9. Find those nine things and kiss in front of them

A fun game to play if you’re both getting a bit bored of each other by now. One mural of Gainsbourg and Birkin. Two Statues of Liberty. Three Space Invaders. Two windmills. One statue of a rhinoceros.

10. Ten cheeses to fix a broken heart

In case the trip to Paris didn’t turn out as romantic as expected, and s/he finally ditched you in front of that rhinoceros (damn rhinoceros). A cœur de Neufchâtel seems appropriate to begin with. Then a lovely Saint-Nectaire, runny like your nose ; a mimolette vieille, as rusty and flaky as your self-confidence ; a crottin de Chavignol (crottin means little turd : like your ex), a tiny bouton de culotte (pants’ button) to remind yourself of that crottin’s underwear ; an époisses and a maroilles, because you don’t care about what your breath smells like anymore ; some fourme d’Ambert, black and blue and mouldy like your poor heart ; and a slice of Chaussée aux Moines, because a monk-like existence is what you’re likely to have now and forever.

And finally, a nice big chunk of gorgonzola dolce, to make you want to fly off to Italy : it’s much more romantic there.

Enjoy!

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Clémentine Beauvais is a writer and literary translator. Her YA novels in English are Piglettes (Pushkin, 2017) and In Paris with You (trans. Sam Taylor, Faber, 2018).

Translating One - Clémentine Beauvais

I’ve just submitted to one of my French publishers, Rageot, the full first draft of my translation of Sarah Crossan’s One, to be published next year. Yes, I’ve had the privilege (and the insane good luck) to translate that wonderful, beautiful, exceptionally moving book into French.

Neither of Sarah’s verse novels has been translated into French yet, which is easy to understand: verse novels aren’t an easy candidate for translation. Plus, verse novels for teenagers are virtually unknown in France - when my own verse novel, Songe à la douceur, came out in August, my publisher Sarbacane put together a press release explaining that the format is well-known and popular in the UK and the US, and giving examples, because they knew it wasn’t going to be an easy sell.

Having seen that I’d just published a verse novel, Rageot, who are also bringing to the French market my Sesame Seade series next year (ironically, not translated by me), contacted me one day to ask me if I knew Sarah’s work - they’d just read One and were considering acquiring it. I replied immediately: ‘Of course I know it! Please acquire it! And can I please translate it?’ I’m generally not pushy with publishers, so that was very out of character, and possibly the brashest thing I’ve ever done. Amazingly, they said yes.

Translating One has been a scary experience, not just because it was the first time I’d translated a verse novel, but because it was also the first time I’d translated a novel, full stop (apart from my own translation into English of one of my French novels). I was acutely aware that I wasn’t a professional translator and that drawing from my experience of writing in two languages wasn’t enough; I got as much reading done on the matter as I could, talked to translator friends, and studied various theories of translation.

But of course, translating children’s literature has its own theories; translating poetry, yet more theories; translating novels, more so; etc. The answers just weren’t solely theoretical, and most of what I learned I learned on the go. Here are some of the most interesting challenges and difficulties I ran into while translating Sarah’s text.

An intriguing characteristic of One is that it’s a verse novel with only very few, very strategically-used rhymes. At the beginning, I was extremely keen to stick to what I interpreted as the ‘wishes’ of the text in that respect. But I found that it was actually very hard in French. French has many categories of words that end similarly - adjectives, past participles, verbs in the infinitive, etc. - so it was often tricky not to make two lines rhyme.

Not just tricky - unnatural. And, as I gradually decided, unnecessary. I warmed to the idea that rhyming would not be, as I’d first categorically ruled, an easy concession, a tacky poetic embellishment of a text that was, so to speak, ‘intentionally left blank’. I discovered that, in French, allowing rhymes to exist in their natural space rendered more accurately the fluidity of Sarah’s original text. 

The occasional ‘new’ rhymes also compensated for something that I often had to lose in translation, namely the very alliterative quality of the English language. Non-Latinate English words tend to be short, evocative in sound, often even onomatopoeic, perfect for poetic effect in brief lines, often of one or two words, sometimes one-letter words.

In French, this isn’t so easy. Many words are long, overloaded with prefixes and suffixes, and opting for lighter or more sonorous alternatives, while often possible, isn’t always desirable - Grace and Tippi’s words in the original text sound very natural, simple, instinctive, and I couldn’t have my French Tippi and Grace resort to lighter, but weirder, synonyms.

The added rhymes therefore ‘displaced’, so to speak, the sound effects internal to the lines in Sarah’s original text to the end of the lines; they moved musicality to a different place.

Another difficulty in French was to render the minimalistic aesthetic of Sarah’s language. There is something haiku-like to Sarah’s style, which works in English to a great extent because the grammar is so lightweight, with many optional words (especially articles), and minimal machinery for stringing clauses together. Authors can occult words they don’t want; translators can’t.

In fact, that very sentence - ‘Authors can occult words they don’t want; translators can’t’ - is a good example: in French, a literal translation would have to be ‘Les auteurs peuvent occulter les mots dont ils ne veulent pas; pas les traducteurs’, totalling 5 more words than the original English sentence. Such inflation is a well-known phenomenon in translation; texts are expected to swell in size from English to French.

This is all very well for a ‘normal’ novel, so to speak, but for a verse novel, we couldn’t have Sarah’s small lines suddenly take up a paragraph. Plus, her discreet use of ‘that’, ‘who’, ‘since’, ‘why’, etc - soft sounds in English - would be disastrously unpoetic in French: ‘que’, ‘qui’, ‘jusque’, ‘pourquoi’, are harsh-sounding, chunky words you don’t want to overuse.

One of the tricks I found was to resort to verb-less sentences, which in French are relatively rare but have a dreamlike, stream-of-consciousness quality that rendered, in some places, Grace’s reflections much more fluidly than the stolid French grammar would allow otherwise. I also very rarely fiddled with lines or enjambments, but I did when lines ended too clumsily on brick-like connectives like the ones listed above.

I can’t conceal that I’m a bit terrified, in part because it’s the first time and in part because I know that I’m not a professional translator. I’ve wrestled a lot with the nagging thought that I’m doing someone else’s work, and that I’ve come at it from a weird place. But I feel I’ve learned a lot, and worked and reworked again and changed my mind and fiddled and tweaked and rewritten; in other words, I’ve done my best. It’s now in my editors’ hands, and I look forward to reworking it, again, when it gets back to me.