Although poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) is not a pop lyricist, the words to one of his best-known poems, “Le Pont Mirabeau” (”The Mirabeau Bridge”), were put to music by Marc Lavoine, pictured above on the cover of his CD titled simply Marc Lavoine (2001). “Le Pont Mirabeau,” the first track on the CD, is a bridge in Paris that spans over the Seine River. Apparently Apollinaire had to walk over the bridge to get to the home of painter Marie Laurencin, his girlfriend from 1907 to 1912. It is also the bridge where poet Paul Celan likely killed himself in 1970. His body was found miles downstream.

Below is Lavoine, since the 1980s a successful French actor and crooner, singing “Le Pont Mirabeau.”

The poem has been translated into English many times and in many ways. Here are a few well-known attempts to translate it. Some of the differences come from the translators’ struggle to replicate the rhyme scheme in English without straying too far from the meaning in French. But a more literal translation, without regard to rhyme, would also be open to question. The meaning even in French is ambiguous (as this brief and useful summary of the poem, in French, points out).

Below is the text of the poem, as well as a more or less literal, though debatable, translation.

Le Pont Mirabeau

By Guillaume Apollinaire
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

Les mains dans les mains restons face à face
Tandis que sous
Le pont de nos bras passe
Des éternels regards l’onde si lasse

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

L’amour s’en va comme cette eau courante
L’amour s’en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l’Espérance est violente

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure
Under the Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine
And our passion
Must I remember again
Joy always came after the pain

Comes the night, strikes the hour
The days go by, but I remain

Hand in hand, let’s stay face to face
While under
The bridge of our arms move
The waters so weary of our eternal gaze

Comes the night, strikes the hour
The days go by, but I remain

Love passes by like this flowing water
Love passes by
In the way that life lags
And hope brings violence

Comes the night, strikes the hour
The days go by, but I remain

The days pass, and the weeks pass,
Neither time past
Nor the passion returns
Under the Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine

Comes the night, strikes the hour
The days go by, but I remain

The long list for the Orange Prize for Fiction was announced last week. One of the top literary awards in the U.K., along with the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Book Award, the £30,000 prize is given to a woman author of any nationality for the best original novel written in English.

Culled from a pile of 129 contenders, this year’s long list is comprised mostly of British authors, but there are also three from the U.S. (including Lorrie Moore and Barbara Kingsolver), as well as lone representatives from New Zealand and Morocco. In addition to the works of established authors, the list features seven debut novels, including Rosie Alison’s The Very Thought of You, which has, until now apparently, not received a single review from a British national newspaper.

See the full list here.

The Orange Prize is making news this year because of some provocative comments made by the chair of the judge’s panel, author and TV producer Daisy Goodwin, who complained that she’d been inundated by “misery literature”—a surfeit of rape, child abuse, and bereavement—that made her feel like a “social worker” on the verge of slitting her wrists.

“There was very little wit, and no jokes,” Goodwin told the Independent.

“I was surprised at how little I laughed,” she told the Guardian, charging that such novels represent little more than a repackaging of the highly marketable “misery memoir” and that publishers are “lagging behind what the public want.”

Goodwin also made repeated references to the neglected value of reading as “pleasure” and her desire to be absorbed in a “pleasurable” book. Some took her remarks as a call for lighter fare, but I think she is getting at something else when she says that, to be compelling, a story must have more than an “issue” at its core. Although Goodwin’s comments were inelegantly delivered, it seems legitimate to insist that a literary novel must be defined by its artistry—in its prose, in its ideas, and in the keen, unique subjectivity of its narrator or protagonist—not merely by its graphic depiction of violence or misfortune. Perhaps it was not the content of the “misery” novels that Goodwin objected to but rather the writing itself.

I’m particularly interested in the question of humor and how women might use it more, even in their darkest stories. Granted it’s not easy to be funny about personal tragedy, but it’s worth trying, as humor can transform a narrative of victimization into one of resistance and self-possession.

Perhaps you didn’t notice, but next month Soft Skull Press is releasing The Bad Life, the English translation of Frédéric Mitterrand’s “memoir” La mauvaise vie (2005). Over the last few months the author has become controversial, and in response Soft Skull published a defense of the book on its blog.

We’d just like to say that what is most surprising to us regarding the situation is that Mr. Mitterrand’s story has for quite some time been public knowledge to the French people, and in the most high-profile fashion. The Bad Life was published four years ago and became a bestseller in France. The controversial passages have been known to us all along and, among other things, it was the frankness and thoughtfulness with which Mr. Mitterrand discussed his life that drew us to the project. Whether you agree with Mr. Mitterrand’s story or habits, he approaches them with a compelling and thought-provoking honesty and we continue to stand behind this elegant and brave book in the same way we have since undertaking to publish it here. As a publisher, Soft Skull has always embraced controversial conversations.

So, then, who is Frédéric Mitterrand, and what did he do to cause such a scandal?

Monsieur Mitterrand is the nephew of the former French president François Mitterrand. In June 2009, after many years as a documentary maker, writer, and television presenter, he became the French minister of culture and communication under the current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, supposedly at the urging of Sarkozy’s wife, the singer and former model Carla Bruni. France is famous for looking the other way when politicians and other personalities transgress moral norms in their personal lives. Hardly anyone in France seemed to care when Mitterrand’s book appeared in French in 2005, even though what he says about paying for prostitutes in Thailand is hardly accepted behavior in France.

Tous ces rituels de foire aux éphèbes, de marché aux esclaves m’excitent énormément. La lumière est moche, la musique tape sur les nerfs, les shows sont sinistres et on pourrait juger qu’un tel spectacle, abominable d’un point de vue moral, est aussi d’une vulgarité repoussante. Mais il me plaît au-delà du raisonnable. La profusion de garçons très attrayants, et immédiatement disponibles, me met dans un état de désir que je n’ai plus besoin de refréner ou d’occulter. L’argent et le sexe, je suis au cœur de mon système ; celui qui fonctionne enfin car je sais qu’on ne me refusera pas.

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All the rituals of the market for young men, the slave market, excite me enormously. The light is awful, the music gets on your nerves, the shows are dreary, and such a spectacle, abominable from a moral standpoint, could also be judged as a hideous vulgarity. But it pleases me beyond reason. The profusion of boys, very attractive and immediately available, puts me in a state of desire I no longer need to restrain or hide. Money and sex, I am at the heart of my system, that which functions in the end because I know that no one will refuse me.

In France the book was critically acclaimed and sold well, but something changed in 2009. Mitterrand, now a politician, threw himself into an international controversy: the arrest in Switzerland of director Roman Polanski, a French citizen, who had fled the United States in 1978 after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a thirteen-year-old girl. Mitterrand called the arrest “frightening.” Unfortunately for Mitterrand, what he seemed to be admitting in his book—sex with underage boys—was immediately identified with Polanski’s crime, sex with an underage girl. Both French Socialists (the party of his uncle) and the ultra-right-wing Front National attacked him for pedophilia and “sex tourism.” It was left to President Sarkozy’s party, the right-wing UMP, to defend its minister of culture. The party’s spokesman, Xavier Bertrand, expressed his support in a typical French way. “On n’est pas obligé d’utiliser la vie privée des gens à des fins politiciennes” (“One is not obliged to use someone’s private life for political ends”).

Hardly surprising, the issue ended up being more complicated than it first seemed. Most importantly, the book is, as its French publisher (Éditions Robert Laffont) states, a roman d’inspiration autobiographique (“novel of autobiographical inspiration”). In other words, it’s a mixture of memory and imagination. The controversial material is found on only a few pages. The book covers a much longer period of his life and concerns something more general, as Mitterrand hints at here when referring to himself in the third person.

Autrefois on aurait dit qu’il s’agissait de la divulgation de sa part d’ombre ; aujourd’hui on parlerait de “coming out.” Il ne se reconnaît pas dans ce genre de définition. La mauvaise vie qu’il décrit est la seule qu’il a connue.

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In the past one would have said it was a matter of revealing his dark side; today one would speak of “coming out.” He doesn’t recognize himself in this type of definition. The bad life he describes is the only life he knew.

Mitterrand eventually went on French television to discuss the controversy. He denied having sex with underage boys, saying gay men often call other men “boys.” He echoed misgivings expressed in the book, saying payment for sex was “an offence against the idea of dignity, human dignity.” And ultimately, as when the book first appeared in 2005, many (though not all) French people admired his honesty in discussing the issue. To this day he remains the minister of culture and communication.

Of course, I don’t know whether Mitterrand is telling the truth. But I give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s a smart man (if you understand French, see the video below), and it doesn’t seem bright to mention in a “memoir” that you committed what would be a serious crime in your own country. France, of course, prosecutes people who have sex with minors.

But what about the book itself, its quality and literary merit? As we have learned so many times before, art is not a reflection of the moral rectitude of the creator. Art, in this case an arrangement of words, stands on its own. On the back of the French edition, a blurb describes the work as “délicat, pudique jusque dans l’impudeur” (“delicate, discreet to the point of indiscretion”). In reading the book, I was absorbed by the author’s elegant style, his search for understanding, of himself and of things around him, whether real or imagined. I found it to be an impressive and moving confession of an unsettling and at times disturbing life.

Translation is a funny business. With a novel it’s important not only to maintain the meaning of the original text but to express that meaning in a way that can be understood and appreciated by people conditioned in another culture. For commercial publishers there’s another concern: how best to attract potential buyers.

In 1951 Catcher in the Rye became an instant best seller in the United States. Soon it started to spread across the globe, contorting itself into different languages. Although in some countries the title kept its literal referents (catcher, rye), elsewhere publishers chose titles that presumably better expressed the intended meaning, or would be more interesting or understandable to their readers, than a literal translation. In Swedish it became Raddaren i noden (”Savior in a Crisis”); in Hungarian, Zabhegyezõ (“A Sharpener of Oats”); and in Polish, Buszujący w zbożu (”Rummage Around in the Corn”).

In France J.D. Salinger’s classic became L’attrape-coeurs (”The Catcher of Hearts”). Why didn’t the French choose a more literal translation? I’ve read several explanations.

The English and French titles are both taken from a scene with Holden and his younger sister, Phoebe, with Holden starting off.

“You know what I’d like to be?” I said. “You know what I’d like to be? I mean if I had my goddam choice?”

“What? Stop swearing.”

“You know that song ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye’? I’d like —”

It’s ‘If a body meet a body coming through the rye’!” old Phoebe said. “It’s a poem. By Robert Burns.”

Holden then says he imagines a field of rye next to a cliff, and in the field thousands of kids are running around. He is the only big person there to protect them from falling off the edge.

I mean if they’re running and don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.

In the French version of the book, Holden says something different.

Tu connais la chanson « Si un cœur attrape un cœur qui vient à travers les seigles » ? Je voudrais . . . (”You know the song ‘If a heart catches a heart coming through the rye’? I’d like . . .”)

When Phoebe corrects him, she uses the word “body” (corps), not “heart” (coeur), and the French is a literal translation from the English.

C’est « Si un corps rencontre un corps qui vient à travers les seigles ». C’est un poème de Robert Burns.

But when Holden continues his thought, he goes to back to using “heart.”

C’est ce que je ferais toute la journée. Je serais juste l’attrape-cœurs et tout. (”That’s what I would do all day. I would just be the catcher of hearts and all.”)

Why did the translator choose the French word for “heart” and not “body” here? One theory I read is that for an adolescent the body is often confused with the heart and with hormones energizing the body. For Holden, then, it would be normal for a teenager to mix up the two words.

But another idea is that a well-known book, Boris Vian’s L’arrache-coeur (English title: Heartsnatcher), was published not long before the French version of Catcher in the Rye and that the publisher wanted to make the connection. In fact, at a dinner in Nice recently, I asked people at the table why the book was called L’attrape-coeurs, and someone immediately thought of Vian.

So my best guess is that, while the translator and the publisher remained faithful to the original meaning in the scene of Holden and Phoebe, the use of coeur (”heart”)—and especially the turn of phrase “L’attrape-coeurs”—was at least in part a marketing strategy.

My copy of Franny and Zooey is a 1961 Little, Brown hardback (fifth printing, mind you), stamped “discarded” and sold to me for less than a dollar by the Missoula Public Library. Still covered in protective cellophane, the dust jacket contains this note from the author about the project he had undertaken:

Both stories are early, critical entries in a narrative series I’m doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses. It is a long-term project, patently an ambitious one, and there is a real-enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I’ll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I’m very hopeful. I love working on these Glass stories, I’ve been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill . . . I have a great deal of thoroughly unscheduled material on paper . . . but I expect to be fussing with it . . . for some time to come . . . I work like greased lightning, myself, but my alter-ego and collaborator, Buddy Glass, is insufferably slow.

As a writer, I am inspired by the intimacy of Salinger’s relationship with the fictional Glass family, by his own particular immersion in the character of Buddy, and by the notion of his having found (or received, somehow, finally) his true material. As a reader, Franny and Zooey is brilliant to me in its portrait of the profound loyalty and understanding that exists between siblings who share “the exact same goddam freakish upbringing,” as Zooey says. I consider the long scene where Zooey is smoking in the bathtub and talking to his mother as one of the most wonderful I’ve read. But I’m by no means a Salinger buff, and I was unaware (before reading the New York Times obituary) of the critical disdain that greeted the book at the time of its publication. Apparently many—from Joan Didion to John Updike—found the Glass children insufferable and excoriated Salinger for what they saw as his self-indulgent and over-wrought devotion to them.

Janet Malcolm details and refutes these criticisms in her excellent article “Justice to Salinger” (New York Review of Books, 2001), claiming that critical antipathy toward the Glass characters in fact signals the genius of Salinger’s creations. Here’s an excerpt:

Throughout the Glass stories—as well as in Catcher—Salinger presents his abnormal heroes in the context of the normal world’s dislike and fear of them. These works are fables of otherness—versions of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” However, Salinger’s design is not as easy to make out as Kafka’s. His Gregor Samsas are not overtly disgusting and threatening; they have retained their human shape and speech and are even, in the case of Franny and Zooey, preternaturally good-looking. Nor is his vision unrelentingly tragic; it characteristically oscillates between the tragic and the comic. But with the possible exception of the older daughter, Boo Boo, who grew up to become a suburban wife and mother, none of the Glass children is able to live comfortably in the world. They are out of place. They might as well be large insects. The critics’ aversion points us toward their underlying freakishness, and toward Salinger’s own literary deviance and irony.

If you’re a fan of Salinger and mourning his loss, Malcolm’s article is well worth the read.