Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be at a French rock concert? Well, here you go: Matthieu Chedid, better known by his stage name M, singing “En tête à tête” (about five years ago in Paris). One of France’s most extravagant and innovative rock stars, M combines the driving, rhythmic motion of rock with the elegant evenness of the French language.

Below are the lyrics and a translation.

En tête à tête

By M
Ce matin j’lui presse des oranges
   mécaniquement
Les yeux encore un peu brouillés par le sommeil
J’me trouve nez à nez avec ce vers qui ne rime
   à rien
C’est vrai ce week-end je suis seul
   avec moi même

En tête à tête avec moi-même
Souvent j’me tâte pour trouver le thème
En tête à tête avec moi même
J’ai pas la force de dire je je je . . .

Il faut aimer pour comprendre
Nous aimer pour nous comprendre
Mieux aimer pour mieux comprendre
C’est vrai ce week-end je suis seul
   avec moi-même

En tête à tête avec moi-même
Souvent j’me tâte pour trouver le thème
En tête à tête avec moi même
J’ai pas la force de dire je je je . . .
En tête a tête
En tête a tête
En tête a tête
En tête a tête
En tête a tête
This morning I squeeze oranges
   without thinking
My eyes still a little blurry from sleeping
I face with this line that rhymes
   with nothing
It’s true I’m alone this weekend
   with myself

All alone with myself
I often hesitate to find the theme
All alone with myself
I don’t have the energy to say I, I, I . . .

We have to love to understand
To love ourselves to understand ourselves
Loving better to understand better
It’s true I’m alone this weekend
   with myself

All alone with myself
I often hesitate to find the theme
All alone with myself
I don’t have the energy to say I, I, I . . .
All alone
All alone
All alone
All alone
All alone

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.

Like many people in France last week, I went to the opening of Gainsbourg (vie héroïque), a film about Serge Gainsbourg (1928-91), the French songwriter, provocateur, and cultural icon. It’s hard to imagine the American equivalent of Gainsbourg, who is as famous in his own country as Elvis Presley is in the United States. To describe his personality and public presence, I thought about combining Bob Dylan, Abby Hoffman, and Charles Bukowski, but any mélange of American personalities would lack the French sensibility of Gainsbourg and the French culture that he both embodied and challenged.

That Gainsbourg, an inventive and disturbing cultural force, was virtually unknown in the United States even during his lifetime reflects the cocooning effect of language. Gainsbourg sang literary and sometimes shocking lyrics and provoked traditional French citizens into a fury, but Americans, deaf to the French language, were left undisturbed and unaffected.

The French book blog Cafebook has a good review of the film from a French perspective. When the film finally makes its way to the United States, Americans will get a chance to see a bit of why he was one of the strongest cultural forces in France during the second half of the twentieth century (and will not see anything from his last decade, when he was older and often drunk and sometimes less than impressive). Americans will also understand how he is now summarized: representing a strain of French Jewish identity after Nazi-controlled France; leading a dissolute life of drinking and smoking that eventually killed him; dating among the most beautiful women of his era, including Brigitte Bardot; and writing songs with sophisticated lyrics (often interpreted by other French singers), some of which trespassed the accepted borders of French society. When in 1979 Gainsbourg recorded a reggae version of “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, he provoked a riot.

Although Gainsbourg had relations with many women, he is best known for his marriage to Jane Birkin, who, despite being British, sang and continues to sing in French. Their daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg, is an actor and singer whose most recent album, IRM, was reviewed last week in the New York Times.

Here is the movie’s trailer. It seems at times more appropriate for a film called “The Sex Life of Serge.” The actual film is more subtle, artistic, and surrealistic, but alas, such is marketing.

For a glimpse of Gainsbourg in the 1960s, below is a video of “La Javanaise,” which he initially wrote for the singer Juliette Gréco.

Curiously “Starsky et Hutch” speak French.

But there remain some common complaints. Americans are loud. They’re overweight. They don’t care about other countries and couldn’t find France on a map. Recently on a plane I was sitting next to a Romanian woman who now lives in Chicago. She told me she had watched an American television quiz show, and the host asked the question, What’s Romania? The contestant, the Romanian woman assured me, guessed it was a type of lettuce.

As a person fond of both Europe and the United States, I just smiled. Not long ago someone here in France asked me if Chicago was a neighborhood of New York.

What does this have to do with literature? One of my favorite blogs is Three Percent, devoted to modern and contemporary international literature. It’s so called because only 3 percent of all books published in the United States are translations. According to Three Percent, among books of literary fiction and poetry, the figure is only 0.7 percent (in 2008 the most commonly translated language in this category was French, with 16 percent of the total, but that added up to only 59 books).

I’m afraid, at least in literature, the stereotype of Americans is true. We all spend time in the produce section, but few of us ever buy a Romanian book.

Allons voir plus loin, veux-tu? Voir la mer, la baie des anges et ses palmiers . . . un peu plus loin, de l’autre coté du Musée Masséna.

Translated into our more accented English, it said,

Let’s go see farther. Do you want to? See the sea, the Bay of Angels and its palm trees . . . a little farther, on the other side of the Masséna Museum.

Musée Masséna by DrOMM via Flickr

Musée Masséna? That’s in Nice, where I live, so how could I say no?

I had never met the person who wrote the note. In fact, I read the message on bookcrossing.com, a website that promotes “free range books.” The idea is simple: read a book, and afterward, instead of putting it to rest on your bookshelf, set it free. The site gives suggestions.

Leave it on a park bench, a coffee shop, at a hotel on vacation. Share it with a friend or tuck it onto a bookshelf at the gym – anywhere it might find a new reader!

When I found the listing for Allons voir plus loin, veux-tu? by Anny Duperey, I saw there were almost 800 books “in the wild” in France, all waiting for someone to find them. In the United States there were some 10,000 books left in parks, coffee shops, and other random places.

The site also lets readers post notes about books before passing them on to someone else. This copy of Allons voir plus loin, veux-tu? began in Feins, Bretagne, in the north of France. It then traveled to nearby Pléneuf-Val-André before heading south to Lyon and finally Nice in southeastern France, where a reader left a rather uninspired recommendation: “Enfin je ne sais pas pourquoi j’avais envie de lire ce livre! . . . mais j’ai passé un bon moment” (”In fact, I don’t know why I felt like reading this book! . . . but I had a good time”).

After reading the note, I decided it was my turn to “passer un bon moment.” Fortunately there was one more clue: “Livre laissé côté rue de France, sur les grilles du Musée” (”book left on the side of rue de France, on the gate of the museum”). As I was going to a concert that evening not far from the museum, I decided to “go hunting,” as the site says.

The museum is a stone’s throw from the sea and next to the famous Hotel Negresco, where, as one site claims, Claudia Schiffer, Orson Welles, and Michael Jackson all stayed. But rue de France is one street in from the sea, and at night, when I arrived, it seemed desolate. A light breeze was pushing around a plastic sack. I was wearing headphones, listening to the French pop singer Bénabar, and reached my hand through the gate to search through a thick stretch of shrubbery. I must have seemed like a thief or a homeless person.

After a while, something didn’t seem right.

I looked around and across the street. Two prostitutes stood waiting for tourists. A flic, as cops are called here, sped by on a motorcycle. Great, I thought. This is all fine, and I don’t mind the weirdness, but someone already took the book.

I love everything about these bold and stripped-down designs, which are by the Montreal firm Paprika—but especially the colors. One thing that makes this series work so well is that the design is very consistent, but each cover is also unique, which keeps things interesting. The Dada-esque illustrations are by Alain Pilon.

They look really good all together in a pile:

Image from AIGA Design Archives

Paprika won a lot of recognition for these designs, and you can read some comments on the work here:

• STEP Design 100 Judge’s Selection
• Graphex 2008 Judge’s Choice
• AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers of 2007 competition