Creative Output

In English I can breathe like air.
In French my easy breath is gone
to water that I’m choking on.
J’ai changé d’air, j’habite en Suisse,
I cannot live in cowardice,
so I speak in French a little more
l’air anglais dedans et dehors
the fractal mix like falling snow
la langue française joue le rôle de l’eau
that’s crystalised like none before
une neige si belle, j’en veux encore
l’eau à la bouche, mes langues y glissent,
I want to see some more of this
et rester dans la neige qui fond.
Je veux nager comme un poisson
dans l’eau française, courante et claire.

Apologies to those who only understand half of this poem. It’s explained further down. Further apologies to those who understand both parts well enough to know that the French doesn’t make much sense because I’m overreaching myself. I didn’t have a lot of time to check it with a native speaker, because I was invited out to a delicious Israeli lunch at a friend’s place and didn’t get home until late. It was worth it.

Shortly after I moved to Geneva at the end of March 2005, I experienced two amazing things for the first time. Seeing falling snow, and speaking French. In a workshop of the Geneva Writers’ Group about a year later, I compared these two experiences, and jotted down a few lines about it, in French. My main idea at that time was the expression, ‘l’air anglais’, which means ‘an English air’ with both senses of the word ‘air’. I thought that perhaps, one day, when I was better at French, I’d write a half-English, half-French poem comparing English to air and French to water, and describing the gradual shift towards French, never quite rid of the English influence (the air of Englishness), and thus yielding a beautiful snow.

I didn’t expect to write such a poem this week. I thought I’d end up writing a soppy love poem about two hearts, bonded like two atoms of oxygen. I didn’t even have time to deal the cards until Thursday night. Then on Friday morning I saw the card of Saussure, and was amused by the fact that he was covered in snow.

The only Saussure I knew of was a linguist, so I assumed it was him, and thought about writing something loosely based on the myth that eskimos have many more words for snow than we do. It would be called ‘Words for Snow’ and it would have something to do with the way having distinct words for things helps us differentiate them. Then I remembered those few lines I’d written, and decided it was time to take the plunge into the aerated French water.

In the interests of symmetry, I didn’t stop at snow, but went all the way to pure French at the end. As you’ve surely noticed, the poem, like myself, starts out in English gradually gets more French as it goes on, in the pattern EEEFEEFEFEFFEFFF. In a way it represents a one-dimensional snowflake, but mostly it just reflects the content of the poem. The rhymes are approximate, since French does not have the same sounds as English, but the rhyme scheme is also symmetrical, something like A_EB_EB_EC_FC_ED_ED_FG_EG_FD_ED_FC_FC_EB_FB_FA_F, where X_F represents a French sound which is somewhat similar to the English sound X_E. The worst match is in the Bs, I couldn’t find anything in English which sounded very much like that particular French nasal vowel, and didn’t want to lose the lines I’d written. A better writer would know when and how to let go of things she’d written.

The picture is supposed to be read, « l’eau et l’O₂ font la neige », or if you’re French, “Water and oxygen make snow” which is not a very comprehensive description of the phenomenon, but it’s the best I can do with so few magnets. Also, the word poking out of the mouth is ‘langue‘ which means either tongue or language.

So now for the translation. Perhaps later I’ll translate the entire poem, creating a new poem with the languages inverted, but for now I’ll just explain what I intended the French lines to mean.

J’ai changé d’air, j’habite en Suisse,

Changer d’air literally means ‘change the air’, which of course goes with the English=air metaphor. It is also an expression which, according to my French-French dictionary, can mean ‘leave, either temporarily or definitively’, but according to this wordreference thread (which I probably should have read before publishing this) can also mean something more like ‘get a breath of fresh air’ or ‘change the scenery’. J’habite en Suisse simply means I live in Switzerland. So together, this means, ‘I left definitively, I live in Switzerland’.

l’air anglais dedans et dehors

I mentioned this one before. It literally means ‘the English air inside and out’ referring either to air inside and outside of a snowflake, and the ‘air of English’ in my French.

la langue française joue le rôle de l’eau

Nothing fancy here, it just means, ‘the French language plays the role of water’. I’m almost certain this actually means what I want it to mean.

une neige si belle, j’en veux encore

Another simple one, though I’m not sure of the grammar. It should mean, ‘Such beautiful snow, I want more of it’.

l’eau à la bouche, mes langues y glissent,

This means something like ‘my mouth waters’ (again it’s a reference to water being French) ‘my tongues glide there’ which could either mean literal tongues in a mouth, or languages. I was gong to just say ‘the tongue/language glides’ but a friend said that this had too much of an implication of it being someone else’s tongue, which indeed it is in sense of French being someone else’s language, but it’s not something I wanted people thinking about in the other sense. So just to make it sound really bizarre, I claimed ownership of both languages and changed it to my tongues.

et rester dans la neige qui fond.
Je veux nager comme un poisson
dans l’eau française, courante et claire.

This should mean something like, ‘and stay in the melting snow, I want to swim like a fish in the flowing and clear French water’. I specifically chose the word courante because this is the word used for running water, and also for fluent speech.

In the last four weeks I’ve used up four ideas from before this adventure started. Next week, I guess I’ll have to think of something new.