French Short Stories 1: Parallel Text

French Short Stories #1

by Pamela Lyon (Editor), Raleigh Trevelyan (Editor)

The eight short stories in this collection, by Marcel Ayme, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Raymond Queneau and other French writers, have been selected for their literary merit and as representative of twentieth-century French writing. The English translations that are printed in a parallel text are literal rather than literary, and there are additional notes on the text.

This volume is intended primarily to help English-speaking students of French, but the stories also stand on their own and make excellent reading in either language.

Genres: France, Short Stories, Fiction, Language, Reference, Literature

269 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

Reviews

[Irena Pasvinter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Parallel text idea is helpful for advanced readers who want to tackle reading French fiction in its original version. The problem with this book is that most of the stories are either excruciatingly boring, or pretentious, or both. The decisive factor for the stories' inclusion into this book must have been their availability in public domain (free copyright). The only excellent story is the one by Marcel Ayme who also happens to be the only widely known author in this selection.

[AC · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read four stories – in a mix of French and English. The first, a sparse little Robbe-Grillet, astonished me because, typically dry in English, it was absolutely sparkling in the French. Well…, maybe that’s the wrong word, but it had a resonance – so that I could see suddenly why he is so well-regarded. The quality, the *tone* of his prose doesn’t transfer into English… but oh! it's there in the French.

The second story was by Marcel Jouhandeau. It was delightfully naturalistic – until the last paragraph, at which point I realized that I had no frikkin' idea at all what this story was about. It was short, though.

“Le Cheval Troyen”, by Raymond Queneau, was about a talking horse – in a bar. Mr. Ed… well, that’s a dumb comment. But the story seemed pretty dumb.

Finally, the longest piece I read, was Phillipe Sollers’ “Le Défi”. This one, written when he was only 21 or 22, really grabbed me --. Sollers, the husband of Julia Kristeva, and the chief force behind Tel Quels, was also the French translator of Finnegan’s Wake… man, he can write…

“Nous restions silencieux et la mer, sur le sable, respirait à notre place…


Previous comment:
The Penguin Parallel Text French Short Stories I, is edited by Pamela Lyon. Volume II is edited by Simon Lee

I am only planning to read the opening story:
Robbe-Grillet, "The Beach", ("La Plage"), pp. 11-24

Foucault was a big fan of Robbe-Grillet, as was Roland Barthes, whose famous essay on R.-G. is printed in this volume: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55...

James Miller discusses the group around Tel Quels (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tel_Quel), including Julia Kristeva, who eventually married Phillipe Sollers.

Vol. I contains a story by Sollers, titled "The Challenge" ("Le Défi"), pp. 216-265. Maybe I will try that one as well.

There are also stories here by by Marcel Aymé, Jean Ferry, Henri Thomas, Jouhandeau, Queneau ("The Trojan Horse"), Pierre Gascar - most of whom I've never heard of. Vol. II has a story from Blaise Cendrars ("The Unknown Saint").

[Sofie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I used to think I could understand the nuances and style of an English translation better than the original French. If these translations are anything to go by, that is not the case at all. Some are better than others, but overall the translations lack an absurd amount of specificity. Even if they don't leave out specific descriptions, they still use less specific words than were in the original, even when there's a good equivalent. I don't really understand why. Maybe it would sound clunky in English, but a foreign sounding translation would still be more interesting. But I guess that's why I read in languages I don't understand.
There's also the sound of the language, which is even harder to capture if you're translating literally. You don't even need to know the cadence of the language, or even the words used to notice repetition.
Other than an interesting look at translation, these books are essentially useless as learning tools. The translations are almost never word-for-word, and, as I said, they are consistently less specific. « Guêpe » is translated as "zip", when the author clearly means the bullets sounded like wasps, not that they went zip. This does not help you learn words, and if you can't understand the gist of a phrase, you should be reading something less advanced.
An index, and notes on the harder words and grammatical structures is considerably more helpful.

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading in a second language can be slow work, and it is easy to miss detail, and even easier to miss nuance. Thus the idea of parallel text is great. It is now possible to read a piece in French and compare what you read to a professional translation. Still reading material twice, but it helps a lot.

However there are two reasons where this nook falls down. Firstly, the stories are rather hit or miss, and as a collection, I was very disappointed. Was this a copyright issue? Surely Penguin could have done better in obtaining more interesting texts.

The second problem was that sometimes the translations were a little too fluid. This book would have worked best by keeping translations as literal as possible, so changing measurements from metric to imperial was a very odd choice, and there were various other points were the translator's choice might actually trip up the inattentive.

I bought this in a second hand bookshop. I am glad I didn't pay full price for it.

[Sarah Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in Paris and of course the stories are evocative. I most enjoyed the surreal ones - so unlike most English stories: The Fashionable Tiger by Jean Ferry and The Trojan Horse by Raymond Queneau. Both deal with the human qualities of animals and the less human qualities of humans!

[Eirik · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

I'm being a bit generous with my rating, but I did in fact think it was a somewhat more than decent book. The biggest problem honestly lies with the translations. They were not literal, and they did not always carry over the meaning of the French. Simply put, the English versions here were pretty bad, and only served as points of reference to get a better idea of what the French was saying.

But this is after all a book primarily intended for people learning French, and I think it achieves that goal. I liked how the stories got progressively more linguistically complex, and the footnotes (sometimes) helped me understand the cultural context of what I was reading. It would've been even better if the translations weren't so useless, but so be it.

The stories are fairly old at this point, and it definitely shows. But old doesn't mean bad, and a couple of them were thoroughly enjoyable. Others were much weaker, at least in my eyes, but that's just personal preference. I have in fact become curious about the authors of the stories that I liked, so as an introduction to French literature, I also think this collection does a decent job.

[Imaduddin Ahmed · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book jacket states that the volume is intended to help English speakers learn French. But the way the stories are translated, it fails at doing just that. 'Vache' is translated as 'swine', and not 'cow'; 'deux mille cinq cents metres' is translated as 'eight thousand feet', rather than 2500m; 'il fut presque en quarantaine' as 'sent to Coventry'. Massive fail.

[Bryan W · Rating 1 out of 5]

I came across this in a local bookstore and thought it would be a good way to practice reading French. Unfortunately, the stories were archaic, dull, and hardly ever seemed to line up with literal English translations, essentially a pointless endeavour and waste of money as far as I'm concerned. Will consign this to the toilet for future skimming when my French level improves.

[Diana Sandberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall pretty interesting. I did like the one by Marcel Ayme, The Seven League Boots, about a gang of small boys in Paris; I found it very engaging. And I rather liked The Offensive and The Little Square. Most of the others I didn't care for so much as fiction, but they were all useful to me as vehicles for learning to read and understand French.

I have a method for reading French that would definitely not suit everyone, but works for me. I read the text and underline every word I am not certain of the meaning, and I circle words or phrases that I understand but want to take note of, usually because it's a usage I'm not familiar with. Every few pages, I go back over the same text and look up every underlined word in the dictionary and write the translations in the margins. If a word has several meanings, I try to put them all in, because I think that the nuance of a particular use can be influenced by the subliminal awareness of its other meanings. I also compare the text to an English version, if I have one, and if I still don't understand a meaning I will go to the internet. Then I go back again and read the same words aloud, which causes me to focus differently. I often have to look up whether a leading 'h' is aspirated or not, or whether a final consonant is pronounced or not. When I finish the book, I will let it rest for a bit, then read it again.

Worthwhile.

I have completed all but the final step for this book, and I expect I may re-read it several times, maybe because it's short stories and I can complete a story arc in one sitting.

[Thomas Casey · Rating 3 out of 5]

The selection of stories here is excellent. I enjoyed them all. The trouble with this book is that most of the stories are at a C1/C2 grammar and vocabulary level. Intermediate French readers will struggle to get through the French text even with a dictionary at hand. For a series of stories of this type, which I assume is targeted to French language students, I would have preferred to see a more graduated selection that builds to C2 in a later volume. Intermediate French students who want to engage French narrative text should probably start elsewhere.

[Frumenty · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read all but the last story. Parallel texts are not for me. I'm not sure why I dislike them. There is something de-motivating about having the English translation just across the page from the original; it makes me think, why bother with the French, or whatever language? Certainly, I don't find them particularly helpful. I've given the book away now and don't remember the French titles of the stories. I thought "Hanged, cuckolded and happy" was rather insulting to women, in much the same way that Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" strikes me as insulting women; but Germaine Greer, of all people, defends that - work that out! I think if you represent a husband as a sort of horse-whisperer, then his wife is a sort of horse to be broken, either by kindness or discipline. On the subject of horses, "The Trojan horse" was bizarre without any redeeming qualities that I could see. The first story in the collection, by Alain Robbe-Grillet, about children on a beach, was very short and said next to nothing. There was a story of a baker's wife who run's off with the blacksmith's son, told from the point of view of a small boy who witnesses the whole thing from first glance to elopement without having any idea what is going on. I've probably forgotten about at least one story. My favourite was "The Seven League Boots", a story of childhood and imagination. There are several stories of children, of boys actually, in this book. I'm giving it three stars because I know I'm a miserable old grouch, so it's almost certainly better than I think it is. I've given away my other Penguin book of French stories with parallel translations without reading it, not even the English.

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

A highly entertaining and diverse collection of French short stories, which I believe to represent the themes and techniques explored in French literature in the 20th century, I enjoyed these stories for both their high literary value and creativity, their moral and social allusions about 20th century France and the diverse texture of the writing styles I experienced in the collection. Above all, reading this is really helpful for a French student to both gain new vocabulary and begin to understand French syntax and constructions in a literary context.

[Lester · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've been unable to finish this twice, and I finally realized that it is because I lost interest in most of the stories. So instead, I have decided to use the cunning trick of buying books that I want to read, and reading with my translation App to hand.

[Marina Sofia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps not the most representative selection of stories (nor the most contemporary), but an interesting premise - to have literal rather than literary translations.

[Firesalefredgmail.com · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun summer read. Foreign reads = less guilt over fluff ;) Good variety... would recommend.