Remembering Mrs. V...
Apr. 2nd, 2005 08:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpI've written about my high-school French teacher, Mrs. Vamvakis, before (here and here, at least), and I had occasion to remember her again today, when I ran across a phrase from Baudelaire that took me directly back to her 12-th grade class, as convincingly as Proust was taken back to his childhood by a petit madeleine.
The phrase? Le goût de l'infini, the title of the first chapter of Baudelaire's Les Paradis Artificiels, a work inspired by Thomas de Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The French translates as "taste of the infinite" and opens a discussion on the consumption of, believe it or not, hashish (though I think that aspect of the text was downplayed considerably in the excerpt we were reading... what could those educators have been thinking of?).
What was particularly noticeable in my Proust-like experience today was recalling Mrs. V's reliance on translation as homework. Except it really wasn't translation, per se, but merely a request - as much as any homework assignment can be a request - to "prepare" pages so-and-so through such-and-such for the morrow, when she would spend the first part of class haphazardly (it seemed) picking on students to read the French, a sentence or two at a time, and then to explain in English what had been read.
Although I don't remember any specific examples, I do recall times when I took the liberty of translating the French directly into colloquial English, which was not the point of the exercise for Mrs. V, whereas I'd go back and render a more literal translation of what I'd read.
When not reading excerpts from classics (I think we did that only in connection with lessons on civilization), we read stories packaged for us in textbooks. I remember this one seemingly endless story about a fellow who, with the advent of WW II, proceeded to drive around the countryside and embed portions of his family wealth (in the form of gold ingots) in the walls of various French cemeteries, only to have one or two of his caches discovered by accident, causing a great rash of destruction of cemetery walls all around the country. The poor fellow lost all of his ingots and went crazy, if memory serves.
Perhaps it was that early experience, leavened with a lack of any other challenging homework to do in my senior year in high school, that paved the way for my current career? Qui sait?
Cheers...
The phrase? Le goût de l'infini, the title of the first chapter of Baudelaire's Les Paradis Artificiels, a work inspired by Thomas de Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The French translates as "taste of the infinite" and opens a discussion on the consumption of, believe it or not, hashish (though I think that aspect of the text was downplayed considerably in the excerpt we were reading... what could those educators have been thinking of?).
What was particularly noticeable in my Proust-like experience today was recalling Mrs. V's reliance on translation as homework. Except it really wasn't translation, per se, but merely a request - as much as any homework assignment can be a request - to "prepare" pages so-and-so through such-and-such for the morrow, when she would spend the first part of class haphazardly (it seemed) picking on students to read the French, a sentence or two at a time, and then to explain in English what had been read.
Although I don't remember any specific examples, I do recall times when I took the liberty of translating the French directly into colloquial English, which was not the point of the exercise for Mrs. V, whereas I'd go back and render a more literal translation of what I'd read.
When not reading excerpts from classics (I think we did that only in connection with lessons on civilization), we read stories packaged for us in textbooks. I remember this one seemingly endless story about a fellow who, with the advent of WW II, proceeded to drive around the countryside and embed portions of his family wealth (in the form of gold ingots) in the walls of various French cemeteries, only to have one or two of his caches discovered by accident, causing a great rash of destruction of cemetery walls all around the country. The poor fellow lost all of his ingots and went crazy, if memory serves.
Perhaps it was that early experience, leavened with a lack of any other challenging homework to do in my senior year in high school, that paved the way for my current career? Qui sait?
Cheers...
