“A country that produces 365 cheeses cannot lose the war!”
So said General DeGaulle.
Also:
“How can you govern a country where there are 258 varieties
of cheese?”
These two quotations came to my mind a couple of months ago
while on the road interpreting for a group of over thirty French visitors to the Midwest. The exact number of cheese
varieties in France, as well as in the quotation, was as jumbled in my memory
as it was in DeGaulle’s, so I had to look it up. I tried to find an exact figure of how many
different types of cheese are produced in France, and those numbers were all in
conflict with each other. I think the
reason for the ambiguity is that the French don’t want to discount the small
producer out in the Aveyron with a hundred head of cattle on a hill and a
really great homemade cheese sold in the local farmer’s market.
The huge variety of cheeses is the perfect expression of how
French cling to their individuality, to their unique personal expression. How horrible of me to make sweeping
generalities about a culture! This is
the place where prejudice is born! And
yet, the more time a person spends straddling two cultures, the more those
cultural definitions become enforced through observation. I know for a solid fact that some jokes will
make an American laugh, and will not even provoke a smile from a French
listener. Conversely, something a
Frenchman finds screamingly funny can totally escape the American sense of humor. Certain actions and reactions can be expected,
dependent upon culture.
My group of French visitors to the U.S. approached me on the
tour bus with a request. Would I please
speak to the driver in order to reserve her services and her vehicle for the
evening?
It would be simple enough to just go interpret the question
to the bus driver, but my antennae went up, sensing a pending
complication. Interpretation always has
the interpreter thinking ahead.
“Before I ask the driver, can you find out three things for
me? How many passengers will there be? What is your destination? And at what time do you want to leave?”
The groups’ transportation delegates left me, with a promise
to come back in a few minutes with the answers.
I sat in the back of the bus and watched the conversation
unfold in the aisle, starting with a simple question and escalating to a full
blown debate, punctuated with both laughter and moments of forcefulness.
An hour later, their spokesperson came to me with the
following itinerary: “Six of us would
like to go to the art museum. Five want
to go to the jazz club. Three from the
museum group want to join the others at the jazz club, and two from the jazz
club don’t want to leave the hotel until later, but then the art museum would
already be closed.”
I borrowed the piece of paper on which the person had
scribbled the math and made my way down the aisle of the bus to the driver’s
position, knowing full well what her response would be: “Taxis.”
How did I foresee that there would not be an easy
consensus? Would an all-American group
have come up with one destination and one departure time? Perhaps not, but I dare to make the
generalization that Americans are more “team players” than the French.
I often hear from French visitors that they are astounded by
the number of American flags, flying from every building, from schools to gas
stations. You don’t see as many tricolor
French flags in France. In some way, the
French don’t need a symbol to know they are French. Their culture is so thick with traditions,
with “dos and don’ts” that are subtle indicators in a person’s mannerisms and
speech that immediately communicate to each other that “I am French.” I can’t describe it, but when I go to the airport
to meet a group of clients, I can spot a group of Frenchmen at a hundred yards
in the crowd. For that matter, it’s just
as easy to pick out American tourists at Roissy. Nobody is carrying a flag. The American one is a confusing patchwork of
stars and stripes, and serves as a symbol to unite the cultural mix that is an
American. The French flag takes the same
three colors, bleu blanc rouge , but
displays them in an understated couturier-acceptable array of equally measured
vertical bands. I think to the French
mind, other than on July 14th on the Champs Elysées, those colors merely indicate the
location of a government office and the French have a love-hate relationship
with government. They rely heavily upon
it and are always extremely unhappy with it.
Working in the French language and culture is personally
exhilarating for me, like joining an exclusive club with an elaborate secret
handshake. The French with whom I work
are usually very warm hearted towards me, with my mixed American background but
my obvious efforts to be one of them. I
think professional linguists have somewhat of a split personality, with a foot
in two cultures. We get to be someone
else, role playing and toggling between idioms and the manners that go with
them.
Today is the Feast of St. Jerome, the patron saint of
translators. He was a Roman who
traveled to Gaul and spent some time in the Middle Eastern desert with
hermits. He made the cultural
transitions required to translate the Bible into Latin, an amazing piece of
work.
I wonder if he was easily recognizable as a foreigner when
he was hanging out in Syria? Or was he
successfully able to blend in with the locals?
The real test would have been when he went to arrange for
his “bus ride” back to Rome….
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