While in London, I noticed that the British had no qualms about swearing up a storm. I’m not sure whether the same is true of Parisians or not. They could have been swearing up a full-on hurricane, and I would not have noticed. Instead, it was me who was (inwardly! I tried very hard to be polite) swearing up some kind of ouragan.

So, oui, everyone, please pardon my French! It’s very poor; but I made do with the few words I know, and I learned a lot. In this blog post, I’d like to share some of the comical language woes I experienced as an American in Paris.

Would You Like a Worm of Wine?

Upon first arriving in Paris, I entered a bar to wait for my Airbnb room to be ready. An exuberant bartender (a friend of my Airbnb host) wished to communicate. Due to our mutual lack of skills in each other’s tongues, we used Google to translate.

One of the first things he typed was (in French) “Would you like a glass of wine?” The app translated this as “Would you like a worm of wine?” I thought this was very funny. I did not for a second think that he was offering to serve me a worm soaked in wine. The word for glass, I was proud to remember, is verre, while the word for worm is ver: an understandable language mishap.

But this was not nearly as funny as what happened next.

Would You Like Broccoli Beer?

Giving up on the app, he asked if I wanted beer. The word for beer is bière, so I understood him perfectly. The trouble was that he then started asking—with greater and greater insistence—whether I wanted broccoli beer.

Broccoli beer? I was skeptical. Don’t get me wrong—I love broccoli. But in beer? Is this how they brew beer in France? Dump some broccoli and hops in a barrel, throw in some worms, wait a few weeks, and voilà: beer! He was so confident that I would like it that I finally agreed to try it.

The beer was served. It was not green, but a normal amber color. It was very good beer.

We kept talking about the broccoli beer, until I finally realized what he was saying: Brooklyn! And I laughed and laughed. I Googled “broccoli” and showed him a photo of what I thought he meant. He thought this was all very funny, too.

And just as funny? The thought that I would travel all the way to Paris, just to drink beer from New York! (He was trying to make me feel comfortable, which I appreciated . . . but ha!)

Would You Like Snails?

Yes, I would like snails, merci beaucoup. I sat outside at a cafe and ordered the snails cassolette, just to try something new and interesting. (I was so eager to eat that I took some bites before snapping this photo.) It was delicious: it tasted like mushrooms or squid. No problems here.

The problem arose when a panhandler walked up to me and said something. I stared at him like an idiot—or like an American who doesn’t speak French. I got the impression that he wanted money, not because I understood a single word he said, but because of his attire.

And then suddenly the waiter appeared and chased him into the street, yelling! They had an altercation! I tried to understand what they were saying; and I thought I understood the waiter to say (in French) “second.” It was just an impression of a feeling, not the conscious hearing of an actual word. Was that the second time the panhandler had panhandled at that cafe? I will never know.

So I finished my snails and went to the theatre.

Would You Like to Cry . . . or Sleep?

I went to a production of En attendant Bojangles (Waiting for Bojangles). The play is based on the best-selling novel by Olivier Bourdeaut, which I wrote about in these previous blog posts. Here is a complete list of the words I understood while watching the play:

• mère (mother)
• père (father)
• avec (with)
• chaque (each)
• Espagne (Spain)
• Mademoiselle Superfétatoire (Miss Superfluous, the family’s pet crane)

Needless to say, these did not get me very far. But the visual aspects of the production were superb. And the audience was loving it. The women around me were crying at the end, and the ovation was loud and long. I, however, had trouble staying awake.

Another evening, I went to a production of the classic play Fin de partie (Endgame) by Samuel Beckett. I understood a longer list of words this time, because Beckett uses a lot of short, simple sentences in the play, so as to help establish an apocalyptic mood. But once again, I understood almost nothing and struggled to stay awake.

After the performance ended and most of the people had exited, I snapped this photo, because I thought it was such a cool venue. It was a little brick tunnel, as you can see. As I was taking the photo, the usher spoke to me harshly. He said quite a large number of words to me. At first, I thought he did not want me taking the photo. But as I was nodding and exiting the theatre, I noticed a lot of people waiting to get in, apparently for another performance that was about to happen. So then I thought that probably the usher just wanted me to leave. Once again, I will never know. Hopefully he was not saying to me, “Under no circumstances should you post that photo on the Internet!”

Maybe I will keep studying French and try the Paris theatres again someday. Fuck me, it was not a fully enjoyable experience this time around (pardon my language).

Would You Like to Buy a Vowel?

To sum up—language is strange. Have you noticed that there doesn’t seem to be a consensus among Americans about how to pronounce “Franklin Roosevelt”? Is it ROSE-eh-velt or RUSE-eh-velt? How about “Teddy Roosevelt”? (This article has more of a definitive answer than what I can provide.) I recently heard “Franklin Roosevelt” pronounced in the French way on a bus intercom; a bus stop in Paris is named after him.

I have no words—in any language—to describe my surprise upon hearing the bus stop announced, and suddenly realizing what had been said!

During the past few weeks, I attempted, with minimal success, to read two books in French. One was Olivier Bourdeaut’s playful novel Waiting for Bojangles, a recent international bestseller. The other was Samuel Beckett’s haunting play Endgame, which premiered in 1957 and is a literary classic.

And so I was surprised, and a little weirded out, to learn that my pairing of these two works is more apropos than I had realized. According to this World Literature Today article, the title Waiting for Bojangles (in French, En attendant Bojangles) is an allusion to another famous and classic play by Beckett. Here’s what the article says about Waiting for Bojangles:

“With its irreverent reference to Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot (1952), the novel’s title is a call to be mindful of the futility of endlessly waiting for fun, love, or fulfillment.”

Waiting for Godot is not a play I have read. However, rumor has it that Godot never arrives. If Waiting for Godot is anything like Endgame, it’s a bleak and beautiful masterpiece that is likely to shuttle one into an existential depression, if one isn’t careful.

In contrast, Mr. Bojangles does arrive in Waiting for Bojangles—in sound and spirit, if not in the actual flesh. And while the story has its sad moments, it never falls into melancholy. And it definitely never descends into grim philosophical musings about the meaningless of existence.*

In the novel, the boy’s parents love to dance to the song “Mr. Bojangles” as sung by Nina Simone. But when the song’s not on, it’s not like the characters are moping around waiting for it to play again. No, they’re finding other ways to live it up. They’re dancing to other music, making up stories, throwing parties, and doing various outlandish things, all in the name of whimsical pleasure.

In this household, there’s no waiting around for joy to magically show up. No matter how horrible their circumstances get, the characters insist on enjoying life. And they insist on altering their circumstances to make life maximally enjoyable. They even insist on enjoying life to the very detriment of living. If they were in the play Waiting for Godot, I’m pretty sure they would be calling up Godot and harassing him with jokes and enticements and crazy stories until he gave up and made an appearance. He might arrive delighted, or he might arrive enraged—but you can bet that he would arrive.

Is the title Waiting for Bojangles, then, misleading? Since the characters aren’t exactly sitting around looking at their watches, waiting for something fun to happen, is the title more paradoxical than descriptive?

Not so fast. The French phrase en attendant can be translated as “waiting for”; but that is not the only translation. Other translations include “while waiting for,” “pending the arrival of,” and “in anticipation of.”

The alternate titles While Waiting for Bojangles, Pending the Arrival of Bojangles, and In Anticipation of Bojangles strike me as more precisely true to the story. The boy’s mom and dad are always looking forward to dancing to the song. This is their best bliss. But in the meantime (which is another translation of en attendant), they are living it up in grandly wonderful ways.

Of course, the title as given is the best choice. It’s the most concise and lovely. And it refers back to Beckett’s play. But I find it fascinating that it has connotations in French that do not translate into English.

Are you sitting around looking at your watch, as you wait for Godot or Mr. Bojangles or whomever or whatever to show up? Waiting is a reality of life. The important question is, what are you doing in the meantime?

*This is merely to state a fact. I have no bias against bleak works of literature that question the meaning of existence. Actually, I like them. A lot.

I purchased both the French and the U.S. versions of the novel Waiting for Bojangles, by Olivier Bourdeaut. The idea was to read the novel in both languages. As expected, that didn’t go terribly well, though I did learn some new French words. My main takeaway from this dual purchase, however, is that cover images—along with syntax, punctuation, paragraph breaks, and meanings—can and often do metamorphose in translation.

As you can see, these two cover designs are quite similar in subject matter, and yet strikingly different in emotional impact and conveyance of themes. I like them both, but in different ways. However, instead of analyzing them myself, I’d like to hear what you think.

Which cover do you like better, and why?

If you were in a bookstore, which cover would better entice you to buy the book, and why?

Did you choose the same cover to answer both questions?

I did not!

Presumably, your cultural background, taste in books, and artistic proclivities will all play into your thoughts and feelings on the book covers—so there are no wrong answers here. But there may well be opinionated answers, and much to discuss!

Did you, by chance, have an unconventional childhood? I suppose we all did, in one way or another, to a greater or lesser extent.

I’d like to tell you about an international bestseller, now available in English, about a boy who’s having an adorably wacky childhood, due to his adorably wacky parents. Here’s a passage from the book describing one of the many unusual aspects of the boy’s home:

“In one corner of the hall, there was a mountain of mail that my parents had tossed on the floor unopened. The mountain was so huge that I could toss myself onto it without getting hurt. Warm and welcoming, it was part of the furniture. Sometimes my father would say, ‘If you’re a bad boy, you’re going to have to open all that mail and sort it!’ But he never made me do it; he didn’t have a mean bone in his body.”

How whimsically lovely! Wouldn’t you have adored living in such a home? And so the boy does.

Waiting for Bojangles is a slim and sweet novel by the French debut author Olivier Bourdeaut. The story’s principal wisdom has to do with the pros and cons of living a carefree life.

That “montagne de courrier” in the hall is indicative of how the boy’s parents live. Who cares about paperwork, when you can dance and drink and have parties and tell fantastical stories? That’s their philosophy, and so they live, for a long time.

But . . . can you see a foreshadowing of desperation and despair in this idyllic picture?