A little while before Christmas we had the Christmas Poirot (one of the Christmas Poirots?) - Hercule Poirot's Christmas - on ITV3. This prompted the thought that since BH has read the original, I ought to buy myself a copy of the French translation as a Christmas present for myself, which I did. But, the French Amazon not being quite up to the standard of its British cousin, the book did not arrive until early in the New Year, by which time I had forgotten a lot of the television adaptation. But another call to Amazon and we now have all three versions: English, French and television.
The television adaptation has made some important changes to the plot, most importantly to give the villain Sugden a South African rather than a Middleshire birth. This allows the adaptation to introduce some opening scenes on the veldt, giving the thing a bit of exotic colour, promoting his father from lovable to murderous rogue, adding a vengeful, special needs mother and generally providing Sugden with a more credible motive than the one supplied by Agatha. Other changes including cutting down the number of brothers and half brothers from six to four and replacing the Chief Constable Colonel Johnson by Chief Inspector Japp, this last in deference to the rule that consumers of television series like the same core characters to appear in every episode. Lots of loving heritage detail added in the form of trains, village pubs, village tea shops, village churches, choirs and the singing of Christmas carols.
Some of the details are added to colour things up a bit in a slightly different way - for example Poirot's leaking radiator, the special delivery of the diamonds and the box for the by-then missing diamonds turning up in the luggage of a daughter-in-law - but generally speaking, the adaptation sticks to the spirit of the original.
On the debit side, the book makes much of the business of some of the brothers sharing with their father a distinctive face, a distinctive way of laughing, a tic of stroking the jaw line with an index finger and a taste for vengeance, served cold if necessary. All this is largely lost in the adaptation, but not on Poirot, who is thereby enabled to join up some of the dots.
I find it hard to keep all this stuff in the brain at the same time, and what did make it there a few weeks ago is now fading fast. So today's thought is that Agatha and others of her ilk pitch the complexity of their yarns just beyond what the average punter can grasp. So the average punter is always grasping and not quite making it, thus keeping him or her engaged.
The French version was good fun, the product of a lady - Françoise Bouillot - who is an author in her own right as well as a translator - which confirms that the Agatha label is strong enough to command quality in the translation department. Strong presence on google if not to the extent of having her own web-site. She does well for me, translating Agatha into what reads like a smooth & accessible French which includes lots of pleasant French idioms, pleasant in the sense that it is generally quite clear what they mean but quite different from the English. I offer a few examples.
'se laisser ballotter au gré d'un coup de cafard' for the English '[he was not a boy -] to be turned this way and that by the whim of the moment'. Fairly literally, 'to let himself be shaken about by the action of some sneak' and with cafard being derived from the late Latin caphardum meaning a kind of painted cotton cloth made in India. On thin ice with this one, not really sure how one gets from one from the other.
'n'avait pas les yeux dans sa poche' for the English 'observant'.
'un de ces quatre matins' for the English 'some time or another'.
'envoyer au diable Vauvert', Vauvert being the name of a grand haunted house in the Paris of the time of the saintly King Louis. Going to this devil being used to say that one is going off to the ends of the earth, off on some ridiculous or complicated expedition. Nothing of the sort present in the English, but the addition does help give the French the general colour of the English.
'tellement bonne pâte' for the English '[you are] such a gentle soul'. Pâte being the stuff of which you make pottery, pies and miscellaneous pastes, by extension the stuff of which you make people.
'croquemitaine' for the English 'bogy'. Literally a muncher of little girls. A word to threaten little children with.
'fair sortir Lydia de ses gonds' for the English 'never get any change out of Lydia', a rather old fashioned phrase which might be out of use. Literally, knock her off her hinges. The first few results from google refer one to this very sentence in this very book.
'un acceuil du feu de Dieu' for the English 'a grand welcome'. A more literal translation of the French phrase might be 'a thundering good welcome', thunder being one of God's fires.
'le vieux sacripant' for the English 'the old sinner'. A compound of a brave knight in a poem by Ariosto and a boaster in one by Tassoni. More generally, a rogue or a scoundrel, but in the friendly sense of the English.
'm'avait tenu tête' for the English '[if only she] had stood up to me'.
'les fenêtres à guillotine' for the English 'sash windows'. Sash being the same root as chassis and not to be confused with shash, the Arabic for muslin.
'tomber dans les pommes' for the English 'faint'. Splendid phrase and my favourite but I can't find out how it came about. Fall in the potatoes is a bit nearer the mark than fall in the apples, but still not there, not for me, anyway. Fall into the potato plants, in the sense of collapsing in the middle of a field of potatoes?
And so it goes on, there are lots more of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment