Dead Nature
I love differences. They inspire travel. If it weren’t for the differences in dress, cuisine, language, music, traffic signs, subways, sirens, smells, sugar cubes and bread that are encountered while traveling, it wouldn’t be worth the flight. Even a two-hour car trip to the nearest city to the south can reveal enough differences to flip your thinking around and send you back home with a new perspective on life. ‘They sure seem American in such-and-such a city’ you might think to yourself after unpacking your car.
Which leads to the differences between the French and English languages. The French can turn a canonic English phrase into something poetic. For example, insomnia becomes nuit blanche (white night), sunset becomes crépuscule enpourprée (crimson twilight), MacDonalds becomes MacdoNALDS (with emphasis on the last syllable).
But in the case of ‘still-life’, typically used to describe an artwork that depicts objects contained within an interior, and that aren’t moving, its French equivalent, nature morte (roughly translated as ‘dead nature’), is VERY different from something that isn’t moving. It is, most definitely, dead.
This nature morte is by the Dutch game painter Jan Weenix, and is currently held in the collection of The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Entitled Still Life with Swan and Game Before a Country Estate, it was painted around 1685. The nature depicted in this painting does look rather dead, don't you think?
The term ‘still-life’, however, implies that the things in the picture are STILL alive. It's a hopeful expression—one that could be used to describe even me, slumped at my desk on a Friday afternoon.
What can we glean from this? For one, that translators are worth far more than the money they’re paid. Language carries with it nuance and implied meaning. No expression or phrase can be exactly duplicated in another language. One cannot clone another culture. C’est interdit!
But we ARE allowed to pack our bags, travel a short or long distance, dive into another culture, and then revel in the diversity and complexity of life on this planet.
Vive la différence!
Which leads to the differences between the French and English languages. The French can turn a canonic English phrase into something poetic. For example, insomnia becomes nuit blanche (white night), sunset becomes crépuscule enpourprée (crimson twilight), MacDonalds becomes MacdoNALDS (with emphasis on the last syllable).
But in the case of ‘still-life’, typically used to describe an artwork that depicts objects contained within an interior, and that aren’t moving, its French equivalent, nature morte (roughly translated as ‘dead nature’), is VERY different from something that isn’t moving. It is, most definitely, dead.
This nature morte is by the Dutch game painter Jan Weenix, and is currently held in the collection of The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Entitled Still Life with Swan and Game Before a Country Estate, it was painted around 1685. The nature depicted in this painting does look rather dead, don't you think?The term ‘still-life’, however, implies that the things in the picture are STILL alive. It's a hopeful expression—one that could be used to describe even me, slumped at my desk on a Friday afternoon.
What can we glean from this? For one, that translators are worth far more than the money they’re paid. Language carries with it nuance and implied meaning. No expression or phrase can be exactly duplicated in another language. One cannot clone another culture. C’est interdit!
But we ARE allowed to pack our bags, travel a short or long distance, dive into another culture, and then revel in the diversity and complexity of life on this planet.
Vive la différence!
posted by Joconde at 2:57 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home