A Reflection

[jsburbidge]

After about 55 years or so, I finally used the wonders of the internet to hunt down a song which we had learned (well, we learned the chorus) in Grade 6 French.

 

It's 'L'homme de Cro-Magnon", and it seems to date back to 1946. It is, in one sense, a perfectly reasonable, albeit silly, song from a period which also gave us "I want a hippopotamus for Christmas".

 

On the other hand, what the actual f*** was our teacher thinking? There are many, many, classic short poems in French. We could have had "Mignonne, allons voir si la rose". We could have had "Recueillement". We could have had "Le Pont Mirabeau", or "Elsa au miroir". We could even have had something by Prévert. Instead, we got this piece of catchy shlock. And this was in an "enriched" class, in a Major Work programme, full of bright students. (When he was about two years older than the bulk of my classmates, Montaigne had finished the pre-university curriculum of his day, which involved rather more foreign language study than we ever had.)

 

Most of this was lost on us. One of us, now dead, went on to teach in French in Montreal. One served in the army, where some bilingualism was presumably of use. I learned real French when I was dropped into a Lycée six years later. I can't think of any of the rest of us who have obviously used the French we learned, and unlike Montaigne and Milton and even Wellington, our foreign language education was not yoked to the task of communicating a different culture which could live with us in later years, but merely delivered contemporary and artificial texts.

Comments

[graydon]

One might suppose your teachers were not thinking on career timeframes?

There seems to be a lot of that, especially as certainty about the future becomes less and less socially normative.

[ionelv]

I just listened to a version of the song from over 60 years ago by Les Quatre Barbus, I must admit that it is very catchy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB9r79LrBgQ&list=RDvB9r79LrBgQ&start_radio=1

[ionelv]

I must admit that reading Ronsard's poem in the original Middle French is more fun than I thought it would be (given its similarity to both modern French and Latin): https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Odes_(Ronsard)/%C2%AB_Mignonne,_allons_voir_si_la_rose_%C2%BB

[jsburbidge]

The Middle French of Ronsard, Rabelais, Du Bellay, and Montaigne is where the standard Lycée curriculum in French literature begins. Villon is not included automatically, so my list above (drawn from the Lycée curriculum) did not include La Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis or La Ballade des Pendus. (My one memory of Villon in Lycée was the teacher quoting "pain be voient qu'aux fenestres".) The lyrics I quoted are parts of the core heritage making up "French culture".

It is perhaps the case that Middle French authors are fun, moreso than most of their successors; certainly anything after the imposition of classical norms associated with Boileau is duller until sometime in the mid to late 19th Century.

[ionelv]

I find it strange that high school French lit starts with Middle French. I would think that belongs more to college-level learning. Are English high schoolers regularly taught Middle English authors? I took Honors English in a Chicago public high school and I only recall modern authors on our reading list (e.g. Sallinger, Steinbeck).

On a separate topic, you and I are quite familiar with the mid-19th century unshackling of French literature through at least one author: Charles Beaudelaire. I still recall reading his poems in French during junior high and getting blown away. He was the first Gothic writer I was introduced to (even though many do not consider him Gothic per se), although Bacovia and Eminescu do have some Gothic influences. It was only later that I read other Gothic authors such as Poe, Shelley, HP Lovecraft, Stephen King, Marquez, Stoker, Murakami, or Eliade. Sometimes, I wish people could read Eliade's stories in the original Romanian (even though only being immersed in Romanian culture and living in certain decades would have imparted the same feelings many of us have had while reading him and even though many of his stories have been translated into French, English and many other languages). The closest feel to Eliade I get only when I read Cioran or Ionesco (which were longtime friends, so probably my feel is not accidental or is simply colored by that knowledge).

[jsburbidge]

Lycée education is driven by French identity, and Montaigne, Rabelais, and the Pléiade are too important to that identity to be left out. English doesn't make Chaucer/Langland/Lydgate or even Malory central in the same way: English literary identity begins with Sidney and Spenser, with a nod to Wyatt, and centres on Shakespeare and Milton.

(Ontario offers no guarantee that you will get anything from even the 17th Century, as it has dropped the old requirement for Shakespeare. But its curriculum was not (in my day, though it was in my parents') driven by identity in the same way. I recall no Milton, for example, in high school, though they might have given us "On his blindness".)

Baudelaire (no e) is the high point of the 19th Century, and I have lived happily with poems from Les Fleurs du Mal furnishing my memory for nearly fifty years, now. (There is the question of comparison to Hugo. André Gide was asked who the greatest French poet is and replied, “Victor Hugo, hélas!”) The symbolistes who follow him are also worth attention.

I have not read Eliade, aside from some of his writing on mythology. I should correct that.

[ionelv]

You're obviously right about Baudelaire spelling (duh). I was curious enough to look up the etymology of the name and found that it is not entirely settled, but an earlier version of the name was badela(i)re: https://www.littre.org/definition/baudelaire

Since you mentioned Hugo and not remembering any of his poems, I read a few (https://www.eternels-eclairs.fr/poemes-victor-hugo.php#%C3%80+une+femme) and stumbled upon one in which Penelope featured which for some reason triggered a connection to Ovid in my head. Imagine my surprise when I read Ovid's bio (https://allpoetry.com/Ovid) and found that one of his influences was a famous poet which wrote this beauty:

My eyes are tired,
I guess I need some rest,
ow, Doh, I just woke up on the couch
with beer and potato chips, lying on my chest.

[jsburbidge]

Wrong Homer.