“S’Éclipser” means “slip away”, which I had, because of a tempting sweet cake, never mind what kind of cake. When I saw it, I knew that, were it larded with mold, if I stuck around, I would eat it, so I slipped away.
This was in Avignon, during the performing arts festival last year
It’s interesting how the two languages have come to use “eclipse”, whose origin is Conquest French, and continues to mean “become obscure” in both.
In French, however, bugging out implies hiding. In English, on the other hand, making yourself scarce brings to mind letting go, relaxing the grip on the mooring cable, slipping toward freedom or madness, take your pick.
Which reminds me – reminds me with the force of a sugar crisis – that there’s more than difference between languages.
There’s especially the own-genius of a language that makes the language itself, which makes these lines from Athur Rimbaud’s Mauvais Sang,
wonderful in French,
J’ai de mes ancêtres gaulois l’oeil bleu blanc, la cervelle étroite, et la maladresse dans la lutte. Je trouve mon habillement aussi barbare que le leur. Mais je ne beurre pas ma chevelure.
Les Gaulois étaient les écorcheurs de bêtes, les brûleurs d’herbes les plus ineptes de leurs temps. D’eux, j’ai : l’idolâtrie et l’amour du sacrilege; – oh! Tous les vices, colère, luxure, - magnifique, la luxure – surtout mensonge et paresse…
but, both in rhythm and sense, vaguely risible in English,
“From my ancestors the Gauls I have the blue-white eye, the narrow skull, am clumsy in wrestling. My dress is as savage. But I don’t butter my hair. / The Gauls were the most handless beast-flayers and grass burners of their times. From them, I have: idolatry and love of sacrilege; - O! All the vices, anger, lust – marvelous, lust – especially falsehood and sloth… “
O! Believe your ears! Mauvais sang is truly magnifique: Léo Ferré sings Une saison en enfer. Mauvais sang starts at 2.20. If after a good listen you don’t feel like exorcising the Panthéon and pissing on your father’s ashes, write to the editor for your money back.
So, when people talk of a chanson française, for instance, it’s not the same as when they talk of “French literature” or even “French songs” or “French music” and certainly not of the lexical field of “Mauvais sang”, which should be allowed to call up Taylor Swiftian “Bad Blood”. They are talking about a specific chanson française, representing the own-genius of the language they speak, that peculiar quality of the combination of the sound and sense of French.
It is this un-differentiable quality that makes Arthur Rimbaud a poet of songs or makes Léo Ferré a singer of poems.
I don’t know of anything like la chanson française in English, though I can lovingly sing Lord Byron’s So We'll Go No More A-Roving; Haley Westenra’s Dark Waltz is poetry and hearing it, I weep hotly, for her lightness that my hands and kisses will rove no more.
I had slipped away but had not hid. Not long after sitting to drink a white wine, Homère and Antonin hailed me from the street, came up to the table and sat down, one on each side, like mafia bagmen, just as if invited.
Antonin seemed to be seething, tensed like an underweight, out-of-shape pugilist at a last-chance match.
Aplomb in hand, Homère ordered for both of them. We all chatted desultorily.
Seething about what, I couldn’t guess.
A man – tall, lanky, dark, triangular face, wide mouth, big hands, big feet, strong eyes – wearing a suit jacket and fancy shoes, no shirt and no socks, comes up to the table, leaning between me and Antonin, leaning into my personal space.
Remember the sweet Frankenstein in that old movie, the one who is trying to save the little girl? This guy was him.
With a discreet recoil of disgust and a dismissive wave, I feel that I am seeing off my own, perhaps similar, descent, toward the moneyless state.
He has managed to lay his flyer in front of me, however.
Before too long, Homère turns to me, points to the flyer and says, “You should keep that”.
Then he pointed again, first, to a round-faced guy slapping at an old box piano that somebody had set outside the old covered market and then to another guy blowing hard on what seemed to be a bass clarinet.
Are there bass clarinets?
I glanced at the flyer
– ORLY: un poète urgent · un pianist en transit · un sorcier souffleur –
picked it up, smoothed it out.
An urgent poet? A transiting pianist? A blowing warlock?
An ad for a homeopathic enema?
“He’s with them.”
Homère points at the lanky, shirtless, good-hearted Frankenstein guy.
“Them?”
Homère, big, barrel-chested and hairy, has an abrupt, authoritarian, manner, an easy, passive-aggressive sneer, carefully cultivated over better than 50 years of being dissed as queer.
“The band, man, the band.”
All the same, Homère has a merry glint in his eyes, is great fun to tease when a little bull-baiting seems à propos, and, in many ways, is really a shy, slightly contrary, but very friendly, little boy. Doesn’t Antonin like that? I think it’s irresistible.
“When are they playing?” Homère abruptly demands.
Next to me, I feel Antonin tense up even more. I think about how my son’s guinea pig exploded like a bloody water balloon when it slipped, for the first and final time, off the first floor balcony and on to the grassy verge below. A guinea pig seems over-inflated and fragile, sure, but who could guess its fleshly envelope would rupture so easily and spectacularly?
I glance. Antonin is dangerously squeezing the stem of the wine glass he brings to his lips to, as he imagines, hide his emotions.
Homère plays piano. He knows an astonishing lot about melody, harmony and song, too.
I grew up among natural musicians. When it comes to music, I have learned long since to listen to people like Homère.
I take the flyer between my fingers and begin to scrutinize.
“O! Neat,” I say brightly. “The show is quite late, Homère. We could go all together then.”
Homère nods across me toward Antonin. “Let’s go tomorrow night?”
Antonin says nothing, purses his lips, turns his face to mine, smiles somewhat falsely, but still, on the whole, amiably, nods.
The next evening, around eleven, Homère on one side and Antonin, still seething, on other, we’re all three in the Atypik Théâtre, hands on knees, faces upturned like cats before an electric can opener, listening intently as ORLY croons and vibrates breathily just beyond reach.
An “atypical” theater, I suppose, because the poured concrete low-riser bench-steps on which we… crouch… really, makes expansive lounging harder even than usual in such a small venue.
Hands on knees then, attentive, then.
ORLY, also the name of the airport where French and European domestic flights meet, does chanson française with the force of real talent, making me forget that Antonin is seething fit to burst and that the charming Homère has a hard and hairy behind.
In translation, ORLY does ballads to a piano, sax, variable percussives and strings, makes music that sometimes wraps itself around words, sometimes, supports words and sometimes goes its own way without looking back. There’s country in it too: love with nasty d-i-v-o-r-c-e as some interesting part of the romance, being someplace from no place or being nowhere someplace and daily life without enough hard money.
But if you just listen to it, you’ll hear chanson française from the whiskey rap and croon of the friendly Frankenstein guy, Samuel Veyrat. If you just listen to the tap, whoosh, puff, tinkle and thrum of Veyrat’s two confederates Ian Zielinski and Xavier Bussy, you’ll grasp a widow’s mite of country fiddler calling figures, free jazz and Bach, or is it Débussy? hear the je-ne-sais-quoi full but never ever raw feeling of Barbara, the sense of Léo Ferré the textured foolery of Boby Lapointe.
But when it comes right down to it, what’s important is the way this Sam Veyrat guy uses French. The way it rolls off his tongue, the way it cuffs the ear and escapes just as the tone registers – and for once, you don’t have to understand a word of it to enjoy it. Enjoy.
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