#meatisadelicacy

LGBTQ/bisexual Seven of Nine icons for @meatisadelicacy!

is sure as fuck look forward to more

I’m glad to hear the new translation is correct, according to native French speakers, even though it sounds odd to my ears.I get that she's saying she felt both the freedom and lack of Marianne, but it's odd to say "I also felt I missed you." If I had written that, any of my English teachers over the years would cross out the “I felt” part and tell me to just say “I missed you,” because the “I felt” is redundant.

That’s not to say that we all speak the way we should write or that I’m criticizing the line as Celine wrote it, because I’m definitely not. It just seems that although it’s not a literal translation, which is often the case anytime anything is translated, it makes more sense to say ‘I felt two nouns,’ rather than ‘I felt a noun and a complete sentence.’ If that makes sense.  Sorry for rambling love your content byeeeee

First, @maisderien added a comment that I’d thought about but had completely forgotten to mention:

Adding my two cent as a french-speaking person. « I felt you absence » FEELS right as a translation of « J’ai senti que vous me manquiez ». Because of the use of the formal « vous » and the imperfect tense (« manquiez ») – a tense we actually don’t use in everyday speech but just in writing – the sentence in french feels distant and literary, not at all like a simple « i miss you » in english.

[W]e actually use the imperfect in everyday speech, mostly in the first/second/third singular person. But rarely in the plural or formal forms. To conjugate the verb « manquer » in the past, most would typically use the « passé composé » (« vous m’avez manqué ») ; the imperfect here really sounds like something written.

I hadn’t known some of this, such as this being a line more suited to writing than speech, but I do understand that the vousvoyer is formal and thus part of what “But I felt your absence” does is defamiliarize an otherwise very familiar--as in “intimate”--sentiment like “I miss you.” It makes it seem just that bit of distant that the vousvoyer imposes in the distance it enforces. As Céline says.

I think the thing, too, and French speakers correct me if I’m wrong (in fact, please do, I need someone to diagram this because I have no grasp of French grammar and syntax), but “vous me manquiez” has a different syntax construction from English’s “I miss you.” So in a literal translation, it’s like Heloise said “But I also felt that you were missing (from me).” So in the subordinate clause, vous (you) being the subject, manquer (to lack) being the verb, me being... what is the official term here? It’s not like an indirect object, but more or less. Whereas in English, I is the subject, miss is the verb, and you is the object. So we’re looking at completely different sentence constructions.

Which is partly why I think “absence” worked so well to capture the sense of how in French the phrasing works so that the object/person that is missed is a thing that is lacking. In French, the phrasing is somewhat passive for the speaker, in that the person speaking is being acted upon by something else lacking (if that makes sense?), and I think the translator was also trying to capture that sort of being acted upon, not necessarily “I miss you” but “you were gone.” Which made all the sense in the world to me until I learned that “I miss you” is the accepted translation of that phrase and that that construction in French is the standard way to express this sentiment, lol.

You’re also right that the translator’s construction is pleasing because of sentence balance, but also it makes sense that he did that because it’s so succinct, and thus concerns about character count and timing (how long it takes for people to read it) are met. Another translation could have been “But I also felt that you were missing (from me).” But that’s long and clunky. Thus the elegance in the solution of “But I also felt your absence.”

ocme back

lol, how bad was it?