Foreign Tongue Read Online Free PDF

where she might be now, if she knows I still think about her with a combination of pain and longing that is violent in its intensity, while at the same time soothing in its reminder of my past, of who I once was, and who I became, thanks to her.
    Wow, that was clumsy. “Thanks to her” sounded awkward, even resentful. “Grace à elle,” by her grace, literally, was more delicate.
    Just the first two paragraphs were going to be harder than I’d thought. There were intricacies in French that didn’t translate easily into English. There was also the notion of feelings being violent, which was commonplace in French and seemed rarer in English.
    The next two pages described her face ( of a purity of line like that of an ancient Egyptian princess —sheesh) and her body ( long limbs, an exaggerated curve in the lower spine, a swan’s neck, a softly rounded belly ).Yada, yada, yada. It was a tedious catalog of this woman Eve’s physical attributes: caressing her skin was one of my greatest pleasures…it was smooth and soft, a warm golden brown with the scent of delicate flowers. I lost myself in the contours of her spine, the curve of her hip —aha! “La chute des reins.” I would have to find a better phrase than “her kidneys.” Maybe “the small of her back.”
    I could do this. It would be a challenge, figuring out how to shape the text and convey the nuances of the prose while watching out for the tricky faux amis : false cognates that mean different things in each language. Spotting the obvious ones—like entrée, which means appetizer, not main course; comédien, which means actor, not comedian; and phrase, which means sentence—was second nature. But others were sneakier: actuellement means at the present time, not in fact; éxperience means both experience and experiment; and une déception is a letdown, not a lie. Some are sly on spelling: le moral means morale, versus la morale, which means morals. Even the alphabet could trip me up on one letter: the French “g” is pronounced like an English “j,” and vice versa.
    I skimmed the next few pages, translating in my head and looking up a few words before eating dinner in front of the evening news. I missed PPDA, the nickname by which TF1’s former news anchor, Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, was known. Then I went to bed.
    In the dark, I thought about the chapter, wondering if anyone would ever think about my skin like that. I ran my fingers along my body. The knob of my hip bone always reminded me of cows in European landscape paintings. I traced random patterns on my thigh, figure eights and stars.
    I remembered the summer I’d spent in Paris with my grandmother when I was ten. I’d never been away from my parents for so long, and I was shy and lonely. But I made a friend or two in the parks before they went away for summer vacation, accepted the Jardin d’Acclimatation as a respectable alternative to Disneyland, and watched Des chiffres et des lettres and Japanese cartoons on TV before bedtime. But sometimes,clutching my Snoopy at night, I’d sing commercial jingles and the TV theme songs from Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch. Home seemed far away and confusing, and I was no longer sure where it was.
    I punched the pillow into shape. A police siren Klaxoned its two-note call in the distance, the Doppler effect changing keys as it raced by. I could live here again.

5
    La queue c’est féminin. Le con masculin. Question de chance. *
    — SERGE GAINSBOURG
    W hen Pascal, an old friend I’d met during an internship I’d had at a cosmetics company, came back from Greece, we met up for lunch near his office, at a glitzy bistro catering to the fashion industry, modeling agencies, and wealthy foreigners shopping on the avenue Montaigne. After two weeks in July on a beach in Páros with his boyfriend, Florian, he was dark brown and sported a neatly trimmed goatee. In a linen suit over a vintage metal concert T-shirt, he looked like a well-dressed