13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [79]
Un souvenir de ma villégiature
Petit calendrier memento pour 1928
Madame Henri Brunet
L’homme illisible
Tu es très gentille, mais pas ce soir
Un jardin public
Un Souvenir
Il faut de la peau
Sentir et ressentir
Une femme dévergondée comme ça
Au nom du père et du fils
Ma chère Muse bien-aimée
Un dispositif simple
Une photo de toi aussi
L’amour est enfant de bohème
La Floride fleurie
11 Novembre
Possession
Possession, bis
De garde dans les tranchées
Espèces errantes
Dieu rit
Jouir comme ça
Off the Record
Off the Record
Afterword
View Additional Images
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Author
Elena Mauli Shapiro grew up at 13, rue Thérèse in Paris, France. She has a BA in English and French from Stanford University, an MFA in Fiction Writing from Mills College, and an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Davis. She currently lives in the Bay Area with her husband.
1. His punctuation is atrocious (commas everywhere like anxious hiccupping gasps), as is his sentence structure and his spelling. I simply could not render it accurately in my translation. I have tried to help along his poor wording without utterly destroying the flavor of his voice.
2. The French salutation je t’embrasse confuses me each time I hear it. The verb embrasser means all of the following: (1) to hug someone; (2) to kiss someone, chastely, as in on the cheek; (3) to kiss someone passionately—what we call a French kiss, of course. I don’t know what to make of it: the connotation must always be picked up from context. It makes for a lot of interesting ambiguities. I choose to translate this word with the English embrace.
3. “Do you need anything else?”
4. “Poor Trevor, you caught a damn big cold.”
5. I pray that you will accept, Dear Sir, the expression of my most distinguished sentiments
6. It must be indicative of some national trait I do not thoroughly understand that the word petit/petite is so often a tender endearment to the French. People who love each other call each other Little This and Little That. I might find it a bit demeaning, but they seem to revel in it. They seem to enjoy being Little Things that can be held and cradled, warmly.
7. [meaning lost]
8. What did they make these rings out of in the trenches? I wonder.
9. One of the French words for depression is cafard, which the boy employs here, and which I find noteworthy. Another meaning of this word is “cockroach.” So when a Frenchman says “J’ai le cafard,” he means he is depressed and he is also literally saying “I have the cockroach,” as if some vile hard-shelled scuttling insect vermin is crawling all over his brain—how dreadful. It’s a bit vivid for me, I’m afraid.
10. Louise’s father did not like this request. At first he was merely angry: he stalked around the house grumbling at the idea of his daughter marrying the half-wit child of his half-wit brother. Not a good boy, to be sure—he’d had a phase as a schoolyard bully that had unsettled the family. There was a lot of talk about the army straightening him out, but how could one be sure? There was no way to know.
He turned to look at his daughter then, saw all the worried hope in her expectant face. Clearly she had in mind that he would rant his way out of the initial shock and eventually acquiesce. He went dark at that moment, more terrible than she’d ever seen him. The cold words that came from him stunned her with pain: “You will not marry your own blood, and that is all. The war might be turning us into animals, but we must have our limits. You have pained me deeply by entertaining such relations with your own cousin. You will stop this. Here is the letter he sent me. You will destroy it.”
She did not understand until much later why the idea of her marrying her own blood infuriated him so. Marriage between cousins was, after all, not so uncommon.
[NB: How do I have this information? It is not in any of the documentation.]
11. Look at these two, all buttoned up. Look at the one in the trench, below the