Maman, untranslatable?

By Quan | 15 July 2024 | 5 min read

I Woke Up Seeing 100 People Had Subscribed to My YouTube Channel. So I Got a Key Lime Croissant to Celebrate

Key lime pie croissant and coffee at Maman

This morning I woke up seeing that the YouTube channel for French Crawl hit 100 subscribers, which feels like a million (thanks y’all). I’m visiting a friend in Princeton, NJ so we went for coffee at Maman Princeton, which happens to be the latest outpost of the popular New York cafe/bakery chain. My friend studied French back in the day so I joked with her that a coffee wasn’t a complete p’tit dej, that I needed a cigarette to make it complet. We had a laugh at the stereotype. I don’t smoke.

Coffee and Cigarettes always makes me think of Jim Jarmusch’s film of the same name. In particular the idea of Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright having a conversation, who appear in the original short.

I picked out the Key Lime Pie Croissant Cube weighing in at a decadent 540 calories. The word “maman" reminded me of a New Yorker article, “Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be,” by Ryan Bloom, which I had read years ago about the translation to the opening line in Camus’s L’Étranger. Bloom writes:

The New Yorker's Lost in Translation

“For the modern American reader, few lines in French literature are as famous as the opening of Albert Camus’s “L’Étranger”: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” Nitty-gritty tense issues aside, the first sentence of “The Stranger” is so elementary that even a schoolboy with a base knowledge of French could adequately translate it … In 1946, Gilbert translated the book’s title as “The Outsider” and rendered the first line as “Mother died today.” Simple, succinct, and incorrect.”

Bloom goes on to talk about the word maman and how there’s really no equivalent. "Mother" being too cold and "mommy" being too childlike. A more recent translator, Matthew Ward, translates the line as “Maman died today.” He goes on to argue why it’s a better translation along with another argument for syntax and word order of the line, its relationship to the character himself, and ends up with “Today, Maman died.” as his answer.

Mother / Ma / Maman / Mère / Me

Maman Princeton

I grew up speaking Vietnamese and still do with my family (and passably with others, I think). But I’m basically illiterate and couldn’t write my way out of a paper bag. In Vietnamese the word for mom is me (three ways via tones) or ma (two different ways via tones) which make up several variations of "mother" based on tone and region. And there’s more words used in literature and other dialects I’ve never encountered that exist.

The northern region’s “me” derives from the French word mère, which means mother. One of the three tonal variants of “me” is the most widely used version, which is what I used growing up. It’s a visceral word and kind of bonks me right on the head whenever I think of the term “mother tongue.”

Per Maman’s website, they describe their story:

“Maman founders Benjamin Sormonte and Elisa Marshall have brought to life a melding of our earliest childhood experiences in the kitchen and a nod to their mothers from the south of France and North America. Maman, after all, means “mother” in French.”

Zeroing in on my prey

I’ve never taken a DELF French exam. Maybe one day I will. One of my professors thought I was somewhere in the B2 realm. I honestly feel like I’m A1 at times with various aspects of it. The thing I’m really curious about though is whether I can ever achieve this feeling I’m after. Something akin to how I feel with Vietnamese when I speak it or hear it, which is of ease and being at home. This despite the fact that I would say I’m more advanced in French overall than Vietnamese.

There are moments when I have had dreams in French after intense studying or having been immersed it in for a period of time. At other times I’ve caught a glimpse of being in flow during a conversation, but it often feels like running in a race where the pacer grows more distant over time.

“Utilizing the original French word in the first sentence rather than any of the English options also serves to remind readers that they are in fact entering a world different from their own.”

L'Étranger

The spread at Maman Princeton

Perhaps the idea of the goal is absurd itself because it goes beyond more than studying the language, the syntax, and is more alike to how Bill Evans describes Jazz:

“Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can’t explain it. They really can’t translate feeling because they’re not a part of it. That’s why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.”

Often times, learning a foreign language feels like sitting in on another group of friend’s conversation. They tell inside jokes, reminisce on past stories, and laugh about moments you were not a part of. It’s less about understanding them and everything about not having lived those moments and being an étranger.

Hitting 100 Subscribers on YouTube

Bloom writes, “Utilizing the original French word in the first sentence rather than any of the English options also serves to remind readers that they are in fact entering a world different from their own.”

Maybe all I’ll ever get is the silhouette of it, an essence, like caching the wind with a net. I guess that’s part of the chase, the mystery and curiosity of it all. And as to why I don't feel the same way about Vietnamese, I'll psychoanalyze that later. Until then, I’ll continue to enjoy the next coffee or pastry thinking about it.