One of my wife’s birthday presents was a CD of Saint-Saëns: Sonates & Trio, played by Renaud Capuçon, Bertrand Chamayou, and Edgar Moreau (a lovely recording it is, too); the blurb on the back says “Moins connue et jouée que celle de Fauré, Ravel ou Debussy, la musique de chambre de Saint-Saëns n’affiche aucun complexe face aux puissants chefs-d’œuvre du répertoire germanique,” immediately followed by a translation: “Less known or played than that of Fauré, Ravel and Debussy, the chamber music of Saint-Saëns stands on a par with the greatest masterpieces of the Germanic repertoire.” Afficher is ‘to display, show’ and complexe is ‘complex’; how do you get from ‘displays no complex in the face of’ to “stands on a par with”? What complexity am I missing?
Also, if you subscribe to the Criterion Channel and have any interest in African movies, I recommend Shaihu Umar, which is leaving the channel at the end of the month and which is one of the first movies in Hausa — it’s going to take me a few days to get through it because I keep pausing it to look things up (fortunately, I own Nicholas Awde’s useful little Hausa-English/English-Hausa Dictionary). I’ve already dug through the LH archives to find David Eddyshaw’s comment from last year about Hausa wuri ‘cowrie,’ plural kuɗi ‘money.’ And the start of the movie, which shows pilgrims arriving in a dusty Nigerian town to meet the famous Umar (who then tells them his life story in flashback), provides an excellent example of the prolonged formulaic exchanges of greetings so prevalent in West Africa.
complexe here seems to be short for complexe d’infériorité.
I thought of inferiority complex too. But could it mean that the music displays no less sophistication than the German stuff?
complexe here seems to be short for complexe d’infériorité.
Ah, that would makes sense, but then the English doesn’t represent it well: it means the S-S isn’t afraid of the Germans (subjectivity), not that it is on a par with them (objectivity).
Googling “n’affiche aucun complexe” finds much sports journalism about competitors not overawed by higher-ranked opponents. Some extended use about business rivals, and humans in less explicitly competitive domains. Perhaps the oeuvre of Saint-Saëns is being personified, or perhaps the expression is semantically bleached enough to apply to things lacking a mind.
I thought Françoise Hardy might have sung “complexe” in Comment te dire adieu but no.
Mollymooly, are you thinking of Marie-Paul Belle, ‘La Parisienne’ (1976)?
As ulr notes, this is from the jargon of psychoanalysis. TLFi:
As the citation shows, such use is not particularly recent. Also see the results here.
Thanks, my knowledge of French idiom is now improved!
(Marie-Paule.C/P error.)