I’ve started watching Jacques Rivette’s Jeanne la pucelle (it’s almost six hours long, so I’m taking it in chunks, which fortunately it breaks easily into); it’s gorgeous, and Sandrine Bonnaire can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned, but the subtitles are occasionally iffy, and I’m here to complain about one that particularly irritated me. Someone is talking about the warring forces in France and mentions a group that the subtitle calls “the Godons.” I thought I knew a fair amount about the period, but that didn’t ring a bell; after some googling I realized that it was this. OK, apparently “godons” was a variant form of the more familiar “goddams” (though I note that the Wiktionary article says “speculatively connected to English God damn, although the profanity is not attested in Middle English” [see Xerîb’s comment below for further demolition]), but what a lousy way to render it! “The English” would be preferable, but even “the goddams” would give more of a hint to the viewer not versed in Medieval French obloquy. And this from a subtitler who, when Jeanne tells her uncle she wants to go to see the Dauphin and he says “Qui — le roi de Bourges?” renders his response “the Well Served?” Which is not only unintelligible to the non-specialist viewer but misses the entire point of mockingly calling him “King of Bourges”!
Here’s a historical fun fact (?) from wikipedia: “During this period, Bourges was a major centre of alchemy.[citation needed]”
“Oh, you want a citation, do you?”
*waves wand and overcurious editor disappears in a puff of vile smoke*
fun fact
The establishment has tried to suppress knowledge of this:
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Le débat sur l’alchimie à Bourges n’en est pas à ses débuts, il y a une véritable bataille d’Hernani sur le sujet. Ville d’Art et d’Histoire, la cité de Charles VII s’est trouvée depuis longtemps phagocytée par des amateurs ou des chercheurs très rationnels, très compétents mais dont les domaines de recherches étaient totalement encadrés par ce que l’on pourrait appeler le pouvoir officiel.
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“phagocytée par des amateurs“, ey wot ? To an etymon-aware Anglophone that sounds so weird, and yet scientific and immunitary-lifelike. Unfortunately, the French seem to use it as an ordinary word meaning “monopolized”. They do that kind of thing a lot, not gonna lie.
‘Amateur’ is one of my favourite false friends – I remember a great debate started by a label on a jam jar which mentioned ‘amateurs de confiture’!
IIRC, Anouilh uses ‘godons’ in his play about Joan, ‘L’Alouette’. When I read it I remembered that ‘goddams’ is explained in Shaw’s ‘Saint Joan’, which I studied at school.
There is a bit more on godon at the entry (from the late 70s to early 80s, when Albert Gier was an editor?) here in the DEAF électronique. (Click to expand the etymology, the citations, and the subentry; LH readers can run the entry through their favorite online translator if need be.) And at the entry (from 2023?) in the DMF here. (Click on the tab ‘Complet’ to expand for the citations.) And at the root god- in the Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch.
The page of the Bayeux Manuscript with the song mentioned in the DEAFél is here (folio 64r). There is a transcription here, p. 72 in Jean Théodore Gérold (1921) Le Manuscrit de Bayeux : texte et musique d’un recueil de chansons du XVe siècle, p. 72, song LXII.
Some attempts at a performance of the song can be found simply by searching on the string “et cuidez-vous que je me joue” in YouTube, such as this one. The others I don’t want to give the clicks to.
There is partial English translation of the song on p. 10 here, with a ridiculous etymology of godon in a footnote… (Heh heh, les godés.)
Ah, so “godons” is not a variant of “goddams”! Thanks, I’ve added a bracketed note in the post.
I had not heard of the Battle of Hernani. The Wikipedia article is lively
I had not heard of the Battle of Hernani.
Nor I, but I decided that to learn more would not significantly up my salon cred. After all, many French intellectuals will have never heard of Chicken Little, and are easy with that.
Nor I; in fact, I’d never even heard of Hugo’s Hernani — I knew only Verdi’s Ernani.
Here’s the Wikipedia article mollymooly quoted; it’s as dauntingly long and complex as Hugo’s play.
Might it be fair to say that “goddams” is a subsequent eggcornish reanalysis of “godons”?
And how old is it, come to that?
Often I have found that a WiPe article in one language, presumably the original version, is much longer than the version in other languages. My presumption is that the subject of that longer article is dearer to the hearts of native speakers of the same language, because national fervor, that to the hearts of foreigners.
However, “The Battle of Hernani” seems to be a sentence-for-sentence translation of “Bataille d’Hernani”. I looked closer at both texts after noticing that one English sentence was a bit patchworky, for my taste. It feels tacked together, with that colon, that “, and,” (“and” flanked by commas) as well as lots more commas. Unlovely, although bearable:
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What did make the essay original, however, was the centrality of the aesthetics of the grotesque:[19] its alliance with the sublime made it the distinctive trait of “modern genius, so complex, so varied in its forms, so inexhaustible in its creations”,[20] and, since this alliance was not permitted by the strict separation of theatrical genres in the classical hierarchy, which reserved the sublime for tragedy and the grotesque for comedy, this hierarchy, unfit to produce works in keeping with the genius of the age, had to give way to drama, capable of evoking in the same play the sublime of an Ariel and the grotesque of a Caliban.[21]
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I thought: “is this one of those long French sentences?”. And sho’ ’nuff’:
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Ce qui en revanche faisait l’originalité de l’essai, c’était le caractère central qu’y occupait l’esthétique du grotesque[19] : son alliance avec le sublime en faisait le trait distinctif du « génie moderne, si complexe, si varié dans ses formes, si inépuisable dans ses créations »[20], et, puisque cette alliance n’était pas permise par la séparation stricte des genres théâtraux dans la hiérarchie classique, qui réservait le sublime à la tragédie et le grotesque à la comédie, cette hiérarchie, inapte à produire des œuvres conformes au génie de l’époque, devait laisser la place au drame, capable d’évoquer dans une même pièce le sublime d’un Ariel et le grotesque d’un Caliban[21]
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I may be kidding myself, but I feel such length goes down better in German, because hypotaxis and cases are your helpmeets. The French article reads hitchless too, but I don’t trust my judgement here. I have facility, but not felicity.
@JWB:
I was just wondering that myself, particularly in view of the fact that it appears that English soldiers were not, in fact, given to saying “God damn” at the time in question. (Or later, quite possibly.)
What is “fuckin’ A” in Middle English, anyway?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_creole
I remember reading per contra that whereas “Get your fucking rifles!” was a routine order as long ago as WWI, “Get your rifles!” represented genuine urgency. This might be explained as the former being more or less artificial and the latter being a reversion to more spontaneous usage.
That would make sense in view of the well-documented use of “fucking” etc as markers of (especislly) male solidarity in English (analogous in some ways to the tutoyer practices of French, though more restricted socially.)
In the stress of combat, such subtle discourse markers will naturally be elided.
Jeanne la pucelle stands out in my memory as the first of several Rivette films with a special look, continued through Haut bas fragile and Secret défense: namely a lot of nighttime scenes shot with some kind of lens that still provided incredible clarity, rather like the way cinephiles rave about the look of Barry Lyndon. I ought to read the credits to these again to see if it shows what lenses and film were responsible for this.
It’s gorgeous, but I find I much prefer the scenes of her wandering around a bucolic France trying to drum up support to the battle scenes (I’ve just gotten to the siege of Orléans), which look kind of pathetic — a couple of dozen actors dashing around with lances and banners trying to look like an army. Bondarchuk’s War and Peace spoiled me.
Re: ‘La bataille d’Hernani’ – I remember a university lecturer 50+ years ago telling us that one of the controversial aspects of the play was a king asking “Quelle heure est-il?” instead of making some high-flown reference to the passage of the chariot of the sun across the sky. Well, the Wikipedia article does mention ‘trivial dialogue’!
And no wonder — that leads straight to “merdre“!
Poetae docti sunt.
Hat: kind of pathetic — a couple of dozen actors dashing around with lances and banners trying to look like an army
That may be a pretty accurate description of much medieval warfare.
Heh. Good point!
Medieval generals tended to avoid pitched battles (sieges like that of Orléans are not battles): warfare was simply very expensive; they literally couldn’t afford to lose a battle. During the decade 1421-1431, there were six battles in the Hundred Years War. Jeanne was present at one of these, the battle of Patay in 1429. According to Jean de Wavrin (who fought on the English side under Sir John Fastolf), there were 13000 soldiers on the French side, but modern estimates speak of 3000-4000 French. When Jeanne arrived on the battlefield, the actual battle was over. 2000 soldiers on the English side had been killed and 200 were taken prisoner. Prisoners not important enough for a ransom were simply killed. (Information from Jeanne d’Arc. Histoire et Dictionnaire by Philippe Contamine, Olivier Bouzy and Xavier Hélary, Paris 2012).
So, contrary to the subtitle Rivette gave the first part of his movie, Jeanne was only present at one real battle (and she never fought). Everything else was just skirmishes, for example during the siege of Orléans.