Xa va.

Dennis Duncan’s LRB review-essay on Raymond Queneau’s life and career (Vol. 46 No. 12 · 20 June 2024; archived), formally a review of The Skin of Dreams (Loin de Rueil), translated by Chris Clarke, begins with the language angle:

‘Si tu t’imagines,’ Juliette Gréco sang. ‘If you imagine.’ It was her first time singing in public, on 22 June 1949, at the Boeuf sur le Toit cabaret, the beginning of her seven-decade reign as the first lady of French chanson. Both the venue and the song were selected by Gréco’s unlikely svengali, Jean-Paul Sartre. François Mauriac, three years away from his Nobel Prize, was in the audience. So was Marlon Brando. After the concert he gave Gréco a ride home on his motorbike. ‘Si tu t’imagines,’ indeed.

But the song isn’t a wish-upon-a-star fantasy. ‘Imagine’, here, is used in its finger-wagging, admonitory sense: you’ve got another think coming if you imagine that … That what? The next line is the song’s best, a sound poetry joke. Over the music-box twinkle, Gréco suddenly glitches, ‘xa va xa va xa’, clicking plosives like the needle skipping on a record, until the line resolves: ‘va durer toujours’. If you want to be boring about it, ‘xa va’ = ‘que ça va’: ‘If you imagine/That this will, that this will, that this/Will last for ever …’ But the poem that Sartre chose, and had set to music, was by Raymond Queneau. And Queneau spells it ‘xa’.

Ten years later, in the summer of 1959, the French edition of Elle magazine reported on a new and virulent linguistic disease sweeping the country. ‘The Zazie phenomenon is ravaging France like an epidemic. In the streets and on the métro, from the mountains to the beaches, we are all “speaking Zazie”.’ That summer, simply everyone was imitating the insouciant, potty-mouthed heroine of Queneau’s latest novel, Zazie dans le métro. ‘Unbearable’, Elle’s columnist mock-harrumphed.

But Zazie is hardly the only character in the book whose speech seems designed to get up the noses of a certain class of reader. Set over the course of a weekend in Paris, the novel breezes through strikes and riots and abductions as a thwarted but persistent paedophile hounds Zazie and attempts to assault her aunt. Giving languid pursuit, Zazie’s uncle Gabriel tries to mollify everyone by inviting them to his drag show. Throughout, everyone speaks some variety or other of slang. The book opens with Gabriel’s one-word assessment of the crowds at the Gare d’Austerlitz and their personal hygiene: ‘Doukipudonktan’. As with ‘xa va’, to make sense of it one needs to sound it out: ‘D’où qu’ils puent donc tant?’ ‘Holifartwatastink’, as the novel’s first translators had it. Later, Zazie will reveal her obsession with ‘blouddjinnzes’, a fashionable variety of American legwear, and once again readers are forced to mutter the word aloud.

To be fair to Queneau, the reason everyone was ‘speaking Zazie’ in 1959 was because that’s how they spoke anyway. It was just that Queneau had the temerity to transcribe the laconic patterns of everyday speech – its elisions and inversions, its slang and its borrowings – and put them into literary fiction. And besides, he had been doing it in his novels for a quarter of a century.

The idea had come to Queneau on a visit to Greece in the early 1930s. There he learned about the dispute between adherents of the two rival forms of the Greek language: the archaic, revivalist Katharevousa, harking back to classical Greek, and the modern, vernacular Demotic. Queneau recognised a similar gulf between literary French and the contemporary spoken language: ‘I came to realise that modern, written French must free itself from the conventions that still hem it in.’ What was needed was an overhaul, an attentiveness to everyday speech, which would bring about a new written language, a ‘néo-français’, corresponding to the language as it was actually spoken.

We discussed Queneau’s Catharêfwsa a few years ago, starting here; if you’re wondering about the very different title of the translation, Duncan says:

While ‘La Peau des rêves’ (‘The Skin of Dreams’) was the working title that appeared on Queneau’s typescript, it was abandoned before the novel was published. For an English readership its replacement, Loin de Rueil (‘Far from Rueil’), is off-puttingly obscure – not to mention virtually unpronounceable. Rueil is the small town on the outskirts of Paris in which the novel begins and ends.

(We discussed problematic titles of translations here and here, and I complained about a particular one here.)