LE CHAT NOIR ~ en francais

Well I finally have a French translation of my play LE CHAT NOIR that I like and I got a bunch of francophone actors to perform it on Zoom this past week. What an experience. It was so weird but fun to hear the whole thing in French. 

And it was so appropriate since, as I just found out, this week is la semaine de la langue français et de la francophonie. That is to say, the French government is, from March 15 - 23, celebrating the French language and French-speakers, which includes those outside of France.

By chance, the French speakers I assembled for the Zoom reading included a Ukrainian, a Franco-Turk, two French people from the south of France, a Quebecois and me, because I decided to play the role of Madeline Valadon, the mother of Suzanne Valadon. Only because she does not have a lot of lines and I practiced her lines night and day for a month. 

And I still couldn't quite get some words right. I practiced with Microsoft Word, which has a dictation feature - you speak and Word transcribes what you say onto a document. And you can do it in lots of different languages, including French.

So I practiced saying the words with Microsoft Word and watched how it was transcribed. I got pretty good after a while but there were some words that were incredibly difficult to pass off to Word as if a French-speaker was talking. Words like "scélérat" (scoundrel), "pour louer" - which means "to rent for" but Word kept thinking I was saying "polluer" which means "to pollute." And "meule" which means "millstone" and it's sort of pronounced "mew-lah" but Word though I was saying, at various times, "mur" (wall), "mûle" (mule), "molle" (soft) and "nul" (zero, but also an insult along the lines of "loser.")

I did finally conquer "la fée vert" which means "the green fairy" - it's what people sometimes call absinthe, but I had to practice a million times before Word understood I was saying "fee" for fairy, instead of feuille (leaf) or fait (fact) or veille (the day before) Oh lah lah!

But worst of all is "love" - or "l'amour." Usually when I said the word it came out "la mort" which means death. And they are fairly distinct- "la mort" is like lah mehr, while l'amour is like lah-moor. I don't know why it took so long to get it right. And I have to get it right! French is the language of l'amour, not the language of la mort!