Je chasse le ptérodactyle
I’ve ditched Duolingo. Finally.
For five years or thereabouts it was my little daily discipline. Quarter of an hour, twenty minutes, usually in the early mornings, guessing the gender of nouns, feeling pleased when I remembered something from an earlier lesson, engaging with the animations to the extent that I could almost think of them as having real personalities: all chucked before Christmas, with no regrets.
I didn’t mind the silly phrases you’d never use in real life. I wasn’t bothered by all the exercises involving the words for foods I have never eaten and wouldn’t recognise if I saw them on the plate. The Americanisms were understandable. I could close my eyes to the relentless advertising and pretend that I was just taking a break between lessons. But I ditched it anyway, and likely for the same reasons anyone ditches it. I was there to learn French and not to earn pointless points.
But hang on – why did I want to learn French anyway? I spend on average about one day of any given year in France or the French-speaking world, so my inability to hold a conversation is hardly a handicap. I can say please and thank you and I can order cake. I don’t need much more than that to get by in English. But I started learning French because I wanted to be able to read comics. I have no excuse. I make no apology.
By Jacques Tardi, copyright Casterman.
The French and Belgians do good comics. I’ve been a fan ever since Asterix was serialised – two panels at a time – in the Irish Times when I was small. That was in English translation, of course. (It was a while before I even knew that the original was Astérix with a fada over the e.) Likewise, Jacques Tardi’s C'était la guerre des tranchées came my way as It Was the War of the Trenches, albeit many years later. Tardi’s powerful work didn’t have quite the same attraction as Asterix, but I had to seek out more just the same. As I may have mentioned in an earlier post, my interest in illustrated stories featuring soldiers in bleu horizon goes back a long way.
So next came Putain de Guerre, translated as Goddamn This War, but by then the translations stopped coming. The hoped-for Jacques Tardi comics boom had failed to occur.
Seriously: there had been such a hope. It was built on the film adaptation of his most famous work and alas, while the film (by Luc Besson) was all sorts of charming, if neglected to set the box office on fire. I speak, of course, of Les Aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec, which is the title of both film and comic. The film is sweet, but it was the comic that I fell for.
There’s a superb belle époque aesthetic to the art, and I believe that was what drove Tardi rather than, say, any story he felt he had to tell. The stories are plain silly, with more than a suggestion that they were made up as they went along.
But I enjoyed them hugely, and a great part of that was having to read them in French. It strongly reminded me of how absorbed I used to get in comics as a child. Barely literate, deeply ignorant, I would pore over the pictures, and then the words, and then back to the pictures to try and make sense of it. Forty years later, add in a French-English dictionary, and that was me during Covid lockdown.
Duolingo was a natural progression from the dictionary. It didn’t help as much as I’d have liked when it came to the absurdities of Adèle Blanc-Sec or the nineteenth-century slang of Tardi’s massive Le Cri du Peuple, but it gave me a handle on the grammar that I’d lost somewhere back around the Inter Cert.* And honestly? I don’t want much more. It’s not like I intend to go reading Camus in the original or engaging in rapid-fire banter in French social gatherings. So yeah – Duolingo has outlived its usefulness or, to look at it another way, its annoyances have at last outweighed its usefulness.
And what, if anything, has this to do with the world of Dirty Shirt?
Well it so happens that Mlle. Adèle Blanc-Sec is a redhead with a permanent sick-of-your-bullshit scowl. That much at least was translated into the character of Miss Nora Maxfield, of the Voluntary Aid Detachment of the Red Cross.
And now you know.
*For overseas or younger readers, the Intermediate Certificate Examination was a burdensome and useless institution which served only to take a bite out of the summer holidays and accustom Irish sixteen-year-olds to heavy-duty examinations.
The wardrobe is ten years too early, but the automatic pistol and the expression are very Nora. So, in a way, is the illogic of Adèle Blanc-Sec’s world. (images copyright Casterman)
