But there is always something that is not

The scene takes place after the war in an amphitheatre of the Sorbonne. A professor is hot gorges of a couplet (two to group containing a full statement) of Goethe, saying in essence: "in breathing, there are two benefits: air and to unload.". Students drink milk small. Why show his pleasure to mock the "heaviness" of the Germans, after five years of occupation One refuses to be on the senior: Georges - Arthur Goldschmidt, born in Germany in 1928. It rises and calls the teacher: "Sir, this seems ridiculous when you do not know German." The time is not in the discussion, even less to the challenge, the master him close the order to the door, showing could not be more concretely what "principle of authority" means.

Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, seventy-six years this year, regret nothing. And is consistent in: "To learn a foreign language, is whether breathing." Each language has its respiratory rate. In German, a sentence makes perfect sense that completed. Therefore, to speak, consume a sufficient amount of air. This is not the case of French, where you can breath between words, catch its breath before a subordinate proposal. "(He mime gesture.) Learning a language involves much breathing. And to the ear. For hearing, the French are at a disadvantage, the range of sounds of their native language being less than that of a Russian or German, perceive poorly phonetic subtleties and they find it more difficult to reproduce them. It does no good to beat his guilt, there is obvious: the French language does not hearing education. Ultimate argument Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt. "Why, according to you, the variety speak German to the Tigers." Silence. Perhaps all are from Bavaria and Tyrol, two regions where skin (of beast) pants elegant Unless the University of Heidelberg offers courses of language immersion in the cat No, the variety speak German, "because it is a more sound language.

Kafka to Handke

This is the response of Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt to the publication of the report of the Ministry of National Education highlighting the poor results of small French in English practice. "Nothing is easier to teach a language, even deemed difficult as German." Provided focus on oral. Always this case breathing and sound. The old Professor comes in support of the translator, and vice versa. Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt has taught at the lycée Paul-Eluard, in Saint-Denis, in region Paris, then at a College, located in the Gambetta métro, in the 20th arrondissement of Paris. For his "pleasure", he became a translator. He has translated "The trial" and "The Castle" (Press Pocket) of Kafka, "Thus spoke Zarathustra" (LGF) Nietzsche, contemporary Austrian writer Peter Handke and, recently, "Lenz" of Georges Büchner (1813-1837), in a bilingual edition (wanders). The height of happiness for a translator "Dry." Any language is, on paper, translatable. But there is always something that is not. It is the heart, the essence of a language key. "And its"open":"A language does not really say what it means... ". The language is still before us, can never to take ownership of it completely. We must always start over. That is, his incompetence.

Teacher, translator, Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt is also French language writer. But he has written ten years ago a German book (translated into French under the title: "The line of flight") and he wrote another, at this time. His latest book in French, "Blow" (Verdier), is autobiographical. It focuses on the "language of wonder", maternal German, and French "language of home, open and liberating".

A lego set

This is not a theoretician of Linguistics, but involuntary practitioner, close to his body defending. His mother tongue was banned, he was forced to acquire another, before returning to the first language and multiply the back and forth. Memories of a young boy of barely nine years in 1937: "these large placid and peaceful men who left their turnstiles of postcards on the sidewalk and put their lots of shampoo in the showcase, they are now in uniforms goose caca, mouth twisted by hatred and marching to goose step." His maternal German is "put to sound abrupt, raw and hard." It recognizes more language "If secret and melodious" his mother reading a tale of Grimm, the language of "song of the cuckoo, the cracking of the hubs of carts, of the voice of parents, the du vent, the first lies and the first marvels". Where are they, the "old ladies to tape of velvet around his neck, which detached the syllables, left spinning sounds without too support and which gave German a softness, a soup so special" This "infant language as a set of Lego", with pre-and postprépositions, of contiguous words, to cartoon itself, by marrying a jargon to extension, bureaucratic and deadly. "It is no longer a question of"Kinderlandesverschikung"("stays of children in the countryside"), of Volksgemeinsschaft" ("ethnic community")... The death "a master of Germany", the poet Paul Celan "had invaded the language". Twisted, mistreated, dirty, abused, it gave way to what the German philologist Victor Klemperer called "LTI", "lingua tertii imperii, the language of the third.

Worse, this language "of the deep range of his soul", become unrecognisable, is prohibited. Did not then: "wenn ein Jude deutsch spricht, lügt er" ("when a Jew speaks German, lying") The Georges-Arthur young, high in Lutheranism, a family of the bourgeoisie of Hamburg, falls high. Jews, he knows that those of the Bible. The racial laws Hitler does not the conversion of her parents embarrassing. They are leaving the Germany. Via Munich and Florence, put him in a savoyard internship. Just before the Declaration of war.

Century French

One evening in November 1939, a classmate of internship exclaims: "flakes". The young man realizes that he understands French, even months. It is in not realized, without daring to speak. More troubling, he has the sense of understanding words that he has not read. However, he read many. The books are the only distraction in this mountain boarding. He devours the available authors, those of the 17th century, the century. He discovered the subtleties of the French through La Bruyère and its "characters", Pascal, and Rousseau, and the 18th century. The boy is amazed by the "brief densities" of La Rochefoucauld, Retz, La Fontaine, by these words he devine, to hear, their very old use. "They looked like old people full of experience," languor ","promptly","pride", it imagined them in habits of court;". ""complacency", "jealousy", "brightness" or "opportunity" each had their physiognomy, their appearance and especially no one knew what they were made, unlike the German words which all the elements were recognizable. "Pride", for example, became "hochmut": high spirit. "German, finds, gives"the illusion to say things with the glut of the words", the French plays on"emaciated""rarity":"Root, it is 700 words." The brutality of a crush German responds the refinement of the host language. "The French had something rugged, a language for tapestries, medallions and shepherdesses." Perhaps he regretted core torments expressed by his first language. French was "a language that spinning in the mouth, that could take on the corner of lips, and which would only", but it was not "the bulges or the German, his sweetness, nor its hardnesses uprisings."

Baroque Catholicism

Late 1943, the Germans replaced in Savoie Italians. Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt has no words to thank these gendarmes, the Director of boarding school and a few others who have hidden it in a farm. "Five French risked their lives for a foreign kid pissait to bed." An illustration, he said, of the French Paradox: a Government of collaboration and relatively few deportations; a church with a hierarchy "despicable" and "great" campaign priests The young man seventeen in 1945 converts to Catholicism (today, it is said "atheist"). In recognition for those who welcomed him and a fascination with disorder he suffered corporal punishment for this mixture of mysticism, Bliss, flogging. His Catholicism is baroque statuary.

French serves as an intermediary for "it soothes gradually this tormented relationship" in German, that he found in the preparation of the Bachelor. He acknowledged only in these manuals filled with overblown texts. Today, when Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt travelled to Germany, its interlocutors tell him that he speaks "a beautiful German of pre-war", that of the bourgeoisie in the North, that of Thomas Mann. They are surprised by this witness of another era, this dinosaur come from another world.

A solution: bilingualism

From this dual proximity, Georges-Arthur developed a kind of psychology of languages, where mixed history, geography, affectivity. German is a language that describes the path it traverses, observed, French jump steps. It appears "open", "great sea", addressing "all senses", "a language coloured by the sun setting". The German is more "raw", a language of "early bird, the backpack", embarrassed. Each his fate. In the 17th century, the preachers had removed the French warriors terms and the Court of Versailles had removed the guttural sounds, which have survived in Quebec. The German was built on the translation of the Bible by Luther in 1535; He created "a juicy, evocative, and sound idiom full of images, a mixture of gentleness and violence, no other such". Soiled by Nazism, this language has undergone a new contempt, "newspeak" of the Stalinist GDR.

Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt regretted that Europeans interested if little languages of their neighbours, then their vision of the world. They accommodated English "pidgin" (literally "petit-nègre"), which reduces the contact to a minimum. The deletion of the post of teacher of German in French colleges and the alienation of the young Germans for the French language navrent. "It is a folly, one day it will pay dearly." Bilingualism is, he says, the solution for Europe. Provided that the second language to belong to another language group. The French should not just Spanish or Italian, they should engage in learning Russian, Polish. Or German, of course. Anyway, there is no official European language. The country of the language chosen would be suspected of hegemonic subject. Under the return to the latin, "a language neutral and extraordinary"