Il est plus honteux de se defier de sus amis, que d'en etre trompe.
I don't know what this means. French drives me crazy. It is a romance language, it should not be so hard to get the basic, ballpark gist of one little sentence. I can plug this into babelfish and still all I get is that defying your friends is in some way being compared to a horn, which I could have gotten on my own, except for the tromp part, which I would have guessed meant trick, not horn. Isn't something like tromp de'leil trick of the eye art? All those vowels! And xes! I get so thrown off.
Ah hah. Trompe l'Oei. So, we're assuming, tromp is a completely different word. I don't know. I'm tired and hungry and ready to go home. My first weekend in ten months. There are all kinds of crazy self-punishing and self-indulgent habits I have gotten myself into this year that I am going to have to break.
Ah hah. Trompe l'Oei. So, we're assuming, tromp is a completely different word. I don't know. I'm tired and hungry and ready to go home. My first weekend in ten months. There are all kinds of crazy self-punishing and self-indulgent habits I have gotten myself into this year that I am going to have to break.
posted by Anna at 4:28 PM
6 Comments:
i get something like: it is better to pretend you don't know your friends than to be a dirty cheater. Or something to that effect. M says he can get a guy he works with to translate it though. :)
Brilliant! French-speaking people!
It is more shameful to distrust your friends than to be betrayed
so says the french man
Oh, and he wants to know where it came from/what its about. He agrees that the expression is difficult to translate. trompe in this circumstance means to be tricked or betrayed (presumably by the friends you're supposed to be trusting)
Ahh, that makes sense. It is a saying quoted by a francophile schoolteacher in the novel The Jane Austen Book Club, which is exactly what the book is about-- a group of women (and one man) meeting each month to discuss the six Austen novels, their relationships with each other, and perhaps most prominently the practice of reading itself, the individual's relationship to literature. But that quotation makes sense thematically, both in the world of the novel and maybe in Austen's, too--in both places your friends can (and do sometimes) misguide you, but there isn't a deep underlying moral code or sense of personal destiny that could give you any better answer about how to live your life (who to marry). Everything's based on the imperfect wisdom of those you trust.
yanno, if you're not doing anything this weekend ... come up! we're having a thing, and then a super-exclusive barbecue after ... :)
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