Precipice

Four months ago, I began learning how to read French, using a book recommended by a friend on the internet — Joseph Palemeri and E.E. Milliagan's French for Reading Knowledge. The logic of the book's pedagogy is that English speakers have access to a portion of the French vocabulary by dint of their shared lexicon, and the authors aim to mobilise this to facilitate the acquisition of reading knowledge. In practice, it translates to short grammar lessons followed by a section where the reader is tasked with translating a few sentences, usually without the help of a dictionary, to slowly become familiar with the practice of reading the language. I've been working through the book quite inconsistently since April, and at this moment, I find myself at a linguistic precipice, where French text is almost intelligible, hidden, just beyond a veil. Simple sentences pose barely any difficulty, but lengthy paragraphs are a test of endurance. And this has been the case, until Palmeri and Milligan set a out a section of La Fin du Monde for me to translate:

Cette fin du monde s'opérera sans bruit, sans révolution, sans cataclysme. Comme l'arbre perd les feuilles, au souffle du vent d'automne, ainsi la terre verra successivement tomber et périr tous ses enfants, et dans cet hiver éternel, qui l'enveloppera désormais, elle ne pourra plus espérer un nouveau soleil, ni un nouveau printemps.

Elle s'effacera de l'histoire des mondes. Les millions ou les milliards de siècles qu'elle aura vécu seront comme un jour. Ce ne sera qu'un détail tout 'a fait insignifiant dans l'ensemble de l'univers. Actuellement la terre n'est qu'un point invisible pour toutes les étoiles, car, à cette distance, elle est perdue par son infinie petitesse dans le voisinage du soleil, qui de loin n'est lui-même qu'une petite étoile. Dans l'avenir, quand la fin des choses arrivera sur cette terre, l'événement passera donc complètement inaperçu dans l'univers.

Les étoiles continueront de briller après l'extinction de notre soleil, comme elles brillaient déjà avant son existence. Lorsqu'il n'y aura plus sur la terre un seul regard pour les contempler, les constellations régneront encore dans l'étendue comme elles régnaient avant l'apiparition de l'homme sur ce petit globule. Il y a des étoiles dont la lumière érhploie des millions d'années pour nous arriver ... Le rayon lumineux que nous recevons actuellement est donc parti de leur sein avant l'époque de l'apparition de l'homme sur la terre. L'univers est si immense qu'il paraît immuable, et que la durée d'une planète telle que la terre n'est qu'un chapitre, moins que cela, une phrase, moins encore, un mot de son histoire.

This is how I translated it:

The end of the world will proceed silently, without revolution, without cataclysm. As a tree loses its leaves in a gust of autumn wind, thus the earth will witness its children fall and perish, in an eternal winter, that will envelop the world henceforth, there will be no hope of a new sun, nor a new spring.

The earth will be erased from the history of worlds. The millions and billions of centuries that have been lived will seem like only a day. An insignificant detail in the universe. At the moment, the earth is but an invisible point for all the stars, for, at this distance, it is lost in its infinite smallness in the vicinity of the sun, which by far, is itself a small star. In the future, when the end of things arrives on the earth, the event will pass completely unnoticed in the universe.

The stars will continue shining after the extinction of our sun, as they have shone before it existed. When there is no one left on earth to contemplate the stars, the constellations will still reign in the expanse, as they reigned before the appearance of humans on this little globe. There are stars whose light takes a million years to reach us... the luminous rays we receive today have left their bosoms before the appearance of humans on earth. The universe is so immense, it seems immutable, and the duration of a planet such as the earth is but a chapter, less than that, a sentence, less still, a word in its history.

(needless to say, any mistakes are my own)

Translating this, I was transported to a summer afternoon during my early childhood, when, as I read about the eventual death of the sun in an illustrated encyclopedia volume, I felt a chill run down my spine as the sun began to set and the temperature dropped almost imperceptibly. It was in the middle of summer, but the knowledge of the earth's impending demise was palpable to me, it sucked the heat out of a tropical summer, it filled me with horror, and I believe I spent quite a while after, bringing the message of our impending doom to my uninterested classmates (I was a very cheerful child).

Camille Flammarion was a contemporary of H.G. Wells, and while I have yet to read La Fin du Monde, first published in 1893, in its entirety, just reading the extract reminded me of one of the most desolate images from the latter's The Time Machine, published only two years later, where the time traveller sits in his time machine at the end of the world, contemplating the colossal crab that occupies the horizon, and the red sun that fails to fully illuminate the starless sky. Both Flammarion's and Wells's dismal literary futurisms were informed by the discoveries of the then contemporary science (Flammarion's reference was a comet that was predicted to destroy the earth, and you can read more about the case of Wells here, the author of the piece also looks at a lot of other English language doomsday fiction).

The Flammarion extract was surprisingly simple to translate. It took a while, as translations at this point of learning a new language generally do, I imagine, but I found that the shared ground of science and science fiction made a difference to the process of translation; I was already canny to a general episteme of the the universe as well as its literary incarnations, and while the words might have been unfamiliar, the meaning was not. In light of this, perhaps I shall concentrate on reading science fiction to hone my French reading skills.