French play (not) lost in translation

There is something interesting about watching a play about the difficulties of communication when the entire thing is in a language in which you are not fluent.

Last week, I found myself at the Théâtre des Abbesses in the Montmartre section of Paris sitting through a performance of “L’Européenne.” The play, written by 37-year-old Frenchman David Lescot, explores the mess that is The European Union and its 23 official languages.

The text, based in French, also contains a decent amount of Portuguese and Italian, with a few words of German, English, and Bulgarian thrown in. A comedy of errors, the plot was somewhat secondary to the dialogue, which was a mad rush of translation and misinterpretation.

The characters are in the midst of counting the votes in the referendum for the 2005 EU Constitution, and a melange of European Union bureaucrats and musicians are brought to form an orchestra. (They instead end up forming more or less of a klezmer band, with a clarinet, an accordion, and a bass.)

The interesting part about attending a play about language (in a foreign language) is that the language isn’t really that important. The main themes come across in the music, the gestures and movement of the actors, and the actors’ abilities to communicate beyond the text.

There is no doubt that the blonde Italian singing about a volcano in a tight little red dress is there for the sexual appeal. Or that the skinny Portuguese guy is supposed to be the awkward, class-clown type. Or that the uptight French bureaucrat “running the show” is kind of a cold-hearted dictator.

Their interactions say it all. The confusion about the European identity comes across clearly through the characters’ words, and, often, without them. This confusion about the European identity is actually quite amusing to me.

I was discussing this phenomenon with a French person the other day. She was not the first person to suggest to me that France is very different from the United States. They are 27 different cultures with 23 different languages—can they ever be “European”? There are many people who believe it will never happen. They are French, or Portuguese, or Italian before anything else.

But I really don’t see such a big difference. Sure, we can mostly understand each other, and the House of Representatives doesn’t need a band of 500 translators, but the same culture? I think I experienced at least as much culture shock moving from California to New York as I did moving from New York to Paris.

 This summer, I took a road trip with my dad through the South, and I continually found myself baffled by differences between life in Tennessee and anything that I had experienced on either coast. And how long did it take citizens of the United States to stop seeing themselves first as Virginians and second as Americans? In some places it took a war, in others it never happened.

Obviously, the European example is much more complicated, and its origins have a stronger history than our own, but integration and culturally different identities are not mutually exclusive. At the end of the day, or at least the end of the play, there are things that we all share as human beings: music, emotion, life, death, love, and sex (yes, sex). 

Shane Ferro is a Columbia College junior studying abroad at Reid Hall in Paris. La Vie Culturelle runs alternating Tuesdays.