زوج وزوجته

 انا اشاهد هذا الفيلم واشاهد وجوه الرجل والامراة.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06f146k/storyville-20142015-28-a-syrian-love-story

J'essaie maintenant d'ecrire en arabe chaque soir - No Warning

Chaque soir

Ce n'est pas impossible, mais il faut choisir des mots et des evenements avec soin. Voyant un tout petit bonhomme de neige sur un table devant un cafe me donne des idees, mais ce soir j'aurais peut etre mal a trouver des mots dont j'aurais besoin.

No warning

H said mumtaz and ahlan to me without any warning on the way home. Then he wanted to say allah. So I gave him various versions. He said there was no point in knowing Arabic if he wanted to go to Germany. I said it was always extremely useful to know a bit of Arabic, whatever country you are in. I find it lets me feel more at home here in London and Oxford.

As I drove around Knightsbridge recently I spotted an Islamic Bank of Somewhere on a roundabout and I regularly go past a pharmacy (as-sidliya). It's nice to know that the words mean exactly what they are meant to, there isn't some elaborate practical joke going on over our heads. Ads on doorways really are just about renting rooms.

Listen to the French

This is a 3 hour set of tributes to Abdelwahab Meddeb. Pierre Joris' blog linked to it, and I have listened to bits of it. Simply listening to the sound. Each person has a slightly different delivery, but it is all French. It is being spoken more slowly and more reflectively than usual.

He moved from Tunisia to France in 1967 and has a wiki page.

This is like being a beach, every tide brings new people, dead or alive, to get to know a little before the next tide moves in.

The photo is from last November. A friend built a vast bonfire structure up in the air on wooden struts. This is the grass where the embers fell as it started to burn.

Translating my own poem - Grammar

1

I have a small poem which I won't read out at any reading soon. I don't want to share it with anyone to translate yet. However I hit on the idea of doing it myself. Since I know French I have had a go at moving it into French.

What a surprise. Since I know what I was driving at in my English words, I am not just making a translation, but an expression of what-it-was-before-it-came-out-in-English in French. I am surprised at my knowledge of French, much subtler than I had been aware of. Phrases and single words come to mind. I have not gone to look for my dictionary yet, though I did use Google Translate. It wasn't very good, just clunky. The spellings were correct, but then I knew them anyway.

I know this little poem by heart so I can think about it as I walk around.

Is a poem written by one person, but in two languages, a different thing from a poem written by one person and translated by another? Twin poems, dual poems, parallel poems. It wasn't written with the intention to translate it. That might alter things entirely.

2

I worked out a piece of grammar for myself today, so feel satisfied with myself. It started with an un-obvious translation of 'home news'. I then reflected on the name of a pudding I had with my brother over the weekend and put 2 and 2 together to make 4. I worked it out while walking from my kitchen through the passageway to my mother in law's house. I even waved my arms around in pleasure at my discovery.

Ouch my French

I have had a look at the text I sent my mother yesterday. It has two major grammatical/spelling errors. Bless her, my mother didn't text a word about them. She texted back using perfect endings and the feminine where it should be. Ouch and blush. I need to dig out my French dictionary. Texting from a station while waiting needs all the information to be in my head.

A couple of weeks ago I forgot how to spell soleil. It only came back to me when I saw a lorry or some advertisement with it written clearly and boldly. That is my sort of language learning/relearning. Accidental and effective.

Maybe embarrassment is the strongest push to learn things, the emotion shoves the information right into the brain without any effort.

I used to try to chat to my Grandmother in French, but it never seemed right. She was an Anglophile anyway, her heart was here and she was more at home in English.

"eau" - Muriele Camac

http://murielecamac.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/mes-poemes-eau.html

I have taken a step into French, it is my family language after all. I did a google search for 'poesie 21 siecle' and pretty soon came across this poem. I feel very pleased with myself that I can just read it so very easily. The meaning for 'averse' came to me after a bit. A good surprise that vocab is not permanently dormant.

'trombe' is familiar but I don't actually know what it means. Google says 'downpour', so that's a good play on words: 'tombe en trombes'.

I had forgotten about artists like Nicholas de Stael too, so the pictures on the blog are an additional gift.

To ployon - autonomous education again

Ancient Greek anyone? I found myself offering to teach H the first line in my Ancient Greek book when we were last out and about in our garden under the huge moon in the late evening. Since the answer was 'No', I quickly told him those first words and that they meant 'The boat'.

It all started when we were talking about the planets, stars, the sun and photons. Qi had told him about the great length of time the photons take to get to the surface of the sun. We mused over the inscrutable nature of light and I tried to point out a planet. Saying it was at 1 o'clock in relation to the moon didn't help. Pointing out Orion without a laser beam was difficult too.

Would you like it if I told you that I have started both my paragraphs with quotes from ModPo texts. I just got another one in there. This is where common texts turn into in-jokes and get irritating to outsiders.

Caroline Bergvall's VIA

Tracie Morris Africa(n) and with Val Jeanty

Gertrude Stein's Portrait of Picasso - video in French about her writing, art collection

French Home Ed Blogs

I have finally found some French HE blogs. Hooray. I can feel my brain stretch each time I read French.

Camping

It's basically waiting in one place in the map, in one area, for the whole of the game, until you get the chance to kill one of the opposite team.

Here is a picture of the view along the barrel of one of the many different guns in this game. The graphics are so clear. Here H is lurking in the grass. The game he's in right now is set in the Middle East and it is called Ambush. The sun is shining, the palm trees never get any damage from all the mayhem round them, the crashed cars burn brightly.

When I think how these games could be written: sickness, decomposition, torture, corruption, they are such a sanitised fantasy. Thank goodness for that. There are no children, females, older people, animals. You respawn, ie come to life again, at the start of each round.

There are glitches in the games, players can jump from roof top to roof top, have weapons which hover in the air, even move through vertical panels which are meant to be solid. (I am thinking of the pipes section in one map). I like the glitch which lets players stay in mid air above a three pronged missile launcher. Happy days.

Sometimes we can hear the French players chatting, but it's just too fast for me to follow. The accents are the same as when I lived in France years ago.