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By coincidence I began reading a French English translation of Minnesota author F. Scott Fitzgerald’s require high school reading The Great Gatsby. I had ordered it online after struggling through another Eng/Fr translation of his fellow writer Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Before that I’d stopped short with another Eng/FR vintage American novela, “Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck.
I have been desperate to read adult level books in French from the start of my French studies which are now officially over seven years in process. But the required vocabulary for adult reading has been beyond me. I suspect that especially with adjectives that are common in literature there are an average of 5 or 6 for most words with various levels of connotation and overlap with another dozen words. I picked them up in English in my school years so that by the time I was in college I rarely ran into new words. Not so with French after seven years.
So on November 11th (a day I have highlighted before) I suggested to Claudia we watch the WW I remembrance that was mentioned on the PBS News Hour’s conclusion without much thought. Immediately after it was over I put its link in a note to my children with my rave review telling them it also bumped into our own family’s history….that being my Grandfather George Seanor Robb.”
It was also a tribute to Tin Pan alley and the music of World War I to which I’ll add that my grandfather once told my mother that his war’s music was a lot better that her WWII music. And my grandfather’s 369th Infantry brought Jazz to France from which that nation has never fully recovered.
But the mention of The Great Gatsby by the creator of the monologue which accompanied the special really took me by surprise. Gatsby wasn’t assigned to me in school and I largely depended on watching two hour long movies to spare me from the ten or more hours I’d have to slog along to complete a book. And now I had just begun reading it in a much better version for learning French. Rather than side by side pages even English, odd French this book was one line (often less than a complete sentence) French followed by one line English so that I didn’t have to wade through a page to compare the languages.
And in the special I learned that there was a deep connection for period readers in the 1920’s with the main characters who had both survived the war. This was true of readers in the 1920’s as well. My Dad was born smack dab in the middle of the Roaring 20’s in 1925. Like author Fitzgerald his father, my namesake Harry, was a little to young to get into the last horrific year of the war. He enlisted by never was sent overseas. He did some joy riding in the Florida Naval Air base but then came home safe and sound. Not so my other grandfather. He spend months mending a broken body in Kansas when he returned…..a soon to be war hero.
I’m not done with this post.
