Found poetry on the autoroute
I've just come back from France.
Long-time readers will know I have a tendency to misread signs in ways that make them more surreal and whimsical than they in fact are. This is even worse in French, almost certainly because my grasp of French is even more shaky than my grasp of English. It doesn't help that crucial accents are often left off in signs when written in all caps. There's classics of confusion/puns that cause trouble for lots of people: peche vs pêche (peach vs fishing), cheveux vs chevaux (hair vs horses), and ferme vs fermé (farm vs closed).
But I seem to come up with some of my own too, from that special place in my head. So, for instance, I always think that the sign "CHAUSEE DEFORMEE" means something about bent shoes (that would be "chaussures déformée") rather than a broken-up road surface. And was genuinely boggled and delighted at the idea that there existed a church called "Notre Dame des Epinards", or Our Lady of the Spinach. In real life, when I looked more closely, it was Notre Dame des Épines, or Our Lady of the Thorns, which I think is a more traditionally Catholic sort of sentiment, but I like to imagine a minor cult of adoration of the leafier aspects of the Mother of Our Saviour: Our Lady of the Cabbages, or the Blessed Virgin Mary Who Once Ate Spring Greens.
A new discovery this trip was found poetry on the Autoroute. This was displayed in large official signs by the side of the road in low-res dot matrix format. Most of the time it was quotidian stuff like telling you it was 5 minutes to the next exit, or that there was congestion near Lyons. (Another completely stupid misreading: I often imagine that when it is warning of delays because of a bouchon (=traffic jam) it means a cochon (=a pig).) But when there was nothing like that to say, the powers-that-be put other messages on it. In Britain these tend to be things like "DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE" and "TIREDNESS CAN KILL TAKE A BREAK", which seem rather hectoring and are not remotely poetic.
I'm not sure whether it's because they were in French, or whether they really are more poetic, but I was really struck by seeing this:
VOYAGER
C EST AUSSI
S ARRETER
Which in my terrible French means something like "to travel is also to stop [oneself]", which sounds like one of those deep philosophical statements that sounds self-contradictory but isn't, except - so far as I can make out - that it doesn't actually make much sense. Maybe to a better Francophone than me it is simply a perfectly functional reminder to make regular stops when driving.
There was also
UNE PAUSE
CA REPOSE
Which I think means something between "a pause; it rests" and "a break is what it is all about", which I think is quite clever, or it means that I'm not as clever at French as I'd like to be.
The trouble is, once I'd seen a few like that, I started to read all of the others in a whimsical, poetical/philosophical sort of way. Once you're in that mood, even a blank screen apart for a single
*
seems like it's trying to make a statement of some sort well beyond simply informing you that the sign is working but there's nothing special to tell you right now. (As a less-whimsical aside, I much prefer the current time to serve that function.) You can spend ages trying to read multiple layers in to:
LA CEINTURE
DEVANT DERRIERE
J'ADHERE
which is probably nothing more than a reminder to leave a safe gap between you and the vehicle in front, but does seem very poetic to my mind. There was also stuff about their agents (presumably employees) where I struggled to even understand the surface message. For example,
NOS AGENTS
NOUS PROTEGENT
ET VOUS?
I think that's saying that their agents look after them, and maybe they would you as well if you had a mind to it. Or maybe it's asking you to look after their agents? Really that's a matter for their employer, to be honest. Unless the 'nous' is supposed to mean 'us' including the reader, and they protect all of us, and maybe the reader ought to step up to that task too? Oh, it's turtles all the way down. They also had
VEILLEZ
SUR NOS
AGENTS
I initially misread this as "veuillez sûr nos agents", meaning something like "please be sure of our agents", which seemed a nice thought ("you can rely on our staff"). But actually I think it's asking you to watch over their agents, which certainly the other way round to how I always imagined it worked for Highways Agency staff. Maybe they're asking you not to run them over? I think veiller can also mean to wake up - perhaps they're enlisting public help to stop their people snoozing on the job?
However, even I struggled to make anything poetic and deep out of
FAITES UNE PAUSE
POUR LIRE
VOS TEXTOS
Which is simply telling you to take a break to read your text messages, rather than reading them while you're driving, you bozo. But wait ... it's saying we should pause ... to read ... our texts. Are we really *reading* them? Perhaps we just casually glance at them. We should take an actual break, a pause, a rest, to truly read them, to experience them deeply, to apprehend them in their entirety. And we should do so safely, by pulling over at the next service station, in 11 km.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/323158.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.
Long-time readers will know I have a tendency to misread signs in ways that make them more surreal and whimsical than they in fact are. This is even worse in French, almost certainly because my grasp of French is even more shaky than my grasp of English. It doesn't help that crucial accents are often left off in signs when written in all caps. There's classics of confusion/puns that cause trouble for lots of people: peche vs pêche (peach vs fishing), cheveux vs chevaux (hair vs horses), and ferme vs fermé (farm vs closed).
But I seem to come up with some of my own too, from that special place in my head. So, for instance, I always think that the sign "CHAUSEE DEFORMEE" means something about bent shoes (that would be "chaussures déformée") rather than a broken-up road surface. And was genuinely boggled and delighted at the idea that there existed a church called "Notre Dame des Epinards", or Our Lady of the Spinach. In real life, when I looked more closely, it was Notre Dame des Épines, or Our Lady of the Thorns, which I think is a more traditionally Catholic sort of sentiment, but I like to imagine a minor cult of adoration of the leafier aspects of the Mother of Our Saviour: Our Lady of the Cabbages, or the Blessed Virgin Mary Who Once Ate Spring Greens.
A new discovery this trip was found poetry on the Autoroute. This was displayed in large official signs by the side of the road in low-res dot matrix format. Most of the time it was quotidian stuff like telling you it was 5 minutes to the next exit, or that there was congestion near Lyons. (Another completely stupid misreading: I often imagine that when it is warning of delays because of a bouchon (=traffic jam) it means a cochon (=a pig).) But when there was nothing like that to say, the powers-that-be put other messages on it. In Britain these tend to be things like "DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE" and "TIREDNESS CAN KILL TAKE A BREAK", which seem rather hectoring and are not remotely poetic.
I'm not sure whether it's because they were in French, or whether they really are more poetic, but I was really struck by seeing this:
VOYAGER
C EST AUSSI
S ARRETER
Which in my terrible French means something like "to travel is also to stop [oneself]", which sounds like one of those deep philosophical statements that sounds self-contradictory but isn't, except - so far as I can make out - that it doesn't actually make much sense. Maybe to a better Francophone than me it is simply a perfectly functional reminder to make regular stops when driving.
There was also
UNE PAUSE
CA REPOSE
Which I think means something between "a pause; it rests" and "a break is what it is all about", which I think is quite clever, or it means that I'm not as clever at French as I'd like to be.
The trouble is, once I'd seen a few like that, I started to read all of the others in a whimsical, poetical/philosophical sort of way. Once you're in that mood, even a blank screen apart for a single
*
seems like it's trying to make a statement of some sort well beyond simply informing you that the sign is working but there's nothing special to tell you right now. (As a less-whimsical aside, I much prefer the current time to serve that function.) You can spend ages trying to read multiple layers in to:
LA CEINTURE
DEVANT DERRIERE
J'ADHERE
which is probably nothing more than a reminder to leave a safe gap between you and the vehicle in front, but does seem very poetic to my mind. There was also stuff about their agents (presumably employees) where I struggled to even understand the surface message. For example,
NOS AGENTS
NOUS PROTEGENT
ET VOUS?
I think that's saying that their agents look after them, and maybe they would you as well if you had a mind to it. Or maybe it's asking you to look after their agents? Really that's a matter for their employer, to be honest. Unless the 'nous' is supposed to mean 'us' including the reader, and they protect all of us, and maybe the reader ought to step up to that task too? Oh, it's turtles all the way down. They also had
VEILLEZ
SUR NOS
AGENTS
I initially misread this as "veuillez sûr nos agents", meaning something like "please be sure of our agents", which seemed a nice thought ("you can rely on our staff"). But actually I think it's asking you to watch over their agents, which certainly the other way round to how I always imagined it worked for Highways Agency staff. Maybe they're asking you not to run them over? I think veiller can also mean to wake up - perhaps they're enlisting public help to stop their people snoozing on the job?
However, even I struggled to make anything poetic and deep out of
FAITES UNE PAUSE
POUR LIRE
VOS TEXTOS
Which is simply telling you to take a break to read your text messages, rather than reading them while you're driving, you bozo. But wait ... it's saying we should pause ... to read ... our texts. Are we really *reading* them? Perhaps we just casually glance at them. We should take an actual break, a pause, a rest, to truly read them, to experience them deeply, to apprehend them in their entirety. And we should do so safely, by pulling over at the next service station, in 11 km.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/323158.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.