Woot, Barthes' "The Pleasure of the Text" («Le Plaisir du texte») is short enough, and clearly (hm, not exactly clearly) fluently written enough, that I might just read the whole thing in parallel.
(My French is terrible, but at least I have a French, unlike basically any other non-English human language.)
A hardcopy of the English just arrived in the post, and I found this on the interwebs: http://palimpsestes.fr/textes_philo/barthes/plaisir-texte.pdf
Allons! :)
Ah, this is fun: «au moment où il jouit» might, given the context, go into English as "at the moment that he comes" (or even "cums"); the French verb «jouir» is ambiguous between "enjoy" and "orgasm" just as the English "to come" is ambiguous between "move towards" and "orgasm".
Google translate primly renders it as "enjoys"; Miller spells it out again, as "at the very moment of his orgasm, his bliss".
In fact this edition has a small "Note on the Text" all about how French, unlike English, has words for the erotic that are neither, as he puts it, coarse nor clinical. How educational!
#barthes #writing #reading #French #translation #text #eroticism
Perhaps-relatedly, Miller translates «La déconstruction de la langue est coupée par le dire politique, bordée par la très ancienne culture du signifiant» quite reasonably as "The dismantling of language is intersected by political assertion, is _edged_ by the age-old culture of the signifier". I don't know if the «bordée» has the same erotically-freighted additional meaning as does the English "edged", but Barthes didn't in any case italicize it. Maybe it's just my naughty mind, but I see a little nudge-nudge wink-wink from Miller here. :)
That aside, it's just a great sentence in itself. I'd be hard pressed to say that it means, exactly, but there it is.
(It is of course quite possible that Miller was just translating a different French text than the one I'm reading, and that one _did_ have that «bordée» in italics. Notably, this English translation begins with a Latin quote from Hobbes, and this French one with a (quite different, if thematically related) French quote from Hobbes. So there's that too.)
Ah, but language well-used is amazing! Sometimes I start reading a book like this and, wanting to stop and bask after every page or paragraph or sentence, eventually end up mislaying it before finishing...
«La culture ni sa destruction ne sont érotiques; c'est la faille de l'une et de l'autre qui le devient»
Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the fault-line between the two that becomes so.
(RIchard Miller renders «la faille» here as "the seam... the fault, the flaw", which is an interesting way to try to capture the ambiguity of the original; but I'll take a simple "fault-line" and its geological connotation.)