She'd grown up in Paris loving American rap music, absorbing images of hip-hop culture on television and the Internet. A few years ago, I met a perky young Frenchwoman who had just returned from a year of studying in Los Angeles. It's the most loaded words that are the most dangerous to bungle in translation. I've asked French writers and editors, "Why not change the expression to a direct translation of the English term 'ghost writer': ecrivain fantome?" I usually get a blank stare and a response along the lines of, "Never thought of that. But you can click on the trailer for the film dubbed in French and hear Ewan McGregor, the title character, say to Pierce Brosnan, " Je suis votre negre." (Or, if you like: "I am your n-.") It must have been decided that putting Le Negre on posters and marquees might be offensive. "They call ghost writers negres, but in any other context, they would consider the word negre racist."Ī schizophrenic case in point: Roman Polanski's most recent film was released in France under its English title, The Ghost Writer. "The French are schizophrenic about that term," a French literature professor tells me. The important difference was that the chains of the negre litteraire were not made of iron. The idea was that writing under someone else's name, erasing your own identity, was thankless servitude on a par with the labor of colonialism's black subjects and victims. The French started calling ghost writers negres back in the 1700s, just as colonialism and the slave trade were gaining momentum. And I always have to remind myself that, in French publishing circles, it's only the term for what English speakers call a "ghost writer." But I needed the money." I wince every time I hear the word. A journalist might mention the autobiography of a French celebrity and whisper, "I was her negre." Or a struggling novelist might say, "I hated being a negre. Over the years, I've met quite a few French writers, all of them white, who have referred to themselves as negres. I've met French admirers of American literature who are shocked when reading works from, say, the 1950s, to see writers referring to black people as "Negroes." I have to explain that this was, in fact, the politically correct term of its day, not the ultimate pejorative. This linguistic difference can lead to some curious misunderstandings. But if you're talking about a blast of pure racial hatred, the true equivalent of "n- " in French, the unutterable insult is actually " negro." " One could say that negre is demeaning and caste conscious in the same way that "colored" might sound to the 21st-century American ear. They have urged a boycott of Guerlain products.ĭoes the French word negre translate directly to the epithet Americans refer to as the n-word? The most accurate answer would be "Yes, but. Last Saturday, anti-racism activists protested in front of the Guerlain boutique on the Champs-Elysees, effectively shutting down the shop. When the newscaster Audrey Pulvar, born in Martinique, called outraged attention to Guerlain's use of that dusty old turn of phrase, it sparked the sort of racial protest that is unusual in France. The word negre is being bandied about in the French media in an unusually intense way these days, thanks to the blatherings of the cosmetics tycoon Jean-Paul Guerlain, who said on French television recently that he had "worked like a negre" to develop the perfume Samsara. Jake Lamar lives in Paris and writes novels. ![]() ![]() Guerlain made news recently by telling an interviewer he had 'worked like a negro' on the brand's new perfume. A demonstration in Paris protesting the perfume maker Jean-Paul Guerlain.
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