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Nov. 1st, 2009 01:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
almaviva90Call me a romantic softie sometimes who usually scoffs at cliched/overdone/melodramatic stuff but I'm rather glad I'm able to read French otherwise I would have never understood the meaning of this wonderful and tragic line from the romantic/historical/tragic novel Arc de Triomphe:
'Sans toi...je serais morte depuis longtemps.'
(Meaning in my mangled English translation which probably doesn't do any justice to the line...'without you, I would have died a long time ago') Of course the line itself sounds cliche by itself but seeing it in context with the story, it's a tragic line even when the character who's saying this should actually be blaming the man (who is the 'hero' of the book) for her soon to be impending demise.
Funny thing is that the original book was written in German (by Erich Maria Remarque who also wrote the famous All Quiet on the Western Front [which was a great novel]) then translated into French and now I'm trying to make sense of it all by reading it in French since the only way to get it in English is to buy it off Amazon or something since the libraries here don't have it (but HKU has about FOUR copies of it in Chinese?!...you'd think they would think about getting an ENGLISH version, right?).
'Sans toi...je serais morte depuis longtemps.'
(Meaning in my mangled English translation which probably doesn't do any justice to the line...'without you, I would have died a long time ago') Of course the line itself sounds cliche by itself but seeing it in context with the story, it's a tragic line even when the character who's saying this should actually be blaming the man (who is the 'hero' of the book) for her soon to be impending demise.
Funny thing is that the original book was written in German (by Erich Maria Remarque who also wrote the famous All Quiet on the Western Front [which was a great novel]) then translated into French and now I'm trying to make sense of it all by reading it in French since the only way to get it in English is to buy it off Amazon or something since the libraries here don't have it (but HKU has about FOUR copies of it in Chinese?!...you'd think they would think about getting an ENGLISH version, right?).
