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Contact me for my translation of Le Problème by François Bégaudeau.
See below for the introduction to the translation.

François Bégaudeau has worn many professional hats. Born in Paris in 1971 and raised in Nantes, he played on the French national handball team, wrote lyrics and sang for the punk band Zabrinkie Point, nurtured a passion for watching and playing soccer, and taught public high school for ten years. His writing career began with sports articles, essays, film reviews that appeared in the French version of Playboy (Play Boy), a “fictional biography” of Mick Jagger, six screenplays, five novels, and one memoir. He entered the public eye when the memoir, Entre les murs (Between the Walls; the US release was called The Class), about teaching underprivileged high school kids, was made into a movie in 2008. It won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Festival and an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film. Bégaudeau starred as himself.

Le Problème, published in 2008, was Bégaudeau’s first play. He published two others in 2012: Le Foie (Liver) and Un deux un deux (One Two One Two). All three depict what Bégaudeau calls “scènes de famille”: in Le Problème, a woman leaves her husband and children for another man. In Le Foie, an adult man decides to distance himself from his mother. Ten scenes in the life of a couple play out in Un deux un deux, the characters known simply as She and He. Le Problème opened at Théâtre du Nord in Lille in 2009, toured Yvelines and Jura, and finished its run in 2011 at two prominent theaters in Paris, one public (Théâtre du Rond-Point) and one commercial (Théâtre Marigny). In the French theater scene, the public-to-commercial leap usually attests to a play’s wide appeal.

Bégaudeau recalls a lifelong desire to write, even amidst all his other activities. His previous professions surely inspired his journalistic writing about sports and music. As for his novels, they integrate sports and other glimpses from his past, but their most striking feature is their experimental style, most often taking the form of an entire story told in one long scene. When asked about his turn to theater, Bégaudeau cites inspiration from novelist and playwright Olivier Cadiot, whose theatrical pieces explore subtleties of voice and movement. Before his introduction to Cadiot, Bégaudeau’s impression that “actors scream their lines” had turned him off to theater. The crossover between dramatic and literary texts in Cadiot’s work prompted Bégaudeau to experiment in Le Problème with what he calls “dedramatization.” In developing his own playwriting craft, he wanted to push against the heightened dramatics of the traditional theatrical dénouement: “[My characters] have all the reason in the world to scream, but the atmosphere stays hushed...that’s what I find touching about it. There is no dénouement. The neighbors don’t hear a thing.”

Bégaudeau calls Le Problème a feminist play, with the mother as heroine for heeding her desires. He claims an interest in female protagonists; a curious fact, given his history with Play Boy. More striking though, is Le Problème’s complication of its audience’s ability to take sides, a characteristic that echoes Entre les murs with its tension and negotiation between teacher and student, and its exposure of the struggles, mistakes, and victories of both.

These shifts are achieved through the immediacy and intimacy of Bégaudeau’s work. Le Problème proceeds in real time, with pauses and silences indicated in the stage directions. Characters are not required to constantly busy themselves with various tasks around the set, as is so often the case in psychological realism. Alban, the husband, lies on the couch for nearly a quarter of the time; Julie, the daughter, keeps getting on and off an exercise bike. What Bégaudeau calls dedramatization, his director Arnaud Meunier calls “ultra-realism”; either way, the actors are instructed not to “raise their voices any louder than is necessary to hear each other,” except where otherwise indicated. They are ultra-present, “as if they were right in front of you.” In Le Problème, the poetry of the French oratory tradition in theater is replaced with the everyday language of middle-aged adults, young adults, and teenagers of the twenty-first century Parisian middle class.

If Annie is a Nora figure, she differs from Ibsen’s heroine in that she has made up her mind long before the play begins. Instead, it is her family’s thought processes that unravel before us. A symposium with neither question nor consensus, Le Problème represents the space for emotional expression between action and reaction. Everyone speaks, and does so without shying away from the delicate or personal. Bégaudeau says he has written the language to be “democratic.” The characters do not shun vulgarities; even the teenager asks her parents whether they still have sex.

I wanted to translate Le Problème so I could revel in the transformation of contemporary French speech into contemporary English speech. Having taught at a French high school myself, I fancied that I possessed an expertise in French teenage slang, and the deciphering of that linguistic subcategory drew me to this text. However, understanding only takes you so far; communicating tone and character resulted in an exercise in American to French adolescent-speak alchemy. “Ben ouais mais bon” equals what in American English? What expressions could be replaced with “Oh my God,” “like,” “y’know,” and other staples of teen language?

More important than the colloquial language per se, of course, is its expression of four different verbal coping mechanisms: Adam’s anger; Alban’s detachment; Julie’s steadiness and quiet defense of her mother in the face of father and son’s alignment; and finally Annie’s veneer of calm.

Moreover, language always reveals culture, here posing a challenge particularly in the character of Alban. American culture could not have produced this man. When Alban offers his library as collateral in a wager, Bégaudeau is creating a moment of caricature. But while it merely winks at French audiences (we all know an insufferable homme de lettres like this, n’est- ce pas?), it screams at American audiences: Oh, those uppity French! On the other hand, American audiences might assume that the frank discussion of personal sex lives is common in French families. It is not unheard of, and certainly more common there than in the US, but Bégaudeau employs it to serve his experiment with “democratic expression,” not to depict a typical household moment. The embarrassed reactions of Adam and Julie help to illuminate this point; otherwise, program notes might be the most direct way to prevent false cultural assumptions.

I did make the mistake, in my early translation attempts, to Americanize the family. I leap-frogged over line-by-line translation directly to American idiomatic speech. It worked with moderate success for everyone but Alban, who ended up with no consistency of voice, sounding like a foreigner trying out newly picked up expressions: correct meaning, inappropriate tone. In later attempts I stayed closer to the French, and then worked foreign-sounding constructions and vocabulary out of my English phrases and kept more cultural references.

Indeed, there is no reason to translate the Frenchness out of Le Problème. The best way to serve the text is to render it colloquial and speakable, but to keep it French in order to preserve the characters and thus the confluence of attitudes as this family discovers a dynamic it never knew it had. The universal elements will come out, even if the family’s quirks feel foreign. In fact, Annie, Alban, Adam, and Julie are given no last name, and the Anglophone first names give the translator the gift of a link to Anglophone culture. The set designer at Théâtre du Nord placed a cubed frame around the apartment that suggests a view right through the walls. Some critics have said it looked like a television set broadcasting an intimate moment. What the family deals with is private, but it’s no secret.

A note about the title: I have decided not to translate it, since the meaning is clear to English-speakers; it indicates the setting; and the foreignness of the word distances it from Anglophone audiences, thus capturing the euphemistic way in which the family talks about Annie’s departure, as well as the inexpressibility of the feelings that accompany profound change.

This translation of Le Problème follows François Bégaudeau’s text published by Théâtre Ouvert, Editions Tapuscrit, 2008.

-Sarah Krasnow

WORKS CITED

Bégaudeau, François. Le Problème. Paris: Théâtre Ouvert, Editions Tapuscrit, 2008.

Elghazi, Sarah. “Le Problème”: chaos calme.” Les Trois Coups. Paris: January 10, 2011. http://www.lestroiscoups.com/article-le-probleme-de-fran-ois-begaudeau-critique-de- sarah-elghazi-theatre-du-nord-a-lille-64681612.html

Jeffries, Stuart. “Everyday I was Playing a Role.” The Guardian. London: February 19, 2009.