I know what a crabby girl looks like
When I woke up this morning very early, it was dark. I walked into another room and turned the light on. The light was bright, and my face scrunched up in a certain way that I knew was the way I scrunched my face back when I was six years old or younger. The expression on my face that I could feel but not see brought the whole childhood thing back just for a moment.
In Marcel Proust's case, as told in Remembrance of Things Past, the taste of a long-forgotten Madeleine cookie brought Marcel's childhood back to life.
My face must have gotten into that position back then when I was woken up early or when a suspicious disappointment happened. Something made me mildly cross. That's as far as I can get. I could never write a book about it.
I would have liked to make this blog entry into a short poem, however.
Comments
Dear Gloria,
first I didn't know that Marcel Proust's "À la recherche du temps perdu" was translated as "Remembrance of Things Past". What a difference of meaning in translation! It is meant to mean "In the search of the lost past". Oh la la!
Second, the original novel/chronicle fills 9 thick volumes. I tnink that is good from you to write only a short poem!. You have enough work with Heavenletters and your Godwriting blog.
Third, I would be very curious to check how can Marcel Proust be translated into English. It has a richness of vocabulary, sentence construction, rhythm, poetry that could hardly be translated in any other language. I raise my hat to the translator!
Now to complete my comment, I understand very well your reference to Proust and the madeleine cookie. A taste just suddenly makes you travel back in time. A taste carries a vivid memory. A smell can do the same. And it is very powerful.
On a more trivial ground, I just remember, when I traveled to Greece, how I loved the stuffed tomatoes that I was eating in the greek "Tabernas" at the foot of the Acropolis.
I was wondering what was giving a very special taste to those stuffed tomatoes (stuffed with rice and lamb and tomato paste) that was so different from the italian ones.
It took me two years, with trials and errors, to discover the secret that would take me instantly from Rome to Athens. I just had the idea of putting some cinnamon into the stuffing. And instantly, at the first bite in the stuffed tomato, I was litteraly transported from Italy to Greece on the wings of cinnamon. Cinnamon was my madeleine cookie.
This is a great story you tell, Normand. "...on the wings of cinnamon." I can almost taste the Greek dish even though I have never had it.
I read all nine volumes of Proust's book. Obviously, I loved it. I was a literature major. The translator did a good job. The translation couldn't have had all the nuances, yet it was a delicious book. As for the title, I suspect (of course, I don't know) that that was a publisher's decision rather than the translator's.