Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

...l'image la plus exacte de l'esprit français est la langue française elle même.*

As one of the principal international languages, French remains with English, the only language that is taught everywhere in the world, and one of the only two working languages of the United Nations, where 20% of the delegates express themselves in French.

If ' the most precise image of the French spirit is the French language itself,' * ( Désiré Nisard ), then because over 40% of English vocabulary is of French origin, mostly derived from the Anglo-Normal spoken in England before the language settled into what became Modern English, the English should to an extent feel some affinity with French. However, one only has to holiday in France to realise that the two cultures and languages are very different. So what chance has the native English speaker of coming to terms with the French and their culture? By learning the language; studying French philosophy and history; living in France; making French friends; trying to discover the reason for their Nationalism? Avant que d'être à vous je suis à mon pays. Pierre Corneille, Horace, (above belonging to you I belong to my country.)

French-Canadians Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow, spent more than two years researching Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong , ' a journey into the French heart, mind, and soul,' to arrive at, what in many people's opinion, is the best of the plethora of recent books about France and the French. For two years they lived in a working-class neighbourhood of Paris where they mixed with French people from a multiplicity of origins – this, they said, was just what they needed ' to make sense of this unfamiliar, immense territory, the mind of the French.' At the end of the two years, they came a long way to appreciating the French psyche. They realised that the contradictions or paradoxes of the French pointed to one conclusion: France was 'something else' that could not be understood in terms used by English speaking nations.

It is perhaps this 'something else' that attracts us to this great country and its people, prompting us to write about it time and time again – witness the variety of compelling work in this issue of The French Literary Review, my second as editor. I very much look forward to receiving similarly inspired contributions for Issue 10.

Barbara Dordi
Editor
April, 2008