Rostand’s second poem from Les Musardises, entitled “The Bedroom.” For my English translation I chose rhymed couplets, though I admit with BlaiseP that there’s a procrustean quality to some of them.
Incidentally, the author dedicates a short essay to explaining the title of the book. Musardise is not a word in standard French, and figuring out a good English neolo-translation of the title is an interesting task in itself.
Jason Kuznicki
Jason Kuznicki is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and contributor of Cato Unbound. He's on twitter as JasonKuznicki. His interests include political theory and history.
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Musardise is daydreaming.Report
I’d always thought so too, or something quite like it.
I was entertained by Rostand’s little essay about what the word means to him. But it starts with a dictionary definition, so I looked it up in the Robert.
And it wasn’t there. Not in any of its forms. It’s in the online dictionaries, but I’d still like a bit more detail about the word and its origins and context. (Flâner is a synonym, apparently, but it’s also a notoriously hard word to translate.)
So what’s going on here? It could be prosaic: Jason just needs a better dictionary. Or it could be more interesting — the word might be colloquial, or sub-cultural, or a nonce word of Rostand’s that made its way occasionally into the language afterward. It has the virtue that it really does sound like what it is.
So I’ll probably do some poking about in the contemporary dictionaries before I translate the essay. Those old things are always a hoot to read in any case.Report
Un musard is a daydreamer, head in the clouds. Common enough word. Provençal.Report
Oh, this is you- good work! By sheer happenstance, I’ve been reading documents to do with the Rostand family recently because they were important in Marseilles and I’m studying the Marseilles Chamber of Commerce. This translation tumbler is a cool idea.Report