I concur. Those are two of the barely translatable French authors. Rabelais is another, especially the original, unmodernized language. Rabelais in modern French loses way too much and it's especially irritating that translators constantly decided Rabelais didn't intend this or that, and "corrected him" (they even do stuff like turning a paragraph long sentence without punctuation into shorter sentences - that's criminal). I'm a bit baffled everytime I hear someone's reading Rabelais in foreign languages - 90% of the interest is his unique language, so what's the point?

I've been curious to look at a translation of Vian in English for a long time - I have a hard time figuring out how they do it and what's left of Vian in that - but bookstores don't have any in stock and buying it would be a waste of money. One day I'll come across one, I guess.

Vian has another aspect: he is a writer one must read. Vian read aloud, or adapted, most often doesn't work (which is why I'm very curious to see as well what Gondry is going to achieve with his movie adaptation - the previous two attempts to adapt L'Écume des Jours have failed miserably). That's true strictly of Vian's novels and novellas, however, as he adopted a subtly different style when he wrote plays, poems and songs.

I love L'Écume des Jours, though I rarely reread it nowadays. It used to be my favourite Vian novel when I was much younger, but these days I prefer the more ambitious and darker L'Automne à Pékin and L'Herbe Rouge.

As for Racine, what you said is all true. It's even more obvious Racine can't be translated when you hear his verses from the mouth of great actors. The modern way Racine is played (a return to an earlier fashion, actually), very fast and with most of the focus on the language and its music - and on the intensity - is awesome. That you're hearing the epitome of versified French drama (linguistically, at least) is really apparent then, and the quality of his language, as hard and sharp as a diamond, comes through far more (rather than the feeling it's very ornate and stilted which you get when reading his plays. A lot of non-anglophones have similar experiences with Shakespeare on the page vs. in the mouths of actors). The way Racine was still used to be played when I was a teenager, slowly and pompously, was extremely tedious.




Indeed. It's very hard to coin Vian's style (he was not very influenced by the surrealist movement which he found took itself too seriously for example) - which is why many French scholars often opt for "pataphysics". Vian himself claimed a filiation to British Nonsense and to Carroll. There's something very British in Vian - there's something there of the same sense of the whimsical that you find for instance in Harry Potter.




Not in L'Écume des Jours. It's closer to the way he deals with those themes in L'Automne à Pékin.



That owes a lot to the period. Vian's earlier novels were even more adolescent and absurd - they were above all farces - and didn't have the bitter-sweet aspect of L'Écume des Jours. All those novels owe a great deal to the occupation/early post-WWII mood of the "hip" youth, their almost surreal euphoria and the harsher and much greyer reality. It's escapism in that sense, and also escapism for Vian himself, who had a kind of double-life as engineer in a very conservative milieu by day and was like the ring master of St-Germain-des-Prés's parties by night. Vian was surrounded by younger people just too young to have fought the war (himself had a heart disease). He will move a bit from that "universe" after L'Écume des Jours, though the touches of adolescent humour never go completely away.



That again owes to the fact the characters are heavily inspired by the Zazous sub-culture - and in that novel, starting to move away from it to "real adult life". The Zazous are not "entirely believable" - not even to the people of their time. Hard to think they co-existed with and often gravitated around the same circles as the existentialists.