Galloping Gallic

When the Reader's Digest (circ. 16,000,000) decided to run Columnist Billy Rose's autobiography, Wine, Women and Words, in some of its foreign editions, it ran smack against a language barrier. Who could manage to translate what Rose himself called "grab-bag grammar and tipsy tavernacular"?

Last week Rose gave part of the answer in his newspaper column. For the Digest's French and French Canadian editions, Maurice Chevalier, an old Rose friend who knows his Times Square as well as his Montmartre, had turned the Rose prose into "galloping Gallic." Wrote Billy, after a look at Champagne, Danseuses et Stylographe: "You could have knocked me over with an escargot."

In Chevalier's 7,000-word translation, the phrase "as complicated as a Rube Goldberg invention" became "more complicated than existentialism." A "hoot-nanny" emerged as a corrida (i.e., bullfight). Rose's untranslatable "razzle-dazzle and razzmatazz" was altered into the equally untranslatable "plaisanter sur des plaisanteries plaisantes." Rose's laconic account of the end of a riot at his Texas Centennial Exposition ("The brawl was over") was elaborately transformed into "My savage cowboys became as well-behaved as [Paris] street urchins on the day of their First Communion."

Last week the Digest had not yet figured out how to turn Rose into nine other languages, including the Scandinavian.

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