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Bilingual French/English

Tales from the other side of the Ardèche

This is a collection of short stories I've written over the years. I thought it was a pity to leave them in a drawer. I also illustrated them. They were written for various competitions, or as part of the short stories members of the Cercle des auteurs ardéchois write for the summer editions of the weekly La Tribune. And as my English is getting quite rusty, I asked my sister Judith, who is not influenced by the French as I am, to have a look. And what a good idea that was! So many thanks to her for her work. The only connection between them is that they were written down here in lovely, sunny, southern Ardèche. We could add that a lot of them are tongue in cheek.

Researching into Boissel meant that Pierre did a lot of digging into the French Revolution itself, and he came up with the idea of writing a handbook summarising the major points of this great event clearly and succinctly : the people involved, the major events that provoked the people, the main events as the Revolution unfolded. 89 prints from the time illulstrate the book. He knew that the English are also interested in this subject, and wanted it translated. We came up with the idea of publishing a bilingual book.

The subject of this book is contreversial : the Allies dropped fake bombs on German targets to show that they were well aware of the enemy's fake military sites. This has long been denied by the military instances. However, Pierre collected testimonies from veteran air crew members from France, Germany, Italy, The USA, the UK, as well as testimonies from people living close to sites that were bombed and who saw these fake bombs. He personally interviewed several of the witnesses, and photographed artefacts belonging to them. The book contains a large amount of photographs. Again, the translation of this text lead to an enormous amount of research. I was able to use my own brother's brain on several accounts for aircraft terms, as he is ex-RAF. He remains however sceptical about the reality of the subject.

Pierre is also interested in astronomy, and, influenced by his work as a teacher, he embarked on a story about a boy whose grandfather has died, and seems to reach out from the cosmos through a site on the internet. Not only does the child learn about the physical aspects of the solar system, but also gets an insight into the philosophy of life in general, which enables him to come to terms with his grandfather's death. Pierre may have meant this book for youngsters, but in fact it can be read by adults. Translating it meant a great amount of research into the technical terms on my part.

François Boissel was born in Joyeuse, Ardèche, in the 18th century. He lived through the French Revolution, was imprisoned for his ideas on private property, the equality of men and women, marriage, and a lot of socialist ideas way ahead of his time, that he published in several books. He is completely unknown. Pierre Antoine Courouble, who lives in Joyeuse and is keen on history, dug into his life and wrote a play. He also succeeded in publishing the original books by Boissel. He asked me to translate his play into English, which was no mean task, as his play is about the meeting between a 20th century student and the 18th century Boissel, and therefore contained modern and 18th century French, something I had to maintain in the English version. Thus it took me a whole afternoon to find an equivalent in English of a joke containing a play on words in French in which the same word no longer had the same meaning for the people using them.