The Cheffe by Marie NDiaye

Author:Marie NDiaye
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

TRANSLATOR’S NOTES

her impish picture in Sud-Ouest: Sud-Ouest is a newspaper that covers the southwestern corner of France.

assuming I don’t get the reference, you’re convinced I don’t have much of an education: The allusion is to Jean-Paul Sartre’s short story “L’enfance d’un chef,” usually translated into English as “The Childhood of a Leader.”

my apartment in Lloret de Mar has more visitors in a week than my Mériadeck studio saw in several years: Lloret de Mar is a resort town on the Spanish Mediterranean; Mériadeck is a modern, planned business district in Bordeaux.

when she talked about Sainte-Bazeille: Sainte-Bazeille is a small town southeast of Bordeaux.

a family in Marmande: Marmande is a modest city a few kilometers southeast of Sainte-Bazeille.

as polished and glazed as gravestone ornaments: The large slabs of stone covering graves in French cemeteries often bear tributes or remembrances in the form of thickly laminated plaques.

“one big cromesquis!”: A cromesquis is a croquette made of chopped meat in cream sauce, breaded and fried.

she called her restaurant La Bonne Heure: The name of the restaurant echoes the expression à la bonne heure, which has a variety of meanings ranging from “it’s about time” or “just in time” to a more general expression of pleasure, not all that different from a simple “Hooray!” There are English equivalents, but none of them fits the context: the name La Bonne Heure is an entirely plausible name for a restaurant in France, which—to my ear, at least—is not true of that phrase’s counterparts in our language.

went off to the Marché des Capucins: A large covered food market in central Bordeaux.

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