She wrote: La maison où j’ai appris à me taire n’était pas une maison ; c’était un royaume. A kingdom. A place of arbitrary rules, a distant and silent monarch, and subjects who learned to tread softly.
She did not correct them. There was nothing to correct. Instead, she took two blank index cards. On the first, she wrote: Sami – “Patrie” shows you understand that some silences are inherited from lands we lose. Would you like to talk about that story? I would like to hear it. exercice translation 4eme
In her own translation of that final sentence—the one she never wrote down, the one she carried in her own chest—Mme Fournier thought of her mother’s nursing home during the pandemic. The window between them. The glass that could not be translated. The house where I learned to be silent was not a house; it was a country. Yes. She had a country too. They all did. And maybe, just maybe, the exercise of translation— 4ème , or any grade—was not about turning English into French. It was about turning solitude into language. She wrote: La maison où j’ai appris à
: la droite sur laquelle on glisse (ex: horizontale, verticale ou oblique). She did not correct them