Zazie in the metro

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Zazie in the Metro ( French : Zazie dans le métro ) is a novel by the French writer Raymond Queneau . It was first published in 1959 by Éditions Gallimard . The first German translation by Eugen Helmlé was published by Suhrkamp in 1960 . In 2019 the publisher brought out a new translation by Frank Heibert .

The heroine of the novel, the girl Zazie, spends a weekend with her uncle in Paris and gets caught up in a vortex of increasingly absurd events. The eponymous journey Zazies in the Paris Metro does not come until the end of the novel: She is overslept by the girl. Characteristic of the novel are puns, numerous quotations and allusions as well as the juxtaposition of different linguistic styles ; In particular, Quen from the colloquial language modeled creations stand out. Zazie on the Metro became a bestseller that was equally successful with audiences and critics, and remained Queneau's best-known work. The 1960 film adaptation of Louis Malle was released in German cinemas under the title Zazie .

Paris metro sign - "... until she noticed that a work of baroque blacksmithing on the sidewalk near her bore the additional inscription Metro ."

content

The little brat Zazie from the French provinces arrives at the Gare d'Austerlitz in Paris. Her mother wants to have an undisturbed love affair at the weekend and entrusts her precocious daughter to the care of her uncle Gabriel. Zazie's greatest wish is a ride on the Paris metro; The disappointment is all the greater when it is out of order due to a strike. This is how Zazie first gets to know her new surroundings: Uncle Gabriel, who allegedly works as a night watchman, his gentle wife Marceline, the pub Turandot, his waitress Mado Ptits-pieds, who is courted by taxi driver Charles, the shoemaker Gridoux and Turandots Parrot Laverdure, who comments on everything and everyone with the sentence “You chatter, you chatter, that's all you can”. The favorite saying of the enthusiastic cursing Zazie, on the other hand, is "fucked up".

Soon Zazie gets bored with her uncle, and the next morning she bucks off to explore Paris on her own. When Turandot tries to catch her, Zazie yells out loud for help, he wants to harass her. In the resulting crowd, she manages to escape. She meets the second-hand seller Pedro Surplus, who actually seems to have the intention to molest her. However, Zazie first persuades him to buy a “ Cacocalo ” and a pair of the “ Bludschins ” she loves so much . When she tries to steal away with the package, this time it is up to Pedro to cause a crowd by accusing Zazie of stealing the blue jeans. Pedro pretends to be a policeman and later takes the names Trouscaillon and Bertin Poirée. Zazie is wondering whether he is a sex offender in the guise of a policeman or a policeman in the guise of a sex offender in the guise of a policeman. When Trouscaillon-Pedro delivers Zazie to her uncle, Gabriel's real job comes to light: he dances as a transvestite in a night bar. From then on, Zazie is keenly interested in whether her uncle is also " hormone-dependent ".

There is a nightly
showdown at Pigalle .

Gabriel and Charles want to show Zazie Paris and lead her to the Eiffel Tower . There they meet the tourist guide Fédor Balanovitch and his tour group. Gabriel wins over the tourists with some philosophical remarks to such an extent that the fanatical crowd abducts him without further ado in their coach. Trouscaillon, the man-mad widow Mouaque and Zazie are following the bus. The chase ends in Uncle Gabriel's gay bar, where the protagonists reunite. Gabriel dances the dying swan in front of everyone as "Gabrielle" . The tourists are enthusiastic and immediately set off for Gibraltar , their next stage of travel. The remaining group goes to Place Pigalle to end the evening with a plate of onion soup .

In the Aux Nyctalopes they turn the waiters of the restaurant against them, and there is a solid fight with a veritable army of "napkin swivelers". Gabriel in particular is characterized by immense physical strength in the fight. Finally, the police intervene, led by Trouscaillon , who now calls himself Harun Alraschid . The widow Mouaque dies under the volley of a submachine gun. With her last words she mourns the loss of pension. The rest of the group managed to escape before scattering in all directions. Marceline, transformed into a Marcel, accompanies Zazie to the train station. The strike is over, the metro is running again, but Zazie overslept the journey like most of the previous evening. When her mother picks her up at the train station, when asked what she's been up to over the weekend, Zazie only knows to say, "I've gotten older."

interpretation

action

The novel is reflected in Zazie's visit to the Eiffel Tower .

The novel does not offer the reader a coherent, logically comprehensible course of action. Only the time and place remain fixed: the novel is set on a weekend in Paris from Zazie's arrival on Friday evening to departure on Sunday morning. But even localities are questioned when Gabriel and Charles, who as a taxi driver should actually know the Parisian sights, argue whether they are presenting Zazie the Panthéon or the Gare de Lyon , the Invalides or just the barracks of Reuilly . Already here it becomes evident that the novel does not want to establish any truths or proclaim messages of any kind. Instead, according to Mona Wodsak, Queneau is playing the game with the reversal and cancellation of supposed securities. Apparent facts are questioned, transformed into their opposite; Information is withdrawn immediately. In a speech by Gabriel, Queneau commented on his own novel: “Paris is just an illusion. Gabriel a (charming) dream, Zazie the illusion of a dream (or a nightmare) and this whole story the illusion of an illusion, the dream of a dream, little more than the delirium of an idiotic novelist typed into the machine (oh! Sorry). "

Despite its surrealist elements, Andreas Blanks believes that Zazie dans le métro follows the model of the classic French novel more than other works by Queneau. But Queneau also used modern novel techniques, for example in the mirror-image structure of both individual chapters and the entire novel, which is grouped around the “climax” of chapter eight, as on the top of the Eiffel Tower about sexuality and at its foot about the question of being and appearance is philosophized, two core themes of the novel. In addition, various leitmotifs and phrases used as a leitmotif run through the plot: Marceline's gentleness, Gabriel's alleged homosexuality, Zazie's commentary phrase “on the ass”.

The structure of the novel does not follow a continuous arc of suspense; Again and again the threads of the plot break, the reader's expectations of a certain development are answered with a cover of the event. Zazie, who has just accused Turandot of fornication, is in the next moment accused by Pedro of being a thief; the alleged moron delivers Zazie safe and sound at home; the alleged night watchman Gabriel turns out to be a transvestite; as the involuntary leader of a tour company, he becomes an abductee himself. The adventures that Zazie experiences in Paris in two days are solely determined by chance. In contrast to the adventure novel , in which chance experiences serve to prove the hero, Zazie learns nothing from them. In the end she didn't mature, she just got older. According to Günter Berger, the experiences were a cycle without further development.

characters

The characters in the novel remain vague in many of their characteristics. So the reader does not find out about Zazie her age, her hair and eye color or her clothes - with the exception of blue jeans. The other characters are also not psychologically drawn characters with a coherent way of life. The brevity of the narrated excerpt from life and the randomness of the events do not allow any development, not even a depth of experience. Only the parrot Laverdure, the figure most determined by its always the same sentence, is developing. In shock, he “put on another record” and suddenly mumbles “charming evening, charming evening”. His transformation goes even further when he joins the choir of people: “Look, Gabriel, Turandot, Gridoux and Laverdure did in the choir.” In the end, he even swaps roles with his owner Turandot: “Well, come on Goodbye boys, said Laverdure. - You chatter, you chatter, said Turandot, that's all you can. "

Not only the parrot, but also the human characters fall out of their roles several times in the course of the novel. Most noticeable is the figure Trouscaillon, which is already defined by its name as a composition of "trousser" (in the argot for laying a girl) and "caille" (whore). Trouscaillon-Pedro, like Proteus, is constantly changing roles. His own confusion confuses him so much that in the evening he can no longer remember the role of the morning. In the final appearance as Harun Alraschid he comments: “I am the one you have known and sometimes badly recognized”, who gives “the appearance of uncertainty and error”. Queneau called him the "essential figure of the book"

Other characters also play several roles at the same time: Zazie is precocious and at the same time childishly innocent, although she seems ahead of her age in her knowledge, she repeatedly falls into the whining of a toddler. Gabriel is robust in brawls and at the same time is mannered and subtle; despite his size, he moves with elegant grace. In the widow Mouaque, pronounced prudery is combined with unrestrained manliness. Mado and Charles act alternately romantic and serene-realistic, hetero and homoerotic. Marceline, always described as gentle, casually turns into a man on the last page.

language

Saint-Germain-des-Prés becomes “Sänktschermängdeprä” in the “ortograf fonétik”.

The arbitrariness of the content elements of the novel draws the reader's gaze to its actual subject: the language, which, according to Mona Wodsak, becomes an end in itself. The novel makes use of the most varied of styles, mixes language and word games , all kinds of quotes, archaisms , specialist terminology and neologisms . Already the first word introduces the novel with such a thing: "Fonwostinktsnso?" (In the original: Doukipudonktan ) - where does it stink from, a question that Gabriel asks himself waiting at the train station. Queneau puts colloquial language into a written form, which he calls "ortograf fonétik", a phonetic orthography . Queneau does not use this technique consistently, but only in 62 places in the first two chapters. According to Wodsak, the word creations primarily serve as provocation elements for the reader that stand out from the rest of the text flow. In contrast to the faithfully reproduced dialogue language of the characters, their gestures are only hinted at, as is a break in communication: “Where are you thinking (gesture). I didn't have time for that, with everything that happened (silence). "

Queneau repeatedly contrasts colloquial language with educational language insertions. The individual figures do not retain a consistent style of speech ; even the narrator changes his language level and sometimes even arrives at the rogue language of argot . Gabriel's grandiose philosophical excursion at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, in which he initially mixes Sartre's main work Das Sein und das Nothing with Shakespeare's Hamlet monologue, ends in slang platitudes: “Being or nothing, that's the problem. Up, down, go, come, man does so much until he disappears in the end. ”For Günter Berger, the novel in its entirety is not just a dialogue between the characters involved, but a dialogue between the different voices and levels of language that are not involved certain figures remain bound. While Queneau had always advocated the language reform of a "neo-français" in the past , according to Andreas Blank he no longer followed a consistent new literary language in Zazie dans le métro , but instead juxtaposed the various discourse traditions in a playful way. Through exaggerations and linguistic contrasts, he encourages the reader to reflect on the diversity of their own use of language.

Translations

Eugen Helmlé's German translation is controversial. Helmlé himself explained: “Problems for the translator are the quite frequent word formations and new creations Queneau. In most cases it is simply impossible to salvage the joke and all the ambiguities contained in the original. " Wolfgang Koeppen expressly praised the translation:" Eugen Helmlé has done the very difficult task of translating Queneau's anti-language brilliantly. “More than forty years later, Joseph Hanimann also spoke of a“ fabulous translation ”. Walter Widmer judged on the other hand, "Queneau's spirit has been shamed, corrupted into the cheapest, most vulgar everyday German, quite apart from the mistakes that are teeming with the German translations."

Subsequent linguistic and literary studies revealed inaccuracies in the translation in detail and an orientation that was fixed on the content, which lost many nuances of the original. Monika Wodsak judged: "[T] he original Queneau language is impoverished to a standardized, standardized written German based on the standard language, which is occasionally interrupted by bizarre-absurd formulations incomprehensible to the reader." Queneau in particular lost many intertextual allusions for Günter Berger its meaning in the translation. He saw “major weaknesses” in the German transmission, even in the revised version.

In 2019, Frank Heibert re- translated the novel for Suhrkamp Verlag. He described "the irrepressible pleasure of translating Raymond Queneau", which aroused in him an "excess of silly ideas", which however often fell victim to the final version. He called Helmlé's first translation "a bit dusty". He “concentrated on the experimental aspect and dealt with a lot with great literalness”. In contrast, Heibert has given the names of some protagonists a meaning translated into German. So now “Madame Lalochère” becomes “Madame Grossestittes”. Barbara Vinken praises the “unbelievably fantastic German translation”, which opens up “the shimmering depths of the modern classic”. For Klaus Nüchtern , the compromise that the new translation makes to mix up the various jargons and linguistically modernize a novel set in the post-war period does not always work. In general, “the re-encounter with Zazie leaves mixed feelings” for him, since the “sordid and slippery” today “seem more uptight than bold” and the language games are often just “dull avant-garde jokes”.

reception

Zazie dans le métro became a bestseller right after its release . In the first two weeks, 28,000 copies of the novel were sold, 100,000 in the first year and 315,000 in the first two years. In 2001, the total print run had risen to over a million books, this number not including translations. The novel sold significantly better than all of Queneau's other works; it is one of the best-selling works in French literature of the twentieth century. The figure Zazie achieved particular popularity. She was classified as a “figure of today's French folklore” or stylized as a “national institution” and compared in her influence with Colette's Gigi . In a 1999 survey of Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century among French readers, Zazie came in 36th on the Metro .

With a few exceptions, contemporary French reviews have been positive. Roland Barthes saw Zazie dans le métro appear in the outer form of a “well-made” novel that serves all the “qualities” of the genre. But as soon as the novel was introduced, Queneau lifted its security. Everything becomes ambiguous, divided, unreal: The novel is "a parody that undermines from within, its form masks a scandalous incongruence ." Queneau "takes over the literary mask in order to point his finger at it at the same time." Nevertheless, he succeeds in his questioning of literature "a brilliant comedy, cleansed of all aggression."

Foreign editions were also largely received positively, although the loss of language games due to translation was regretted. Wolfgang Koeppen spoke of the "most amusing and charming anti-novel". It “emerged from language. The language proliferates, the language dreams, it dreams of Zazie and their encounters. "

In 1960 Louis Malle filmed the novel with Catherine Demongeot in the title role and Philippe Noiret as Uncle Gabriel. In Germany, the film was released under the title Zazie , but only after heavily censored interventions in the dialogues that were rated as offensive and the removal of homosexual allusions. For the lexicon of international film, "Louis Malle staged a grotesque comedy in cinema , trying to consistently translate the linguistic wit of the original into pictures." The film thus became "an exemplary work of the French ' Nouvelle Vague '".

The novel was adapted several times for the stage and implemented as a comic. Zazie dans le métro , the thirteenth of Raymond Queneau's fifteen novels, remained his greatest popular success. Although the subject is different, the novel has been compared to Nabokov's Lolita . Gilbert Adair emphasized that both authors were by no means mere one-book authors and were nevertheless identified in public with the young title heroine of her greatest success. For example, after Queneau's death, a Paris newspaper ran the headline: “Zazie is in mourning”.

literature

Text output

  • Raymond Queneau: Zazie dans le métro . Éditions Gallimard, Paris 1959. (first edition)
  • Raymond Queneau: Zazie dans le métro. Editions Gallimard, Series Folio Vol. 103, Paris 1989, ISBN 2-07-036103-9 (paperback)
  • Raymond Queneau: Zazie on the Metro . German by Eugen Helmlé. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-518-38098-2 . The cited page numbers refer to this edition.
  • Raymond Queneau: Zazie on the Metro . New translation by Frank Heibert. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2019, ISBN 978-3-518-42861-0

Secondary literature

German

  • Günter Berger: The novel in Romania. New trends after 1945 . Narr, Tübingen 2005, ISBN 3-8233-6147-3 , pp. 73-85.
  • Andreas Blank: Literarization of orality. Louis Ferdinand Céline and Raymond Queneau . Narr, Tübingen 1991, ISBN 3-8233-4554-0 , pp. 291-304.
  • Monika Wodsak: Un délire tapé à la machine par un romancier idiot '? On the problem of the translation of Raymond Queneau's Zazie dans la métro . In: Henning Krauß (Ed.): Open structure. Literature system and reality of life. Festschrift for Fritz Nies on his 60th birthday . Narr, Tübingen 1994, ISBN 3-8233-4128-6 , pp. 295-316.

French English

  • Roland Barthes : Zazie et la littérature . In: Barthes: Essais critiques . Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1964, ISBN 2-02-001923-X , pp. 125-130.
  • Michel Bigot: "Zazie dans le métro" by Raymond Queneau . Editions Gallimard, Paris 1994, ISBN 2-07-038636-8 .
  • WD Redfern: Queneau: Zazie dans le métro . Grant & Cutler, London 1980, ISBN 0-7293-0086-2

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Queneau: Zazie in the Metro , p. 35.
  2. a b Queneau: Zazie in the Metro , p. 74.
  3. a b Wodsak: Un délire tapé à la machine par un romancier idiot '? , Pp. 295-297.
  4. Blank: Literarisierung von Orality , pp. 291–292.
  5. a b Wodsak: Un délire tapé à la machine par un romancier idiot '? , P. 297.
  6. Berger: The Roman in the Romania , pp. 73-74.
  7. ^ A b c Gilbert Adair : Introduction . In: Raymond Queneau: Zazie in the Metro . Penguin Classics, New York 2001, ISBN 0-14-218004-1 .
  8. Queneau: Zazie in the Metro , p. 149.
  9. a b Queneau: Zazie in the Metro , p. 153.
  10. Queneau: Zazie in the Metro , p. 155.
  11. ^ Berger: The novel in the Romania , pp. 74-75.
  12. "personnage essentiel du livre". Quoted from: Wodsak: Un délire tapé à la machine par un romancier idiot '? , P. 296.
  13. Queneau: Zazie in the Metro , p. 23.
  14. Queneau: Zazie in the Metro , p. 7.
  15. Queneau: Zazie dans le métro , Gallimard folio p. 7.
  16. Berger: The Roman in the Romania , p. 76.
  17. Wodsak: Un délire tapé à la machine par un romancier idiot '? , P. 300.
  18. Queneau: Zazie in the Metro , p. 41.
  19. Blank: Literarization of Orality , p. 302.
  20. Berger: The Roman in the Romania , pp. 76-80.
  21. Blank: Literarisierung von Orality , p. 303.
  22. Quoted from: Wodsak: Un délire tapé à la machine par un romancier idiot '? , P. 307.
  23. a b Wolfgang Koeppen : The new French dictionary . In: Die Zeit , No. 53/1960.
  24. Joseph Hanimann: Amélies naughty sister . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , September 8, 2007.
  25. Walter Widmer : A witty author was messed up . In: Die Zeit , No. 31/1964.
  26. Wodsak: Un délire tapé à la machine par un romancier idiot '? P. 305.
  27. ^ Berger: The novel in the Romania , p. 85.
  28. ^ Frank Heibert: About the irrepressible pleasure of translating Raymond Queneau . In: logbuch-Suhrkamp.de , Suhrkamp Verlag's blog .
  29. Felix Pütter: "I didn't want to produce a museum costume film" . Interview with Frank Heibert. In: Tralalit of June 12, 2019.
  30. ^ Barbara Vinken : Tragedy and Travesty . In: Die Welt from June 15, 2019.
  31. Klaus Nüchtern : Hormo in tutu and brat in Bludschiens . In: Falter 22/2019 of May 31, 2019 ( online ).
  32. Paul Fornel: Queneau en quelques chiffres . In: Georges-Emmanuel Clancier: Queneau aujourd'hui . Clancier-Guéneaud, Paris 1985, ISBN 2-86215-071-1 , p. 227.
  33. Paul Fornel: Queneau en quelques chiffres , p 227, 232nd
  34. You're chatting . In: Der Spiegel . No. 50 , 1960, pp. 80 ( online ).
  35. a b L'Enfant le Plus Terrible . In: Time of November 21, 1960.
  36. “c'est une parodie minée de l'intérieur, recelant dans sa structure même une incongruité scandaleuse […] il assume le masque littéraire, mais en même temps il le montre du doigt. […] Un comique éclatant, et pourtant purifié de toute agressivité. ”In: Barthes: Zazie et la littérature , pp. 125–130.
  37. Zazie in the Metro on Complete-Review.com.
  38. Stephan Buchloh: "Perverse, harmful to young people, hostile to the state": Censorship in the Adenauer era as a mirror of the social climate . Campus, Frankfurt 2002, ISBN 3-593-37061-1 , p. 200.