“All the same,” said the Pompier with indignation, “our friend is French. His father, Alsatian, fought for France; his mother was French, she never understood a word of German. But I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.”

“But, my dear Pompier, don’t you realise that you’ve touched on a sore point? If the child was led astray, it was the fault of his mother! Why did she not refrain from bringing a future poet into the world under Prussian bayonets, which – alas – were not only of steel? Why did she not have the resolve to part from him and leave him to the Vosges?”

“Never! She would have never parted from me, unless she were compelled by force. She lost three children at a young age; the last one, she wanted to hold on to.”

“A Roman,” Langue-de-Feu continued unperturbed, “would not have hesitated… And the fault she committed, when she saw her son entranced, haunted by the magic of words; why did she not correct his normal speech? Alas! She did not even realise that he was losing his footing in his own mother tongue. The years passed… the food of the spirit, the great train of civilisation, it nourishes itself where one feeds it, in school, in the German classics. The language of Goethe became for him an exotic mistress, charming and difficult, intoxicating in his consent, he loved it, delighting in the sublime conquest. What an affair! … How could one resist!”

“But I don’t see anything wrong in that at all,” said the Pompier.

“Yes, perhaps… if this unfortunate tag-along of the Germans didn’t love his mother so much, a Frenchwoman through-and-through… but this love as well is born of a fever… with his delicate health, placed in between two currents of air, he contracted a disease that would imprison his life… he welcomed it, the imbecile; like all his species of artist, he savoured his fever… in short, his mother didn’t coddle and protect him long enough. And here he is, growing up in the tower of Babel, in the Franco-German-Alsatian compartment, forced in an uncomfortable tête-à-tête to translate the sweet little German verses addressed to his mother into a French that is, frankly, bad. ”

… Langue-de-Feu lowered his voice despite himself.

“Listen well, my un-dekrautable Orpheus… it would have been better that you never knew French at all. A foreigner condemned to learn it from scratch will be ten times more likely to make gay use of it than a man like you who deserted his native language, while keeping, deep in the recesses of his soul, with the hint of a faraway music, the nostalgia of a true serenity, of a native without effort or fatigue… it won’t suffice to change one’s habits, one has to be reborn.”

“The foresight of his mother is admirable,” said the Pompier. “He is called René.”*

*FR: Rebirth

René Schickele, 1938, as published in “Der Wort hat einen neuen Sinn” (Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2014). Translated from the French.