Looking back

The translator job that Jeanine at USIA had wanted to fill ended up being cut out of the budget, CHM told me when I met him. She hadn't hired anybody. Charles-Henry had himself been hired a couple of years earlier to be the editor-in-chief of a French-language magazine that USIA published. It was aimed at a francophone African audience. Charles-Henry's job was to arrange for the translation into French of the articles that were first published in the English-language edition of the magazine. He used free-lance and moon-lighting translators who worked in Washington DC for international organizations including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

By the way, the woman named Jeanine, who managed a staff of a half-dozen full-time francophone translators, turned out to own a house in a village called Carteret in Normandy, near the city of Cherbourg and not very far from the Mont Saint-Michel. She had inherited house; it had been her grand-parents' home. She often spent her summer vacations there. To me that was a funny coincidence because the town where I grew up on the North Carolina coast is in Carteret County.

In 1992, Walt and I had come to France for a two-week vacation, part of which was to be a week-long road trip to Normandy, Brittany, and the Loire Valley. We went to Carteret because I wanted to see it. We walked around the little town and took pictures. I was to visit Carteret in Normandy quite a few times after we moved to Saint-Aignan in 2003. Ten years or so ago Jeanine's health began to decline and she quit coming to France. She was in her 90s when she passed away. I also took my mother and her sister to Carteret in Normandy in 2004 when they visited us in France so that they too could see the town.

By the way, in 1983 or '84, Jeanine's husband Philippe offered me a job. He worked for the U.S. government's Voice of America radio service. I had applied there around the same time that I applied for the USIA job, and had taken a test in which I translated an American news article into French and then recorded my translation so that he could judge what I would sound like if I worked there. Philippe said he could hire me at the GS9 pay level. When I told him that I already had a job at USIA that was at the GS11 level, he said, well... you probably ought to keep that job for now. I did.

This is a picture of Charles-Henry that I took in 2009 in a church in the town of Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe, which is about a 90 minute drive south of Saint-Aignan. Another coincidence: I had a poster, mounted on a board and hanging on a wall, showing the church in Saint-Savin. I got it from the American Association of Teachers of French (AATF) when I worked at its headquarters in the late 1990s. Charles-Henry, his older brother, and their mother had spent time there in the mid-1940s, toward the end of World War II. Walt and I had gone there on a road trip in 1989 because we had the poster and we wanted to see the town. Later, not long after we moved to France, I went there again, with Charles-Henry. When we arrived, I parked the car in front of a restaurant where I thought we should have lunch. He shed a tear or two as we sat in the car, saying he had had lunches and dinners there many times with is mother and brother during the war years. Charles-Henry's father, Paul, was a doctor. He himself spent the war years caring for people in Paris but he sent his family to the country, where it was safer for them. Paul died in 1956 at the age of 96.

When I met Charles-Henry in person in 1983, he told me again that he needed to hire somebody to be one of his assistants. He was intrigued by my translation for the test I had taken. He said that after reading it, he wondered if I was an American who spoke and wrote good French, or whether I was a French person who had lived in the U.S. for a long time and who had let some anglicisms slip into his French. He said he needed the help of an editor and proof-reader in French, and he especially needed the assistance of an anglophone who was fluent in French and could explain to him the meaning of English expressions that he wasn't sure he understood correctly. He had been living in Washington DC since 1969.

It was a funny coincidence because I had started living and working in France at the end of 1969. Our paths had finally crossed. We had a good conversation that day I met him. My French was laced with then-current slang terms and expressions that I had learned when I was spending a lot of time with a group of French friends in Paris for the previous three years. He found that very amusing. We might make a good team, he said. When could I start? Was I willing to work as a contractor for a few months while he got authorization to hire me full-time? His previous assistant editor had been a French woman who had quit her job when her husband retired and they decided to move to (another coincidence) Chapel Hill, North Carolina for the better weather, the lower living costs, and the university environment — the University of North Carolina system has its main campus in the town of Chapel Hill.

That's how it all started. I worked for three or four months as a contractor and then Charles-Henry offered me the full-time job as assistant editor of the magazine. For me it was fun and I needed the money. The staff of the English language edition of the magazine was happy to have me there too. One of them was an American woman who spoke good French and was the managing editor of the magazine. We hit it off. She was from Chicago and now she lives in California. I wrote to her yesterday morning to tell her about Charles-Henry's death.