luxurious B & B. Mum and Dad will be required to serve champagne breakfasts on the balcony. The European winner will be treated to a sightseeing tour of Paris by night on Frédéric’s motorbike. Alicia was bursting with confidence.
‘Everyone will be falling over themselves for tickets.’
I stared in stunned amusement. Could she be serious? (Apparently, yes.) Forty – no, more like fifty – dollar ticketsfor the chance to ride on a motorbike or stay with my parents! Who’d fall for that? I tried to be tactful.
‘You’re off your head,’ I laughed.
Unfazed, Alicia tried to persuade me. ‘Go on, it’d be great! A friend of mine held a raffle to pay for some expensive college and he raised heaps of money.’
I was touched and buoyed by her enthusiasm—and who knows, maybe the plan would really work. But I couldn’t ask for money from friends and family, I wouldn’t feel comfortable. Besides, selling raffle tickets had never been my forte. When I was at school, Mum and Dad always ended up having to buy all my unsold booklets.
In the end, I decided simply to write to companies and ask for sponsorship. Because I needed to narrow my focus somehow, I targeted Australian companies which do business in France and French groups which have interests in Australia. It seemed logical given my nationality and the fact that the program is based in Paris. Breaking down the required total amount into more digestible bites, we decided to ask them for ‘contributions’ of about $4,000. All I needed was for six companies to say yes.
Although we didn’t admit it, neither Frédéric nor I really believed this strategy would work. Companies receive hundreds of requests each year to support causes far more worthy than mine. But the alternative was to give up and forget about the program and I wasn’t prepared to do that, not yet. All my hopes for the future were wrapped up in it and these hopes provided me with a purpose, a goal. We concealed our doubts under bouncy, brittle optimism. The business of letter writing turned into a full-time job—for both of us. But our approaches to the task turned out to be rather different.
‘Can’t you make it less flowery? I mean, it’s not supposedto be poetry.’ Frédéric’s French translation of my English letter seemed longwinded. Its wordy sentences, carved by commas, trailed onto a second page. On the computer, we fiddled with the font until eventually it squashed onto one sheet. In contrast with the airy original, the French version looked dark and compressed.
But as everyone knows from Proust’s legendary page-long sentences, the French language doesn’t lend itself to concision. Its beauty lies in the fluid rhythms of musical, meandering passages which express a multitude of possibilities and doubts before reaching any conclusion. Oblique messages are revered as subtle and sophisticated whereas direct language is considered too blunt—an appropriate writing style for a robot but not for an erudite human being. My English letter ended succinctly with ‘Yours sincerely’. Signing off in French requires a two line formal flourish: ‘ Je vous prie de recevoir, Monsieur/Madame, l’expression de ma considération distinguée.’ Literally, ‘I beg you to receive, Monsieur or Madame, the expression of my distinguished consideration.’
Thanks to the seventeenth-century philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, though, in France Latin flamboyance is tempered by method and reasoning. It’s the French Yin and Yang, apparently. Frédéric’s letter might have been long but each line led the reader through another step in his argument. Although I remained unconvinced about the length and wording of his translation, he was insistent. We were writing to some of the most important names in French business. They were most likely cultivated, highly educated people. Our message needed to be elegant, lucid.
By mid-June we had sent out about fifty letters and there were
‘Everyone will be falling over themselves for tickets.’
I stared in stunned amusement. Could she be serious? (Apparently, yes.) Forty – no, more like fifty – dollar ticketsfor the chance to ride on a motorbike or stay with my parents! Who’d fall for that? I tried to be tactful.
‘You’re off your head,’ I laughed.
Unfazed, Alicia tried to persuade me. ‘Go on, it’d be great! A friend of mine held a raffle to pay for some expensive college and he raised heaps of money.’
I was touched and buoyed by her enthusiasm—and who knows, maybe the plan would really work. But I couldn’t ask for money from friends and family, I wouldn’t feel comfortable. Besides, selling raffle tickets had never been my forte. When I was at school, Mum and Dad always ended up having to buy all my unsold booklets.
In the end, I decided simply to write to companies and ask for sponsorship. Because I needed to narrow my focus somehow, I targeted Australian companies which do business in France and French groups which have interests in Australia. It seemed logical given my nationality and the fact that the program is based in Paris. Breaking down the required total amount into more digestible bites, we decided to ask them for ‘contributions’ of about $4,000. All I needed was for six companies to say yes.
Although we didn’t admit it, neither Frédéric nor I really believed this strategy would work. Companies receive hundreds of requests each year to support causes far more worthy than mine. But the alternative was to give up and forget about the program and I wasn’t prepared to do that, not yet. All my hopes for the future were wrapped up in it and these hopes provided me with a purpose, a goal. We concealed our doubts under bouncy, brittle optimism. The business of letter writing turned into a full-time job—for both of us. But our approaches to the task turned out to be rather different.
‘Can’t you make it less flowery? I mean, it’s not supposedto be poetry.’ Frédéric’s French translation of my English letter seemed longwinded. Its wordy sentences, carved by commas, trailed onto a second page. On the computer, we fiddled with the font until eventually it squashed onto one sheet. In contrast with the airy original, the French version looked dark and compressed.
But as everyone knows from Proust’s legendary page-long sentences, the French language doesn’t lend itself to concision. Its beauty lies in the fluid rhythms of musical, meandering passages which express a multitude of possibilities and doubts before reaching any conclusion. Oblique messages are revered as subtle and sophisticated whereas direct language is considered too blunt—an appropriate writing style for a robot but not for an erudite human being. My English letter ended succinctly with ‘Yours sincerely’. Signing off in French requires a two line formal flourish: ‘ Je vous prie de recevoir, Monsieur/Madame, l’expression de ma considération distinguée.’ Literally, ‘I beg you to receive, Monsieur or Madame, the expression of my distinguished consideration.’
Thanks to the seventeenth-century philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, though, in France Latin flamboyance is tempered by method and reasoning. It’s the French Yin and Yang, apparently. Frédéric’s letter might have been long but each line led the reader through another step in his argument. Although I remained unconvinced about the length and wording of his translation, he was insistent. We were writing to some of the most important names in French business. They were most likely cultivated, highly educated people. Our message needed to be elegant, lucid.
By mid-June we had sent out about fifty letters and there were
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