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Neat reference to Sartre. "The line “Hell is other people” in French reads “L'enfer, c'est les autres” or “Hell is [the] others.” (The best known English tran
by Ice_cream_suit 5y ago
Neat reference to Sartre.
"The line “Hell is other people” in French reads “L'enfer, c'est les autres” or “Hell is [the] others.”
(The best known English translation of the play, by Paul Bowles, actually renders the line “Hell is just – other people.”)
We get a little more of the flavor of the line in English if we read it as “Hell is the Other"
https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2010/07/most-famous-thing-jean-paul-sartre.html#:~:text=The%20line%20%E2%80%9CHell%20is%20other,as%20%E2%80%9CHell%20is%20the%20Other https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2010/07/most-famous-thing....
- torstenvl 5y ago"The Other" strikes me as a distinctly anglophone construction. I think you may be reading too much into French's use of adjectives as nouns, meaning people to whom those adjectives apply. In English, we are okay with "the young" and "the old" but shy away from doing the same with other terms, especially in the plural. "The poors," "the gays," "the olds" are all considered derogatory trolling. Not so in French. The best translation of "les autres" really is "other people."
- grey-area 5y agoYes this is a normal phrase meaning simply other people and nothing to do with ‘the other’ which has a different meaning in English. Another example of this is the film ‘Au revoir les enfants’ which a literal translation would render as ‘Goodbye the children’ but is really just ‘Goodbye children’.