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Showing posts from October 14, 2012

THE FRENCH EXCEPTION (English)et L'EXCEPTION FRANÇAISE ( Francaise)

This is a kind of  love letter to France, my original English text of an article commissioned in 1998 by the French national newspaper LE MONDE and a rough French translation done with Google because I couldn’t find LE MONDE’S French translation anywhere on the Internet.   (Update: meilleur traduction francais --merci a Alain Gresh I’m putting it online on the occasion of my impending 6 weeks or so in France because it’s been causing me to reflect on what my 14 years living in France has meant to me and still does during my largely unwilling return to New York. What I wrote in LE MONDE in 1998 is personally even truer for me now that it was then.  Since then, I’ve done appearances for the French Foreign Service in New Caldonia and Mexico, received a Career Achievement Award at the Utopiales festival in Nantes from the hands of  Jean-Marc Ayrault, then the mayor of Nantes, now Prime Minister of France.  I’ve had a hand in getting the prison diary of Edward Daladier published