{"id":13,"date":"2011-03-02T13:10:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-02T12:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gydle.ch\/blog\/?p=13"},"modified":"2016-05-18T21:08:31","modified_gmt":"2016-05-19T04:08:31","slug":"bien-etre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gydlepublishing.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/bien-etre\/","title":{"rendered":"Bien-\u00eatre"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I\u2019ve been asked to translate the introduction to a Nordic walking book. Initially, I was very excited \u2013 this could be my big breakthrough into book translating! \u2013 but those hopes were dashed when the author explained that the translated text would be sent by her Swiss publisher to an agent in North America, and if it was accepted, it would be farmed out to a translator there.<\/p>\n

Well, never mind, a job\u2019s a job, so I get started. I don\u2019t Nordic Walk, so I’m confident I\u2019ll at least learn something new in the process.<\/p>\n

One word keeps popping up, jarring my translating flow: bien-\u00eatre. This is roughly translated into English as \u201cwellbeing.\u201d Nordic Walking, it turns out, is not only a total body workout (it uses 90% of your muscles!), but it also makes you feel good about yourself. But every time I type \u201cwellbeing,\u201d it feels stilted and awkward. I realize it\u2019s not a word that Americans use much. We love talking about exercise, weight loss, cardiovascular health, muscle tone — did I mention weight loss? Lose Weight! Get a Total Body Workout! I guess the implication is that if you\u2019ve got all those bases covered, it\u2019s obvious that you\u2019re going to feel good about yourself. If your body is buff, what more do you need? Wouldn\u2019t saying that you\u2019ll have a sense of wellbeing be redundant?<\/p>\n

More to the point, isn\u2019t it totally subjective? How can you compare something as vague as \u201cwellbeing\u201d with numbers of calories per mile or target heart rate or the percentage of your muscles you\u2019re using? What has a higher bien-\u00eatre index: an hour of Nordic Walking outdoors with your friends or a sweaty session on a Stairmaster? Can’t we measure brain waves or something? Please?<\/p>\n

I often pass groups of Nordic Walking ladies, marching along with their poles and chatting away, as I run along the lake. They look happy. But then maybe they\u2019d be happy anyway, even without the poles. The depressed ones are curled up on the couch at home, watching reruns of Friends<\/em>. But that\u2019s the thing: bien-\u00eatre is more than just happiness. It\u2019s a deeper concept, a state of being. It has to do with tranquility, a sense of peace, of all being right with your world.<\/p>\n

Why would the word describing this concept be used more in Europe (well, at least in the French-speaking countries, I can’t vouch for the others) than across the pond? Sure, Europe has had a lot more serious angst to deal with in the last couple of centuries than the US has. A couple of world wars, the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Maybe that has something to do with it. But then, look at the crazy yoga boom in the US. Even though it often masquerades as a total body workout, yoga also has a non-negligible karma component. All the marketing gimmicks aside (Yoga clothing? Yoga magazines?), I\u2019m convinced there\u2019s some big cultural thing going on here. Maybe we\u2019re entering a kind of national existential crisis. Maybe Americans are finally starting to see that wellbeing isn\u2019t something you can buy or something you can attain by working really hard, but something more elusive that has to be nurtured from within.<\/p>\n

I read an article<\/a> in an actual paper copy of the Sunday New York Times (thank you Matt at BooksBooksBooks<\/a>) not too long ago about Jack LaLanne and his role \u00a0in turning physical fitness into a moral issue in the US. This is key, I’m almost sure of it. In the US,\u00a0you exercise because it’s a virtuous thing to do. If you don’t, you’re a worthless slothlike sack of flab. Working out thus gives you the heady feeling of — an absence of guilt. That’s a far cry from wellbeing in my book. Nobody cares about wellbeing. We just want to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror without an overwhelming surge of self-loathing.<\/p>\n

There’s certainly some of this exercise-as-higher-virtue going on in Europe, too (thank you, globalization) but I don’t think it’s as pervasive. The Swiss are certainly into extreme sports, but it’s more a question of how crazy they can be than how buff they are. So when my Nordic Walking enthusiast counts bien-\u00eatre as one of the benefits of her sport, I’m sure she means it. I just wish I knew how to translate it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been asked to translate the introduction to a Nordic walking book. Initially, I was very excited \u2013 this could be my big breakthrough into book translating! \u2013 but those hopes were dashed when the author explained that the translated … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[4,5,7,6],"tags":[325,327,273,275,326,274],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1R58n-d","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gydlepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gydlepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gydlepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gydlepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gydlepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.gydlepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2523,"href":"http:\/\/www.gydlepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions\/2523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gydlepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gydlepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gydlepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}