LUGUBRIOUS, adj. I just finished reading Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s novel Tram 83, and I knew “lugubrious” had to be my word this week when its French equivalent, lugubre, appeared 80 times in a row on page 227. (I’m using the 2014 Métailié edition. This novel has also been translated into English and The Guardian published the first chapter as an excerpt a few years ago, in case that’s of interest.)
Let’s get this out of the way: “lugubre” and “lugubrious” are not etymologically interesting. Both the English and the French mean “gloomy, mournful, doleful, plaintive, super fucking sad.” (The French word has an additional definition meaning “related to funerals and death” that I can’t find attested in English, but that’s not too far from “mournful.”) Both come from directly from Latin lūgubris, which means the same thing and is related to the Latin verb “to mourn,” so that’s a couple thousand years with no real change in sound or meaning. Fancy words are boring like that.
What’s exciting here is the decision to write this same word 80 times in a row. Even if you can’t read the surrounding French, that block of text makes a visual impression. So what’s going on in this passage?
Tram 83 is about a nightclub in “la Ville-Pays,” the City-Country, a setting loosely inspired by Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo but purposefully left nameless. The City-Country is a chaotic place, full of child miners and students and sex workers all trying to get by and greedy tourists trying to get rich, and Tram 83, the premiere nightclub, is the City-Country in microcosm. Its all-hours, non-stop hedonism is loud, crowded, and by turns joyful and desperate. In this excerpt, the nightclub hosts a musical and literary performance. The writer and intellectual Lucien performs a story he has written interspersed with the singing of the nightclub’s most famous regular performer, a woman called “the railway diva.” Her voice is compared to a train—not beautiful, necessarily, but piercing, moving, unstoppable.
Lucien’s story is about a man and a woman who meet on a train and fall in love, despite both having lost their memories. They cannot communicate. The man tries to make a language to express his love, despite only knowing five words (“hi/story, strep throat, truce, shame, and welding”), and then the woman in Lucien’s story, played by the railway diva, begins to sing. Her song is “long, lugubrious [x80], and celestial.”
[Translator’s note: if I were actually translating this book to publish, I’m not sure I’d choose “lugubrious” as my translation of lugubre. Because English and French are so historically entwined, in translation it can be tempting to choose the English word that looks most like the French. This is sometimes a good choice, if you’re aiming for sound and not meaning. And “lugubrious” has a hell of a sound! But I think “lugubrious” is a higher register of formality than lugubre. That tends to be the case for English words with Romance roots: English speakers think “commence” is fancier than “begin,” whereas in French, “commence” is “begin.” Thanks, Norman conquest. Anyway, if it were actually my job to translate this book, which it is not, I think I would have landed on “mournful,” or possibly “plaintive,” since it’s a description of sound. But for this newsletter, I’m sticking to “lugubrious” because I’ve never had this many opportunities to type that word. Imagine if I wrote it 80 times!]
The excessive repetitive of “lugubrious” serves, even more than the adjective “long,” to make us feel how lengthy this performance is. And it’s a shock. In the way of shocking things, the transgression is also bizarrely funny—eighty! times!—even as it is plaintive and mournful.
“Lugubre” doesn’t look like a real word anymore (and it didn’t start off strong on that count), and seeing it so many times in a row nearly strips it of meaning. That contributes to the unreal feeling of this avant-garde performance. Lucien’s embedded story is about a man who can’t speak—one of his five remembered words is “strep throat,” suggesting a physical obstacle as well as mental one—and even Lucien’s words are obscured from readers, summarized instead of reported, but the narration has time to repeat “lugubre” over and over. Repetition that looks like an absurd excess in writing sounds totally normal in music, and it is the diva’s wailing song that overpowers Lucien’s words here, conveying a pain that neither he nor his character can find a way to express. Where language fails, music succeeds.
In this great interview, Fiston Mwanza Mujila links his stylistic choices, like the nameless setting and the prose that tumbles out in long lists or loops back on itself with interruptions and repetitions, with the content of his novel:
It is impossible to write about the Congo. It is impossible because it is a country that still doesn’t exist. It does not exist as a place of rights, as a normal state. It is also impossible to write about the violence in the Congo and its millions of victims. The only way you can write about this is by embracing extremes, exuberance, and poetry. And my novel is like a long poem.
Tram 83 is like a poem. It’s also very much like the song described in this passage. The diva’s song is not only plaintive and long, but “celestial.” She makes beauty out of pain. It’s a strange, shocking kind of beauty, but also an overpowering one. This book performs the same transformation, telling the story of people who live in the City-Country, alternating wildly between abundance and scarcity, joy and despair, life and death—making music from screaming.
(I try to give content warnings for all the romance novels I talk about in this newsletter, so I feel I should give them for Tram 83, but since it’s a portrait of a lawless, exploited place, there’s a lot of violence and upsetting content. Many of the sex workers in this book are “ducklings,” which means they’re under the age of eighteen and possibly more like twelve. Rape is omnipresent. There’s also sexual abuse in the form of people being photographed naked without their consent for blackmail purposes, and some of those people have been drugged against their will. Homelessness, starvation, and abuse by the police also come up. Just want you to be forewarned!)
I was gonna say “on a less lugubrious note,” but most of the small-r romance that I read this week had some mournful content. Still, the Happily Ever Afters were all guaranteed, which is why I read this genre in the first place. Sometimes it’s good to impose a little order on the lugubrious chaos of the world.
A Virtuous Ruby (m/f, both cis and het, historical, Christian) by Piper Huguley. This is set in a small mill town in Georgia in 1915, where Ruby Bledsoe has been trying to found a chapter of the NAACP and encourage the mill workers to organize. She has been raped by one of the white men who run the town as a way to punish her, and now has a six-month-old baby born out of wedlock, which has led the Reverend of her church to cast her out, but she refuses to stop fighting. The title plays on the line from Proverbs “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies,” and the book makes the point that Ruby’s virtue is not her virginity, but her drive to fight for a better life for her community. She eventually falls in love with Adam Morson, a Black doctor who was able to get an education by passing for white at university, and she teaches him to be proud of who he is and to make trouble like she does. Their romance is sweet and moving, and he accepts and admires her for who she is and never asks her to diminish herself. This book really captures the racist violence and terror of the South, but it does so to underscore how courageous Ruby is in fighting back—and falling in love. Content warnings: rape, pregnancy, childbirth, lynching, racism, prison/forced labor/slavery.
Xeni (m/f, both cis and bi, contemporary) by Rebekah Weatherspoon. This book just won one of The Ripped Bodice Awards for Excellence in Romantic Fiction. It is such a relief to me to know there is an award in romance that is going to the right books—as opposed to RWA’s RITA awards, which have been cancelled this year due to the organization’s massive racist fuckery and which were plagued by racism in prior years—because this book absolutely deserved an award. It starts with a homegoing ceremony for Xeni’s aunt, eccentric and iconic R&B singer Sable Everly, and Xeni’s grief over the loss of her aunt underlies every choice she makes. Sable has left Xeni her fortune, but since this is a romance novel, naturally there are some conditions attached—namely, marriage to young Scottish musician named Mason that Sable befriended late in life. Mason turns out to be amenable to the marriage of convenience, and then he and Xeni have to reckon with the fact that they really like each other. And why wouldn’t they? They’re both delightful to read about, as are all the supporting characters. I would totally hang out in this book. Even though grief plays a part in the story, it still feels like a comfort read. It’s warm and funny and sexy, and the writing kept me invested and turning the pages without resorting to big, painful conflict between Mason and Xeni. They have some stuff to work out, and it’s satisfying to see them get through it, but you never really lose faith that they will. That, too, is a big relief. Content warnings: sex, grief, miscarriage (in the past), abortion (in the past), a character’s previous partner refused to use contraception, a supporting character is pregnant, a bisexual character has an unsupportive parent, a main character’s family has not told the truth about their parentage.
Thornbound (m/f, both cis and het, historical, fantasy) and Moontangled (f/f, both cis and lesbian?, historical, fantasy, novella) by Stephanie Burgis. I read the first book in this series a couple weeks ago, was tickled by the idea of magical Regency England where women politicians rule, and then came back to read these sequels. They’re both fun, although I loved Harwood and Wrexham working together in Snowspelled, so I missed Wrexham when he was absent in Thornbound. Content warnings: none I can think of.
On another note, after last week’s discussion of kecap/ketchup, my friend David made a really great comment covering some condiment vocabulary in Mandarin:
On Ketchup and Chinese languages:
Interestingly the word “ketchup” in contemporary standard Mandarin reflects the transformation that the original condiment has gone through. The word is 番茄酱 (Fanqie jiang) or “tomato sauce.” The word “tomato” here is one of a few words that describe a tomato. The literal translation of “Fanqie” is “foreign eggplant” (eggplant being called “qiezi” 茄子).
I think the “tchup” in Ketchup comes from 汁 or “juice” which in Mandarin is pronounced “zhi” and Cantonese is “zap” and then I guess “ziap/chiap” in Fujianese.
Also interesting: a lot of histories of soy sauce (Jiangyou 酱油) discuss the fact that the method derived from making soy sauce were developed using the same method as fish sauce with soy beans replacing fish (presumably because as the process moved inland fish were in shorter supply). So the idea that kecap manis (which I think is similar, if not identical, to the Chinese stuff sold as tian jiangyou 甜酱油) is connected to fish sauce is pretty cool and interesting.
And lastly, I made it to 11 instances of “lugubrious” in this newsletter. Twelve if you include the preceding sentence. That’s probably a lifetime record for me. I hope neither you nor I have further cause to describe things as gloomy, doleful, mournful, etc., in this coming week!
