Not lost in translation.

After all, it may be that Jean-Luc Godard is not Korean. Lucky Koreans : if he had been, they would enjoy and understand him less.

This is the doom of French-speaking viewers, as they listen to Godard dialogues : because the words sound familiar, they think they can make sense of the sentences ; they fail and the more they fail, the more frustrated they grow.

In Korea and the whole non-French-speaking world, spectators run no such risk : as they listen to Godard, they hear the foreign language it is.

They do not try to grasp the words ; to their ears, this is music and how Godard should be appreciated.

Godard’s dialogues are like saloon talk in a Western film : their literal meaning could not matter less.

Do you speak Godard ? Nobody truly does, but Jean-Luc himself. Even his favourite actors speak his prose with a hint of a foreign accent, as if it were French.

Only Jean-Luc does full justice to his words, the articulation of their sounds, the return of their alliterations, their rhythmic slowness.

Only he can intone them to hypnotic effect, like the oracle and zen master, if not God, he truly is, as his voice over comments his experimental films and his « Histoire du cinéma ».

If Godard is not Korean, maybe one need be, or Japanese, to enjoy his aphorisms fully, meditate them for years and be rewarded with sudden illumination.

Stravinsky said that music did not express anything beyond itself. Then, Godard is true music ; his language cannot be lost in translation, because it cannot be translated.

If he had been Japanese, Godard would have written haiku. A French native speaker, the Cartesian structure of his language forced him to become an analytical poet.

The only way to enjoy a work by Godard is not to strive to understand it. With him, absence of understanding is lived like a form of ataraxia, a peaceful and paradoxical state of plenitude, similar to the instants in « Sauve qui peut (la vie) » (1980), when the world suddenly stands still.
According to Bunuel, the need to understand was a typical « bourgeois » failing. This is debatable, particularly in a movie theatre : the need to understand, bourgeois or otherwise, follows on the heels of boredom.

Who would feel the need to understand Godard films if they were more entertaining ?