Paris: Parisienne Femme Capitale
JE JOUE OUI
She’s back, the queen of aerosol can and the spiky epigram.
Urban artist Miss-Tic’s latest show opens this week at Galery W in Montmartre, and she’ll be gracing the space on the 16th November, from 3.30pm, to sign her new book.
Published by Éditions Grasset, it’s called “Je prête à rire mais je donne à penser”: “Made you laugh but got you thinking”, in my easy-oazy translation - but there’s a little play on words that I can’t render into English. Suggestions?
Mlle. Tic does rather a lot of that sort of thing. She considers herself more writer than artist, styling herself a femme de l’être, I mean, femme de lettres, that is to say, both…. Well, anyway, you get the idea.
Check out Miss-Tic’s oeuvre here.
Very interesting to see how this artist has become so well-known.
All her words are bases on plays with words :
For example : Je joue oui (on the poster)
If you translate word to word, it’s : I play yes.
But you could understand also : je jouis, which means I enjoy…but in french, in the sexual meaning.
About the sentence : je prête à rire mais je donne à penser, I don’t see how to translate the play in english, because it comes from french expressions :
Je prête à rire means : people will laugh at me
But prêter in to lend.
Je donne à penser means : I give you an occasion to think.
Jean-Claude
November 2, 2008 at 11:12 am
Thanks for rising to the challenge! That “give-take” idea is elegant, but it’s totally lost in English. It’s an interesting job for some ambitious young translator out there….
I really like Miss-Tic’s work for the fact that it is Parisian, Franco-Francais, unlike a lot of street art which could come from just about any city. In my case, she’s right. She makes me smile, but she gets my wee grey cells working overtime.
Amanda
November 4, 2008 at 10:24 am
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