I feel like this series would make a great animated series 🤩

The translation of the lyrics to «Le mal de vivre» by Barbara, which go:

Le mal de vivre Le mal de vivre Qu’il faut bien vivre Vaille que vivre

are given by Benoît in the book as:

The pain of life (OR The sickness of living OR The evil of life OR The sorrow of life) The pain of life (OR The sickness of living OR The evil of life OR The sorrow of life) That we must live with or endure We must live the life we have or We must soldier on

While this is technically true, it is woefully inaccurate, considering how long of a part in the book this character has, and how deep he therefore could have gone into the translation.

As I am wont to think of myself as one of the Resident Boundling Linguists, I have taken it upon me to write a treatise on the matter. Feel free to add your own interpretation/translation, my French is a tad rusty!:

1. Much as the rest of the excerpt, the title phrase, Le mal de vivre, has layers of meaning to it. Literally, it is “the bad(ness)/ill(ness) of living”. This can indeed mean “the pain of life”, or “the disease of living”. The word « mal » means a lot of things in French: illness, badness, damage, harm, pain, trouble, difficulties. I think translating it as “the pain of living” comes close to the multiple layers, considering the English word “pain” and its layers of meaning (physical pain, going to pains to avoid/achieve something, be ordered to do something under pain of a punishment, etc.). Crucially, I chose “living” instead of “life”, not only because the original uses a verb or verbal noun, but also because the gerund evokes a greater impression of imminence.

2. qu’il faut bien vivre can be translated two ways, depending on whether one interprets the little word bien (“well”) therein literally, or as a particle modifying the verb: a) “which one must live well” (→ life must be lived well) b) “which one must very well live” (→ one can’t help but to just live life) I think an ambiguous translation, achieved by dropping the idiomatic ‘very’ of the second interpretation (b), should serve best in this case: “The pain of living, which one must well live”

3. vaille que vivre: This is, indeed as Benoît says, a little bit tricky, but not more so than the other two phrases. Beforehand, it must be noted that « vaille que vaille » (lit.: “be it worth what it be worth”) means “as best one can”. The closest idiomatic equivalent might be something akin to the English “for whatever it may be worth” (or, not matching the original French at all: “come what may”/“by hook or by crook”).

Now, the last word in French is changed for “vivre” in the lyrics, which throws off the expectations for the abovementioned idiomatic phrase. When setting the French idiom aside, a pure and literal translation of the phrase might be “it would merit to live”.

The hard part of translating this particular phrase is that the French idiom repeats the verb “to be worthwhile”, but the English equivalent that I came up with above does not, so the surprise moment of changing the idiom cannot be replicated easily. If we cheated ourselves into accepting that an equivalent English idiom might look like “for what(ever) worth it may be worth”, then we could translate the lyrics into something like “for what(ever) living it may be worth”. Adding the meaning of “it would merit to live” into this is impossible, because “for what(ever) living it merited to be worth” sounds extremely convoluted – but for those of you who are curious, that would encompass almost all the layers of those three little words when peeled back completely and exposed at a surface level. The additional layer of the original idiom contains “come what may”, which might be introduced separately as “live what may”

Concluding my ramblings, the end result of the lyrics’ translation may look as follows:

“The pain of living, / one must well live it, / for whatever living (it) is worth.”

OR

“The pain of living, / one must well live it, / live what may.”

I cannot yet decide which one I like better.