Tecserion | Litsy

Tecserion | Marie-Madeleine de Lubert

Any French speakers able to help me with this quote:

... souvent il vaut mieux faire des riens que de ne rien faire du tout ...

Google Translate renders it as: “... it is often better to do nothing than to do nothing at all ...“, which matches the sense from my very elementary French but which is no sense at all. I expect I'm missing a nuance, maybe between the plural “riens“ and the singular “rien“?

Merci d'avance!

squirrelbrain I understand the same sense as you. I looked it up in my (very large!) French dictionary and there‘s a section on faire + rien but nothing that would offer a different translation. The only thing I wondered would be to translate ‘riens‘ as ‘sweet nothings‘ or ‘little somethings‘. Better to do little things than nothing at all? (edited) 4w

swynn @squirrelbrain I think you're right. That interpretation makes sense in context. I also found a few sourceson line that say “rien“ or “des riens“ can mean trivialities or things of no consequence. The Collins Dictionary has an example: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/french-english/des-petits-riens

I'm calling it solved. Thanks! 4w

vlwelser Better to do little nothings than to do nothing at all. This doesn't translate well. Like better to do useless things (like picking flowers or something that has no purpose) 4w

See All 7 Comments

rwmg @vlwelser @swynn Maybe a more idiomatic translation would be something like:

It's better to do nothing much than to do nothing at all. 4w

squirrelbrain Yay! I‘m glad we worked it out! 4w

swynn @vlwelser Thanks for confirmation of this! 4w

swynn @rwmg I like this rendering, and wonder whether a French reader would have a parallel problem puzzling over the meaning of “nothing much“ 4w

15 likes7 comments

Welcome to Litsy!

Trending Hashtags

Trending Books