Sally Mara’s Intimate Diary, dating from 1950, is exceptional; a salacious, black humorous andmeaningful story by the influential and erudite French novelist, Raymond Queneau. When ‘Sally Mara’begins her diary in January 1934, she is 17 years old and lives with her mother, older brother andyounger sister in south central Dublin. The everyday language is, of course, English, but she is writingin ‘newly-learned’ French to impress her beloved and just departed French tutor, a professional polyglotlinguist. To impress him even more, she decides to learn Irish in order to write a novel of some kind inIrish. However, the action throughout is determined by Sally’s resolution to overcome her ignorance ofthe mysteries of sex and reproduction. The often sensual and dark humour of Sally Mara’s Journal intime is founded on language andlanguages, so this translation, while prioritizing clarity, aims to maintain ‘Frenchness’, tinged of coursewith Dublinese. Surprisingly, for a French author, Irish words and phrases occur throughout; these arenot translated but, like some challenging French phrases, are supported by footnotes.In 1949, when Raymond Queneau wrote Journal intime, published anonymously under thepseudonym Sally Mara, he was, as always, greatly influenced by James Joyce and fascinated by thelimitations of language. He was also in need of the ready money provided by Éditions du Scorpion,publishers of erotic and violent pulp fiction, and of Journal intime.
