Over at Michelle Obama Watch, Raine posted about LeMode interview with Barack and Michelle Obama from 1996. This was four years after they were married and before the weeMichelles were born. The whole thing is in French. My French is limited to “Combien”. Now if is was in Spanish, we’d be just fine.
ABC only translated a portion however, with the power of Google’s translation tools, you can read the entire thing in English. Just go to Google Translate and copy and paste it into the box make sure it is translating French to English and voila, a pretty decent translation.
I would post the whole thing here, but I don’t want LeMode coming after me. I will post the answer to this one question because ABC posted a portion, and it is funny to compare the computer translation to the human translation.
How did you feel when you met Michelle for the first time? What did you think?
B. O. : Well, I thought it was a lot of speed, I liked it. And Michelle is a strong person, she knows who she is and where it comes from.
But if you look at the bottom of the eyes, you see a certain vulnerability. In any case, I see even if most people did not doubt it wanders the world, big, beautiful, confident, very competent … There is a part of herself that is fragile, young, sometimes scared, and I think these are the contradictions that attracted me to her house. And then it makes me very happy. She is very familiar and so I can be myself with her, she knows me well, I am completely confident, but at the same time, in some ways, it remains a mystery to me.
Sometimes, when we went to bed, I look and I am seized with vertigo realizing that here is extended a separate person from me, who has memories, background, thoughts, feelings different from mine. This tension between familiarity and mystery tisse something solid between us. Even if you build a life based on trust, mutual care and I think it is important that the other continues to amaze and surprise you.
Black love. It’s a Beautiful thing 
Hopefully this Sunday’s light reading will not be as contentious as last Sunday’s
4 comments ↓
What a wonderful sentiment.
I didn’t realize that they would have been interviewed so far back! Thank you for the information. It’s a good thing French is my first language, so I won’t need any translation.
The thing that makes me smile is their consistency as individuals and as a couple. Black love is indeed a wonderful thing.
And the part you clipped, with Barack talking about Michelle’s ‘vulnerability’, meaning her complexity as a human being - I love it.
Leave a Comment