When a series of nouns or adjectives occurs in English, the last one is almost always connected with “and.” But in French, there may be no “and.” I usually add “and” when translating into English. But there are times when it’s better to leave it out.

Here’s an example from a novel I recently translated by the eighteenth-century writer Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, L’Histoire du marquis de Cressy, about an unscrupulous, ambitious young man:

Mais le temps, la vanité, le désir, l’amour peut-être, détruisirent cette sage résolution, et lui présentèrent un moyen d’entretenir le goût que Mademoiselle du Bugei lui laissait voir, sans rien changer au plan déjà formé pour son élévation.

But time, vanity, desire, and perhaps love destroyed this sensible resolution, and offered him a way to maintain Mademoiselle du Bugei’s interest in him without changing anything in his plan for advancement.

Adding “and” feels necessary to me here; without it, this complex sentence would be hard to understand in English.

However, there are times when the style of the sentence is stronger without the interruption of “and.” The prose gains a different flow, maybe even a sense of emphasis or drama, as in this example from a book I translated on urban life (I’ve also shifted the sentences around a bit):

La ville sensorielle, affective, interactive, la ville en mouvement, offre aux habitants un autre regard, une autre expérience. Elle n’est plus seulement la ville où l’on travaille, celle où l’on dort…

The city can be sensory, emotional, interactive—a city in movement. It is not just a place to work or a place to sleep. It offers its residents another way of seeing, a different kind of experience.

One of my favorite examples of a series without “and” comes from “Our Lady of the Quarry,” a terrific story by Mariana Enriquez translated by Megan McDowell that appeared in the New Yorker. The narrator describes how she and her group of girlfriends felt about Silvia, their “grownup” friend, who did favors for them.

But we wanted her ruined, helpless, destroyed.

When I start reading a story in the New Yorker by an author I’m not familiar with, I often play a game with myself where I try to guess if it has been translated or not. Fiction should still be itself in translation—it’s okay if some strangeness comes through, as I suggested in a recent blog post. When I saw these three adjectives, I thought: Bingo! This was written in Spanish. The sentence has a sense of drama and inevitable progression. Reading this, we wonder if these things might really happen to Silvia. Adding “and” would have stifled the style and made it seem ordinary.

Top photo by Lukas via Pexels, center photo by Ruslan Khmelevsky via Pexels, bottom photo by Mike Beaumont via Unsplash.