I’ve come across this construction several times in a series of boundary descriptions in French.
At first I thought the double “en en” was a typo, but I’ve now seen it several times.
Why the doubling of “en”?
I don’t think it is repeated: you are dealing with two different words, homonyms: one “en” is a preposition and the other is a pronoun.
Google Translate (admittedly not infallible) translates this as “going up [the course of] the river”, apparently ignoring both occurrences of “en”. With my feeble grasp of French I’m assuming that one “en” is a preposition that applies to the entire phrase that follows, IOW “in going up the course of the river”. But how does the first “en” fit in? Can you parse this out?
I’m guessing that the first “en” is a partitive, equivalent to “de _____” and referring to something that precedes this segment.
To the OP: Can you give us the full sentence so we can see what comes before the phrase you posted?
Probably the other way around: the first en is the preposition applying to “remontant”, and the second is not partitive,
but an adverbial pronoun which does not have an explicit antecedent in this case, but associated to the verb of motion or referring to where you are going (up the course of the river).
I just looked on the Leo site, which defines the entire phrase en remontant la rivière as simply “up the [specified] river” or even just “upstream”, i.e. an adverbial phrase. It’s a little clearer to me now, but I’d still like to see it in context.
I think the additional wording le cours de is nothing more than extra wordiness on the part of the original writer.
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There are really three French words en: (1) The pronoun often translated “of it,” (2) the preposition that can be translated “by” or “while” when followed by a gerund, and (3) the relatively rare adverb that can be translated “thence” or “from there.” It’s the last one that you find in metes and bounds, corresponding exactly to the English thence found in the same context. It seems to be used alongside de là (“from there”). As far as I can tell, there is no difference in usage between adverbial en and de là.
Doesn’t sound grammatical to me. However, “en en remontant le cours”, when talking about the river, would be: here the second “en” is a pronoun substituting for the river.
But I’d like to see the sentence in context, just in case there’s something I’m overlooking.
It’s a long metes and bounds description for a federal riding early in the 20th century. The French draughting for the federal statutes was not the the best French, usually with a lot of anglicisms, particularly legal ones. This one seems to have anglisicms from technical English surveying terms.
The overall description runs to many, many lines, all one sentence, with each separate description divided by semi-colons in the long run-on sentence.
I understand it to mean: “ ; from there (or thence) following the said North Saskatchewan River, going downstream ; from there etc.”
The above is just one example. The phrase is used several times, sometimes “en en descendant le course” and sometimes “en en montant le course”.
If the origin of the movement is explicit or clear, it seems clear that that is what the second “en” keeps referring to, and not anything more obscure or requiring the tortured explanations I was grasping at (cf. je m’en vais, je m’en suis, je m’en tiens…) It seems your uses can be translated into English as “thence” or “from there/from that place”.
Ah yes, in this case it is grammatically correct. The second “en”, as I’ve said, refers to the river. So “en en descendant le cours” here means “en descendant le cours de la rivière Saskatchewan Nord”, which indeed means following the river going downstream.
As native frencg speaker, I agree with DPRK “en en remontant le cours” means “in the act of moving up the river”.
The first “en” is linked to the verb “remontant”, meaning that you are making an action ( like “en marchant” means that I walk)
The second “en” rapport to the river itself.
The phrase is unusually formal, perhaps as it seems to be a legal document dating from a century ago.