A rather odd question
I’m positive there are some people here that can answer my question, though it is a bit left-field.
Could somebody tell me what the French idiom equivalent of “(He/She/I/They) wear (his/her/my/their) heart on (pronoun) sleeve”
Thanks in advance,
~Chris
Unfortunately, I’ve no clue what it means in english…
“He wears his heart on his sleeve” means he shows his emotions freely, without hiding them behind a façade.
“Le coeur à fleur de peau” is my guess, but let clairobscur verify.
I’m not sure. “Avoir le coeur a fleur de peau” would rather mean being very sensitive. For instance in this sentence “Sous ses faux airs d’homme dégrossi et rustre, il cache une sensibilité à fleur de peau”, the appearance is misleading.
But I can’t think of another idiomatic, sorry.
Well, there may not be an equivalent idiom in French; not every idiom exists in every language (otherwise they wouldn’t be idioms, right?) The fact that clairobscur can’t think of one makes me think this is the case here.
I’m thinking a native French speaker would use (what we would consider) a circumlocution like ‘ne pas dissimuler ses émotions’ or ‘montrer ouvertement ses émotions’.
My Larousse Dictionnaire de Locutions includes “porter le coeur en écharpe” as the equivalent of “to wears one’s heart on one’s sleeve.” I’ve never heard the French phrase myself, but I can’t say I’ve heard the English phrase very often, either.
In Googling though, I discovered this website for a Montre ton Coeur movement in 2003. An English version translates “Montre ton coeur” as “Wear your heart on your sleeve.”
I didn’t know this one, either. I googled around, and apparently it has been coined by Chateaubriand during the early 19th century and has been a trendy sentence amongst the romanticists. According to a dictionnary it means parading one’s feelings, so there’s apparently an ostentatious character attached to it.
Maybe. But it’s not really an idiomatic. It just means “show your heart”, and then you interpret/translate it as you see fit.
You could look up a good French translation of Othello and see how the phrase (coined by Iago, I think) is translated there. Of course, they may have tranliterated rather than supplanted a common FrencH idiom.