Just a quick question for French speakers: Are the following two French sentences grammatical and accurate as translations of the English versions? (I realize 2 is a little awkward in English; I just want to make the French is no worse.)
1:
I want Jean to open the door.
Je veux que Jean ouvre la porte.
2:
I want Jean to have opened the door.
Je veux que Jean ait ouvert la porte.
Sounds right to me - sentence 2. is horribly awkward, but the grammar’s fine.
Except that Jean is a woman’s name, and in French should be Jeanne. 
So, if I’m writing in English about the former Prime Minister of Canada, I should call him “John Chrétien” and not “Jean Chrétien”?
No, you should call him John Christian!
"I want Jean to have opened the door.
Je veux que Jean ait ouvert la porte. "
Nope. Even English does not sound right. I think it should be I wanted Jean to have opened the door.
The correct translation is:
J’aurais voulu que Jean ouvre la porte.
Not necessarily - you simply have to think of “want” as “wish”. “I want John to have opened the door” is equivalent to “I wish John had opened the door”, the problem being that the grammar construct is different in English (but not in French : “je souhaite que Jean ait ouvert la porte”).
Your example is the translation of “I wished John would open the door” or “would have opened the door”, which is not the same. It isn’t even in the same time frame, since now the principal clause is in the past as well.
Not that the actual sentence used matters - as I understand it, the OP merely wanted to know if the simple past subjunctive was the correct form for a present wish that something had happened in the past, which it is.
Yes, the problem is the second case isn’t that it’s grammatically incorrect, but rather that it’d be more obvious with the subordinate clause explicitely there. Compare:
I want Jean to have opened the door when I’ll be back.
Je veux que Jean ait ouvert la porte quand je serai de retour.
There’s nothing wrong with any of these sentences.
Thanks everyone for the responses. Kobal2 is right that with the second example, I’m specifically interested in the way you express a present desire about a (possibly hypothetical) past action. And I think Hypnagogic Jerk is right that extra context makes it sound better.
Nitpick, but if there’s a thread to be a grammar Nazi this is it : when I’m back, not when I’ll be back.
Other than that, spot on.
It’s Jean Poutine.
“When I’m back” is certainly correct, and I’d say it sounds better, but is “when I’ll be back” really incorrect?
I believe so, yes, but I’m having the devil of a time trying to root out an authoritative cite. The best my Google-Fu can muster right now is this page. I’ll defer to our resident ObersturmGrammarians for more exhaustive info on the subject :).
Well, I can provide a descriptively oriented cite on the matter.
*C’est ce qu’on appelle du “petit nègre”.
To sundog66: thanks!
To Gymnopithys: how so?
Je veux que Jean ait ouvert la porte quand je serai de retour.
You are speaking in the present tense to express in the future something that is past. The tense concordance is grammatically incorrect. I suggest a better (and only) translation:
Je veux que Jean ait la porte ouverte (quand je serai de retour).
qu’il ait ouvert la porte is imperfect subjunctive.
qu’il ait la porte ouverte is present subjunctive and agrees with je veux.
(time zone is cause for the laps…)
correction: lapse, not laps…
Is there any grammatical difference between these two sentences? You replace “ait ouvert la porte” by “ait la porte ouverte”. You just put the complement between the auxiliary and past participle instead of after the verb, but it’s still past subjunctive.
Unless you intend the verb to be avoir instead of ouvrir, with ouverte acting as an adjective, as in the difference between these two sentences:
Je veux qu’il ait chauffé un coussin quand je serai de retour.
Je veux qu’il ait un coussin chaud quand je serai de retour.
But in any case, “je veux que Jean ait la porte ouverte” sounds strange; I’m not sure it’s even correct. What we could say is “je veux que Jean tienne la porte ouverte.” But then it refers to a continued action, not to a specific action in time that happens between now and my return.
No, it’s past subjunctive.
I tried to find an online French grammar to check out the rules about tense agreement. This source says that past subjunctive in the subordinate clause may describe an action posterior to the action in the main clause, with the example “je souhaite qu’elle ait fini demain.” This example seems to agree with mine.
Is there any grammatical difference between these two sentences? You replace “ait ouvert la porte” by “ait la porte ouverte”. You just put the complement between the auxiliary and past participle instead of after the verb, but it’s still past subjunctive.
There certainly is a difference. Like you say:
*Unless you intend the verb to be avoir instead of ouvrir, with ouverte acting as an adjective, as in the difference between these two sentences:
Je veux qu’il ait chauffé un coussin quand je serai de retour.
Je veux qu’il ait un coussin chaud quand je serai de retour.
*
That’s my intended meaning.
On the other hand je veux que Jean ait la porte ouverte isn’t strange if you want to convey the idea contained in je veux que Jean ait ouvert la porte. It’s the subtlety of translation. But perhaps being francophone I perceive it differently. I still maintain que je veux qu’il ait ouvert or *je veux qu’il ait chauffé *are incorrect.
OK for past subjunctive, not imperfect.
A bon entendeur…