#30 - Pénible

This word goes with ennui as a uniquely French expression of existential oppression and weariness that applies all up and down the ladder of trials and tribulations, from the very small to the very serious.  Pénible means everything from annoying, to frustrating, difficult, tiresome, rough, burdensome, or painful.  It can be anything, significant or insignificant, that weighs you down, wears you down, makes your life a chore, or makes your life utterly unbearable.


Tu es pénible avec toutes tes questions ! ("You're really annoying, asking all these questions!")
C'est un travail pénible.  ("It's a frustrating/boring/difficult job.")
Le travail de la terre est pénible.  ("Working the land is hard.")
Le décès de sa mère lui est pénible.  ("His mother's death was hard/painful for him.")

The one feeling that I think all these definitions and uses have in common is that they convey a sense of being weighed or worn down by something, which doesn't really come across in some of the English words ("difficult," "frustrating," "annoying").  Pénible is closely related to the word peine which has a similar breadth of meaning unlike any of its English equivalents.  On WordReference.com, peine is defined as:

1. punishment, sentence
2. sorrow, grief, pain, anguish
3. effort, exertion, hard work
4. difficulty, trouble

I'll refrain from making jokes about the fact that the French use the same word for both punishment and hard work.  ;-)  In fact, throughout history many criminal sentences have included hard labor.  Also, the English actually did something similar with the word "travail."  We borrowed the old French word travail (which means simply "work" in modern French) and we now use it to mean:

1. work especially of a painful or laborious nature :  toil
2. a physical or mental exertion or piece of work :  task, effort
3. agony, torment
   (from Merriam-Webster online)

In fact, if you look up the English "travail" on WordReference, the French definitions suggested are labeur and peine.  So we took a French word that's pretty neutral and lacking in connotation, and then all the heavier, nastier connotations of peine ended up applying to "travail" instead. 

At the end of the day, there are plenty of ways to translate pénible into English, but this association with peine in French gives it a deeper, subtly darker connotation that can be difficult to convey in translation.  I'll end with an inscription on the Palais de Chaillot in Paris that I saw back when I was a student.  This is a description of creativity by the poet Paul Valéry:

"Every man creates without knowing it

Like he breathes

But the artist feels himself creating

His act engages all his being

His beloved suffering/sorrow/troubles/toil/sentence strengthens him"

This example could not be more perfect.  Here, peine can (and probably does) mean every single English definition listed on WordReference.  It could include even "sentence" or "punishment," in the sense that he was sentenced by Fate to be an artist--a harsh sentence in some ways, but one that he cherishes none the less.  At its most dramatic, peine (and by extension pénible) can capture the full breadth of France's cultural vision of existential, artistic angst.  No word in English even comes close.