You’re Gonna Miss Me (When I’m Gone)

Such was Shakespeare’s ability to put the human experience into words that he famously coined hundreds of words and expressions, many of which are still in use 400 years later. One that I find particularly eloquent comes from Romeo & Juliet: “Parting is such sweet sorrow,” Juliet says at the end of the balcony scene, and it seems really to convey what the young lovers must feel. When you say goodbye to a loved one, you are confronted with the anticipation of your pending separation even as you share a precious moment of tenderness; this juxtaposition of emotions makes the feeling of love almost visceral. There's an aching sensation in your chest, a warmth rushes to your cheeks, and your skin seems to tighten. Sweet sorrow...

The last time I went away for work, I gave my daughter a final hug on the doorstep. “You’re going to miss me,” she said. “I am…” I replied, smiling. From my expression, she knew she had done it again. She was not, of course, presuming to know my mind (although the feeling was indeed mutual); rather, for once, she had employed a Gallicism that comes from the fact that in French we say, “Tu vas me manquer” (literally “you are going to be missing for me”) when we want to express the idea “I’m going to miss you.”

It’s one of those odd quirks of language that makes true bilingualism so difficult to achieve; in French, the person who will be missed (“tu”) is the subject of the verb and the person experiencing the feeling (“me”) is the object, whereas in English it is the opposite.

It is a notion that can be difficult for language learners to get their head round, but there is a pattern; you might have noticed that passive constructions are more common in French — especially when it comes to expressing feelings. In the expressions "tu me plais" (literally, "you please me," — in English we would say "I like you"), “ça m'intéresse" ("this interests me"), and ("ça m'ennuie" ("this bores me"), the person experiencing the emotion is again the object of the sentence, not the subject. Similarly, we say “J’ai mal au bras” (literally, “I have pain in the arm”), almost as if the arm were a separate part of you.

After we had parted, my mind started to wander: why does French tend to frame certain feelings and sensations as if they were caused by external stimuli, rather than as actions originating from the speaker? Could this reflect or even cause differences in attitudes towards emotion, individual agency or the universe itself? It’s like there is a sort of dualism baked into the French language.

As often in such moments, song lyrics rolled into my head on a train of thought. The one that came to mind first this time was John Lee Hooker’s 1972 blues classic, “you’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.” More recently, Anna Kendrick expressed the same sentiment in an amusingly offbeat pop/country ditty. The Stones and Blink 182 took a less solipsistic (dare I say, more Anglo-Saxon) approach to the subject of absence…

If you are a language learner struggling with this subtlety, maybe thinking of Mick Jagger and John Lee Hooker’s contrasting approaches to the issue will help you remember which expression to use.