There was a full year ahead, and Ethan Levinbook wanted to use it well. For him, that meant learning French.
Quarantined in his family’s Connecticut home during a COVID-19 gap year between high school and Yale, in 2020 and 2021, he pursued the challenge with gusto.
On top of a full-time job, he drilled himself daily on vocabulary and grammar, listened to French radio, and corresponded or spoke by phone and Zoom with native French speakers he met through language learning exchanges online.
“Learning a language is, in a way, a form of travel,” said Levinbook — a thrill perhaps felt all the more intensely when house-bound.
His pandemic pastime paid off handsomely: Upon arriving at Yale, he placed out of French language instruction and directly into French-only literature classes.
This weekend, Levinbook graduates not only as a French major but as Yale’s first ever dual B.A.-M.A. degree recipient in French, a four-year program he proposed and persuaded the faculty to establish. It gave him entrée to additional French courses — he’s taken 23 — expanded his orbit to include graduate students and nearly every French professor at Yale, and allowed him to, as he put it, “live the language.”
Along the way (and early on), he revived a dormant Yale French journal, L’Amuse-Bouche, not merely resuming publication but, as editor-in-chief, evolving it into a vibrant “forum for international exchange” that includes work by contributors from throughout the Francophone world as well as from Yale. The debut issue’s theme was “renaissance,” another was “memory,” and another “lumière et vérité” — or, in Latin (Levinbook’s first foreign language) “lux et veritas.”
Levinbook, also a top editor for Yale’s Journal of Literary Translation, has additionally learned Old French, a medieval language no longer spoken, and pursued ambitious artistic and scholarly projects. He recently completed the first ever English-language translation — in rhymed dodecasyllabic verse — of “La Pitié suprême” (“Supreme Pity”), a 1,350-line epic poem by Victor Hugo. (For his senior thesis, he also produced an English translation and a critical study of another work by Victor Hugo: “La Philosophie.”)
Studying writers like Hugo, Voltaire, and Émile Zola has shaped Levinbook’s activities and professional ambitions, too. Those celebrated writers’ advocacy for social causes through art — for labor reform, against the death penalty, on behalf of justice generally — “exposed me to the power of poetic justice in its most literal sense,” he said, directing him toward the law.
Outside the classroom, Levinbook put his language skills to work as a translator for the New Haven Legal Assistance Association, helping French-speaking clients from Africa and the Caribbean and their attorneys. He also worked with the Civil Justice Clinic at Quinnipiac Law School and spent several Yale summers working for a law firm in Paris.
Levinbook came to appreciate not only linguistic but also cross-cultural fluency as profoundly valuable tools for a legal advocate.
This summer he’ll return to Paris to work as a research assistant for Maurice Samuels, chair of the French department. Once back in the U.S., he’ll enter Columbia Law School, where he expects to seek a second joint degree, one that will set him up to work in the U.S. — and in France, too.
“I found my voice in this new language,” he said.
