More specifically, from the second half of volume XII of the collected edition. Not that I have read that many volumes as some are missing and some have been skipped, containing romans policiers other than Maigret but which, for some editorial reason, have been brigaded with Maigret. Inferior goods.
First, we have the interesting factlet that the French do not appear to have a single word for owl, in the sensible way that we do. They have one word 'hibou' for owls with tufts on each side of the head, rather like ears, in the way of our long eared owl. Other owls are called 'chouettes', with the resemblance to a cabbage being a coincidence.
Second, we have an excursion into the world of sheep, triggered by a policeman in New York being described as having a 'tête de mouton', translated in the Penguin version mentioned at reference 1 as sheepish, which fits well enough. But I was not altogether satisfied with this and dig deeper.
Littré says that a mouton is a 'bélier châtré', where the châtré bit means castrated rather than sheared, as I had first thought, and the bélier bit means a male lamb. But a reasonable leap to the English mutton as meat: moutons were the sort of sheep which you ate rather than simply sheared and used for breeding. But the proper English equivalent seems to be wether, from which we get bell-wether, the sheep with a bell around its neck which leads the flock, which all follow sheepishly after him. Although one might have thought that this sort of leading was work for a ram rather than for a eunuch.
But we also have mutton-head, the literal translation of the phrase we started with, which means something rather different.
Not to mention all kinds of other sheepy words from our rural past, now relegated to the pages of old editions of the OED and wikipedia. For example chilver, ewe, gimmer and tup. This last once being part of the name of a public house in Balham. See reference 2 - but be careful: I suspect that a lot the words are from Australia, where they are big into sheep.
PS: I might say that I am finding the Penguin translation of 'Maigret in New York' a bit crude and banal. Part of this is the difficulty which every translator will have with things which are said in a quite different way by the French (or this case, by the Belgians) than they are by us English. Words and expressions which do not map onto the English in a neat and pleasing way and for which the translator often has to settle for some not terribly satisfactory compromise. Another part of this is the loss of the allure of the foreign, the attraction of the half seen; the stripping away of the veil. Maybe the French sounds a lot cleverer and more nuanced to me, with my not particularly fluent reading French, than it really is. Perhaps there is more than a bit of I-can-read-a-foreign-language snobbery here; perhaps Simenon really is a bit crude and banal, rather flat and lifeless in the way that Agatha Christie can seem to be before her story takes grip. On up side, perhaps being foreign means that one works at it, one really pays attention to what one is reading, in a way that one does not when reading one's own language. All that said, I also think that this translator has been a bit lazy and could have done rather better - although maybe if you are doing all fifty or whatever it is Maigret stories, you lose the will to live, never mind to take trouble with your work.
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/debutante.html.
Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_sheep_husbandry.
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