Étang! When a Pond Is Not a Pond (#707)
There are words one encounters while traveling that seem simple enough - until one tries to translate them.
During our travels through southern France, one of those words kept appearing on maps and road signs:
Étang.
Étang de Berre. Étang de Thau. Étang de l’Or. Étang de Leucate. And, during our travels through the Camargue, the magnificent Étang de Vaccarès.
I knew enough French to understand lac. A lac is a lake. Simple.
But étang?
My translation apps generally offered pond.
Pond? That didn't seem right.
Standing beside an enormous sheet of water stretching toward the horizon, populated by flamingos and other waterbirds and merging almost imperceptibly into salt marsh and sky, calling it a pond seemed rather like calling the Mediterranean a swimming pool.
And so began one of those small traveling investigations that I enjoy so much.
What, exactly, is an étang?
The answer turns out to involve language, geography, ecology, history - and the wonderfully French reluctance of certain words to submit obediently to English translation.
Pond, Lake, or Lagoon?
The confusion is understandable because étang really can mean pond.
The word traces back to the Latin stagnum: standing, still, or stagnant water.
The original idea therefore had less to do with how large a body of water was than with what the water was doing.
Or, more precisely, what it was not doing. It wasn't flowing.
Historically, this made considerable sense in rural France. An étang was often an artificial or heavily managed body of still water. From the Middle Ages onward, landowners and monasteries dammed streams to create shallow reservoirs, particularly for raising fish.
These were ponds in every reasonable English sense of the word.
They were shallow. They were manageable. They could often be drained. They were places where water had been persuaded to stop.
Even scientifically, the distinction between a lac and an étang is not simply a matter of acreage. Depth matters. A shallow body of water may allow sunlight to reach much of its bottom, and wind can readily mix the water from surface to substrate. A deeper lake can develop distinct thermal layers.
So far, so good.
An étang is a pond or shallow lake.
Except that France then reaches the Mediterranean.
And the word changes.
The Mediterranean Étang
Along the Mediterranean coast of southern France, particularly through the former Languedoc-Roussillon region, now part of Occitanie, étang usually means something quite different.
Here an étang is better understood as a coastal lagoon.
These are not little farm ponds.
They can be immense expanses of shallow, brackish or saline water, frequently separated from the Mediterranean by narrow strips of sand. Channels called graus allow water to pass between lagoon and sea.
The result is neither quite sea nor quite lake.
It is something in between.
The Étang de Thau, for example, covers roughly 7,000 hectares and is famous for its oysters and mussels. The Étang de Leucate is another enormous lagoon system, while the coastal wetlands around Palavas comprise a chain of interconnected étangs supporting remarkable populations of waterbirds - including greater flamingos.
Suddenly pond sounds ridiculous.
These are landscapes.
Indeed, there is a wonderfully evocative expression sometimes used for them:
Une petite mer intérieure.
A little inland sea.
That seems much closer to what the eye sees.
And Then There Is the Camargue
The word changes character yet again when one reaches the Camargue.
Here, between the arms of the Rhône and the Mediterranean, land and water seem never to have reached a final agreement about which owns the landscape.
There are marshes, reed beds, rice fields, salt flats, mudflats and shallow expanses of brackish water. Boundaries become uncertain. Water becomes land and land becomes water.
And everywhere there are étangs.
The greatest is the Étang de Vaccarès, at the heart of the Camargue.
It is enormous - roughly 6,500 hectares, or about 16,000 acres - and yet extraordinarily shallow, generally no more than about 1.5 to 2 metres deep.
Think about that.
An expanse of water large enough to dominate the landscape, yet in many places scarcely deeper than a person is tall.
Calling Vaccarès a pond is plainly absurd.
Calling it a lake is better, but still misses something.
Calling it a lagoon comes closer.
Perhaps shallow brackish lagoon is technically more satisfactory.
But perhaps the French had it right all along.
It is an étang.
Water That Refuses to Sit Still
There is another paradox.
The etymological ancestor of étang suggests still water, yet the ecology of the Camargue étangs is anything but static.
Their salinity fluctuates. Mediterranean seawater enters the system. Fresh water arrives from rainfall, rivers and agricultural irrigation. Under the fierce southern sun, evaporation removes water and leaves salt behind. The mistral blows across their shallow surfaces.
An étang may therefore become fresher or saltier according to season, weather and human intervention.
Around them lie the sansouïres - low, salt-influenced landscapes with glasswort and other salt-tolerant plants. There may be no obvious shoreline at all. The étang simply dissolves into mudflat, salt marsh, vegetation and eventually dry land.
And this uncertainty is precisely what makes these places biologically extraordinary.
Shallow water captures sunlight. Nutrients circulate. Invertebrates flourish. Fish use lagoons and wetlands as nurseries. Eels, sea bass and sea bream move through these systems.
And then come the birds.
Herons. Egrets. Migratory shorebirds. And, most spectacularly, the greater flamingos.
Driving through the Camargue, we saw them scattered across the shallow water - sometimes individual birds feeding with their extraordinary inverted bills, sometimes groups of pink punctuating an otherwise muted landscape of blue, grey, green and brown.
The étang is not simply water. It is habitat.
A Word That Carries a Landscape
Perhaps that is why translating étang bothered me.
Translation encourages us to believe that every word in one language ought to have a corresponding word in another.
Étang = pond.
Finished.
Except language doesn't work that way, because landscapes don't work that way.
In central France, standing beside a small managed body of freshwater, pond may be exactly right.
Beside a larger shallow inland body of water, shallow lake might be better.
Along the Languedoc coast, coastal lagoon is usually more accurate.
And in the Camargue?
Perhaps none of them quite works.
Because étang describes not simply an amount of water but a relationship between water and land - between fresh and salt, stillness and movement, nature and human management.
It describes a place that is neither entirely terrestrial nor entirely aquatic.
A place in between.
And perhaps that is why, after traveling through the Camargue, I have decided not to translate it at all.
A lac is a lake.
A mare is a pond.
A lagune is a lagoon.
But an étang?
An étang is an étang!
Sometimes the most interesting thing about learning a new word is discovering that your own language doesn't have one quite like it.
Ultimately, the French étang cannot be boxed into a single English equivalent.
It is a chameleon of vocabulary.
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