My friend disagreed with my translation of "C'est moi" as "It's me". I had two years of high school French and I am not trying to translate on a very high level. But I stand by my translation. I believe a more complete version of his famous remark is "L'etat - c'est moi". I translate this as "The state - it's me". You may know Jumpa Lahiri and her writings and adventures learning and writing in Italian. I think it is far more comfortable and accurate to accept translation from one language to another as an art. Arts and most other human activities require judgment and generate disagreement.
I imagine any king, for that matter, any head of a household, knows perfectly well that activities go on in the king's country and one's household that are completely unknown to the "head". In fact, that is a major point of both "Incognito" by David Eagleman and "Seven and a Half Lessons about Your Brain" by Lisa Feldman Barrett that many, many processes and activities go on in any human's live head that the human doesn't know about, doesn't understand and remain mysteries to us all. It is this fact that the world in us and around us is far more than we know, than we CAN know, that leads us to appropriate caution, humility and admiration of others who know more about this or that than we do.
