the word "venus"

Question

I don't understand the tense of this verb "venus" used in this sentence

Un festival de courts métrages venus des quatre coins de la planète.

A festival of short films came from 4 corners of the planet.

Accepted Answer

Hi Nancy,
What it means is that these films originated from all over the world,
It is a rare case when in English you would have to use a relative pronoun to make sense of the sentence :
which came from /which originated from
I am not sure if 'hailed from' would work on its own, in English?
I am prepared to be challenged...

Answer

Just "coming from", perhaps?

Answer

On reflection, I think the most natural translation is just the single word "from".

Although "a festival of short films come from ..." sounds a little odd, it's not necessarily ungrammatical. (If we change the verb, "... short films drawn from .." is fine.) We do sometimes use "come" like this, but usually in the sense of coming to do something, e.g. "the man come to read the meter". I think the reason it sounds odd is that it's just unnecessary - to say that something has come from somewhere, you just say that it's from somewhere.

So I wonder why the French sentence needs "venus"? Is it that "des" would be ambiguous because it might be interpreted as "of"?

Answer

Hi Alan,
It is very interesting because in French you have to have a past participle to make the meaning clear, you could use -
'issus des quatre coins de la planète'
too.

Answer

Hi Cécile. I think in English you would most commonly just say "A festival of short films from the 4 corners of the planet", as Alan has pointed out. A suitable alternative would be "A festival of short films which have come from the 4 corners of the world" (keeping to the past tense translation). I also think "A festival of short films coming from the 4 corners of the planet" would be fine. Substituting "coming from" with "hailing from" would also be perfectly acceptable here (but not "hailed from" as you suggested). English - it can be nearly as tricky as French sometimes!