Sally Mara's Intimate Diary is exceptional; a salacious, blackly humorous, erotic, and meaningful story by the skillful and erudite French novelist, Raymond Queneau. When "Sally Mara" begins her diary in January 1934, she is 17 years old and lives with her mother and siblings in south-central Dublin. Though the everyday language is English, she writes in "newly-learned" French to impress her beloved and just departed French tutor, a professional polyglot linguist. To impress him even more, she decides to learn Irish and write a novel in that difficult and ailing language. However, the action throughout is guided by Sally's resolution to overcome her ignorance of the mysteries of sex and reproduction. When Raymond Queneau wrote Journal intime in 1949 (published anonymously under the pseudonym Sally Mara), he was, as always, fascinated by the inadequacies of language and orthography and greatly influenced by James Joyce. He was also in debt and in need of the ready money provided by Editions du Scorpion, publishers of risqué pulp fiction. The impish charm of Sally Mara's Journal intime is founded on language and languages, so this translation to the-formerly "hidden" English, while prioritizing clarity, aims to maintain "Frenchness," tinged of course with Dublinese.