Metalanguage as Art

And what's a girl to do with language that talks about language, that describes what kind of language a person speaks? Imagine translating Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (check out this hilarious link) into another language. What a nightmare for the translator. I imagine it would feel like multiple levels of subtlety and nuance slipping through their fingers as they struggle to convey the essential material...

Michel Tremblay has a style that is somewhat comparable. His narrative is in more or less standard French, while the dialogue, which happens to be a good chunk of the text, is in joual, a Quebecois slang dialect. I've read both his La grosse femme d'à côté est enceinte and it's English translation, The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant, which was remarkably well done by Sheila Fischman - the goddess of Canadian French-English literary translation. But even a killer awesome translator like Fischman can't make an English reader understand what it means to be speaking in joual, or feel the colour and the culture that is behind the dialect.

My problem with language is much less complex, but still is giving me pause. There's a character named Liam who is from the south of France, and his accent is described in the novel, along with examples. 

Il dit : « J'aime le paigne frais », mais parfois ça se complique : « Tu as les yeux bordés d'anchois. » Ce qui veut dire : « Tu as l'air fatigué. »

This would be child's play for Fischman, and yet... maybe I can leave some of it in French, or do a little explanitory "He says paigne instead of pain" or something of that nature...