Apologies for the length of time since the last post – I’ve been away in France for a while.

As we’ve previously mentioned, La Ruda started life as a ska band before changing their style into a heavier, rock sound. This song – Héros cherche aventures – “Hero seeks adventure” is from the album Passager du réel and is one of the first songs where they are moving towards their new style.

This has been quite a tricky translation – as always – comments, corrections, critisicms welcome.

Read the full article / translation...

I caught an interview with La Grande Sophie on TV5 Monde last night (Sky Channel 799 in the UK) on a show called Acoustic where she was talking about her latest release La grande Sophie en acoustique toute seule comme une grande. This song, On savait (devenir grand) “We knew (to grow up)” is from the 2003 album Et si c’était moi “And if it were me”.

Read the full article / translation...

Fersen is an accomplished poet who regularly plays with language, using puns, rich rhymes, symbols and images taken from the realms of plants (vegetables, fruits) and animals (birds and various beasts) to tell stories or original fables, to recreate moments from daily life, impressions and sentiments, and also the dreams of ordinary people and their failings and faults. His deep and gravelly smoker’s voice gives a particular tone to his songs, which belong to different musical styles depending on the album (rock, folk-rock or jazz and blues). [wikipedia]

This song, La Chauve-Souris “The bat” is from the album Qu4tre released in 1999. As always with poetic songs, we’re not looking here to recreate the poetry in the translation as we don’t intend to perform the song – the poetry will be left for the original version – the English translation will attempt to give the meaning, hopefully to facilitate the enjoyment of the French lyrics.

Read the full article / translation...

This translation was all going very well until the final line of the second verse Que l’sud d’la fille lui fasse du nord – which I think is simply too poetic to translate – I suspect only the writer knows what this really means, but I have made a clumsy translation here of “That the girl’s south becomes his north” which perhaps tries to create the image of someone’s world being upended by a girl. There is an interesting discussion on this very line on the Word Reference Forums.

Read the full article / translation...

Niagara were quite a poppy band in the 80s but their last two albums Religion and La Vérité had something of a harder edge. This track J’ai vu “I saw” is from the 1990 album, Religion.

I’ve been listening to both albums for free on Spotify – go and get it if you haven’t already.

Read the full article / translation...