Translation of Mon Pére Etait Tellement De Gauche by Les Fatals Picards
| October 28, 2009 at 4:49 pm |
“For saving the council money. I happened to mention one day that I’d had the same broom for the last twenty years. They were very impressed and gave me a medal. Twenty years… that’s a long time, Dave.”
“Yeah, well it’s two decades.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s a long time.”
“Hang on a minute Trig… if you’ve had that broom for twenty years, have you actually swept any roads with it?”
“Of course! But I look after it well. I’ve maintained it for twenty years. This old broom has had seventeen new heads and fourteen new handles in its time!”
Following the departure of Ivan Callot in 2007, Le Sens De La Gravité is the first studio album from Les Fatals Picards on which none of the original members of the band are present. Voilà pourqoui I can justify referencing that sketch from Only Fools and Horses (BBC TV).
Le Sens De La Gravité was released earlier this year. It’s not one of my favourites but it contains some fine tracks. It’s more serious than Les Fatals Picards’ previous studio album Pamplemousse Mécanique but still retains a fair dose of their humour which bears more than a passing similarity to that of Les Trois Accords.
Two of the better tracks on the album are re-recordings of songs from Pamplemousse Mécanique. The first, Seul Et Célibataire 2 is a reasonably heavy rock track which I intend to translate at some point, but for this post I have decided to go with the second Mon Pére Etait Tellement De Gauche, a light, very pleasant acoustic version of the previous recording. You can hear the versions from both albums using the MP3 widget above or by clicking the iTunes button to launch iTunes on your computer.
As you’ll see in a few paragraphs’ time, the translation has afforded me the delightful opportunity to pick up my fair share of left-wing general knowledge and vocabulary.
What would perhaps have been the best song on Le Sens De La Gravité is called Le jour de la mort de Johnny – a song about the death of Johnny Hallyday. Regrettably, Warner, with whom both Les Fatals Picards and Johnny Hallyday himself are signed, asked for the song not to be included on the album, apparently after Johnny Hallyday objected. I’m not sure how long it will remain on YouTube but this is the video of the song that was used to publicise the album.
You may have seen Les Fatals Picards representing France in the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest. I didn’t know this until today but then again I couldn’t name any of the acts that have represented the UK over the last twenty years either.
It took me a while to decipher the reference to “Chez Casto” – I believed for a moment it may have been “Chez Castro”, but no, it refers to these guys from whom you can indeed buy breeze blocks.
Kolkoses, or kolkhozes, were collective farms in the old USSR. L’Internationale is a revolutionary poem written in 1871 and given here in eight languages. Silicosis is a nasty lung condition and Andrei Tupolev was honoured three times as a Hero of Socialist Labour by The Russian Academy of Sciences.
The election of François Mitterrand in 1981 brought in the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic and the Socialist Party remained in power until being ousted in 2002.
I still don’t know anything about Andrei Tupolev’s teeth, Brezhnev’s glasses, or why women would wear false eyelashes at a socialist church wedding.
UPDATE: Thank you Ariane for leaving the comment explaining that faux cils “false eyelashes” sounds like faucille “sickle”, and of course la faucille et le marteau “the hammer and sickle” is a communist symbol.
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