April 20, 2009
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.
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April 15, 2009
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.
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