Dear Tom,
I am glad you like the song.
to beat (caps) cats, beat dogs
As I understand, they play cards:
T'as beau tirer les rois > You might draw the kings
Thanks! ❤ | ||
thanked 5 times |
Thanks Details:
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1. | Elle est d'ailleurs |
2. | Emmanuelle |
3. | Les Corons |
Dear Tom,
I am glad you like the song.
to beat (caps) cats, beat dogs
As I understand, they play cards:
T'as beau tirer les rois > You might draw the kings
Thanks Vale, yes, cards is right. But some cards are dealt and others drawn, so a word that covers both "draw" and "be dealt" is needed, which means that neither "draw"nor "be dealt" fits. But now that you've drawn my attention to it it ca see that "attract" could suggest that the kings and queens are people rather than cards, so I shouldn't have used that word either. I suppose that something neutral like "get" will have to do.
And of course it doesn't matter how often you get kings or queens if someone else gets aces, so although "you might" is a possible meaning and would make sense the way I see it is that he's saying the house always wins (so he always loses) and both "no matter" and "although" convey that better than "might" does(and they are what "tu as beau" most often means) .
"C'est toujours autrefois" is rather "It's like in the past".
"To beat cats" instead of "caps" d:)
Thanks Rene, I must have been asleep when I mistranslated that. The usual ways of saying it in English are "It's always the same" and "It's the same as before" and "It's still the same", so I've picked the second of those three (don't know why, it just feels right).
Sorry, but I think it is not the same. This is a song full of nostalgia. I see two main themes. First, the city is spreading and swallowing old houses and swallowing the lives of men and women. Second, a painful divorce occured. The singer cannot hold his son in his arms because now his son lives with his mother. The singer is wondering where his home is, because a true home is a place for a family, and he has no more family. His true home is the one where he lived with his wife and son before the divorce. He is always thinking of his previous home and his previous city. Now, I don't know how you can translate these ideas.
Thanks. Your comment on "tirer les reines" rung a bell. English slang: to pull = to successfully invite to sexual intercourse. French has (or at least had some time ago) the same idiom with tirer = pull. So that line is "no matter if you pull girls"; the previous line is "no matter if you pull boys" - it's sexually neutral (and the puller and the pulled aren't neccessarily different sexes).
The other comments have made me change a few things. But I think I bit off more than I can chew when I tackled this one.
Paroles : Yann Queffélec
Musique : Pierre Bachelet