Home Home
Help
Sign Up
LT → French, Spanish → Georges Brassens → Le vin → English
  • Georges Brassens

    Georges Brassens

    Le vin → English translation→ English

✕
Favorites
Share
Font Size
Translation
Add French (Original)
Swap languages

Wine

Click to see the original lyrics (French)
Before singing
the story of my life,
giving speeches,
hung over
I carefully considered
things...
 
I am a descendant of people
who were not of the
sober sort...
They say I was
breast-fed1 on
wine2...
 
My parents must have
found me at the bottom of
a vine3
and not under4 a cabbage,
like those more or
less shady people...
Instead of blood,
Oh unparalleled
nobility!
There runs in my veins
the warm liqueur
of the vine.
 
When you're wise,
and also have a
good upbringing5,
you save
something
for a rainy day6...
something... or two things,
but in the form of a
Demijohn,
absolutely full
full of the good milk
of Autumn7...
 
In olden times, in Hell,
for sure, he suffered,
did Tantalus,
when the water refused
to wet his
tonsils...
To be thirsting after water,
that's sad, but I really
must say
that, to be thirsting for wine,
that's even twenty
times worse...
 
Alas! It never
rains wine8
which stains...
When they give wine,
at last I'll go and milk
cows...
May the time come
for wine to flow in
the Seine9!
people, in their thousands,
will run and drown
their sorrows.
 
  • 1. "had suckings"
  • 2. "the juice of October"
  • 3. usually souche is "a variety or strain" but it can also mean a stump or log or trunk; here I think it means a trunk of a vine
  • 4. French uses "in" a cabbage
  • 5. because in this song living is drinking, Brassens uses "savoir-boire" instead of "savoir-vivre"
  • 6. literally: "keep a pear in hand in case of thirst" - the french expresseion dates from the 16th century, about the same age as the English one
  • 7. "the milk of Autumn" is yet another way of saying "wine"
  • 8. "le gros bleu" is one more way of saying "wine"
  • 9. river which flows through Paris
Original lyrics

Le vin

Click to see the original lyrics (French)

✕
Collections with "Le vin"
1.Songs About Beverages
Georges Brassens: Top 3
1.Je me suis fait tout petit
2.Les passantesSubtitles
3.La mauvaise réputation
Comments
michealtmichealt
   Fri, 28/08/2015 - 16:56

OK, I've changed the translation of louche and deleted the footnote.

"I considered translating that one, but conveying the puns was beyond my English"
I first looked at it just a few weeks after I discovered LyricsTranslate.com, when I was going through the Brassens songs on the site looking for things that hadn't been translated to English - there were surprisingly few. I decided that wheover translated that would need native fluency in both languages, unless they just ignored the puns; so I left it for the best part of a year. But no-one took it on. So I finally decided to have a try without tying myself in a knot with the puns. I don't much like the result, because the result is much less comical than the original song, but I think it's probably impossible to make is as funny without distorting it a lot be funny in English in ways that don't work in French (to replace the French funniness that doesn't carry over into English), and with that degree of distortion it would be an adaptation rather that a translation.

michealtmichealt
   Fri, 28/08/2015 - 17:46

Is "gros bleu" not a better quality that "petit bleu"?
"gros rouge" in Paris in the mid 1960s was pretty awful but nowhere near as bad as some of the wine sold in Britain.
I never came across "gros rouge qui tache".

michealtmichealt
   Sat, 29/08/2015 - 18:23

I imagine that "foreigner special" is the sort of stuff that used to be in supermarkets near the mediterranean coast tourist areas of France, sold in cardboard cartons holding a litre and costing 1 Franc. Someone gave me a glass of that once, I had a sip and I hope it isn't poisonous to rubber plants - a pot holding one was the only place available to dispose of it discretely. Or the stuff which I see on the bottom shelves of the wine display in supemarkets in Puerto del Carmen (which have to cater for everything from ignorant foreigners - it has a lot of tourists and a quite a few of resident expats - to wine journalists) while the wines on the shelves above range up to 50 euros a bottle (even with IGIC at 7%, instead of IVA at 20% on the mainland) which is way out of my range - when i'm there I tend to buy reasonably priced Rioja or Ribeira del Duero, or the local wines, not that stuff on the bottom shelves (in cardboard and extremely cheap) because it looks suspiciously like what I fed to that plant in Menton.

Affordable decent wine is difficult to find in Britain, a given wine costs 3 or 4 times as much here as it does in Puerto del Carmen; I can't compare current French prices because it's too long since I've been there. There are some drinkable French reds in the shops, but only one or two drinkable French whites at reasonable prices, but almost all French Rosé in English shops is as bad as the undrinkable rubbish from California, which is a pity, as I used to like some of the dry Rosés from the Rhone valley when they were availabl.) Maybe some of the rosés in the shops would do as desert wines, but not for drinking with bread and olive oil, tomatoes, cheese and ham for lunch, and all the French dry pinks currently in the shops at under £15 a bottle ought to be sold in cardboard boxes at 70 pence per litre. So I'm feeding my wife (who likes to drink pink sometimes and white sometimes) mostly Italian (mainly white) and Spanish (mainly pink) wines, with only an occasional Loire (usually Muscadet sur Lie) to represent France.

michealtmichealt
   Sat, 29/08/2015 - 18:56

That phrase "vin de table" can cause great confusion. It is so close to English "table wine" which is rather ambiguous.

"Table wine" can mean "wine that you would not be ashamed to serve your dinner guests". I have been at very formal dinners (my college invites me to one about once every five or six years; and I've been at a few through my jobs too). The wines served at the table (or immediately afterwards) were from the very best terroirs, perhaps something like a heavy sweet white as an aperative, a soft red with the soup, a fine dry white with the fish, a medium white with a sorbet, a full-bodied red with the main course, a light very sweet wine with the desert, a choice of red or white (both medium bodied, perhaps burgundies) with the cheese, a choice of armagnac or (yellow) chartreuse with the coffee, and a choice of vintage port or cognac with the cigars for the men and a choice of the same port or (green) chartreuse for the ladies while the men take their cigars (ladies may smoke cigarettes, of course, but will retire to a separate room to escape the cigar smoke). When the ladies and gentleman rejoin after the post-prandial smoke, a wide choce of drinks is available, but none of them are plonk. All those wines are called table wines because they are served at the table (or immediately after the table is left). That's one meaning of "table wine" in English. People often assume that that's what "vin de table" means.

The other meaning in English is "wine that has to be served at the table because it needs to be accompanied by strong-tasting food that will mask it's taste (eg a curry sufficiently spiced to numb the taste buds). I guess that's what you mean when you say "vin du table".

I try not to say either "vin du table" or "table wine" - too much risk of being misunderstood.

PaotrLaouenPaotrLaouen    Thu, 19/03/2020 - 18:30

"Gros rouge qui tache" is an old expression dating back to the wine provided to soldiers in the the trenches of WW I.
"Petit bleu" is an antiphrastic development of the same, meaning something even worse, with a pun to the same expression meaning a telegram (anciently delivered on blue paper).
As to "Vin de table" (which does not appear in Brassens' text), it just means ordinary wine for everyday use, whatever its quality, as opposed to "vin de garde", to be kept in your cellar for great occasions.

↑↓