Veronica Maggio - Ayahuasca (English translation)

Veronica Maggio – Ayahuasca

English translation

English

Translation

#1#2 #3

Ayahuasca

Muffled sounds bouncing across rooftops

I’ve lost myself, time has stopped

No one shall sleep,1 I’m staying awake

You’re ayahuasca

You make me wanna fly through mountains

You make me see colours

I wanna dance till I forget who I am

I hear what they’re saying,

but everything feels just fine,

and I can yell louder than them

All I can hear is…

Putting my hair into a ponytail, folding down the covers2

I won’t look back, I know what’s there

You can’t get more, it can’t get any better3

Though you didn’t say a word,

I know you’re flying through the mountains

I’m making you see colours

Let’s dance till we forget who we are

We’re hearing what they’re saying,

but everything is gonna be just fine,

and we can yell louder than them

All I can hear is…

All the red lines on my paper,

all my mistakes

I can’t4 fix things that are beautiful

All my faults tend to work out eventually,

I tend to leave eventually, but I stay put5

All I can hear is…

1. Literally “No one is going to sleep”, changed to “shall” to strengthen the implication that this is Veronica deciding for everyone that they’re not gonna sleep, rather than just not being able to sleep for whatever reason.
2. As in the kinds of covers you find on tents or strollers
3. Difficult to translate, the sentence is quite ambiguous and could be interpreted as “You can’t have any more, nothing could improve this”, “you’ve got all you can get, couldn’t possibly get better”, “you can’t have more things than this, it wouldn’t make it any better”, etc depending on what you think the intended meaning is.
4. Either “can’t” or “won’t”, it’s ambiguous
5. A so-called garden path sentence, where the meaning shifts halfway through. Word for word, the sentence (spanning two lines) is “All faults I’ve committed tend [to] go, but I / Should go but I remain still”. “Gå” (go) can, aside from the literal meaning, also mean “to sort itself out, to work out in the end”. The sentence initially sounds like it’s using the latter, before shifting to the former.

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poetic

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This is a poetic translation - deviations from the meaning of the original are present (extra words, extra or omitted information, substituted concepts).

Submitted by

LivLovisa on 2024-11-22

Swedish

Original lyrics

Ayahuasca

Click to see the original lyrics (Swedish)

Translations of "Ayahuasca"

English #1, #2, #3

Spanish

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