Our Soul (America)

• 1. It's interesting that the Portugese are included here. In a strict geographic sense, Portugal does not border the Mediterranean Sea, although its southernmost region is sometimes marketed as if it does. On the other hand, Portugal is generally included on lists of European countries that have a "Mediterranean character," due to elements of common history, culure, and climate. The lyric here is not misstating Portugal's location. Instead it's saying that Portugese people have a lot in common with those from the other nations the song mentions, specifically that many go abroad to seek jobs.
• 2. Surprisingly, the Greeks themselves are not mentioned (except by inference in the title) in this catalog of peoples rooted in the Mediterranean who have emigrated to the Americas. The modern Greek diaspora is certainly a very significant group, and one (among others) that this song seems intended to valorize.
• 3. A machine translation of the Greek Wikipedia page for "Μεσόγειος" says the following about the name of the sea, which signifies the same thing in Greek, Latin, and English, i.e. "amid earth" i.e. "sea surrounded by land/earth." "Despite the large number of coastal peoples from which various ancient civilizations developed in turn, first from the Aegean and the eastern basin to the western one (which later spread to other continents) [what is now known as the Mediterranean Sea] strangely did not have a special name [in antiquity]. Herodotus, for example, uses individual names of seas and bays instead of a single name (A 163). Other ancient Greeks refer to it descriptively, [ex.] to the columns stretching out to the ocean outside Heraklion. Strabo calls it: " the sea inside and around us," a designation that was faithfully imitated later by the Romans and translated as "Mare Nostrum" (= our sea). Diodorus of Sicily calls it [simply] "the sea" [in contrast to] "the ocean." The same with Polybius, while other Romans use the term "mare internum" or "mare insentinum" (= inland sea) as well as "Mare magnum" (= Great Sea). The paternity of the term "Mare Mediterraneum" belongs historically to the Latins around the middle of the 3rd century, when Solinos was the first to call it a sea between two continents, becoming the historical sponsor of this nomenclature. The 16th and 17th centuries find this sea being called: "White Sea," or the "Sea of ​​the Greeks" (this is how the Turks called it, meaning what we now call the Aegean and the Black Sea). The [first person to use] the Greek term "Μεσόγειος" for the entirety of this sea was the geographer & bishop of Athens Meletios II (Geography Old and New , A 80 - 1707)."
• 4. κι αν πνιγεί Θα είναι η γη = "(Even) if it drowns, it will be the earth" or "(Even) if it drowns, the earth will be." I take this to be a reference to the Old Testament account of the Great Flood, which causes great destruction, but which ends with a refoundation of civilization thanks to Noah and all the people and creatures that survive on the ark to start afresh.
• 5. I took a liberty here and switched to the first person plural and the present tense, which the original lyric does not do. Since we're told in the first verse that a group of expats are singing (present tense) in a basement apartment somewhere in America, I thought 1st person and present tense in the end would lend a sense of immediacy that would harken back to that opening image, i.e., you are invited to imagine that the expats are singing the melancholic song you are actually listening to right now.