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Lilacs

When I go to the florist,
I only buy lilacs...
If my song sounds sad
It's because love has gone.
 
As I was, in a way.
In love with these flowers,
I came through the gate,
Through Porte de Lilas.
 
Lilacs, there were barely any,
Lilacs, there were none,
They all died in the war,
Passed into the next world.
 
I came upon a beauty
Beginning to blossom,
I wanted to graft onto her
My love for lilacs.
 
I marked with a white cross.
The day we took off,
Hanging from a branch,
A branch of lilacs.
 
Fragile love, hold the helm steady,
Time will come through here,
And time is a barbarian
Not unlike Attila.*
 
Through the hearts where its horse passes
Love won't grow back,
In every corner of that space
The desert appears beneath its feet.
 
Now our love is dead,
Vanished into the beyond
Leaving the keys under the door,
At Porte de Lilas.
 
The Sunday warbler,
The one that used to give me A,
Has perched on other branches
Other lilac branches.
 
When I go to the florist,
I only buy lilacs...
If my song sounds sad
It's because love is no longer there.
 
Оригинален текст

Les Lilas

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Georges Brassens: 3-те най-преглеждани
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michealtmichealt    понеделник, 25/03/2019 - 18:31
5

Having looked at this again after a couple of years, I think the changes jaimepapier made bring this translation up to 5 star standard. It isn't how I would translate it, but neither is it wrong.
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Origial comment justifying the 4 valuatiion at only 4 stars:-

A pretty good translation, certainly 4 stars, but a few errors, enough to preclude five. Long comments below:

First stanza (and also the last): "my song sings sadly" is strange English, the normal way of saying this is "my song sounds sad"
Second stanza: I think that "train" is wrong - there is indeed a metro station called Porte des Lilas, but it's a tube station not a railway station, and "porte" as "gate" in the third line would be more senisble, and probably "porte des Lilas" in the fourth line is used either literally for the gate (through the enceinte de Thiers, the Paris circumvallation contructed, along with its 17 gates, in the early 1840s and rendered obsolete less than 40 years after its completion); if it doesn't refer to the gate itself, it refers to the area which took its name from the gate (the wall was demolished withing a decade of the end of WW1).
Third stanza: first two lines: avait is past imperfect tense, not present, and the second line's English just isn't English (what doe "there's aren't" mean?). The two lines actually say
Of lilacs there were scarcely any,
Of lilacs there were none,
Fifth stanza: leaving "d'" untranslated in the first line, and failing to treat "Le jour" as the direct object of teh verb "ai marqué" have rather garbled the sense; "l'on" in the second line can't mean "it" because it has to be plural to produce the s of "Accrochés" in the third line; it can't be "they" or "you" (no antecedents for those pronouns) and "people" wouldn't really make sense, so it must be "we".
Sixth stanza: I think "steadily" would be better for "bon" than "tightly", but "tightly" may be right - both are possible. Also I think it would be better not to leave "par là" out.
Seventh stanza: repousse carries the ide of "grow again" or "grow back" - love was there before but the barbarian (Time) killed it and left a desert so that it wouldn't grow back. And "coeurs" is literally "hearts" and here it surely isn't a metaphor for anything else.
Ninth stanza: the tenses are important: so the second line should be "the one that used to give me the A" or "the one from which I used to take the A" ("used to sing me the A" is possible too, but used to sing A to me" doesn't convey the idea that this is the A used for tuning: "the A" rather than any old A), and the third line should begin "Has perched" or even "Now perches" rather than just "perched" to make clear the contrast between the time before and the time after "le jour" mentioned in the fifth stanza.

Oh, incidentally, your comment about the gender of teh ENGLISH possessive pronouns in the seventh stanza is a bit off track; the pronouns are fine, but not because they refer to Attila. They refer to Time personified - and "le temps" (like Attila) is masculine.

jaimepapierjaimepapier
   понеделник, 12/01/2015 - 11:51

Thank you very much for your comments. I've made some corrections, but will hopefully get a chance to look at the whole thing again this afternoon (when I will also look at your other review) since I don't remember translating most of it. I'm a bit mystified by a couple of things I wrote over two years ago. For example, using "train" for "porte" I can only assume was the beginning of an attempt to compensate the loss of the repetition of "porte", but then on the next line I used "station".

michealtmichealt    вторник, 13/01/2015 - 03:40

I see you've taken the comments in.

But I want you to get even better. So let me point you at the third line of the thrid stanza (it doesn't really matter whether your translation here is right or wrong, because the emotional impact of the statement is the same either way, otherwise I would have inculded it in my fistcomments). What part of speech do you think "morts" is? I guess you think it's an adjective, but actually it's a past participle of one of those verbs that uses "être" (instead of avoir) to for its compound past tenses. So why do we have "[il]Z étaient morts" instead of "il[s] sont morts", and does your translation reflect this? If you can see that and fix the transaltion it will be that tiny bit better - if you can't, it doesn't really matter for this translation but may matter some time in the future, so if you don't see it ask.

jaimepapierjaimepapier
   вторник, 13/01/2015 - 16:28

Yes, I see your point that the original is in the pluperfect but my translation is in the simple past, rather than the past perfect. Having said that, I think I prefer "they all died at war" to "they had all died at war" (although I think I shall change that to "in the"). It sounds better to me in English and therefore delivers the emotional impact better.

Of course it's completely subjective. If you can think of another way of phrasing it, let me know.

jaimepapierjaimepapier
   вторник, 13/01/2015 - 16:32

In fact, I've now changed a couple of other things to make it sound better in English.

michealtmichealt    вторник, 13/01/2015 - 22:31

It reads quite well now. But there are two translation questions:

In the 4th stanza, what is the "beauty"? Your use of "it" and "which" suggests that you think it isn't a person. But then who are people (plural, because they are accrochés, not accroché) in the next (fifth) stanza? One of them is the "je" of the first, second, fourth and fifth stanzas. There has to be at least one more, and the only likely candidate is the "beauty" - so the beauty is a beautiful young woman (just coming into blossom, so presumably a teenager) and "her" and "who" would perhaps be a better choice of words tha "it" and "which".

In the 8th stanza, what are "nos amours"? You have taken it as meaning "our lovers", but I think here it carries the sense "Les épisodes successifs d'un même amour" (as in quotations 144 and 145 in the TLFi (http://atilf.atilf.fr/tlf.htm) page on "amour") so it should be "our love". Songs about regretting the end of love don't generally refer to a series of lovers!

There are a lot of places where I would phrase things in a different way, but that's all personal preference for expression, not disagreement about meaning. For example in stanza 5 I don't like "vanished", and in stanza 7 I would have "the hearts" in line 1, "don't" instead of "won't" in line 2, and "It makes a desert" rather than "A desert appears" in line 4, and I don't like "All across space" in line 3 but I'm not sure which of several possibilities I would choose, including the possibility of translating "l'espace" as "that space" so that it clearly refers to the heart as the territory that is being made desert - although that would be somewhat redundant - as well as changing "all across" to something else. But as thought sort of thing really is about expression rather than meaning I will leave it all to you.