Les dingues et les paumés - English translation

Hubert-Félix Thiéfaine

Les dingues et les paumés

2 translations

Album:

Soleil cherche futur

Original lyrics

Translation

Les dingues et les paumés

Lunatics and Misfits

The lunatics and misfits play with their manias

in their guarded rooms their flowers are carnivores

and when their monsters shout too close to the exit,

they give birth to scorpions and cry mandrakes,

and their airports transform into bunkers,

at four in the morning behind a telephone,

when their voices that call each other to change into revolvers

and invite each other to scram by screaming "come on"

The lunatics and misfits search in the rain,

and are drinking the blood of their lost visions

and in their eyes mescaline hides their nostalgia,

They see unfold the end of an unknown

They see phantom kings on ruined pinball machines

spitting the mad love of their metropolitan nights

They believe they see God come, they reread Hölderlin

and sink back into their frozen baby-doll arms

The lunatics and misfits drag themselves to the house of the Borgias

followed by an old echo playing rock'n'roll

then they sink like the rats in their banlieues by night

trying to catch a look at their eyeliner

and when their drums play sold-out,

they turn up in a prison cell with their mouths shut

and are like the players running headless

to collect their chips from the dealer on the corner

The lunatics and misfits fight over their placenta

and transplant a cobblestone in place of the brain,

then they offer tarantulas to the end of a bazooka,

by making them dance until the last mambo,

They are cautious wolves at the arm of another death,

they trample the last flowers of evil in the mud,

They believed they were drunk on the Songs of Maldoror

and now they collapse in their animal shade.

The lunatics and misfits sacrifice Don Quixote

on the incensed altar of their nervous fibers,

then they tell their queens by laughing at the boycott

that solitude is no longer a shameful malady,

retake your Walkyries for your masochistic waltzers

My flayed horse calls me at the back of a bar

and this angel that shouts to me "come home to me, my bastard"

invites me to make the needle of my radar dance

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Song details

Translation details

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Evander

dionysius

submitted on 28 Jul 2013 - 15:23

Author's comments:

Corrections are most welcome! My French is pretty rusty, so I've likely missed idioms, for example!

Comments 4

crimson_antics M

30 Dec 2013, 02:35

Pretty good translation, just some details, as usual:

when their voices that call change into revolvers: in this line and most of the following ones, ex. in 's'appellent' and s'invitent', the s'/se mean 'one another', not themselves.

spitting THE mad love...

ils tournent dans un cachot: I think it means they shoot/film something there, but I wouldn't bet all my money on it.

the players running, headless, / to collect...the local dealer

fleurs du mal: I would translate it by 'flowers of evil', like the Beaudelaire poetry book.

on THE incensend altar...

then they tell their queens through by laughing at the boycott: through?

That solitude is no longer...

at the back of a bar?

invites me to make the needle of my radar dance

dionysius A

30 Dec 2013, 17:40

Thanks very much for the five stars; I highly appreciate it!

Thank you too for the correction. I love this song, but it was rather a difficult text.
I was very confused by the line "ils tournent dans un cachot" too.

Ahhh, "Through by laughing": I think I either wrote "through laughing" or "by laughing" and then changed it to the other but forgot to remove the other word! It took me a long time there to work out what on earth I had written. :)