-
Retouches à un roman d'amour de quatre sous → traduzione in Inglese
Amendments to a penny dreadful
- 1. lit. "you died coughing", but the image is a wink to the famous novel "La dame aux camélias", where Marguerite Gautier, a frivolous courtesan, is redeemed by true love but tragically dies of tuberculosis in the end
Grazie! ❤ | ||
thanked 6 times |
Thanks Details:
Utente | Tempo fa |
---|---|
art_mhz2003 | 2 anni 11 mesi |
vevvev | 4 anni 6 mesi |
Ospite | 6 anni 6 mesi |
michealt | 6 anni 10 mesi |
Nikolai Yalchin | 6 anni 10 mesi |
Sophia_ | 6 anni 10 mesi |
Retouches à un roman d'amour de quatre sous
Clicca per vedere il testo originale (Francese)
1. | Brassens |
1. | Je me suis fait tout petit |
2. | Les passantes |
3. | La mauvaise réputation |
1. | black maria |
2. | Sang bleu |
It's very good, but there are a few places that could usefullly be changed.
Stanza 1 line 1: "on the cheap" - that usually refers to buying/procurement, if you apply it to selling it tends to mean not low priced but instead poor quality owing to the seller doing procurement on the cheap. A better way of saying "à quatre sous" here (because it's about selling price and not about quality) would be "for tuppence" ("tuppence" pronounced /ˈtʌpəns/ was a sum of money amounting to £0.00833 in the pre-1971 British and Irish currency system). If you want to be horribly modern you could use "twopence" ( /tuːˈpɛns/; £0.02 in the British currency system adopted 15/02/1971, and in Ireland from 15/02/1971 until the adoption of the euro) instead, but what we said back in the 60s and 70s (and still in 80s, and even today for a lot of people) when we meant a very low price was "tuppence". Or in American English "two red cents" (I think - I don't speak American).
Stanza 2 line 4: I think "sang bleu" has a connection with aristocratic or royal blood in French much as it has in English, and that ties in too well with the last line of the stanza to be neglected. I can't think of a suitable exclamation to replace "by my word", but maybe something that isn't an exclamation but does keep that link would work? If so, "as a gentleman" might be a replacement for "by my word". If you retain "by my word" it should be the first phrase of that sentence, not an orphaned parenthetical clause in the middle. In line 2, I'm not sure about "roundup night"; maybe "night-time raid" would be better, or maybe not. It's noticeable that the police object to the use of "raid" when they go out and pull in everyone they feel like pulling in, and prefer to call it a "roundup" (see for example http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2017-04-22/local-news/Police-obje... for the latest example from Malta; I remember London police objecting to "raid" in the 60s).
In the last line, "Whales" should be "Wales'". (Charles is prince of the country, not of large sea-going mammals :D)
Stanza 3, last 3 lines: I don't think "situer" means "locate" here, it means "set", and shifting "plus transcendent" from referring to the action introduced by "de" to the cottage strikes me as a bad idea. So you might wnt to go for something like
"I reckon it would be much better /to give our love-making a setting in /a little thatched cottage."
As you have it currently currently, it's a bit odd because this isn't a good place to leave out "dans" when translating: your last line needs either "in which" at the beginning (hopelessly over-formal) or "in" at the end (that's normal English usage, and perfectly correct stanard English, but it could lead to vast numbers of ignorant grammar-nazis claiming it's ungrammatical - unless of course a site like lyricstranslate doesn't attract ignorant attract grammar-nazis, which seems quite likely).
Stanza 4 line 1: "barely took flight" sounds as if they had difficulties taking off, rather than they were flying only at a low height (which is what I think the French means).
Line 4: I think "exaggerate" rather than "overdo it" is what "Forçons la note" means here, and "rehaussons" is "raise" rather than "propel" (and there's a missing "d" in "and"). The next two lines don't work well in English if you keep the French word order, so that needs to change; and for "très au-delà" the usual English would be "far beyond" .so you might end up for llines 4,5 and 6 with something like
"Let's exaggerate a bit and raise /their epic flight far beyond /the sound barrier."
stanza 5 lines 1 and 2: I think it's a mistake to change "leave" to "mention"; and although "what a pity" is what the words mean, I think in the context "It would be a pity" would be clearer. Maybe change "leave" to "have had", or maybe keep "leave".
In line 4 "to picture" is ungrammatical, after "advise" without a direct object indicating the recipient of the advice you need a gerund rather that an infinitive governed by "to", so "picturing" here (the rules for this depend on the verb, so they are a pain). But I don't like either "picturing" or "advise", they feel too bland and formal, I would go for something like "I'm for us having had it in Italy".
Stanza 6 line 5: "tell" is the wrong verb, you need "say". You might want to consider "rather" for plutot, but "instead" is OK.
I think lines 1 to 3 would be better with something like
"One day your heart lost interest /and you left - let's keep quiet /about that - slamming the door." I don't know why, maybe it's slightly closer to the French?
Stanza 8 last line: maybe "dubious" instead of "questionable"?
The reason my advice works for you is that you filter it properly and don't follow it blindly. For example here I hadn't noticed that once the second half of the 5th stanza was fixed the first line of that stanza would be better with "mention" than with "leave", so you kept your "mention" that I had suggested should be changed - and when I saw what you had done it was very obviously the right thing.
No, it's "quite the fool" more often than "quite a fool" in Britsh English (and both are used in American English too). Articles in English are nothing like articles in Romance languages and not realy much like articles in other Germanic languages either, despite still having Germanic roots to its grammar and its core vocabulary and having taken most of its non-core vocabulary from Romance languages.
Both "one another" and "each other" take their count from the context (the only restriction is the same for both: the count must be at least two); probably "each other" is used less often than "one another" in the nominative case when the count is more than 2, but in the possessive case "each other's" is used more often than "one another's" whatever the count is. So "one another" or "each other" can be used in that line.
Tom, dear, we can't stretch English Grammar or deny the evident just to prove we're right. Or can we? If there are two people involved we can say only "each other" whatever case it might be. If you say "One Another" it'll make me look round and behind the curtains. Theory of Information, sorry. :)
Sandring, you can go looking behind curtains but you would do far better to go and look in a decent dictionary. I suggest you try the OED - if you are a teacher of English you should have online access to it through your institution.
Cheap bookshop dictionaries are full of nonsense, I'm afraid, and I guess you got your ideas about "one another" either from one of them or from a really awful pseudo-grammar book from one of the numerous promoters of utterly false grammar myths and nonsense.
Please, Sandring, if you teach English, teach people that the plural forms of "advice" are cited in more than 20 (I stopped counting at 20, I think the total is about 27) separate quotations in The Oxford English Dictionary with dates ranging from 1418 to 2009 (all on the 2011 version of the page "advice n") so it had a plural in Middle English before Late Middle English added "d" to the original "d"-less word, and has had a plural ever since. By all means teach them to be very careful about using the plural, and use it only where it is valid: it's safe to use it in Asian dialects of English, such as India's No 2 official language, and it's safe to use it when discussing religious advice with Quakers, but apart from that they should check very carefully in a 1st-rate dictionary that it can be used today in the context where they think of using it and they should be aware that a lot of people will think it odd because it's used only rarely..
Pierre's use of the plural is technically correct (because it's not an invariable noun, and I provided in my first comment several quite separate advices concerning the several stanzas, and that plural is one of the accepted usages although it's very rare) but very much out of the normal run of usage. It is though far more common to pluralise "piece of advice" instead of "advice" despite that phrase being a synonym for most of the meanings of "advice" - English verbosity, I guess.
Nadia, if you make latantly incorect statements about the English language in public I will answer them in public, since answering them in a PM would leave anyone who comes across them in the public comments to believe the your incorrect nonsense. It would be irresponsible on my part to do that and allow innocent learners to be led astray by your incorrect statements. There are already far too many sources of appallingly bad advice out there waiting to trap them .
On "one another", the Merriam-Webster dictionary says:-
Some handbooks and textbooks recommend that each other be restricted to reference to two and one another to reference to three or more. The distinction, while neat, is not observed in actual usage. Each other and one another are used interchangeably by good writers and have been since at least the 16th century.
So we have the world's best English dictionary (OED) and the best American English dictionary (MW) agreeing that neither "one another" nor "each other" has any restriction on being used for 2 or more people - neither is restricted to 2, and neither is restricted to more than 2.
Nadia, "an" is the form of the singular indefinite article used before a word beginning with a noun; "another" is the two words "an" and "other" combined into a single word meaning "an other". Do you imagine that "an apple" means at least two apples? If not, why do you believe that "an other" means at least two others?
I suggest you wake up and use your intelligence. Learn that the good dictionaries (like the OED, the RAE's Spanish dictionary, the French TLF, and so on) describe language as it is acually used by native speakers, not as some bunch of idiots claim it should be used (as do all too many cheap dictionaries), and therefore can be trusted on usage, and use them to avoid stupid mistakes like claim "another" is plural.
- Accedi o registrati per inviare commenti
What a beautiful song, and a joy to translate.
Thanks to Tom for his invaluable advices..