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Celui qui a mal tourné → traduzione in Inglese
He who went astray
- 1. hadn't eaten for a long time
- 2. couldn't afford any wine
- 3. couldn't afford fuel
- 4. not to go by four ways
- 5. "estourbis" is definitely "beating around the bush" - it isn't clear that the victim was killed until the end of the next line
- 6. judges in ermine
- 7. literally: put their paws on top of me
- 8. prison in Paris, entrance on Rue de la Santé about 100 metres south of Boulevard Arago; the Paris Marriot Rive Gauche less than 5 minutes walk away on Bolevard St Jacques reputedly provides more comfortable accomodation
- 9. in the early days of the French revolution "À la lanterne!" was a cry that meant "String him up"; here it just means "from a lamp post" but is obviously a reference to that revolutionary cry
- 10. a piece of a hangmans used rope was regarded as lucky in France
- 11. lit:"At the end of a century"
- 12. literally "Ill at ease on my femurs"'I guess Brassens employs this weird phrase for startling effect (it's maybe accurate anatomically - I don't actually know whether it is or not, but the trembling could be movement of the condyles of the femur against the meniscuses of the knee-joint and I have the impression that Brassens liked getting things like this right and using them to startle people)
- 13. To me the use of "les" rather than "des" means that he thinks his crime has banished him from the human race
- 14. literally: "asked me for news about my health", and of course the word "santé" meaning health is the same word as "Santé", the name of the prison he's just been released from, so when you hear it you dont know which is intended - news about his prison or about his health
- 15. literally: "cried all the tears of my body"
1. | Je me suis fait tout petit |
2. | Les passantes |
3. | La mauvaise réputation |
1. | Beat around the bush |
2. | Beating around the bush |
3. | en tout bien tout honneur |
4. | sur-le-champ |
5. | To close down |
dévoraient - yes, a bit stronger is a good idea. So I've changed "eyes" to "rapacious eyes". Thought about "avaricious" but that is used only of people, where as "rapacious" can be used of things and of people's body parts as well as of people; also considered "voracious" (it goes well with dévorer) but it doesn't really work, so "rfapascious" it is.
fixed the typo.
fémurs - he seemed to have a habit of making a choice of word that was at first sight bizarre but on closer study made sense. It's sometimes very difficult to get the feeling across in English, I find it hard to mix weird word choices, archaisms, and 1950s slang effectively - but then I've no claim to be a poet.
A nice translation, indeed. Just one detail: "coup de bûche" is a slang expression which doesn't mean anything more than "a heavy blow".
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