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  • Georges Brassens

    Misogynie à part → traduzione in Inglese

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Misogyny notwithstanding

Misogyny notwithstanding, the wise man1 was right:
some are quite a bother, there are plenty of them,
they gather in droves.
Some are a damn nuisance, these are somewhat more refined.
And then, there is the cream of the crop:
the supreme pain in the ass.
 
Mine goes one better than them all,
she belongs to all three categories at once,
a true prodigy:
a bother, a damn nuisance and a supreme pain in the ass too.
She overtakes, she outshines, she surpasses everything
She pisses me off, I tell you.
 
O Lord, forgive my bitter words
She pisses me off, she pisses me off, she goes too far, she pushes it
She pisses me off, and I regret my lovely romance with
this little prudish2 girl the bishop pinched from me
She pisses me off, I tell you.
 
She pisses me off, she pisses me off, and demands that I clean my nails before I grope for her ass,
which is anything but perfect3,
and it's only charity that drives my reluctant hand
toward this killjoy, conical, grumpy ass.
She pisses me off, I tell you.
 
She pisses me off, she pisses me off, I say again and when
she gets over-familiar with me, she keeps her gloves on
and that displeases me.
It does not only demonstrate a great lack of tact,
it does not ease contact either.
She pisses me off, I tell you.
 
She pisses me off, she pisses me off, when I fall on my knees
for some typically French devotions
that make your head spin,
she thinks time has come to sing the Creed
and lays her missal wide open on my back.
She pisses me off, I tell you.
 
She pisses me off, she pisses me off, during fornication
she gets bored4, she gets ostensibly bored
she gets bored, I tell you
Instead of crying out "Give me more ! Harder ! Harder !"
she recites some Claudel5, yes, Claudel, no kidding,
and that really freezes me.
 
She pisses me off, she pisses me off, I admit this Claudel
is a true genius, an immortal poet,
I acknowledge his fame,
but trying to find in his pious works
an aphrodisiac, no, that's an utopian dream.
She pisses me off, I tell you.
 
Testi originali

Misogynie à part

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Georges Brassens: 3 più popolari
Commenti
michealtmichealt    Lun, 01/05/2017 - 09:44

I like this translation. But like almost all translations, it can perhaps be improved.

I'll make several short comments insted of one long one, because this song needs too much thought to go at it all at once.

Probably the first line deserves a footnote to point out that the "wise man" who was a misogynist was Paul Valérie.
PV was the first to list the three terms "emmerdante", "emmerdeuse", and "emmerderesse" and claim that the three terms between them covered all women ("Il y a trois sortes de femmes: les emmerdantes, les emmerdeuses et les emmerderesses" - and if that quotation doesn't demonstrate that he was a misogynist and I need another I'll point out that he also wrote "Dieu créa l'homme et, ne le trouvant pas assez seul, il lui donna une compagne pour lui faire mieux sentir sa solitude") so if it wasn't for Valéry we wouldn't have had this song. I believe that he also claimed that they represented three different levels of expertise at being a pain in the butt, and that seems to be implied by the quotation I just mentioned. I do remember thinking that claim nonsense because each of emmerdeuse and emmerderesse is by construction an ordinary feminine form of the masculine emmerdeur so both should mean the same, and of course someone who is emmerdante must be an emmerdeuse becuase they are performing the verb emmerder, so we would be down to all three being synonyms when used as nouns, but that was way back when I was yound and foolish enough to belive that language was constrained by such logic.

It's a pity we don't have an equivalent trio of words in English; but even so, it ought to be possible to come up with three phrases with an obvious commonality - for example they could be rooted in "pain" and then we could have "headache", "pain in the neck", and "excruciating pain in the ass" or something like that, or in "nuisance" with "nuisance", "absolute nuisance", and "catastrophic nuisance"; getting the number of syllables to be almost the same in all three (as they are in French: 4,4,5 in Sète or 3,3,4 in Paris) might be difficult but I'm not sure that would be essential (although it would be nice); it probably is essential to keep all three reasonably short.

I think using "indeed" is a mistake, wrong register, translating the French as "I tell you" would be (much) better than finding something different from the French - in all of stanzas 2 to 8. It's a common translating mistake (one that I make too often): thinking it's a foreign language so the it has to be more obviously foreign than the natural translation.

More comment when I've had time to think some more.

michealtmichealt    Lun, 01/05/2017 - 19:44

Actually getting "elle m'emmerde" and "elle s'emmerde" to fit with the three categories could only happen if there were an English verb which carried the same meanings as "emmerder" and there isn't, so you are right, it can't be done. I guess your trio is ok as we can't really make the similarity run to these verbs as well as to the three categories as it does in French.

2nd stanza: this whole stanza is a single sentence, in the printed version every line ends with a comma, so "she's" at the beginning of line 3 should not be there as it would force a sentence break. In the first line "La mienne" may not mean a wife but a girl-friend/lover/partner, but why specify which when "La mienne" could just be translated as "Mine" or "My own", leaving it to the listener/reader to decide whether she's a wife or something else, as does the French? And losing "a la fois" in the second line is careless. So for the first three lines something like
"Mine, all alone, takes it further than all the rest, /turns up in all three categories at once, /a real prodigy," might perhaps be better?

In line 5, it would be nice to use "surpasses" in English for "surpasse" in French. That of course would mean finding a different word for "dépasse" but given that "exceeds", "overtakes", "outshines", "oversteps", and "goes beyond" are all available (well, maybe not "exceeds" if it's used for "passe") that isn't hard.

michealtmichealt    Mar, 02/05/2017 - 10:11

I think you missed the point that your English says in effect that she's in all three categories but could mean that sometimes she's in the first, sometimes she's in second, and at other times she's in the third while the French says she's in all three at once. I don't think it's important, only answering your question, not suggesting that you change anything.

michealtmichealt    Mar, 02/05/2017 - 21:53

stanza 3 line 5: There must be a better word than "prudish" but I can't think what it is. Besides, she probably wasn't prudish when the bishop stole her, because that was before the movement indictrinated her. Maybe add a footnote saying that the Enfants de Marie were a Catholic Church movement for girls.

Stanza 4 line 2: This is the only place I've seen "confirmer" in anything that wouldn't be English "confirm", but I can't see how it can mean anything but what you have translated it as here.
line 3: I think you are right not to use any Greek (Callipyge or Steatopygous), but a footnote mentioning the statue might be a good idea.

Stanza 5 line 2: "gets close to me" - I have a feeling that "taper sur le ventre" is a bit stronger than that, I've seen it somewhere (a Tristran Bernard play? - all too long ago for me to remember) where it meant "get very much over-familiar with me" so I think one of "extremely close" or "very close" might be better or perhaps "intimate"?

Stanza 6 line 5: why not "missal"?

Stanza 7 line 2 or 3: maybe a footnote referencing 95%? (https://lyricstranslate.com/en/georges-brassens-quatre-vingt-quinze-pour...) - I intend to translate that soon.

Stanza 8 line 4: "but" sounds better than "now"

michealtmichealt    Mer, 03/05/2017 - 02:14

When Brassens was a teenager in Sète the Enfants de Marie was a nationwide organisation for girls created by the Catholic church in France, and I imagine the dated expression you mention came from that period. The organisation was certainly something that tried to instill a respect for chastity in the girls; apparently it also taught them that communism was an evil thing because it was atheistic. It would be surprising if Brassens had forgottten an organisation that was pretty influential during his teens before he reached the age of 50, so it seems likely that he had that in mind as the source of the expression when he wrote this.

On using "now" for "mais": maybe think of "now" in its something-like-but sense as meaning "pourtant" rather than "mais"? There are things like "nevertheless" and "nonetheless" and "yet" and "in spite of that"/"in spite of all that" and more which can be used instead of "but" in some circumstances, perhaps with a little juggling with word order compared to using "but", and they all have French equivalents that can be used similarly to eliminate "mais". I suspect you'll find that people who want to sound clever and honest while lying stupidly use "mais" less often and these alternatives more often than do ordinary French people (the equivalent is true in England).

PaotrLaouenPaotrLaouen    Dom, 22/03/2020 - 22:32

In Str. 4: "confirmer" alludes to the Catholic sacrament of Confirmation, in the course of which the bishop taps the recipients's cheek. Translating "callypige" by "perfect" escapes totally the joke. If you want to make things clear, it should be translated as if you had "elle n'a pas des fesses de déesse" (up to you to turn that in English).
In Str. 5: "(se) taper sur le ventre" is an old slang expression for masturbating.