Σάββατο απόγιομα
Saturday Afternoon Siesta
Grazie! ❤ | ||
The lyrics, written by Γιάννης Κακουλίδης, Νότης Μαυρουδής, rely on lyrical/dream-like images to evoke a pervasive feeling of loss. Listeners can easily map this general feeling of melancholy onto personal experiences such as the loss of a loved one or a failed love affair.
In Greek, the lines contain between 10 and 15 syllables. A word-by-word translation into English would result in lines with fewer syllables, not to mention a loss in the musicality of the words. The Greek lines use not only end-rhyme, but a good bit of internal rhyme.
My loose translation remains faithful to the song's spirit and its imagistic and playfully surreal sensibility.
One obvious liberty I took was with the word "απόγιομα," which simply means "afternoon." But I chose "siesta" instead. The very first line of the song tells us that the speaker has just found that a loved one's door is closed.
"Siesta" suggests that the reason could perhaps be that the person is simply sleeping during the siesta. But subsequent lines suggest that the loved one might be dead or might be closing the speaker out after a failed romance.
After the first stanza, the lyrics become even less ballad-like and explore loss/melancholy in unexpected and striking ways. The song returns to the idea that during this Saturday afternoon, various things get stolen (sunset, tomorrow, springtime). I thought that invoking the siesta hour would be in keeping with this notion - i.e. that the speaker is waking up from her nap to to find the world suddenly diminished in strange and disturbing ways.
Note that translation software will suggest "prison" for "φυλακή," a feminine noun. But the word is used here as a masculine noun in the accusative, which means it should be rendered in English as "prisoner" not "prison."
- Accedi o registrati per inviare commenti