Cloud Tango

şarkı sözleri (Yunanca)

Τhe golden kerchief

Covering the hair of Nefeli1

Made her stand out from the vineyard crowd.

Two adolescent angels flew down

And they stole it from her.

The two teen dieties

Had been dreaming and wanting Nefeli,

To feed her pomegranate and honey2,

Not to renew her, but to make her lose her purity3

They fooled ‘round with her.

Hyacinths and lilies

Wear the aromas they stole from this girl.4

As the two bawdy godlings shot their arrows,

They mocked her with laughter.

But Zeus, taking mercy,

Distills her youth into pure water,5

Making her a vapor, which he scatters,

To trick her tormenters.

The two teen dieties

Had been dreaming and wanting Nefeli,

To feed her pomegranate and honey,

Not to renew her, but to make her lose her purity

They fooled ‘round with her.

Hyacinths and lilies

Wear the aromas they stole from this girl.

As the two bawdy godlings shot their arrows,

They mocked her with laughter.

1. Νεφέλη in ancient Greek means "cloud." There's a myth concerning Νεφέλη, a cloud nymph whom Zeus made into the likeness of his wife Hera in order to test the integrity of Ixion, who failed. This song has obvious resonances with the myth, but here Nefeli is presented as a mortal girl, who becomes the sport of a couple of Cupids. Zeus/Διας saves her in the end and turns her into a cloud/σύννεφο. Note that modern Greek for cloud, σύννεφος has at its root νεφος, which harks back to Νεφέλη and the myth about her. In the lyric itself, I left Νεφέλη as a proper name, but in the title, I replaced Νεφέλη with "Cloud."
2. My translation of this whole line and the next one is informed both by the myth of Nefeli and by the significance in the ancient world of honey and pomegranate. In ancient times, women resorted to honey as a method of contraception. Pomegranate seeds play a key role in the well known myth of Persephone, a girl who gets kidnapped by the God of the underworld. Her mother, Demeter, forces Zeus to free her, but because the girl ate 6 pomegranate seeds while in Hades, she must remain in Hell for 6 months of every year. During those months, the earth loses its fertility. Pomegranate seeds are, thus, linked in myth and ritual to fertility and rebirth.
3. The Greek version is rather coy here about what is at stake for Νεφέλη here. The horny Cupids want her to "not remember"/να μη θυμάται, and to "forget"/να ξεχνάει "what she wants"/τι θέλει. It did not seem to me too big a stretch to be less coy and say that what her suitors want her to forget/abandon is her purity, i.e. virginity.
4. Like many elements of this song, hyacinths and lilies have tie-ins with Greek mythology. Ὑάκινθος was a Spartan boy beloved to Apollo, who died tragically - one of the many instances in which relationships with Greek gods end badly for mortals. The beautiful flower sprang from the place where the young man died, carrying on his name and the essence of his famed beauty. Lilies are associated with Hera, springing up from the place where her breast milk leaked onto the ground. The idea here is that these flowers famed for their beauty have stolen their aromas from Nefeli. The act of stealing here echoes the theft of Nefeli's golden kerchief by the godlings in the first verse (although this time the stolen goods were not taken from Nefeli herself). By making reference to myths of transformation, this verse also foreshadows Nefeli's final transformation in the last verse.
5. της παίρνει νερό της εφηβείας literally translates as "he takes the water of her adolescence." This is the moment of her transformation from mortal existence into an aspect of nature, thus honoring her with a kind of consolation immortality, which tends to happen a lot in mythology. I added the word "pure" to this line to highlight a core concept in this modern lyrical retelling of the myth of Νεφέλη.

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jhbuck tarafından 2021-08-20 tarihinde eklendi.

jhbuck tarafından en son 2024-03-02 tarihinde düzenlendi

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This is not a word-by-word translation. Instead, it is my attempt to capture not only the imagery and ideas of the original lyrics, but also (as much as possible) the strong musicality of the language (which involves end-rhyme, meter, repetition, and other sound-patterns).

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