My Great Big Box of XX Goodness–more on this coming in my next post–arrived today! And it should surprise ABSOLUTELY NO ONE who has been paying attention to my passionate love of Quebecois trad this year that I am all over “Le Bon Vin”, the French song included in this box set!
The notes on this thing say that this song was originally recorded for the album The Hard and the Easy, about which I am hugely delighted since it’s yet another reason for me to be super-fond of that album. It wasn’t included at the time because Alan wasn’t comfortable with his French, apparently! But the notes also say that the B’ys got coaching in their French diction from a girl from New Brunswick, and as near as I can tell, she did a good job. I mean, at least to my Anglophone ears. ;D Online Quebecer friends of mine tell me Alan’s accent sounds quite bad to them, but on the other hand, friends in New Brunswick (I’m looking at YOU, !) tell me that from the standpoint of French spoken in Newfoundland, Alan’s accent is saner.
Me, speaking as an Anglophone fangirl with a watered-down Kentucky accent who’s deeply nervous about unleashing what I’m doing to French on any actual Francophones without direct permission, I just want to figure out the lyrics to this delightful thing so I can sing along. :D
Because I love this song. I LOVE IT SO. It’s weird to hear French lyrics without machine-gun podorythmie to support them (which is what I have trained my ear to expect with all of this Quebec trad I’m listening to), but it does have Séan’s rapid-fire bodhran which is ALWAYS awesome! And that explosion of instruments and Bob cutting loose on the accordion and full-throated harmony a couple verses in! And Alan letting out with a roar of “OH!” tearing into the bridge! This, my children, is what a Great Big Sea song for me is goddamn ABOUT in ANY language! :D
But unfortunately the box set does NOT include lyrics to it! So I am resorting to Mother Google to see if I can cobble together a lyrics transcription. I found this version and this version of the song, which are more or less giving me the chorus and the first couple of verses. But it’s sounding to me like Alan’s diverging hard from either of these lyrics sets.
And I call upon you, any fellow Great Big Sea fans who are better at French than I am, help me figure out these lyrics! Here’s what I’ve got–who can check me over and see what I’ve gotten wrong? And I KNOW this isn’t perfect, I was just aiming for a reasonable approximation of what it sounds like I’m hearing, and hopefully those of you with better French can sharpen this up! :D
Le bon vin m’endort, l’amour me réveille
Le bon vin m’endort, l’amour me réveille encore!
En passant par Paris, caressant la bouteille (bis)
Un de mes amis me dit à l’oreille, bon, bon, bon
Un de mes amis me dit à l’oreille (bis)
Prends bien garde à toi, à l’on poursuivre la belle, bon, bon, bon
Poursuit qui la vous, moi, je m’ai maux que d’elle (bis)
J’ai couché trois en l’ennui avec elle bon, bon, bon
Il y a trois garçons tous trois capitaines (bis)
L’un à Bordeaux, et l’autre à La Rochelle bon, bon, bon
L’un à Bordeaux, et l’autre à La Rochelle (bis)
L’autre à Versailles, à belle la connait bon, bon, bon
Dans ce post, je vais pratiquer mon français! Si vos etes un francophone, j’invite vous à m’enseigne si je faire une erreur!
Au matin, j’étudie le français avec SuperMemo sur mon iPhone. Je peux étudier sur le bus pendant que je vais au travail.
Je suis un testeur pour notre site web à Big Fish Games. (Je ne sais pas–une testrice? Je teste le site web!)
Lorsque je rentre chez moi, j’écris des romans fantastiques. Mon prochain roman sera publié en avril 2013!
Je joue la musique aussi! J’aime tellement le groupe Great Big Sea, qui a m’inspiré apprendre la guitare! Mais, j’aime maintenant la musique traditionelle du Quebéc! :D La musique du Québec m’inspire d’apprendre français, pour comprendre les chansons merveilleuses! J’apprends aussi la podorythmie à faire avec ma flûte!
J’ai tellement trop choses à faire–ma tête est très plein! Mon cerveau explose! Mais, je suis très heureuse. :D
And now, it’s time again for the Tri-lingual Hobbit Re-read! When last we left our intrepid band of short adventurers, they’d managed to escape the goblins only to run smack into a lengthy scene of exposition. This is what Bilbo gets for sneaking up on them all with a magic ring, doncha know. And then OHNOEZ ROCK SLIDE!
Picking up again in Chapter 6 of The Hobbit, Gandalf is finishing up cluing in Bilbo on what happened while he was playing at riddles!
General notes:
Goodness, a book released today couldn’t get away with so much telling of action that the protagonist happened to miss, I must say! Much argument could be had on either side as to whether this is actually a good thing–but to be sure, it’s in keeping with the more relaxed pace of this story, as well as Tolkien’s overall style.
French notes:
First translation shift I note in this round is that in the English edition, Gandalf describes his situation of getting into the caves as “touch and go”. The French translation renders this as “une affaire très incertaine !”
Oh hey, here’s a bit that pings one of my SuperMemo vocabulary verbs: “vous vous le rappeler sans doute”. The actual English text says “as you remember”, and it’s in the bit where the narrator is reminding the reader of Gandalf’s skill with fireworks at the solstice celebrations of the Old Took. Google Translate translates the French phrase as “you probably recall”. And it pinged off of me because I was just this morning reviewing “se rappeler” as a verb, i.e., to remember/recall. The “se” bit changes appropriately to reflect the subject of the sentence, so in this case it’s pinging off of “vous”, the reader.
Here’s another good verb: “falloir”. The English text says “it took a wizard to keep his head in the tunnels and guide them in the right direction”. In French, it’s “il fallait un magicien pour garder la tête claire dans les tunnels et les guider dans la bonne direction”. “Fallait” is the conjugation I’m interested in here, because 1) it’s imperfect tense, and 2) falloir is what is apparently called an impersonal verb. So it only gets conjugated in third person, singular, indefinite! I’m going to have to keep an eye out for this one in SuperMemo. I’m sure I’ll see it sooner or later.
Ooh, here’s another verb I know from songs–gémit, appearing in this sentence: « Mais j’ai horriblement faim », gémit Bilbo. Gémir means “moan/groan”, and it’s all over the lyrics to the awesome La Volée d’Castors song “Belle embarquez”! I am deeply unsurprised to see this word showing up in the context of Bilbo bitching about how hungry he is!
“Une horrible confusion”–this is an instance of how sometimes French words do look pretty much like the English ones, except for being pronounced differently!
This post’s most awesome gigantic French word award must go to “s’épaississaient”! Spotted in the phrase “Déjà les ombres s’épaississaient sur elles”, or “Already the shadows were deepening around them” as in the original English. That big ol’ word comes from the verb “épaissir”, and it’s imperfect tense, third person, specifically. I’m slowly getting the hanging of thinking “ongoing action” when it comes to the imperfect tense.
German notes:
This post’s award for Most Awesome Gigantic German word goes to “Mittsommergesellschaften”!
“Jetzt müssen wir weiter” is the translation provided in German for Gandalf telling everyone “Let’s get on!” Google Translate claims this comes out to “now we must continue”. I keep thinking from the rhythm of the words that I might have heard something that sounds like this before, maybe a fragment of the (admittedly badly pronounced, but hey) German in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I will have to doublecheck this!
Here’s another awesome German word: “Überbleibsel”! It means “remnant” and appears in the context of the party scrambling down the rocks that are a remnant of a landslide. But I swear, it sounds like it ought to be some sort of futuristic flying car or something!
This word, on the other hand, looks like it ought to be Japanese: “Tohuwabohu”! It means “chaos”. SWEET.
That’s it for this post, but before I go, let me share with you my amusement at the comparative thicknesses of the French and German editions of the book. The French version, as you can see, is a much slimmer volume. The German is of course written in German, so naturally one could joke about all the words being longer–but more relevant is that the German text is in a significantly larger point size!
Here’s a photo to show you the difference in book thickness!
French and German Hobbits
Next time: dwarves and a hobbit! In trees! That are on FIRE!
ETA 10/2/2012: A few German speakers have advised me that ‘Tohuwabohu’ is in common enough use in the German language that they don’t think of it as anything but a German word. So it looks like it must have become a loan word, jumping from Hebrew over to German. Learning about this kind of thing, folks, is exactly why I’m enjoying going through the translated versions of The Hobbit so much! Vielen Dank to the German speakers who have enlightened me!
Moving into Chapter 6 of The Hobbit, we find our hero Mr. Baggins/M. Baggins/Herr Beutlin emerging out of the Misty Mountains–with a magic ring on!
Also, as an epilogue to the previous chapter, I must note that German!Gollum using “mein Schatz” for “my precious” is deeply giggle-inducing for me given that I associate that phrase with an Elvis Presley song. Now I have an entirely different spin on the bridge of “Wooden Heart”, imagining it sung by Andy Serkis. Hi folks, welcome to my brain!
General notes:
I gotta admit, if I were Bilbo, travelling with a bunch of dwarves who’d up to this chapter found me fairly useless, I’d TOTALLY be planning to surprise them with my new shiny magic ring, too.
Red hood! Hi there, Balin! Not your fault that the tricksy hobbit could sneak past you when you’re on watch.
“You nearly chopped off my head with Glamdring, and Thorin was stabbing here there and everywhere with Orcrist.” This, of course, requires a macro saying DORI IS UNIMPRESSED BY YOUR SWORDS OF GONDOLIN.
Ranting!Dori is, however, COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY PWNED by Bilbo going OH HAI in the first recorded incident in Middle-Earth of a hobbit pwning thirteen dwarves and a wizard all at the same time.
French notes:
The English title of this chapter is “Out of the Frying-Pan into the Fire”, but in the French edition, it’s “De Charybde en Scylla”–which is of course referring to Scylla and Charybdis. It intrigues me that the French translator jumped over to this phrase; one presumes that “out of the frying-pan into the fire” otherwise doesn’t translate.
Since beginning this re-read I’ve started working on my French vocabulary using an app called SuperMemo on my iPhone, and because of that app, I picked up a couple of words that I was tickled to recognize in the very first paragraph of the French edition: “ensuite” and “avant”. I still need to work on my comprehension of these words, though, because I thought they meant “after” and “before”–but the sentence they appear in starts “Il regarde ensuite en avant…”, and this is the analogue of the sentence in the English edition where it says “Then he looked forward…” Note to self: keep this in mind in SuperMemo vocabulary review tomorrow!
Another word I picked out from Le Vent du Nord: “manteau”! *beam* Right out of the title of “Manteau d’hiver” (winter coat), a lovely instrumental on Le Vent’s last album. About which I have gushed repeatedly in other posts. :D
I understood pretty much this entire line of Bilbo’s: “J’espère seulement, pour l’amour de Dieu, qu’ils ne sont plus là-bas au pouvoir les gobelins !” (Bilbo saying he hopes for the love of God that they, i.e., Gandalf and the dwarves, are not still back there in the power of the goblins.) Of particular note here: I picked up “seulement” and “pouvoir” as SuperMemo vocab words, and I recognized “là-bas” out of the lyrics of the Le Vent du Nord song “Rossignolet”!
Recognizing a few more SuperMemo vocabulary words as I go, too–“niveau” (level, as in “the level of the path”), “se développait” (conjugation of the verb “se développer”, develop), “retourner” (return), and more. So clearly, working with this app is improving my vocabulary quite a bit! I’m finding the text rather easier to follow than the last time I did this!
Wait, what, did the French translator sneak an Italian phrase in here? Here’s the sentence: “En vérité, Bilbo était si content de leurs compliments qu’il se contenta de rire in petto, sans rire dire de l’anneau”. The italics are the translator’s, and Google Translate thinks “in petto” is indeed Italian, meaning roughly “in his chest”. Interesting! A friend on Twitter points me at this reference for that phrase, which makes a lot more sense when you think about it being used in a Catholic country.
And oh, this is weird! After Bilbo tells his story to the dwarves, completely leaving out the part about finding the Ring, he asks Gandalf what he’d been doing all this time. The original English says, “The wizard, to tell the truth, never minded explaining his cleverness more than once”. But in the French, it says “A vrai dire, le magicien n’aimait pas expliquer plus d’une fois ses artifices”. Which, if I’m reading this correctly, says pretty much the exact opposite of what the English edition says. Francophones, I am reading this correctly, aren’t I?
German notes:
In contrast to the chapter title in the French edition, the German edition’s title is pretty much a direct translation of the English: “Raus aus der Bratpfanne, rein ins Feuer”. Except, however, for that little word “rein” in there, which Google Translate is telling me has a few different possible meanings. “Pure”, “clean”, and “straight” are all proposed, so I’m guessing this is intended to be “Out of the frying-pan straight into the fire”.
I note with satisfaction that the German word for coat here, “Mantel”, is very close to the French “manteau”.
Huh, in the first paragraph of the chapter, the narrative describes how the sun goes down in the west, and both the English and French editions italicize “behind the mountains”. The German edition does not!
Bit of a difference as well where the English edition says of Bilbo that “He wandered on and on”, and the German says “Er marschierte und marschierte” (he marched and marched). Herr Beutlin thus strikes me as a tad more self-possessed than Mister Baggins, hmm?
Oh cool, how awesome an interjection is “Donnerwetter”? In English, Bilbo says “Good heavens”! Google Translate claims “Donnerwetter” means gosh, damn, or heavens! Literally, I think it’s “thunder weather”, but way to be inspecific on the translation there, Google! Any German speakers want to chime in on the best translation for this?
Here also, for reference, is the German version of the French sentence I understood above: “Ich kann nur hoffen, dass sie sich nicht mehr dahinten in den Klauen der Orks befinden!” Slight difference of translation here as “Klauen” appears to be “clutches”.
Oh bah, German translator, was it really necessary for you to rearrange paragraph breaks? Especially given that you’re not signifying Bilbo’s thoughts either by italics OR by quotes? I totally lost track of where Bilbo tells himself “I will give them all a surprise”, and had to dig through a long paragraph to find it. It rendered in German as “Die werden ganz schön überrascht sein, dachte er”.
Dori snarking on Gandalf and Thorin stabbing everything in sight reads pretty awesomely in German: “Beinahe hättet Ihr meinen Kopf mit Glamdring abgehauen und Thorin stach hier und dort und überall mit Orkrist herum.” German!Dori is ALSO unimpressed by your swords of Gondolin!
Here’s a fun German word: “Massenweise”! This is what Bilbo says when the dwarves are all “BUT BUT BUT weren’t there guards?!” Google Translate says this is essentially “lots” or “tons” or “masses of ’em”!
For interesting contrast to the weirdly translated French sentence above, here’s the German equivalent: “Dem Zauberer, um die Wahrheit zu sagen, kam es durchaus nicht ungelegen, seine Gescheitheit noch einmal zu beweisen.” Looks like German!Gandalf, like his English counterpart, is quite happy to go on about how why YES, he IS awesome, why do you ask?
And this’ll do me for tonight, I think! Next time: more of our merry company catching up with each other before things start getting difficult again!
I am so, SO overdue to continue this that it’s not even funny! But since I definitely want to get this done before An Unexpected Journey comes out in December, and because my language geekery is wanting the love, let’s dive into Chapter 5, shall we? Bring on the riddles in the dark!
This won’t be the whole chapter, but it’s a start, and I’ll keep chipping away at this as I can!
I’ve been having great fun, O Internets, learning that yeah, Quebecois trad is pretty much only a skip over from Celtic trad in general when it comes to the overall themes that show up in the songs. As I have frequently joked, the themes of Celtic music are Whiskey, Sex, and Death, and a lot of that applies to Quebec trad as well–though you could make a decent case for Religion also being a theme of the genre, in this case, and for swapping out Whiskey for Wine!
With that in mind, I have been taking note of overall character archetypes and themes I’ve spotted in songs I’ve been trying to translate, or which I have been learning off of translated lyrics from various bands’ websites or from lyrics wikis. I present for your amusement and edification the following things I have spotted in Quebecois trad music: People:
Band members (inserting themselves into their own songs)
Belles (sleeping)
Belles (waking up)
Belles (who are daughters of rich fathers, and pretending to be daughters of the town executioner)
Belles (who want their lovers to murder their mothers)
Belle (who really seriously want their parents to BACK OFF ALREADY when it comes to their chosen galants)
Belles (with unfortunate choices in galants who do not clue in when they’re supposed to making with the snogging)
Dragons (who are actually human soldiers as opposed to mythical giant lizards)
Fishermen (who have issues with their boats tipping over)
Galants (who may or may not be wasting their time trying to win the affections of les belles)
Galants (who are kind of thick-headed when it comes to seeing opportunities to snog their belles in the woods)
Husbands (who lament the scolding of their wives)
Innkeepers (who have issues with their tables not having enough legs)
Knights (transformed into dragons by cranky witches)
Lawyers (who belles do not for the love of GOD want to marry, except their fathers are pressuring them into it)
Mothers (who somehow manage to be concerned about their sons even after being murdered and having their hearts removed, Edgar Allan Poe much?)
Parents (cranky about their daughters accepting the affections of unsuitable galants)
Parents (anxious about the chosen dangerous professions of their sons)
Priests (pursued by women)
Priests (pursuing women)
Priests (who are actually disguised gallants)
Princesses (who are doleful about their knights getting transformed into dragons)
Roofers (who have issues with falling off of roofs)
Shepherdesses (cranky about the shooting of their ducks)
Soldiers (successfully wooing belles)
Soldiers (NOT successful at wooing belles)
Sons of kings (who make shepherdesses cranky for shooting their ducks)
Vintners (who are very bad at making wine)
Vintners’ assistants (who are very GOOD at making wine)
Violin players (who are preferred lovers, not that there’s any bias in that song or anything)
Witches (going around transforming nice young knights into dragons, I mean, the NERVE of some people)
Wives (cranky about their husbands drinking too much, messing around with other women, or both of the above)
Wives (who are not terribly good at household chores, and trust me, you don’t want to know what this one girl wound up doing to her cat)
Wives (who want to poison their husbands) Animals:
Blue Jays
Cats
Dogs
Dragons (who are actually transformed knights)
Ducks (STILL not sure what the heck they were doing next to the wedding bed in that song)
Hawks
Horses
Nightingales (singing)
Partridges
Pigeons
Robins
Snow Geese Locations:
Bedrooms (in which locale the activity of the song ought to be obvious)
Churches (in which priests are frequently pursued and/or pursuing, or which young lovers are illicitly meeting)
Inns (all SORTS of shenanigans going on in inns)
Kitchens (more shenanigans)
Mills (yet more shenanigans, lots of mills in these songs)
Woods (oh my yes with the shenanigans) Things:
Boats
Bottles (generally presumed to be containing wine)
Food
Guns
Poison
Swords
Violins
On my way home tonight I was listening to tracks off the album À la grâce de Dieu by the Charbonniers, and in particular, the song “Allons vidons”. Jean-Claude Mirandette was just getting started on the first verse when I had that delightful double-take reaction of HEY HEY STOP I UNDERSTOOD THAT! I backed up, played that bit again, and sure enough, the sentence “C’est dans notre village / Il y a un p’tit moulin” popped right out at me. “In our village there is a little mill”. It’s a tiny sentence to be sure, but I was inordinately proud of comprehending it.
It’s weird and wonderful to hear a whole sentence in another language, only to understand it just like it’s the language I grew up with. I’m still getting bits and pieces of songs piecemeal, but that I’m getting them in general gives me ridiculous amounts of glee. My main goal is still musical, i.e., to be able to understand the lyrics of all these awesome songs and therefore appreciate them more. Anything I get out of it for conversational purposes is really icing on the cake.
But that said, I was also very pleased to be able to construct this whole sentence all by myself when posting to Facebook: “Je lire les paroles en anglais et français, j’écoute les chansons en français, je peu à peu comprends plus et plus!” Which means, “I read the lyrics in English and French, I listen to the songs in French, bit by bit I understand more and more!”
A good chunk of that sentence did in fact come to me either straight out of songs or else from poking around on band websites. “Les paroles” I know as “the lyrics” from looking at the French edition of leventdunord.com. “J’écoute”, “I listen”, I swiped right out of the lyrics to “Écris-moi”. “Chansons”, “songs”, is all over the place in all the songs in my collection. “Plus et plus” I got out of the lyrics to “Le dragon de Chimay”.
I’m still also heavily using Google Translate–but sometimes I only have to use it to doublecheck gender of nouns or verb conjugation spellings, because some of the words are starting to actually pop into my brain on my own and I just need to doublecheck them. As opposed to having no idea what the words actually are. Progress! I has it!
So yeah! Plan to learn all the Quebecois trad by slow osmosis: proceeding nicely. :D ETA: , who is a wise and clever wordsmith apparently in more than one language, advises me that the proper first person singular conjugation for “lire” is “je lis”. This, children, is why you always ask for language help from people who either speak the language or who have studied it better than you have! Also, this is an extremely important verb for a writer and book geek to know!
