Riding the Ear-Worm
Riding the Ear-Worm
Tips for music-loving language learners
Have no fear, this post has nothing to do with Dune. (However, while we are still on the subject of fear, please allow me to remind you that “fear is the mind killer.”) Rather, today’s wee disquisition offers hints, of the sort once shared by the ubiquitous Heloise, for people who put music to alloglot ends.
Read the Lyrics
People enjoying popular songs often hear the wrong words, turning “there’s a bad moon on the rise” into “there’s a bathroom on the right.” As might be imagined, this common occurrence also occurs when one grooves to a tune in a language not one’s own. Thus, for example, when Céline Dion tries to explain c’est pas grand chose, rien qu’une pause (“it’s not a big deal, nothing but a break”) some of us are doomed to hear “c’est pas grand chose, rien qu’une Porsche.
One remedy for such auditory peccadillos makes use of written lyrics. In days of yore, these could often be found in the packaging that protected records, tapes, and compact disks. Nowadays, you can find them by plugging the name of the song, along with a word meaning “lyrics,” into a search engine. (Marvelous to say, not all of the alloglot counterparts of lyrics take a plural form. Thus, while Francophone folks prefer les paroles, Germans use der Text, and Spanish-speakers say la letra.)
Reading lyrics, whether alone or while the music plays, also counteracts the tendency of the human ear to sacrifice the verses of a song on the altar of the refrain. (Until I ran into a video that provided the lyrics to one of the biggest hits of French singer Indila, I had no idea of the tale told in the subtly-crafted verses leading up to each repetition of c’est un love story.
Listen to Covers
When independent performers cover well-known songs, they often enunciate more clearly than the stars who turned such tunes into hits. (This, I suspect, owes much to the practice of replacing boom boosters of various sorts with lonesome guitars.) Even when this is not the case, hearing a variety of people sing the same lyrics will bring different words and phrases to your attention.
As indie artists will sometimes sing in accents (or even dialects) at variance with those of better known performers, listening to non-commercial covers will also provide opportunities for learning a little about different versions of the language in question. (Compare, if you will, the version of Warum hast du ned na gsagt [“Why Didn’t You Say No?”] sung in Bavarian with versions of Warum hast Du nicht nein gesagt sung in standard German.)
Your search for home-cooked variants will be benefit from the fact that, where music is concerned, the word for “cover” in many languages is … wait for it … “cover.” Similarly, alloglot words for “acoustic” (acoustique, acústico, akustisch) will often resemble their English cognate. (Marvelous to say, this is even true in Finland, where a tune played without the aid of power cords belongs to the category akustista musiikkia.)
Listen to Faithful Translations
The act of translating a bit of text from one language to another invariably involves a good deal of compromise. When, moreover, the product of such work must also match a particular meter, apply affluent alliteration, and (in many languages) follow a rhyming scheme, accurate rendition of original meaning rarely rises to the top of the totem pole of priorities.
Notwithstanding these obstacles, the people who translated the Quebecois musical Notre Dame de Paris into Italian, Spanish, and English managed to achieve, in the words of a Hispanophone commentator, adaptación de la letra inmaculada. The same can be said for the persons of the paraphrastic persuasion who worked on the songs that appeared in various versions of the “jukebox musical” Mama Mia and, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent, the animated film Anastasia.
Beware of False Friends
The international corporations that own the rights to many popular songs care nothing for your quest to learn languages. Thus, they will, from time to time, sponsor alloglot versions of songs that take nothing more from the original than a title and a tune.
Take, for example, the case of À Santa Maria. Sung in French by Mireille Mathieu, it recounts a woman’s supplication for solace, serenity, and the return of a man important to her. (As the latter is identified by nothing more than a pronoun, we cannot know whether he is soldier or sailor, husband or son.) Recently, I encountered a number, performed by a young Roland Kaiser, that, while borrowing the tune, and echoing the title of, the aforementioned number, told a very different story. In the latter piece, the singer describes his memories of the night of passion he shared with a young woman on a (presumably Mediterranean) island. (While they differ somewhat from Herr Kaiser’s Schlag, the Spanish and Italian versions of Santa Maria also deal with the themes of beaches, breezes, and less-than-licet love.)
On a happier note, mention of Madame Mathieu reminds me that the German songs in her repertoire also correspond closely to their French counterparts.
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This essay was a whole lot of fun, thanks! However often I've lamented people butchering Dylan songs I never quite thought of it in the context of mistranslation.
Reminds me of the English and German (Nina and Mike) versions of "La Paloma Blanca." Apparently, there is a real German translation available as well, but George Baker's English version (he's Dutch) is about being as free as a bird and breaking chains, while the Nina and Mike German version sounds like an ad for a tropical vacation.