[Ian Burdon]

At the end of the list of topics you should see the place to start a new thread. I’d post a screenshot but that doesn’t appear to be an option

[Ian Burdon]

Happy Christmas all. A glass of prosecco courtesy of my daughter to mark the moment last night, but then a change of laptop left me playing hunt the password.

Cheers

[Ian Burdon]

All well here too, thanks. I’ve somehow managed to keep making a blog post every day for the last six months which, if nothing else, introduces an element of regularity into the daytime routine.

I haven’t been in a pub since February and the homebrew has run out–I’d make more but other inmates of the house would complain about the smell. We’re fortunate that we have enough house space and garden to make sure we don’t get under each other’s feet or on each other’s nerves, most of the time. And in some respects lockdown is very much like making love to a beautiful woman is very much like retirement life anyway.

Best wishes to everyone else

[Ian Burdon]

Hi Hughie and thanks for starting this topic. All well here.

For the duration, or until I run out of things to write about, I’ve turned my blog into a daily diary. No great insights or revelations, just rambling and a tune to go to bed with 🙂 You’ll find it here: https://www.cosmicsurfer.co.uk

For the oldies, I’ve been trying to write a short post every day about something that happened 50 years ago that day in music in 1970, usually an album release. If you’re on the blog and look to the bar at the top, you’ll see ‘1970 in Music’. Hover over that for options.

Stay well everybody

Ian

[Ian Burdon]

Roll the carpet right back, get cracking with your old Gay Gordons
And your knees up, shake it up, live it up, sup it up, hell of a kind of a time.
And if the coppers come around, well, tell them the party’s mine, boys.

Cheers

Ian

[Ian Burdon]

One or two of us here have tried to translate Brassens and make the results singable. A few years back I wrote a little about the difficulties in an email to Michel Ameline of this board (who has translated Jake into French to great effect.) This was the email. The translation was a team effort by me, Keith Donovan, Judith Taylor, Didier Agid and probably a couple of others.

There are three main problems with translating Brassens.

The first is his language. This is not the French of the classroom but language which vigorously poetic, demotic, often deliberately archaic and with inventive use of slang and metaphor.

The second is that the songs are, naturally, very French in their references and sensibilities. For example Les deux oncles (below), with its extended meditation on WW2 and modern Europe, is brilliant but the references to Verdun and Petain would likely pass an English listener by, as might its deeper resonance with changing French identity, although the surface meaning is clear enough:

This was Uncle Martin, this Uncle Gaston
One the friend of Tommies, one the friend of Huns
Each of them died for their friends
Me, who was nobody’s friend, ah well! I survived

Dear Uncles, now that your time has gone
And your widows have remarried
Now that the stars rekindled in the sky above Verdun
Have been tarnished by Marshal Petain

Now that your arguments have run their course
And the gallows ropes have been scattered
Now that John Bull is sulky towards us
And the pointless squabbles with the Germans are over

Now that your sons and daughters have gone, hand in hand
To make love together and to make tomorrow’s Europe
And care about your obscure battles
As much as about the Hundred Years War

Now, I must confess uncles
You the friend of Tommies, you the friend of Huns
Your truths, your untruths
No-one could care less

About your purges, your collaborations
your atrocities, your wastelands
your plates of saurkraut, your cups of tea –
No-one could care less

Despite the memories and recollections,
And the eternal flames on monuments to the deaths
Of the conquerors and the conquered, of other men and of you
No-one really gives a damn – meaning no offence

The living are reasserting their rights.
Your two crosses no longer cast much shadow
And little by little what have you become?
The unknown soldiers of a minor cenotaph.

Now I’m sure, dear unfortunate Uncles
You the friend of Tommies, you the friend of Huns,
That if you had survived, if you were here,
it would be you who were singing this song.

You who, clinking glasses and wishing ‘good health’, would sing
That it is stupid to lose life for ideas
Which come by and make
Brief images in the flames then burn out forever;

That the belief that anything so mundane as an idea is worth dying for
Is one best left for those who have no original ideas;
That immediately to take the enemy in the field as he comes
Is such a waste, like scraps fallen under the table;

Sing that instead of wrestling with some imagined threat
It is better to wait for a little while and make them a friend;
That it is better to use your bandolier for a rosary;
Better always to delay a salvo until tomorrow;

Better that the only generals at whose heels you should follow
Are the generals of toy soldiers.
In that way each of you could sing while following
The Grand Old Duke of York who goes to war only in nursery rhymes.

You who today receive the keys to the skies –
You lucky buggers who will see God tonight –
When you meet my two uncles on the other side
Pass this on from me: “don’t forget me”.

And so these two little myosotis flower in my garden:
A ‘forget-me-not’ for Uncle Martin
A ‘vergist mein nicht’ for Uncle Gaston
Poor friend of the Tommies, poor friend of the Hun.

Third, that is a translation in which some french turns of phrase, proverbs and nursery rhymes have been replaced by English ones. But as you can see it does not scan because of the different syllable lengths and need for different numbers of words. Nor does it rhyme.

More subtle, an important structural feature of Les deux oncles (and other of his songs) is the use of the subjunctive tense to link the verses and the meaning together. It is normal for Brassens to carry the subjunctive through from verse one and not resolve it until the end. This is fine in French but much more difficult to render in English which does have the subjunctive but not often in ‘normal’ language.

Finally, some of Brassens’ humourous songs are simply not funny in English.

For myself, my approach has always been to try to develop as close a translation as I possibly can first but then to try and capture what I think of as the ‘spirit’ of the songs in casting them as English songs. In that sense all translations are adaptations and sometimes you have to change the words to keep the meaning – which is, of course, what Jake did.

Added: rereading this it struck me that Les deux oncles and particularly the verse below are resonant in the UK right now with the Brexit shitshow

Now that your sons and daughters have gone, hand in hand
To make love together and to make tomorrow’s Europe
And care about your obscure battles
As much as about the Hundred Years War

[Ian Burdon]

Returning very late to this thread (what’s a mere 9 years 7 months amongst friends?), I was interested in the discussion on the blog post of Kirkstall Road Girl. It’s one of Jake’s songs that I’ve never liked and the reason for that was the element of ‘I know where you come from’ (or as we’d say up here, ‘I kent her faether..’) It always struck me as false and somewhat sanctimonious. The last lines really annoy me:

Chic boutiquey clothes, with her brand-new hair and a brand-new nose:
though she daubed herself with woad, we’d still know that bird down the Kirkstall Road.
There’s lots as good as her down the Kirky Road.
But they don’t go away… thank The Lord they stay…
they’re better off any way down the Kirkstall Road

The song always reminds me of Peter Starstedt’s Where Do You Go To My Lovely? (So look into my face Marie-Claire and remember just who you are), which similarly denigrates a woman’s success in getting out of the circumstances of her birth and finding something better. I don’t buy into the idea that Jake was a misogynist, and Kirkstall Road Girl is from early in his career, but equally I don’t like the attitude expressed by either him or Starstedt..

Starstedt had a better tune, though.

[Ian Burdon]

Ginnel was new on me too; I spent my first 9 years in Derby, where a ginnel was a jitty.

[Ian Burdon]

Yes. This is one that Sheila Thackray once described as “Trenet turned Thackray.” We discussed this on the old Topica message board in February 2003 🙂

We came back to it again in October 2003 when the late Ian Watson said Sheila told him Jake got into some sort of bother about using the Trenet tune

[Ian Burdon]

well you could do worse than email me ian (dot) burdon (at) gmail (dot) com

I listened to it earlier and the sound quality is poor (I think my recording is 3rd generation), but I’m happy to send an MP3 of Cenotaph.

(yes, that’s me and Hugh)

[Ian Burdon]

Good Morris is a joy to behold, especially(IMHO) Cotswold Morris though I’m partial to NW Processional too. Several years ago I managed to find myself at Holmfirth Festival with both the Jake Thackray Experience and Mons Meg Rapper, in one case finishing the afternoon gig in the Old Bridge then sprinting round to another pub in time to grab a sword and dance in the bar.

[Ian Burdon]

Hi Kevin. It is a while since I’ve performed Jake’s songs. For the most part, if I changed the words it’s because I’d forgot the real ones in the heat of the moment and panicked.

Having said that, the taking names from the town war memorial for Cenotaph was something I started, possibly at Holmfirth Folk Festival, or possibly Torrington, but then always after that. The last name I sang was Frank Weston who, at the time, was the only relative of mine I knew to have been killed in WW1. This is the end result: https://youtu.be/8wNh-0Ymm2M

I would usually find a way not to use ‘rape’ in Family Tree–I usually changed it to “once shagged a Duchess” I also once sang “My cousin Ruth’s stupendous cleavage” when she was in the audience. Later that evening the late Terry Grant saw her, looked her up and down and said “You must be Ruth then.”

For Thomas Haverley I kept the words but changed the music a little because I don’t like Jake’s version and tried to make it more lyrical. I can’t remember the details now, but I changed the tempo and the chord sequence when I realised I could fit Jake’s melody over the backing to Marc Cohn’s Walking In Memphis 🙂 The second time I performed this, I noticed a woman running from the hall in tears: it was Thomas Haverley’s mum, Sue. Apparently the story about the cherry tree is true, but unfortunately it was later eaten by the family’s pet goat.

(added: it occurs to me that during I Stayed Off Work Today I once blew a bishop when I should have damned him; an easy mistake to make, I feel, in the current ecclesiastical climate. No doubt it was an ecumenical matter, but in any event large quantities of Timothy Taylor’s Landlord were implicated)

[Ian Burdon]

If I recall correctly, Jake knew Laurie Lee and got his permission to make a song of it.

[Ian Burdon]

Hi Paddy.

I think it may be me you’ve seen performing this on YouTube, in Scarborough with Hugh Bradley on bass. I know of only two recordings of it by Jake: one is on The Camera and the Song and the other is on a radio programme–I think a Ralph McTell show–that Jake was a guest on. I have that on an old cassette somewhere I think.

cheers

Ian

[Ian Burdon]

to Jake: not forgotten.

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