English Translations of the Songs of Serge Gainsbourg
NEWS: La Cité de la musique in Paris contacted me about an exhibition on Serge Gainsbourg taking place there from October 21st of 2008 to March 1st of 2009. You can read what they sent me here.
Hello! As far as I know these are the only translations of Serge
Gainsbourg's songs on the internet. Most of them contain typos and are
likely to continue doing so. They are by no means 'finished' and may
change syllable by syllable as time passes.
I am currently in graduate school working on linguistics, and
am not working much on this project. Nevertheless, if you have a
special request for a song you'd like translated and you don't see it
here, email
me and I'll try to do it and post it.
All of the French for these songs was taken from the book Mon
propre rôle I published in France by Denoel and
fully recomended for those who are interested not just in Serge
Gainsbourg's music, but also in his poetry. Gainsbourg's lyrics were so
full of rich wordplay that it is very difficult to take them out of
French. An unavoidable consequence of anglicizing something so Gallic
is that much is lost. I have opted for a more literal translation that
ignores rhyming schemes. Listen to the music if you want to hear those.
These translations will simply allow the Anglophone world to understand
what Gainsbourg was saying in each song, and not always how he was
saying it. Especially subtle plays on words or metaphors or linguistic
curios are explained in footnotes. An examination of recurrent themes
can be found here.
Enjoy.
-A. Chabot
thankyougustad@hotmail.com
Mon propre rôle (My Own Role)
Please suck, reading these lines, the juice of a cherry. - Francis Picabia
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