Just a place to jot down my musings.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Vois Sur Ton Chemin (Look to Your Path)

I had promised myself not to blog until I got through all the work that eagerly and hungrily awaits to devour me, but this song was just so exquisitely beautiful that I had to drop everything else and post it here. It featured in the 2004 French movie Les Choristes, directed by Christophe Barratier, and was composed by Bruno Coulais.

C'est vraiment une chanson incroyablement belle, et le chanteur Jean-Baptiste Maunier a la voix d'un ange. Voilà!



Les paroles:

Voir sur ton chemin,
Gamins oubliés, égarés,
Donne leur la main
Pour la mener
Vers d'autres lendemains

Sens au cœur de la nuit, 
L'onde d'espoir
Ardeur de la vie
Sentier de gloire.

Bonheurs enfantins,
Trop vite oubliés, effacés,
Une lumière dorée brille sans fin,
Tout au bout du chemin.

Malheureusement, je comprends juste un peu français, mais je veux traduire cette chanson en anglais. S'il vous plaît, pardonnez-moi toutes les erreurs!

Look to your path:
Children, forgotten, lost;
Lend them your hand, and
Lead them
Towards another morrow.

Sense, in the depth of the night—
A wave of hope
A zest for life
A path to glory!

Childlike pleasures,
Too soon forgotten, effaced;
A golden light glimmers without end
At the end of the path.

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Why pearls, and why strung at random?

In his translation of the famous "Turk of Shirazghazal of Hafez into florid English, Sir William Jones, the philologist and Sanskrit scholar and polyglot extraordinaire, transformed the following couplet:

غزل گفتی و در سفتی بیا و خوش بخوان حافظ

که بر نظم تو افشاند فلک عقد ثریا را


into:

Go boldly forth, my simple lay,
Whose accents flow with artless ease,
Like orient pearls at random strung.

The "translation" is terribly inaccurate, but worse, the phrase is a gross misrepresentation of the highly structured organization of Persian poetry. Regardless, I picked it as the name of my blog for a number of reasons: 
1) I don't expect the ordering of my posts to follow any rhyme or reason
2) Since "at random strung" is a rather meaningless phrase, I decided to go with the longer but more pompous "pearls at random strung". I rest assured that my readers are unlikely to deduce from this an effort on my part to arrogate some of Hafez's peerless brilliance!

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Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
—W.H. Davies, “Leisure”