I’ve always loved Jacques Brel’s La Chanson Des Vieux Amants. I was listening to it again the other day and started looking online for a translation. The only ones I found were really clunky, Google Translate-type things, so I decided to do one myself, drawing on the French I picked up at Lavender Road Junior School and from visiting Paris a few times. And using Google Translate. And making the rest up.
I think I might have too much time on my hands:
The Song of Old Lovers
Yeah, I know: we’ve walked through storms,
Through twenty years of insane bloody love.
A thousand times you’ve picked up your suitcase,
A thousand times I’ve run away
And each piece of furniture
In this cradleless room
Sparks flashes of the old lightning.
Nothing makes sense now:
You’ve lost your taste for booze
And I’ve lost mine for conquest.
But my love, my sweet,
My tender, my marvellous love:
In the clear light of dawn
And at the end of the day,
I love you still, you know. I love you.
Me, I know all your spells;
You, you see through my ‘charms';
You, you’ve protected me, from harm to harm,
Me, yeah, I’ve forgotten you every now and then.
(Of course, you’ve had a few lovers:
No point in wasting time,
The body has to rejoice in itself.)
Oh, and ultimately, at the end of the day,
When all’s said and done, you’ve got to agree:
It’s pretty impressive
To get to be this old without ever growing up.
But my love, my sweet,
My tender, my marvellous love:
In the clear light of dawn
And at the end of the day,
I love you still, you know. I love you.
The more time marches us off to our funerals,
The more it tortures us.
But isn’t the very worst trap of all
When lovers live in peace?
Granted, you no longer cry as quickly,
Granted, it takes me longer these days to tear myself apart,
Granted, we guard our secrets less
And granted, we leave less to chance these days –
We’re cautious of the undercurrents –
But it remains, always, war,
A tender war, but a war. As it should.
And my love, my sweet,
My tender, my marvellous love,
In the clear light of dawn
And at the end of the day,
I love you still, you know. I love you.