Jacques Brel - I do not know

jacques brel - je ne sais pas par bisonravi1987
Original Title: "Je ne sais pas"
Year: 1958

I do not know why the rain
Leaves up there its rags
That are the heavy grey clouds
to lay down on our hillsides

I do not know why the wind
plays in the bright mornings
to peddle the children's laughs
frail chimes of winter

I do not know anything about all this
But I know I still love you

I do not know why the road
That pushes me toward the city
Has the sickly smell of the routs
From poplar tree to poplar tree

I do not know why the veil
Of the frozen fog that escorts me
Makes me think to the Cathedral
Where ones prays for the dead loves

I do not know anything about all this
But I know I still love you

I do not know why those streets
Open in front of me one by one
Virgin and cold, cold and naked
Only my steps and no moon

I do not know why the night
Makes use of me like of a guitar
Forced me to come here
To cry in front of this station

I do not know anything about all this
But I know I still love you

I do not know at what time leaves
That sad train for Amsterdam
That a couple has to take tonight
A couple of which you are the woman

And I do not know for which port
Leaves from Amsterdam that big ship
which shatters my heart and my body
Our love and my future

I do not know anything about all this
But I know I still love you
But I know I still love you

in addition to the translation of the dialogue at the beginning of the video:
- I mostly like writing songs and then I like to sing to some extent because we manage to write songs only when we sing everyday At least in my opinion because we write song with a vocabulary that is not common, not the one of everyone, that is not the one we have outside of writing songs And we manage to know the weight or the value of the words only when singing everyday
- Does it happen to you to be annoyed by a word?
- Yes often
- Do you change it?
- No it's too late
- How so, it's too late?
- well, yes it's too late
- But a song can be corrected
- No, no, songs are like men
- Do you agree to go on the set there, please
Jacques Brel do you like all your songs?
- No, not all of them, oh no
- Your favorite?
- My favorite is "I don't know"

Jacques Brel - It snows over Liège

Original Title: "Il neige sur Liège"
Year: 1963

It's snowing
It's snowing over Liège
And the snow over Liège
To snow puts gloves on

It's snowing
It's snowing over Liège
Black crescent of the Meuse
On the forehead of a white clown

It's broken the shout
of the hours and the birds
of the children with hoops
And of the black and of the grey

It's snowing
It's snowing over Liège
Which the river crosses
Without noise

It's snowing
It's snowing over Liège
And so much turns the snow
Between the sky and Liège

That we do not know anymore
If it's snowing
If it's snowing over Liège
Or if it's Liege that snows towards the sky

And the snow marries
The debutant lovers
The walking lovers
On the whitened Square²

It's snowing
It's snowing over Liège
That the river carries without noise

Tonight
Tonight, it's snowing
Over my dreams and over Liège
That the river pierces without noise

²Le Carré (the Square) is the name of a neighborhood of Liège

Jean Ferrat - Love is cherry

Jean Ferrat - L'Amour est Cerise par ViveFerrat
Original Title: "L'amour est cerise"
Year: 1980

Rebellious and submissive
Eyelids lowered
Take off your shirt
Beautiful bride
Love is cherry
And time in a hurry
We will go dance
Another time

As far as it seems to us
Reasonable and crazy
We will go together
Beyond everything
Lend me your mouth
For me to love you a little
Open me your bed
For the love of God

Let me without fear
Come on my knees
To taste your absinth
Drink your sweet wine
Oh laughs and moans
Oh insane words
The crazy lament
Quickly soared

Let's defy the world
And its bans
Your pleasure floods
My delighted mouth
Virtue or permit
By god, I don't care
I lose my semen
In your red sex

Oh moon Pierrot
Oh mounts and marvels
Here is my quill
that is falling asleep
And like a she-wolf
With children sensitive to cold
The night covers us up
With its blue coat

Rebellious and submissive
Weary eyelids
Put your shirt back
Beautiful bride
Love is cherry
And the time passed
We will go dance
Another time

Jacques Bertin - Spin

Original Title: "File"
Year: 1967

Spin, spin with your febrile fingers
Spin your heart all entangled
You will make a skein out of it
an overall ball
Then you'd make a jumper out of it
To keep you warm in winter

So goes the wild children
Fearing tomorrow to get cold
They knit mischiefs for themselves
To protect themselves from the sun
They cover themselves with unreality
To protect themselves from the sun

The famous jumper can wait
Here is not the main thing
It's in the summer that resembles us
Whatever we said, whatever we did
Oh, remember of the essential
Of your naked skin under the sun

I leave you with your distaff
Your needles against the summer
I have run too much stitch after stich
I wanted to undress you
Or dress myself alike to you
I had forgotten the essential

I am not in a hurry my beauty
I smoke the pipe and the time
I wait for you to undress
And to give me your clothes
I will unpick them
When I will have time at Chirstmas
Stripping you naked under the essential
I will give you the sun

Jacques Bertin - Parish

Original Title: "Paroisse"
Year: 1975

Women are sitting in the winter
Along the radios, on a last work
It's late at night, it's already somewhere around ten o'clock
For a long time are sleeping in frozen bedrooms
some children protected from evil by a sign of the cross
Women are sitting in winter. It's the cold of winter.

At the station people are still waiting for the train from Combourg and Dol
In the meadow the gypsies are watching the sleep of the horses
They have fold up the derisory circus and they are going away. Tomorrow
The masons won't be working probably because of the frost
Tomorrow there is the mass for the young girl who is mourning
From Nantes the frost with its brass. It's the cold of winter.

Parish of year sixty. Oh periphery of peace
Women laid down like an oil lamp in the silence
Gather in that case there all your children. Take them away
Towards the good Lord and let us not be separated.
Ask him if it's well tomorrow that the paymaster is passing
And when is the street finally going to be tarred. You are cold.

You turn the radio off. You go upstairs carefully
Toward a place that I have prepared for you in my memory
And that has detached from me to live, like a song
Where you are fine because we won't be separated.

Léo Ferré - Aragon - Blues

Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1961

We stay up, we think about everything, about nothing
We write verses, prose
We have to fiddle something about
while waiting for the day that is coming

The mist when the morning breaks
Takes away from the windows their breath
It was like that when Verlaine
Here slowly passed away

Several are dead, several alive
We do not all have the same cards
Before the other I have to go
Them out I remained dreaming
Not everybody is Cézanne
We will content ourselves with little
We cry and we laugh as we can
In that herbal tea universe

"Young man what do you fear
You will grow old somehow"
Was saying the shadow on the high wall
Painted by a Breughel of fairground
We stay up, we think about everything, about nothing
We write verses, prose
We have to fiddle something about
while waiting for the day that is coming
We stay up, we think about everything, about nothing
We write verses, prose
We have to fiddle something about
while waiting for the day that is coming

All poems written by Louis Aragon

Catherine Le Forestier - In the country of your body

Original Title: "Au pays de ton corps"
Year: 1971

La la la...

I know a country, it looks like a garden
I can live there naked without ever being cold
When I close the eyes, I find there under my fingers
All the paths
I have the bottom of your eyes to look for gold
The colour of your skin to read the seasons
The hollow of your shoulder as horizon line
And all around me your arms are making the decor
At the country of your body
At the country of your body
At the country of your body

La la la...

I have seen marvels there and biggest mysteries
Than summer in december or snow in may
It seems to me that more I know it
more I get lost into it
And if it measures barely one meter eighty
I make there a longer way with a single kiss
Than do, in the sky, men and their rockets
It's a country where one travels with the hands
The country of your body
The country of your body
The country of your body

La la la...

I know a country, it looks like a garden
I can live there naked without ever being cold
When I close the eyes, I find there under my fingers
All the paths
I have the bottom of your eyes to look for gold
The colour of your skin to read the seasons
The hollow of your shoulder as horizon line
When lazily I roll up and fall asleep

At the country of your body
At the country of your body
At the country of your body

Dominique A - Nanortalik

Year: 2009

I would like to be anywhere, Nanortalik
In other lands anywhere, Nanortalik
Kissing other musics
Polishing other retorts
Lied down, standing up early morning
The aquatic gold has gone back up
Some boats unload silvered
Millions of scales reddened
Thousands of empty eyes
That are staring at me and that tell me
But what are you waiting for?
Charge toward the unknown, Nanortalik

Aurora borealis help us, Nanortalik
To go round the cape of the swirls, Nanortalik
White mermaids let's meet again
On a ferry-boat of the Baltic
In bed, standing up then let's go toward Nanortalik
Nanortalik

Live version:

Charles Aznavour - Stay

Original Title: "Reste"
Year: 1965

Stay
Stay some more
With me
Over my body
In my arms
Embraced
Out of breath
Assuaged
Dazed
Stay in the warmth
Languid
In the enclosure
Of the night.
Over my heart
Without modesty
Passionate
Almost naked
Stay like that
Hungry for more
Over my life
Between my hands
Hair in a mess
possessed
stretched out
relaxed
Stay there
Without a word
On your joy
Over my skin
In hope
In the dark
Up to the morning
My love

Jean Ferrat - Louis Aragon - It's always the first time

Original Title: "C'est toujours la première fois"
Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1965

At last, at last I find you back
You who had never been
Anything else but absent like a young she-wolf
Or the sleeping water at the bottom of the moats
Escaping under the sun of summer

You can open your arms a hundred times for me
It's always the first time

Absent like a souvereign
Who is seen passing between two hedges
Oh you so close and so distant
As soon as love spins its wool
Between our out of tune fingers

You can open your arms a hundred times for me
It's always the first time

The hunger of you which is devouring me
Makes me bend knees and arms
I would not have enough amphorae
Nor words again and again
To give birth to an end for it

You can open your arms a hundred times for me
It's always the first time

The thirst of you by which I tremble
My lip forever parched
My love what do you think of it
Is it of living or not together
That will be able to quench my thirst of it

You can open your arms a hundred times for me
It's always the first time

Love of you by which I exist
Has no other reality
I am nothing else but a name on your list
A step on the floor that the wind
erases before it existed

You can open your arms a hundred times for me
It's always the first time

You can open your arms a hundred times for me
It's always the first time

Live version:

All poems written by Louis Aragon

Barbara - Nantes

Year: 1964

It's raining over Nantes
Give me your hand
The sky of Nantes
Makes my heart despondent

A morning like that one
Barely one year ago already
The city had that pallid colouring
When I went out of the station
Nantes was then unknown to me
I had never been there
That message had been needed
For me to do that trip:

"Madam, be at the rendez-vous
Twenty five Grange-au-Loup² street
Be quick, there is little hope
He asked to see you."
At the time of his last hour
After many years of wandering
He came back to me right in the heart
His cry pierced the silence
Since he had gone away
For a long time, I had hoped for him
That vagabond, that missing person
Here he was back to me

Twenty five Grange-au-Loup street
I remember the rendez-vous
And I engraved in my memory
That bedroom at the end of a corridor

Sitting near a fireplace
I saw four men standing up
The light was cold and white
They were wearing Sunday clothes
I didn't ask any question
To those peculiar companions
I said nothing, but from their gazes
I understood that it was too late

Yet I was at the rendez-vous
³ Twenty five Grange-au-Loup street
But he never saw me again
He had already disapeared

There, you know the story
He came back one evening
And it was his last trip
And it was his last shore
He wanted before dieing
To warm himself up with my smile
But he died that same night
Without a farewell, without an "I love you"

At the path that borders the sea
Lying in the garden of stones
I want that tranquil he rests
I layed him down beneath the roses
My father, my father

It's raining over Nantes
And I remember
The sky of Nantes
Makes my heart despondent

²"Barn of the wolves" is the litteral translation of the street name
³ The "live" version above is slight different here: "Twenty five Grange-au-Loup street
He wasn't at the rendez-vous anymore
He had died that same night
Without a farewell, without an "I love you"

There, you know the story
Of the man who came from nowhere
And who came back like a wreck
From the end of his last trip
Of the vagabond, the badly loved
Who when remiscing the past
wanted before falling asleep
To warm himself up from my smile

Other versions:

Sung by Actor G. Depardieu

René-Louis Lafforgue - Christmas at sea

Original Title: "Noël en mer"
Year: 1956

Christmas at sea, on a boat
that is being worn out by the wave and the squall of winter
Christmas at sea

They are going away beyond the winds
Those sailors of the end of December
Looking at the bottom of the oceans
for what to fill their vessel
Their hands gnawed by the cold
The faces larded with salt
The fate makes them quite an hard life
And though, tonight it's Christmas

Christmas at sea, on a boat
that is being worn out by the wave and the squall of winter
Christmas at sea

They work while keeping quiet
Dreaming that in this day of December
They always have their white Christmas
Back home where everything waits for them
There Where ground is firm and safe
Over there, at the other end of the sky
They imagine their hovels
Flourished by the Christmas tree

Christmas at sea, on a boat
that is being worn out by the wave and the squall of winter
Christmas at sea

If destiny has some common sense
If it has two ounces of kindness
Let it make sure that for tomorrow
the fishing to be like a leaven
That the wind hits the sails
Bringing back like a rainbow
Those sailors to the port, without wounds
So they may taste Christmas

Christmas at sea, on a boat
that is being worn out by the wave and the squall of winter
Christmas at sea

Dominique A - A few lights

Original Title: “Quelques lumières”
Year: 2012

Makeshift houses
If I have to I will live there

A few moonstones
I'll be content with

Emergency kisses
I will look for them

From love hangovers
I'll recover

I am not asking for the light
Just a few lights
bordering the side of the river
Up to the street that nothing lights up

From insane fever
If I have to, I will come out

From weary lips
I will tear myself from

I am not asking for the light
Just a few lights
bordering the side of the river
Up to the street that nothing lights up

Darkness is making a sign to me
It finds me perfect
In the day drawing to a close
It likes me

I am not asking for the light
Just a few lights
bordering the side of the river
Up to the street that nothing lights up