Jacques Bertin - The drowned ones

Original Title: "Les noyés"
Year: 1982

What have we done? What could we do?
The world went by in front of us
Like going to the sea, the river
What have we done? What could we have done?
- O make me undergo that trial
To the destiny I oppose passion
And my twenty years in the course of things.
Twenty years already, I couldn't do anything.

It's true nevertheless I saw you
In the water up to the knees yet
moving forward against the current
While shouts were coming from the bank
"Take care the sand is shifting
Every faith is a drift"
Thousands of silver fishes
were paying a naïve court to you

The river lies, the river goes
It has its deep moves.
Limp lip to the wind of songs
One thinks bathing in it, one drowns in it
The drowned one thinks, going in the waters,
he is ruling the current, the world
Carry the man and the man learns
to be the wreck of time

The long stay in the water
ate his eyes, made a face,
You are already not as beautiful anymore
You are old. Are we old?
We believed in hope
We were going huge
Like to the beautiful destiny
Where were shining unthought suns

Suns, farewell! We are old
We are alike to our folks
Exhausted, defeated, we are done
What could have we done? What have we done?
Let's remember while going in the waters
with our eaten faces
That we will rule over the world
Lenient as drowned men.

Suns and you my hopes
Thank you for that slow procession
from the furthest of my childhood
That is taking me away toward the ocean
Those who remained on the bank
Dead trees motionless to the wind
Creaking in the eternities
Are they seeing the blue sky of the drowned?

That madness that frees us!

Graeme Allwright - Leonard Cohen - Stranger Song

French Title: "L'étranger"
Text: Leonard Cohen
Year: 1975
Graeme Allwright adapted the song of Leonard Cohen: Stranger Song (1967).
The lyrics are very close.

slightly modified translation from : http://les-paroles-de-chansons.com/chanson/montrer/636508/graeme-allwright/paroles-et-traduction-de-chanson-ltranger/

All the men you have known
Told you they did not want anymore
To give the cards, caught like in a trap.
It's hard to hold back the hand
Of a man who seeks further
And who wants to reach the sky to open up
And who wants to reach the sky to open up

Then picking up the cards
That stayed there on the table
You know he left you very little,
not even his laugh
Like all players he sought
The card that is so delusional
That he will never need another anymore
That he will never need another anymore

One day, leaning out of your window
He will tell you he wants to be reborn
To the world that your tenderness is hiding to him
And taking from his wallet
An old train schedule, he says:
I warned you: I am a stranger
I warned you: I am a stranger

Now another stranger
Seems to want you to ignore his dreams
As though they were the burden of someone else
You have seen this man already
Giving the cards with his golden arm
But now you see his hand is frozen
Yes now you see his hand is frozen

But you do not like to look at
Another tired man
lay down all his cards like a defeat.
While he is dreaming himself to sleep
In the shadow you see like a smoke
A road that goes up behind his head
A road that goes up behind his head

You tell him to come in and to sit
And when you turn around you see
That your bedroom door remains open.
And when you take his hand, he says:
Do not be afraid my tender friend
This is not me anymore, oh my love, the stranger
This is not me anymore, oh my love, the stranger

I waited always certain
To see you again between the trains
Soon another one will have to be boarded
Oh I never had you know
any secret plan
Nor anyone to drive me
And you wonder what he is looking to say
Yes you wonder what he means

Down the riverside tomorrow
I'll wait for you if you don't mind
There, near the bridge they are building
Then leaves the quay for a sleeper
You know he seeks another shelter
That he never has been a stranger
That he never has been a stranger

And you say: okay, at the bridge or elsewhere, I will come

Then picking up the cards
that stayed there on the table
You know that he left you very little
not even his laugh
Like all players he sought
The card that is so delusional
That he will never need another
That he will never need another

One day, leaning out of your window
He will tell you he wants to be reborn
To the world that your tenderness is hiding to him
And taking from his wallet
An old train schedule, he says:
I warned you: I am a stranger
I warned you: I am a stranger ...

Dominique A - For the skin

Original Title : "Pour la peau"
Year: 2001

As you managed to wait.
The way you spoke to her
And as she resisted you
She wanted to defend herself
And it was almost beautiful
To see you both, almost beautiful
Your infinite patience
Her "no", "yes", "not here.
One day it happened
She wanted in your room
And everything went fine
And everything was very tender
But after, as always
It made you feel all peculiar
She washed herself quickly
You knew well how it's but...

What wouldn't you do for the skin?
What wouldn't you do for the skin?

Your blood went hot at once
You feel it run
Carry you anywhere
Make you do a bit of everything, unbridled
There, you are in your bed
And the girl is pretty
And after, you talk
And you say "I have someone";
You sleep under other sheets
For a long time already
That's why you are here
With your blood that sleeps
Under your hands, under your skin;
You blood peaceful finally
Peaceful, him at least

What wouldn't you do for the skin?
What wouldn't you do for the skin?

Léo Ferré - Verlaine - My familiar dream

Original title: "Mon rêve familier"
Text: Paul Verlaine
Year: 1964

I often make that strange and penetrating dream
Of an unknown woman and whom I love and who loves me
And who is, everytime, not entirely the same
Nor quite another and who loves me and understands me

Because she understands me and my heart transparent
For her alone, alas!, stops being a problem.
For her alone, and the sweatiness of my pallid forehead
She only knows how to refresh them while crying.

Is she brown haired, blond or redhaired? I don't know.
Her name? I remember it's sweet and resonant,
Like the ones of the loved ones who have been exiled by life.

Her gaze is alike to the gaze of the statues
And, for her voice, distant, and calm, and deep, it has
the inflexion of the dearest voices who went silent.

Julos Beaucarne's version:

Jean Ferrat - Aragon - I hear, I hear

Original title: "J'entends J'entends"
Text: Louis Aragon

Year: 1961

I have seen so many people who went away
They were only asking for fire
They were content with so little
They had so little anger

I hear their steps, I hear their voices
Which tell banal things
Like one could read in the newspapers
Like one could tell in the evening at home

What is being done of you men and women
Oh tender stone, worn out early
And your broken appearances
Looking at you tears my soul off

Things go like they go
Time to time earth shakes
Misfortune ressembles to misfortune
It's deep, deep, deep

You would like to believe in the blue sky
I know that feeling
I believe in it myself sometimes
Like the lark does in the mirror

I believe in it sometimes, I confess
Up to not believing my own ears
Ah, I am indeed your equal
Ah, I am indeed the same as you

As you, like the grains of sand
Like the blood always shed
Like the fingers always hurt
Ah, I am indeed your fellow man

I'd have liked so much to help you
You who seem to be other myselves
But the words that I sow to the black wind
Who knows if you hear them

Everything is getting lost and nothing moves you
Nor my words nor my hands
And you go on your way
Without knowing what my mouth says

Your hell is nevertheless mine
We live under the same rule
And when you bleed, I bleed
And I die in your same bonds

What time is it, how is the weather
however I'd have liked so much
to win for you, losing for me
Having been useful maybe

It's a modest and crazy dream
It'd have been better to keep it quiet
You will bury me with it
Like a star at the bottom of a hole

Cora Vaucaire's version:


All poems written by Louis Aragon

Jacques Brel - The F...

Original Title: "Les F..."
Year: 1977

The Flemish nationalists! comical song

Misters the Flemish nationalists
I have two words to laugh at you.
It has been too long
that you are making me fry
Blowing up your own ass
To become busses.
Here you are acrobats
But really nothing more.

Nazis during the wars
Catholics in between.
You oscillate endlessly
From the rifle to the missal.
Your gazes are distant
Your humor is drained
Even though there are streets in Ghent
That piss in both languages.
You see when I think about you
I like that nothing gets lost
Mister the Flemish Nationalists:
Fuck you.

You make Flanders dirty
But Flanders is judging you
See the North Sea
She ran away from Bruges.
Stop getting on
my old balls
With your Flemish Italo-spanish art
You are so so
much heavy
so that during evening of storms
some Educated chinese people
Ask me where I am from.
I answer, tired
and tears to the teeth
"Ik ben van Luxembourg"*

And if to young ladies
you dare singing a flemish song
They fly away while dreaming
to the rose and white birds.

And I forbid you
To hope that ever in London
Under the rain one could
believe you are English.
And I forbid you
In New York or Milano
To eructate, my lords
in any other way than in flemish.
You won't look dumb
Really not dumb at all.

And I forbid myself
To say that I don't care.
And I forbid you
To force our children
Who never bothered you
To bark in flemish.
And if my brothers remain silent
Too bad for them girls.
I sing, persist and sign:
My name is Jacques Brel

* "I am from Luxembourg" in Flemish

Jean Ferrat - Aragon - One day, one day

Original Title: "Un jour, un jour"
Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1967
Song about the execution of Federico García Lorca during the Spanish civil war.

Everything big and magnificent man has been,
His protest, his songs and his heroes,
Above that body and against his executioners,
In Granada, today, appears suddenly in front of the crime.

And that absent mouth and Lorca who went quiet
Filling suddenly the universe up with silence
Against the violent ones violence turns
God the roar that makes a murdered poet

One day, yet, one day will come orange colored
One day of palm, one day of foliages at the forehead
One day of bare shoulder where people will love one another
One day like a bird on the highest branch

Ah I despaired of my wild brothers
I saw, I saw the future on its knees
The triumphant Beast and the stone over us
And the fire of the soldiers brought upon our shores

What? Always it would be, through atrocious trade,
a neverending sharing that they make of the earth
Among those assassins feared by the panthers
And who made a dagger tremble when their hand touched it

One day, yet, one day will come orange colored
One day of palm, one day of foliages at the forehead
One day of bare shoulder where people will love one another
One day like a bird on the highest branch

What? It would always be the war, the quarrel,
Manners of Kings, and prostrated foreheads
And the woman's child uselessly born
Always the shredded weath of the grasshoppers

What? The penal colonies always and the flesh under the wheel
The slaughter always, justified by idols.
To the corpses thrown that coat of words.
The gag for the mouth and for the hand the nail.

One day, yet, one day will come orange colored
One day of palm, one day of foliages at the forehead
One day of bare shoulder where people will love one another
One day like a bird on the highest branch

All poems written by Louis Aragon