Jacques Douai - André Maurois - The birds and the dreams

Original Title: "Les oiseaux et les rêves"
Text: André Maurois
Music: Henri Salvador
Year: 1952

Birds and dreams
Are for those who can take them
Birds and dreams
Are for those who can wait

And you pursue them
The birds and the dreams
If you pursue them
Take off straight away

Wait for them to land
While looking elsewhere
Wait for them to land
With a mocking look

Then when they curl up
At the hollow of your hand
Then when they curl up
Then hold them tight

When love shows up
It scares the beauties
When love shows up
They are more cruel

Wait for them to come
While looking elsewhere
Wait for them to come
With a mocking look

Birds and dreams
Are for those who can take them
Birds and dreams
Are for those who can wait

Henri Salvador's version:

Edith Piaf - Life in Pink

Original Title: "La vie en rose"
Piaf herself sang the song in English here of course the words had been adapted for that version so here is a word to word translation of the french version:
Year: 1945

Eyes that makes mine lower
A laugh getting lost on his mouth
Here is the portrait without alteration
Of the man I belong to

When he takes me in his arms
He talks to me in a low voice
I see life in pink

He tells me love words
Words of the everyday
And it has an effect on me

He entered in my heart
There are no happiness
Of which I know the cause
It's him for me
Me for him in life
He told me, swore to me, "For life"

And as soon as I catch sight of him
Then I feel inside of me
My beating heart

Never-ending love nights
A big happiness settling in
Some troubles, sorrows fade
Happy, happy to die of it

When he takes me in his arms
He talks to me in a low voice
I see life in pink

He tells me love words
Words of the everyday
And it has an effect on me

He entered in my heart
There are no happiness
Of which I know the cause
It's him for me
Me for him in life
He told me, swore to me, "For life"

And as soon as I catch sight of him
Then I feel inside of me
My beating heart

Jean Ferrat - Louis Aragon - The fires of Paris

Original Title: "Les feux de Paris"
Text: Louis Aragon

Year: 1994

Always when to the obscene mornings
Between the legs of the Seine
Like a drowned woman with crazy eyes
From the mist of your poems
The Saint-Louis Island is rising pallid
Baudelaire I think of you

When I learned to see things
Oh slowliness of the metamorphosis
It's your Paris I saw
It was required for Paris to change
Like the oranges turn blue
The whole length of my life

But to seek those adventures
The city threw its belt away
of walls of herbs and of wind
She painted her landscape
Like a girl does of her face
To seduce a new lover

Nothing is at the same place no more
And the water of the Wallace fountains
Cries after the merchants of wafers
Who were shouting Pleasure Ladies
When the pianos were practising scales
In the lounges for outfits

Where are the big tapestry makers
The reed pipes in the dust
Where are the weddings in songs
Where are the mules of Réjane
One does not go on donkey's back
To have lunch in the grass at Robinson's

What good can it do to you
One does not choose his hell
Backward what's the point to search
That the past consumes itself without you
It's here that your fate lights up
One does not choose his bonfire

With your steps the clouds move
Go away in the street with the red eye
The world bleeds in front of you
You walk in a barbarian day
The present time is burning in the Snackbars
Its purple dawn is on the roofs

To hell with the lunar beauty
And the millenial darkness
Spotlight on the Champs-Elysées
Here is the new carnival
Where electricity gives a facelift to
The edifices set ablaze

Spotlight on the man and on the woman
On the Louvre and on Notre-Dame
From the Sacré-Coeur to the Panthéon
Spotlight from the Concorde to the Ternes
Spotlight on the modern universe
Spotlight on our soul with neon

Spotlight on the darkness of the dreams
Spotlight on the arts of lies
Burn perpetual summer
Burn of our human flame
And that everywhere our hands bring back
The sun of the truth.

all poems written by Louis Aragon

Jacques Brel - Sorry's

Original Title: "Pardons"
Year: 1957

Sorry for that girl
We made cry
Sorry for that gaze
That we leave laughing

Sorry for that face
That a tear changed
Sorry for those houses
Where someone waits for us

And then for all those words
Which we call love words
And that we use
By way of currency
For all those oaths
Which died at daybreak
Sorry for the never's
Sorry for the always's

Sorry for the hamlet
Which never sing
Sorry for the villages
Which have been forgotten

And sorry for the cities
Where noone know one another
Sorry for the countries
Made of non-commissioned officers

Sorry to be of those
Who do not care about anything
And for not having
tried everyday

And then sorry still
And then sorry most of all
For never knowing
Who has to forgive us

Marianne Oswald - Jacques Prévert - Children hunting

Original Title: "La chasse à l'enfant"
Text: Jacques Prévert (1934)
Music: Joseph Kosma
Year: 1936

Bandit! Rascal! Thief! Scoundrel!

Above the island, birds can be seen
All around the island there is water

Bandit! Rascal! Thief! Scoundrel!
What are those howls
Bandit! Rascal! Thief! Scoundrel!
It's the pack of honest people
That is hunting children down

He said "I am done with the reformatory"
And the wardens had broken his teeth using their keys
And then had let him lying down on the cement

Bandit! Rascal! Thief! Scoundrel!
Now he ran away
And like a hunted beast
He gallops in the night
And all gallop after him
The gendarmes, the tourists, the person of private means, the artists

Bandit! Rascal! Thief! Scoundrel!

It's the pack of honest people
That is hunting children down

To hunt children down, no need of a permit
All the decent people got down to it
What is swimming in the night?
What are those flashes those noises?
It's a child who is running away
He is being shot at with a rifle

Bandit! Rascal! Thief! Scoundrel!

All those men on the shore
Are empty-handed and purple* with rage

Bandit! Rascal! Thief! Scoundrel!

Will you get back to the continent?

Above the island, birds can be seen
All around the island there is water

* green with rage in french

Live but not complete:

Prévert et Marianne Oswald:Chasse à l'enfant sur wat.tv

Léo Ferré - Verlaine - Setting suns

Original Title: "Soleils couchants"
Year: 1964

A weakened dawn
Scatters onto the fields
The melancholy
Of the setting suns

The melancholy
Rocks of a sweet song
My heart which forgets itself
To the setting suns

And peculiar dreams
Like suns
Setting, on the strands,
Vermilion ghosts,

Parade relentlessly
Parade, alike
To big suns
Setting on the strands.

Another version:

Gribouille - Ostend

Original Title: "Ostende"
Year: 1968

If I knew how to speak about Ostende
Me, I'd give her your name
I would tell to whom wants to hear it
That you deserve a song

Ostende, you made it so pretty to me
Noone ever changed Paris for me
And of wave's memory
If one has to believe the waves
And of seaweed's memory
If one has to believe the seaweeds.

There hasn't been before
Lovers as beautiful as us
Even so that Tristan
Was sleeping at our knees

If I knew how to speak about Ostende
I'd ask her forgiveness
Because I swear to whom wants to hear it
That it always bore your name

Ostende which was making her ships silent
I know, it was to better hear your laugh
And we were standing
Without knowing that it was raining
While drinking that thunderstorm
Oh God, how I loved you!

The words you told me
Are not those that one writes down
Feathers and poets
Are quiet sometimes

If I knew how to speak about Ostende
I would not say anything about the sea
But I'd say to whom wants to hear it
That love gives you green eyes

I do not know how to talk about Ostende
I can only make a song
You only will be able to understand
That all along, I have said your name