Friday, May 16, 2008

Le festin est sur mon chemin




Les rêves des amoureux sont comm’(e) le bon vin
Ils donn(ent) de la joie ou bien du chagrin
Affaibli par la faim je suis malheureux
Volant en chemin tout ce que je peux
Car rien n’est gratuit dans la vie

L’espoir est un plat bien trop vite consommé
A sauter les repas je suis habitué
Un voleur solitaire est triste à nourrir
A un jeu si amer je n’peux réussir
Car rien n’est gratuit dans…

La vie… Jamais on ne me dira
Que la course aux étoiles; ça n’est pas pour moi
Laissez moi vous émerveiller et prendre mon en vol
Nous allons en fin nous régaler

La fêt(e) va enfin commencer
Sortez les bouteilles; finis les ennuis
Je dresse la table, de ma nouvell(e) vie
Je suis heureux à l’idée de ce nouveau destin
Une vie à me cacher et puis libre enfin
Le festin est sur mon chemin

Une vie à me cacher et puis libre enfin
Le festin est sur mon chemin

(English Translation)

Dreams are to lovers as wine is to friends
Carried through lifetimes, (and) spilled now and then
I am driven by hunger, so saddened to be
Thieving in darkness; I know you’re not pleased
But nothing worth eating is free

My hope is a banquet impatiently downed
Impossibly full, now I’ll probably drown
Many thieves’ lives are lonely with one mouth to feed
If giving means taking, I’ll never succeed
For nothing worth stealing is…

Free at last; won’t be undersold
Surviving isn’t living; won’t eat what I’m told
Let me free, I’ll astonish you; I’m planning to fly
I won’t let this party just pass me by

The banquet is now underway, so…
Bring out the bottles; a new tale has spun
In clearing this table, my new life’s begun
I am nervous, excited; (oh) just read the marquee!
A lifetime of hiding; I’m suddenly free!
My dinner is waiting for me

A lifetime of hiding; I’m suddenly free!
My dinner is waiting for me


(Thanks to the kind people of stlyrics.com for the lyrics and the delightful translation).

French is rather hard to sing; I thought I’d give it a try but pronouncing malheureux damned near sprained my tongue, so I gave up and wondered if there ever was a chance for me to say Je T’aime to someone, I would simply just mispronounce it into Jet Amy.


French; ze language of love. Paris, ze grande ville of amour. 5 years ago I was one of the three people, namely my mother and father and I, who wondered aloud as to why my brother scoured the bottom of his piggy-bank to purchase an English-French-English dictionary (pocket sized, by Oxford). This was shortly after he bought an English-Japanese-English dictionary, and we thought he was on the verge of becoming a prodigious 17 year-old who will inevitably master command of 7 languages and will be one of those people who can rescue distressed Spanish ladies asking for directions in Kuala Lumpur*.

(*It remains without doubt as one of the coolest things one person can possibly do. Being able to do so will increase your cool level notches higher. This, somehow, does not seem to work with Hakka and Sing-lish. No offence. It’s personal observation and analysis).


Till now, the reason for the French dictionary now sitting on the top of my writing table (mostly seen wedged between the Japanese dictionary and the Federal Constitution when my mother saw fit to tidy it, collecting dust lightly along the top and proudly giving people the assumption that I could speak some French, which I really don’t) still eludes us, and my brother would simply claim “I don't really know” whenever I asked.


I concluded that my brother had, among the many individuals out there immersed by the way Gomez Addams would go nuts when Morticia used French (“Ah cherie! You spoke French!”) and knowing that girls sorta reacts the same way on a vice versa scenario, thought he would benefit from the additional few vocabulary in French.


Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, but the dictionary now stands gloomy and very much unused, aside from the occasions in which I saw need to know how something sounded in French (now Babelfish took over, but I still flip the book sometimes).


But French; the language and all of its articulated properties; why is it so captivating, so alluring and enticing, to be deemed as ze language of love? Is it the way it is pronounced? Does saying voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir sound more appealing than saying “You, me, bed, tonight”? Or is it the enigma of it; the mystery both heightened by its often difficult-to-fathom pronunciation and the opposites lesser knowledge upon the language (“Vous gros et paresseux re comme un porc” said Andy under the perfect cerulean skies, and Lisa sighed and said, “yes, I do.”)? Or is it stereotyping to a profoundly huge level, that French, regardless of anything, IS the language of love, brought as the gospel truth by movies and stories?


Alas, I do not know. Perhaps I with some sort of miraculous brilliance I would have studied upon it. But I would tell you that French is, undoubtedly, beautiful, but it is the sort of beauty that lies in every language spoken in the pleasure of passion and purpose. Latin, Italian, Japanese, even Hakka, all have this quality that transcends the need to understand the meaning. Think of it as orchestral music, and the melodious harmony it sprung, like rivers of abstract stories and emotions, when played right and passionately, and you don’t even need to know what makes that sound like clams dropped on one another.


(I would like to state here my believe that the most beautiful way a language could’ve been spoken, in the fashion of utter passion and desire, is the flustered ramblings of an Italian lady discovering the activities her husband did sub rosa.)


* * * * * * *


I think I’ll have to apologise for this, even if you won’t likely have read it. I think I can safely say that I am bored out of my skins.


It’s pretty annoying when in a situation where one is torn between writing for the class blog, as promised to a fellow classmate to which he replied with a Thanks, and feeling like ditching everything to play Chrono Cross. I’m not obliged to write apart from being obliged to write as some sort of practise, this being a responsibility to myself for aspiring to be a writer while not being a good one. But I would try to write and end up something nonsensical, or fiction at the closest best. Fiction which I would not think suitable to post in a class blog once deemed political blog but really a journalistic blog.


And currently the only things journalistic to me are reviews and some feature on some stupid something which significance to the world is close to zero. I feel my abilities being limited here (It’s like Spider-man in space, and webbing is useless there, man.).


Well, nothing worth eating is free.

1 comments:

vic said...

here's a belated welcome back!
and "advice" to go continue rambling on said class blog after chrono crossing under pretext of reviewing the joys of chrono cross during boredom.

don't mind me. i'm almost about as bored, i guess. just not enough for a full fledged post. xP jaa~!