Lyrics in French & approximate translation below... does it make any sense? Only a little, but I love it.
De la belle et la bête je suis les deux
Mon antre est une vaste comédie
Je suis seule malgré l'ombre de vos yeux
Le silence attire ma folie
Cendrillon j'ai rayé ta citrouille
Avec l'aiguille de ton talon dodu
Comment être vraie quand on me souille?
Mon pied nacré a besoin d'être nu
J'ai donné mon corps au diable
Enfin j'ai sauvé mon âme
Je m'enfuis de la fable
Je ne ressens pas de blâmes
Le vilain meurt, reste le beau
C'est ma vie de château
J'ai fini par tout perdre et tout gagner
Ne me jugez pas, apprenez moi
Je suis entière, je suis hantée
Ne me regardez pas, vivez moi
Moi je suis la petite princesse, fière
Sans parures et sans couronnes
J'ai vu le serpent, la faiblesse
C'est toute nue que je me donne
J'ai donné mon corps au diable
Enfin j'ai sauvé mon âme
Je m'enfuis de la fable
Je ne ressens pas de blâmes
Le vilain meurt, reste le beau
C'est ma vie de château
Je me fou de ce que l'on raconte
Ma vie est là si cela vous chante
Je suis sortie, grandie de ce conte,
Moi je ris, je bondis et je chante.
A Little Fable
Of beauty and the beast, I am both.
I reside in a vast comedy,
Alone, but for the shade of your eyes,
And the silence brings out my folly.
Cinderella, I've done away with your pumpkin
With the spike of your buxom heel.
How to be true when I am maligned?
My mother-of-pearl foot needs to be bare.
I gave my body to the devil,
In the end, I saved my soul,
I am running away from the fable,
I do not feel to blame,
The villain dies, the handsome prince remains.
This is my life in a fairytale castle.
I finished by losing everything and winning everything.
Do not judge me, learn about me.
I am whole, I am haunted.
Do not look at me, live me.
I am the little princess, proud,
Without finery and without garlands.
I saw the serpent, the weakness,
And it is in nakedness that I give myself.
I gave my body to the devil,
In the end, I saved my soul,
I am running away from the fable,
I do not feel to blame,
The villain dies, the handsome prince remains.
This is my life in a fairytale castle.
I could not care for what they say.
My life is there if it enchants you.
I have left, grown out from this tale
And I laugh and I leap and I sing.
For some reason the lyrics remind me of
'The Lord of the Dance',
here played on the harp by Mary O'Hara.
Finally, a little joke from a man of fable, the legendary mathematician Paul Erdös:
I have to come back for the video....I am most intrigued now to hear. The house is asleep and my headphones are put away, I must tippytoe, but I shall return.
ReplyDelete:^) Rose.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to know your take on the lyrics... whether they make any sense. To me it sounds like a desire to shed the outer crust of "self" into the fairytale fable, and escape naked and free and joyous and without self into a greater reality. But it sounds dangerous because of human weakness of the flesh.
Hmmm Just my take but..-both of her journeys sound like fable lives to me-- both very naive-one she just feels that is more happiness. Perhaps I am wrong The fable perhaps is the occasion of a reflection of the good and bad, the sorrow and great joy that can be had, It is not at all to be taken literally by her or us as she says "This is my life in a fairytale castle. Maybe only a hopeful greater reality to her. Perhaps she feels we would find joy in that too. But yes I do see the mention of temptation of the human flesh as a danger as you mentioned in that
ReplyDelete.
Done very well though. Never heard it before.
Thanks, Had! Perhaps we're over-analysing, but isn't it fun. :^) I hadn't seen it as two fable journeys, but now that you mention it, it is even multiple, each fable a different aspect of herself: Beauty, the beast, Cinderella, Eve (alone but for the shade of the eyes reading her fable book).
ReplyDeleteHad said: "The fable perhaps is the occasion of a reflection of the good and bad, the sorrow and great joy that can be had"
I like that. And I guess there's a sense of playing through all the roles, good and bad, and then transcending them all. Human temptation is just one of these roles now I think of it. Transcending them all, the nakedness is the vulnerability of not having a role at all, living in the soul not the body. All that you can know about her is written in her stories, but now she has risen beyond all that. Complete freedom!
Freedom, removing false illusions, riding the control of isms and expectations of one placed upon one by the circumstance of the world, unclothed from the clutches of societies expectations, dancing on the garments that we have worn, throughout our lives.
ReplyDeleteI wrote mine, before I read yours.
ReplyDelete(So I would not be 'swayed.')
ReplyDeleteI did not get the physical aspect of it, though the pull of the physical is strong, I'd say she escaped from the physical, actually. Though the pull be strong, she ran.
ReplyDeleteOh, I'm glad of that! :^)
ReplyDeleteYes! I changed my mind about that second time round. That was just one of the "roles" she played and ran from.
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks for your interpretation, Rose!!!
ReplyDeleteFun assignment. I have one for you too. :)
ReplyDelete(oops that should have been ridding. Not riding.) (hah).
ReplyDelete:^) Turning the tables, eh? Go for it! But in a way this was my assignment too...
ReplyDeleteOh, and I like riding! It gives the image of one trying to control the elephant of mind/ego to the point when one can ride it.
Yes, I thought so too as I was re-reading it. Thought hmmm...that sounds pretty danged good, with the same spin, you put on it.
ReplyDeleteMy assignment is on my blog, 'which tv personality.'
It fits in nicely with this... *which* fable-character do you see yourself playing? Good question! I am thinking on it...
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like a blog itself. Why don't you do one :P
ReplyDeleteI know I shouldn't say this but I'm going too...........(gulp)
ReplyDeleteI don't associate running around Buck Naked as freedom......so I guess I don't personally get the physical nature of it
Bur I understand that being naked represents nothing concealed to many
Again another interesting blog
I see it as the same question as yours. Maybe something for Yahoo Answers? :^) I've been absent from there for a while.
ReplyDeleteWhen have I read or watched something and thought, wow! that character is just like me? To be honest, I don't remember ever thinking that. It's like Cyn's blog about how difficult it is to look at oneself in the mirror... what Deano calls "stalking the self".
I call it stalking the self too.
ReplyDeleteI just thought it would be 'fun to,' see a person more 'rounded' than they can type. Humanize their qualities a bit. Sometimes we can be surprised, at what they more closely identify with. For instance, Roddy, saying George Castanza. I'd of not thought that in a million years, now I think back to some of the humorous things Roddy has said, coloring that into his voice, and it makes him, all the more precious in my eyes.
(I meant naked in a figurative sense.) (I prefer clothing myself.) I am nude under my clothing. That's good enough for me.
ReplyDeleteThank you, dear Had, and please feel free to say anything!
ReplyDeleteOf course the nakedness is metaphorical but it is suggestive, of.... hmmm... casting off that which protects us and gives us warmth on the physical plane, and venturing vulnerable into the great unknown. I can see why you might not associate that with "freedom". More like insanity, lol. It reminds me of the following by the 14th century Kashmiri mystic, Lalla:
Dance, Lalla, with nothing on
but air. Sing, Lalla,
wearing the sky.
Look at this glowing day!
What clothes could be so beautiful,
or more sacred?
http://jamintoo.multiply.com/recipes/item/11/Songs_of_Lalla
When I was talking to Rose about the "physical aspect", I meant that was just one of the roles she played in her fables... of giving her body to the devil... dangerous business... which she ran from.
And finally, for some reason I'm reminded of this song:
I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black
It's hard to dance with the devil on your back
They buried my body and they thought I'd gone
But I am the dance and I still go on!"
... the dance of course representing God/Christ.
I've been searching high and low for a good version of this song. I originally heard it in a really fast version which was super-cool. But this version is very cute also...
I Danced in the Morning (performed by Mary O'Hara)
My read is the opposite..... that she has left the fairy tale (everyone's ideal of the fairy tale life) completely behind...given up/lost everything to gain everything.....
ReplyDelete"My life is there if it enchants you" but she's left and grown out of the tale.
She gave her body to the devil (others view of the devil) to save her soul and the freedom that brings.
Oh, Rose, I can absolutely see why you asked the question. It's a great question. In this online world, it's so easy to be lost in abstractness. I think it was a great idea to shed light on people's human side, the part we "connect" to. I'm still thinking, hehe. If only I could say, oh, I'm already on tv/film, I'm dot dot dot, it'd make life so much easier.
ReplyDeleteAnd finally, for some reason I'm reminded of this song:
ReplyDeleteI danced on a Friday when the sky turned black
It's hard to dance with the devil on your back
They buried my body and they thought I'd gone
But I am the dance and I still go on!"
... the dance of course representing God/Christ.
tres cool :)
That's what I thought too, I just had a different wording but the heart and soul is the same.
ReplyDeleteYes well if its hard for you to choose one, choose many. That's what I did. Are you serious? Do you joke a lot? Do you laugh much. Do you raise your eyebrows and make big eyes? Are you reserved? Shy? Outgoing.
ReplyDelete(I'm the last person on earth I guess you should tell you cannot come up with an answer to, look at the outcome!) (hah!)
Nancy, you expressed it beautifully. My first "take" was a bit "off". I think I said it clearer in my next comment in response to Had. Except I thought of the fables as her personal histories which she had played out and moved on from, as opposed to the expectations/fables of the world. Same for the world's devil. I hadn't thought of that perspective and it makes more sense. Thanks!
ReplyDelete(I agree, nancy encapsulated the message more prosely.) (I am given to making up words, but it fits).
ReplyDeleteBetween your lyrics and aspara's blog with poem from T.S. Elliott, I am enjoying a nice revisit to verse.
ReplyDeleteOk, Rose... here's a man I admire immensely. I'm nowhere like him, but he's the closest to a celebrity that I've regarded as a model. He truly is a "fable" character because in his life he wrote 1600 published articles... and I'm yet to write even one good one.
ReplyDeleteDo a blog on him, Okei, so we can learn more...
ReplyDeleteNancy, I couldn't really add anything to what's online about him...
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erdős
I never "met" him for example. But what I admired about him... well, the way he collaborated with so many people and wrote so much, over half his articles in the last 20 years of his life, the way he was constantly travelling, always on the move from one conference to the next, often sleeping through lectures and waking up at the end with some pertinent insight or way to solve the lecturer's problem, and most of all for his phrase "my mind is open", always happy to think about problems in a wide area of mathematics and try to help others towards a solution. There might be a group of mathematicians sitting in a room, each thinking about their own problem, and he would literally go from one to the next, shedding his light!!!
He had his own idiosyncratic vocabulary: he spoke of "The Book", an imaginary book in which God had written down the best and most elegant proofs for mathematical theorems. Lecturing in 1985 he said, "You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book." He himself doubted the existence of God, whom he called the "Supreme Fascist" (SF). When he saw a particularly beautiful mathematical proof he would exclaim, "This one's from The Book!". He called children "epsilons" (because in mathematics, particularly calculus, an arbitrarily small positive quantity is commonly denoted by that Greek letter (ε)); women were "bosses"; men were "slaves"; people who stopped doing math had "died"; people who physically died had "left"; alcoholic drinks were "poison"; music was "noise"; ... (Wiki)
I know-lol
ReplyDeleteVery beautiful words
ReplyDeletesome amazing statements there--I will have to read more on him
ReplyDeleteEnjoyed the blog and all of the comments and posts.Thank you for letting me visit
Oh good! I wouldn't wancha thinking I was writing from a nudist beach in Cabo!
ReplyDeleteThanks for a little background on him jamin. He sounds like a man interesting to know.
ReplyDeleteLaugh ! Witty
ReplyDeleteYes, I enjoyed all of this blog and "comments"
And the music