The Jimmy translation project

Unless I can think of a better way, participation in this project will be via an 'e-group' mailing list. (You are probably already familiar with these - Manu and Yoyo's Starmania mailing list is one example. You can opt either to receive e-mails from all participants, or to view the list archive online, or both). There is also a 'message board' for quick thoughts and comments.

How to obtain the lyrics (in French):

• Buy the Cherche Midi editeur book. (Complete lyrics from Modador production).
• Buy the album/cd. No printed lyrics, unfortunately, but you can at least listen to them. Only the 'studio' tracks are included, not the whole show.
• Obtain a tape recording of the whole show. A bit illegal, this, and in any case I don't know of one. Do you? Its probably best if all blatantly copyright-infringing activities like this are conducted by private e-mails between participants. If you have any recordings, transcriptions or cast songsheets, please let us know.

How to obtain the lyrics (in English):

Do you have to be bi-lingual?

The problems

Il avait hérité de la beauté, la beauté du diable

Its not difficult to translate that literally:

He has inherited the beauty, the beauty of the devil

So what's wrong with that? Everything!

1. What does it mean? The devil isn't beautiful, is he? And 'inherited' means 'passed down from generation to generation'. So Jimmy is the devil's son?? There clearly a Faustian connotation intended (or is there? Is the Faust reference as explicit in French as it is in English?) - Jimmy has made some sort of pact with the devil; beauty in exchange for ... what? It becomes clear later when 'Mephisto' reveals that the deal involves Jimmy having only 5 years to live. But again, is this just my interpretation of the lyrics in English? Is something elese entirely different implied in the French?

   These comments from Pascale are enlightening:
   "In French, when we say about someone that he has La beauté du diable, it means that he is very beautiful, a perfect fine, with something frightening in the eyes. (Garbo is a good exemple). A real beauty, but with a big mystery, someone wilde and secret, cold, thrilling. Someone who will be able to go further than his limits, further than his fate, a kind of bulldozer, conscient of his power of seduction. This power of seduction is his only strength"

   So La beauté du diable is just an idiom - nothing to do with the devil at all? La Légende de Jimmy is full of idioms, and a literal translation is not only likely to miss these, but might also lead us down the wrong track entirely.

2. It leads to the ludicrously contradictory line later:
   En cadeau du ciel (de la beauté) / from the Lord (the beauty)
   La beauté du diable / the devil's beauty

   So the beauty of the devil is a gift from the Lord???? Pascale again:
   "It's a play-on-words because of a movie "la beauté du diable" (I don't know the original title in English, I don't know who made it and who plays, and I never saw it).Of course, beauty cannot be given both by God and Satan."

   So En cadeau du ciel is another idiom (nothing to do with the Lord), and La beauté du diable is a movie title which may be familiar to French people??

3. It doesn't scan. I haven't yet worked out a way of representing stress pattens, but, to keep it simple, lets just say there are too many syllables in the English translation, and the emphasis falls in all the wrong places.

4. Its not very 'poetic'. Highly subjective area this, obviously, but He has inherited the beauty of the devil just sounds like a dull bit of prose in English, and has lost all emotion and feeling.

5. 'Beauty' is a rather controversial word to apply to a male in English. From Ros: (actually talking about the line 'Il est beau comme le soleil' in Notre Dame de Paris, but on the subject of male beauty):
   "Perhaps Jennings felt a man should not be called beautiful (in English it usually relates to women) but women sometimes call a strikingly handsome man beautiful, and this song is sung by a woman....
   I did imagine most men would object but as I did say, it's a woman singing and that's quite possibly what she'd say. However, handsome would do well enough although it doesn't have quite the same empahsis."

6. What has happened to the assonance; herité... beauté? French is full of assonance with é sounds everywhere, which is one of the reasons why French seems to lend itself to romantic ballads and chansons. Or at least, that is how English listeners hear the French language. But is it important to the French? Do we need to retain the assonance?

7. Rhyme. I picked a line which doesn't have a rhyme, but obviously rhyme is going to be one of the biggest difficulties in producing a translation. Do we want to:
   retain the original rhyme scheme?
   put rhymes in as and when we can?
   dispense with rhymes?
   adopt a completely different rhyme scheme?

What next?

Become a full member of the project team (An 'egroups' mailing list. You can also upload/download files, pictures etc.)

Or

Add a comment or two to the message board (if you just have one or two ideas to share)

Important Note: This project is entirely unofficial, and does not have any endorsement from Luc Plamondon, the estate of Michel Berger (France Gall), the publishers or, for that matter, anyone!

Important copyright notice: It isn't the intention of this project to infringe anyone's intellectual property rights. All passages from La Légende de Jimmy (or other published work) quoted or distributed via this project, are solely for the purpose of critical and analytical study. All submissions to this project (i.e. your translations) shall be deemed to be free from copyright restrictions, or rather shall be deemed to be the common property of 'the project' (whoever that is). (You'll gather from the wooliness of this notice that I am not a lawyer!)