Poem: C’est la vie (Antoine Cassar)

[lilmoka]

A few days ago, in my intro post, I said I would share with you my favourite poetic genre: multilingual poems.

I'm deeply fascinated by this genre, I find it's a terrific way to open your mind. As Antoine Cassar said, "I believe that selecting one [language], or even two, would mean sacrificing others, and to a certain extent, I feel that making a choice would also imply a political decision. Why the fixation with one as opposed to many?"

I'm not going to talk about politics in here, it's not my cup of tea. Instead, what I have in mind is a little game. I'd like to share a poem with you, titled "C'est la vie". It contains five different languages (English, French, Italian, Maltese and Spanish).
I'd like you to find the meanings of these words, maybe asking that person you met some time ago, maybe calling your middle school teacher, maybe using what little you remember of one of these languages, and share them in comments. On Saturday I'll post the official translation for all to see.

Ready to play?

C’est la vie
by Antoine Cassar.


Run, rabbit, run, run, run, from the womb to the tomb,
de cuatro a dos a tres, del río a la mar,
play the fool, suffer school, żunżana ddur iddur,
engage-toi, perds ta foi, le regole imparar,

kul u sum, aħra u bul, chase the moon, meet your doom,
walk on ice, roll your dice, col destino danzar,
métro, boulot, dodo, titla’ x-xemx, terġa’ tqum,
decir siempre mañana y nunca mañanar,

try to fly, touch the sky, hit the stone, break a bone,
sell your soul for a loan to call those bricks your home,
fall in love, rise above, fall apart, stitch your heart,

che sarà? ça ira! plus rien de nous sera,
minn sodda għal sodda niġru tiġrija kontra l-baħħ,
sakemm tinbela’ ruħna mill-ġuf mudlam ta’ l-art.

Comments

[rebeccation]

Nice challenge! I spent part of the evening playing with translations and the form (a rhyming sonnet) of this poem. I'm trilingual, and speak a little Italian, so I feel like posting definitions of words would be cheating. On the other hand, I'd love to track down someone who can help me with the Maltese... I'm pretty sure "u" is "and", but that's all I have.

"le regole imparar" is possibly my favourite phrase here--as far as I'm aware, imparar doesn't exist in Spanish: this is "[French article] [Italian noun] [Italian vocabulary as a Spanish verb]". Beautiful.

My other favourite is the nod to the Spanish poet Lope de Vega with his "siempre mañana y nunca mañanamos", which was a pain to translate and keep at least the assonance of the rhyme in the sonnet. (That should give you at least part of my answer to your question yesterday about whether or not we think a translation should try to maintain the rhymes of an original.)

I love the rhythm of this poem, and the way the hectic busyness of life is recreated in the busy-ness of the language switches. Neat! Thanks!

I'm looking forward to seeing the official translation.

[lilmoka]

First, congratulations on being trilingual. Its' awesome! Also, I would love to read your definitions, now that the translation is up <3

I think it's all in Italian. If the article was French, it should be 'les', because regole is plural for regola (rule). Also, 'imparar' is an Italian verb (it's usually spelled as 'imparare', but sometimes you can eliminate the 'e' at the end).

I put a video of A. Cassar reading the poem with the official translation, I think you'll like it ;)