Song texts
14 April 2025 02:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI'm still struggling with "Twenty Years After": the film managed to cover a vast chunk of the book in a few scenes, although the adaptation must have been made slightly more tricky by the fact that they had decided to omit both Planchet and Grimaud from the first film and therefore could not use them here, at a point where in the book their roles are actually rather significant! Sadly this means we also miss out on Rochefort escaping and being rescued by Planchet after being wrongfully imprisoned by the Queen -- quite a turn-around for the characters, and a point at which we get to appreciate the reality of the throwaway comment at the end of "The Three Musketeers" about Rochefort and d'Artagnan eventually becoming genuine friends.
It's frankly hard not to sympathise with Rochefort, having gone grey in the Bastille, being summoned and then dismissed by the smarmy younger Cardinal as too old to be of any use -- naturally he promptly does his utmost to demonstrate just how useful he can be *against* Mazarin! But omitting him helps to abridge the story, and possibly they couldn't get the actor back -- his role in the plot, such as it remains, is taken over by Jussac, whom one gathers was in real life a Soviet master swordsman who was the fencing-master on all the 'Musketeers' films, and therefore had his role considerably enlarged on screen so that he could make recurring appearances to fight d'Artagnan :-p But he gets about one line in this film so far, substituting for Rochefort's role as someone who gets consulted as to d'Artagnan's past history and possible utility...
They also save a lot of space by omitting the entire business about Raoul being the secret son of Madame de Chevreuse -- understandable, as it is completely irrelevant to the narrative and frankly stretches credulity anyway! (I can only assume that Dumas wanted to give Athos a son while having him in effect remain celibate, but it seems an unnecessarily complex aspect of the plot -- and why Madame de Chevreuse, out of all the loose-living aristocratic women in the entire country?) But teenage Raoul really is absolutely loveable, a mix of charming dignity and unaffected boyish eagerness; apparently Soviet child actors were rather better than ours at that era ;-p
The sequence with various horsemen galloping through the night, as with the previous episode, had me completely confused because I simply couldn't tell who was who or what was going on; it occurs to me now that it was probably both much larger and much better lit on the cinema screen for which it was intended. (Even re-watching the earlier sequence with d'Artagnan, Aramis and the lady -- whom I think in this version was Madame de Chevreuse rather than her younger substitute Madame de Longueville -- after having read the relevant section of the book to elucidate, I still couldn't see what was supposed to be happening amidst the shadows. It doesn't help that d'Artagnan doesn't have Planchet to discuss the situation with, so the book-dialogue is missing!)
But I had no memory at all of the whole business with the escape of the Duc de Beaufort (who was revealed by the book to be the mysterious 'Bofors' mentioned in the first episode :-p) and yet did manage to more or less follow what was going on. I even guessed the pie beforehand ('pirog' having been one of the very first Russian foodstuffs I learned to cook!), which may have been a subconscious recollection of some kind, or just cunning cinematography to draw our attention to it :-)
Naturally this sequence is also very much abridged to the single scene of the actual escape, thus painlessly cutting out a further huge chunk of the book (particularly given the absence of Grimaud, whose presence and role does not therefore need to be explained :p) Interestingly, de Beaufort is depicted here as a competent and grizzled warrior rather than as the rather dimwitted young sprig of (illegitimate?) royalty that he is in the book, which was presumably a deliberate decision -- to make him a more convincing threat to Mazarin, perhaps?
The bit I didn't get at all, and still couldn't get on re-watching with the crib and with the auto-generated YouTube subtitles (dodgy, but better at guessing multisyllable inflected Russian nouns than I am), was what on earth was happening in that interview between Mazarin and La Ramee. The book did at least explain who La Ramee was and what he was doing there, and I managed to catch with the aid of the crib an allusion to the duke's "forty ways of escape", but I still have no idea why La Ramee flung himself upon the Cardinal slobbering in gratitude, much to the dismay of the latter. Something to do with promising him a splendid uniform ("mundir") to wear?...!
What I did, however, manage to find was the lyrics to the two songs which occur in these first couple of episodes, which enables me finally to understand the context to the intriguing lines of the chorus that I did succeed in catching by ear alone :-)
https://textys.ru/lyrics/12/Mushketery/tekst-pesni-Nasha-chest
(Always tricky, because my keyboard won't let me *type* Cyrillic -- hence the need for a 'real' dictionary! -- but only cut and paste it, which makes searching online very awkward indeed.)
The song about honour (Наша честь) was so catchy that I thought it must be a repeat from the first film, and spent some time going through the various war and friendship songs there trying to identify it in the hopes of locating the lyrics in the subtitled copy! But it isn't; it seems to be a genuine original for this film, and I managed to track it down online.
The translation here is pretty awful so far as I can tell, but it's enough to prompt me through the important bits of vocabulary so that I can more or less parse it on sight myself without the use of the dictionary.
"Perhaps the pipes are victorious"? :-O
I'm assuming the "and...and" is the construction meaning "both...and" in English, so it would be *both* the trumpets of victory and the money that are being parted with; but not honour. Never honour, even with your final breath.
And I don't think it's "one soul has a treasure", but "the soul has but a single treasure" :-p
The "поднебесной выси" was the bit I couldn't get from the chorus (unsurprisingly, as it's not exactly basic vocabulary), but the dictionary suggests that it is not the "Celestial Site" but the heights that lie beneath the heavens; the meaning is clear enough anyhow. Everything else on earth may depend on the whim of the heavens, but our honour is what we ourselves make it.
And the other chorus that struck me was the oddly optimistic one that plays as d'Artagnan is saddling up and preparing to ride out in search of his long-lost friends: "И кончится все хорошо". It turns out to be about a guardian angel, and very poetical -- it's not surprising I couldn't make out the context.
"И кони ржут, и кровь рекою льется" -- the horses, of course, are not laughing but neighing, and the blood flows in rivers... but in the end all will be well. The angel does not sleep, and all this will pass -- and in the end all will be well.
(YouTube presented me with my 'recap of all the tracks you loved this season' based on my recent hours of listening, with the 'Ballad of Athos' at the top and four other songs from the soundtrack underneath it. "Your top genres were": 24% "Russian pop", 23% "Russian chanson", 5% "classical music", 5% "New Age music" and 5% "Russian rock" -- oops :-D Apparently that's what happens when you listen to stuff repeatedly to try to work out the lyrics...)
It's frankly hard not to sympathise with Rochefort, having gone grey in the Bastille, being summoned and then dismissed by the smarmy younger Cardinal as too old to be of any use -- naturally he promptly does his utmost to demonstrate just how useful he can be *against* Mazarin! But omitting him helps to abridge the story, and possibly they couldn't get the actor back -- his role in the plot, such as it remains, is taken over by Jussac, whom one gathers was in real life a Soviet master swordsman who was the fencing-master on all the 'Musketeers' films, and therefore had his role considerably enlarged on screen so that he could make recurring appearances to fight d'Artagnan :-p But he gets about one line in this film so far, substituting for Rochefort's role as someone who gets consulted as to d'Artagnan's past history and possible utility...
They also save a lot of space by omitting the entire business about Raoul being the secret son of Madame de Chevreuse -- understandable, as it is completely irrelevant to the narrative and frankly stretches credulity anyway! (I can only assume that Dumas wanted to give Athos a son while having him in effect remain celibate, but it seems an unnecessarily complex aspect of the plot -- and why Madame de Chevreuse, out of all the loose-living aristocratic women in the entire country?) But teenage Raoul really is absolutely loveable, a mix of charming dignity and unaffected boyish eagerness; apparently Soviet child actors were rather better than ours at that era ;-p
The sequence with various horsemen galloping through the night, as with the previous episode, had me completely confused because I simply couldn't tell who was who or what was going on; it occurs to me now that it was probably both much larger and much better lit on the cinema screen for which it was intended. (Even re-watching the earlier sequence with d'Artagnan, Aramis and the lady -- whom I think in this version was Madame de Chevreuse rather than her younger substitute Madame de Longueville -- after having read the relevant section of the book to elucidate, I still couldn't see what was supposed to be happening amidst the shadows. It doesn't help that d'Artagnan doesn't have Planchet to discuss the situation with, so the book-dialogue is missing!)
But I had no memory at all of the whole business with the escape of the Duc de Beaufort (who was revealed by the book to be the mysterious 'Bofors' mentioned in the first episode :-p) and yet did manage to more or less follow what was going on. I even guessed the pie beforehand ('pirog' having been one of the very first Russian foodstuffs I learned to cook!), which may have been a subconscious recollection of some kind, or just cunning cinematography to draw our attention to it :-)
Naturally this sequence is also very much abridged to the single scene of the actual escape, thus painlessly cutting out a further huge chunk of the book (particularly given the absence of Grimaud, whose presence and role does not therefore need to be explained :p) Interestingly, de Beaufort is depicted here as a competent and grizzled warrior rather than as the rather dimwitted young sprig of (illegitimate?) royalty that he is in the book, which was presumably a deliberate decision -- to make him a more convincing threat to Mazarin, perhaps?
The bit I didn't get at all, and still couldn't get on re-watching with the crib and with the auto-generated YouTube subtitles (dodgy, but better at guessing multisyllable inflected Russian nouns than I am), was what on earth was happening in that interview between Mazarin and La Ramee. The book did at least explain who La Ramee was and what he was doing there, and I managed to catch with the aid of the crib an allusion to the duke's "forty ways of escape", but I still have no idea why La Ramee flung himself upon the Cardinal slobbering in gratitude, much to the dismay of the latter. Something to do with promising him a splendid uniform ("mundir") to wear?...!
What I did, however, manage to find was the lyrics to the two songs which occur in these first couple of episodes, which enables me finally to understand the context to the intriguing lines of the chorus that I did succeed in catching by ear alone :-)
https://textys.ru/lyrics/12/Mushketery/tekst-pesni-Nasha-chest
(Always tricky, because my keyboard won't let me *type* Cyrillic -- hence the need for a 'real' dictionary! -- but only cut and paste it, which makes searching online very awkward indeed.)
The song about honour (Наша честь) was so catchy that I thought it must be a repeat from the first film, and spent some time going through the various war and friendship songs there trying to identify it in the hopes of locating the lyrics in the subtitled copy! But it isn't; it seems to be a genuine original for this film, and I managed to track it down online.
The translation here is pretty awful so far as I can tell, but it's enough to prompt me through the important bits of vocabulary so that I can more or less parse it on sight myself without the use of the dictionary.
"Perhaps the pipes are victorious"? :-O
I'm assuming the "and...and" is the construction meaning "both...and" in English, so it would be *both* the trumpets of victory and the money that are being parted with; but not honour. Never honour, even with your final breath.
And I don't think it's "one soul has a treasure", but "the soul has but a single treasure" :-p
The "поднебесной выси" was the bit I couldn't get from the chorus (unsurprisingly, as it's not exactly basic vocabulary), but the dictionary suggests that it is not the "Celestial Site" but the heights that lie beneath the heavens; the meaning is clear enough anyhow. Everything else on earth may depend on the whim of the heavens, but our honour is what we ourselves make it.
And the other chorus that struck me was the oddly optimistic one that plays as d'Artagnan is saddling up and preparing to ride out in search of his long-lost friends: "И кончится все хорошо". It turns out to be about a guardian angel, and very poetical -- it's not surprising I couldn't make out the context.
"И кони ржут, и кровь рекою льется" -- the horses, of course, are not laughing but neighing, and the blood flows in rivers... but in the end all will be well. The angel does not sleep, and all this will pass -- and in the end all will be well.
(YouTube presented me with my 'recap of all the tracks you loved this season' based on my recent hours of listening, with the 'Ballad of Athos' at the top and four other songs from the soundtrack underneath it. "Your top genres were": 24% "Russian pop", 23% "Russian chanson", 5% "classical music", 5% "New Age music" and 5% "Russian rock" -- oops :-D Apparently that's what happens when you listen to stuff repeatedly to try to work out the lyrics...)