Madame showed the six of us who went to her house yesterday this musical, Notre Dame de Paris (Notre Dame of Paris), which is based on Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Before this the class decided to also watch this comedy called "Tais-toi" which I fell asleep during, but this one had me watching the whole way through. The opening song is still my favourite.



Madame knows this entire musical by heart. She was softly singing along almost throughout the whole thing. "If you could understand the French," she said, "you would know how poetic the lyrics are." And she was right, of course. Pretty much the only parts I could understand of this whole song was "It has come, the time of the cathedrals / the world has entered / into a new millennium" (except we haven't learnt past tense yet) and "write his story / in the glass or in the stone". And there were so many other gems like "blood and wine are the same colour", "take me, take me if it is my destiny" , "he is dead from love", "I don't want to die before having loved", "Love like the night loves the day" etc etc etc. I wanted to write them all down but I couldn't remember what the subtitles said so I couldn't. In retrospect I should have probably put them down on paper rather than try typing it on my phone.



And also, the second act started with English subtitles, and even though at least five out of six of us couldn't understand more than 25% of what was going on, we decided to switch back to the French ones. The English ones just didn't fit. The translation(s) above aren't official ones; they're mine, and even though next year I'm probably going to come back and laugh at all my mistakes this is how I read them. This dissatisfaction is, in fact, corroborated by the critics who all panned the English translation of the lyrics, which are worse than those in the video, which are more literal. (Mine are as literal as a French ab initio, Google-translated, Word-Referenced student can get.)



One example would be the song "La Cour des Miracles", which is probably my second- or third- or fifth-favourite, I don't know. I word-referenced it while watching, and it literally translates to "The Court of Miracles", which I found really poetic considering these were Bohemians singing about their home i.e. the slums. I went home and found out that these "miracles" actually refer to the disease-faking beggars becoming their healthy selves once again upon returning home. So literally translating it wouldn't entirely cut it, but IMO, neither does "den of thieves". Maybe it fulfills some cultural undertone I don't understand, but something tells me no translation could really ever deliver the same effect. (And there's also a line that's translated from "La couleur de ma peau contre celle de ta peau " to "The colour of my skin next to yours", when it should really be "against"; the image is so different it leaves me wondering why they did that.)



And oh, I love this guy's voice. In the first video, I mean. And his nose. I can't get over the way they made up his nose.