Another Swedish folk song in translation

[luzula]

Since my last Swedish folk song translation was a success, here's another one! This one is shorter, more carnal, and appropriate to the season (at least in the north).

Jag längtar, längtar
jag går i drömmar
när grenen knoppas
och forsen strömmar.
Vad som mig fattas
jag redan vet
och han är som lågande elden het.

I long and long for
I walk in dreams
among the breaking buds
and the running streams
What I am lacking
is always in my thought
for he is like the burning fire hot

I am quite happy with the translation--yay for preserving the rhymes in a natural way! Well, except the very first line, because apparently "längta" is easier to use intransitively than "long for" (see, I can't even skip the "for"). But I figure that maybe I can leave the object a mystery in the first line. It's interesting to try to sing in the Swedish folk style in English--there's this thing where you linger on the consonants n, m, ng instead of the preceding vowel which does not feel as natural in English.

Comments

[riverlight]

Yeah, when I was learning Swedish it was really fascinating to me to realize that you can have long consonants in Swedish just as you can have long vowels... we don't really do that in English (or at least not in my particular dialect!)

I do emphasize consonants when singing classical music in English, but it's more for musical emphasis than anything, to highlight a particularly poignant word—is that what you mean?

[luzula]

Swedish doesn't really have long consonants, but Finnish does? Well, okay, Swedish has it in compound words such as billås = bil-lås = car lock, but not in a, what's that linguistic phrase? In a way where that's an information-carrying sound. There's no minimal pair where just the length of the consonant determines the meaning. Or not that I can think of? It's definitely a thing in Finnish, though.

Now I'm waiting for you or someone else to prove me wrong--sometimes we don't know as much about our own language on a theoretical level as about other languages. : )

I do emphasize consonants when singing classical music in English, but it's more for musical emphasis than anything, to highlight a particularly poignant word—is that what you mean?

No, I mean that we will tend to "rest" on the m, n, or ng instead of the vowel. Like, in "drömmar" in the recording I will hurry to get to the "m" and rest on that, and the "ö" will be pretty short. AFAIK you don't do that in classical music?

Once in choir we learned a song in Czech, and in that language l and r can be used as vowels. Like, you could have words like "bld" and "grp" (making up those examples--I don't remember the actual words). There was this one place in the song where we would have to rest on the "r" for a whole measure, and it always made us crack up while we were learning it. Lucky we could already do trilling r:s--I imagine it would be hard to do for most English-speakers. *g*

[luzula]

Okay, I had to google the consonant length thing. Apparently we do have "half-long" consonants: the "n" in "Anna" is longer than the "n" in "ana", which I can hear if I think about it. But that is not a minimal pair since the "a" in "Anna" is a short vowel and the other one is long. And since the short/half-long consonants don't distinguish meaning, Swedish-speakers don't think of themselves as having any long consonants.

What did your teacher say about it?

[riverlight]

Well, I asked my mother—for whom Swedish is a native tongue—and she had no idea what I meant with "doubled consonants," so I don't know where I got that. I could have sworn I'd read it one of my books, but—who knows. I'm honestly no linguist, except in that I've studied a lot of languages and have sort of picked up stuff by osmosis—but that's no real qualification. Still, what I meant was simply that a word that had a double m in it (glömma) would have a longer m sound in it than a word with a single m. I'm probably wrong, and/or it's just one of those workarounds that I used while learning the language.

Actually, we do do something like that in classical music! Not in all of it, for sure, but particularly in Tudor English pieces—if I were singing "lamenting," for example, I'd draw the m out a lot in order to make the music sound like the word. If that makes sense.

Oh fun to sing in Czech! Yup, we'd have a lot of trouble with the rs, most of us!

[luzula]

Oh, okay! I am definitely no linguist, either--I just find the subject interesting.

And interesting that classical music does do that sometimes!

[ride_4ever]

Your singing is -- as always -- stunningly beautiful. This is the first time that I have heard something where you have done the song in both Swedish and English on the same recording (maybe you have done this elsewhere, but I missed it). I am riveted by hearing your "Swedish sound" in direct comparison to what to my Midwestern American ears sounds like "flawlessly unaccented American English".

I ♡ that you made this a dS snippets prompt; the plotbunny is hopping around for it, but I expect that I won't catch it by "closing time" and it will end up as another one of your prompts that leads to my posting at an amnesty.

[luzula]

Thanks so much! I do have another song where I sang it both in English and Swedish. Another folk song about love, actually. : )

We'll see what happens with the future of the comm--it hardly seems worth it to keep posting prompts. I do miss the time when there was an active, tight-knit community, but since I myself am hardly active anymore, I guess I can't complain. I could not imagine leaving dS fandom while I was in it, but it happened anyway... : (

[ride_4ever]

I do think it's worth it to keep posting prompts, and I'm willing to become one of the "monthly hosts". I too miss that active, tight-knit community -- I think the fracturing of fandom by the emergence of so many social media platforms has done that -- but there are present dS fen, and perhaps future ones, who will still write snippets to the prompts.

Hmmm. You see yourself as having left the fandom? It looks to me like though you are not now making fanworks, you are still contributing to the dS community in other ways.

[luzula]

Hmmm. You see yourself as having left the fandom? It looks to me like though you are not now making fanworks, you are still contributing to the dS community in other ways.

Oh, I'm contributing to the community a bit still, and I occasionally make podfics, but I have left the fandom emotionally; I don't feel the squee anymore. It's like falling out of love--you can't really decide rationally whether to be in love or not. But I do still want to pay back to the community, as much as I have the time/energy for, anyway, which is why I stayed on as a snippet mod.