Tuesday, June 28, 2016

"Ma non è giusto"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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Yester-day I listened to the Into the Afterlife album.  I found a couple parts that sounded easy, and I'm going to try to figure them out, but no promises on those.  What I really want to write about is "Ma non è giusto," the Italian version of "She's Not There."

I've been learning Italian for two years, and I've practiced it everyday since March.  While I'm far from fluent, I'm getting pretty good, so I could pick out some more words in the lyrics.  The first line starts with "È così triste" ("It's so sad"), which certainly sounds like a Zombies song.  I also heard "Tu sei che" ("You know that"), "ma più di te" ("but more than you"), and - I think - "ci incontriamo" ("we meet").  It's an excruciatingly slow process, but I am transcribing and (sort of) translating it.  Like I mentioned one other time, the Italian lyrics seem to depart from Argent's original lyrics.

After I listened to the album and was thinking about these Italian lyrics, I realized that the Zombies are half of the reason I started learning Italian in the first place.  Chris White wrote "Brief Candles" loosely based on Aldous Huxley's book of short stories of the same title.  About five years ago, I got a copy of Brief Candles, and when I was re-reading it two years ago, I felt kind of stupid because I couldn't understand the Italian phrases in "The Rest Cure," one of the stories.  (At the same time, I was also reading Dante's Divine Comedy, and - even though this was an English translation - there were still some Italian phrases, with which I had the same problem.)  So I started learning Italian on Duolingo.  It seems to be going pretty well.