My story

In 1973, I had an experience that changed my life.

At the time, I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley and had been invited to dinner by a friend and his wife. The wife had eclectic tastes in music and after dinner, played for us a record she had found at the nearby Tower Records music store. It was the newly-released "Georges Brassens Sings of the Birds & the Bees", a collection of songs intended for English speakers and which included the text of a dozen of his songs, plus translations. The songs were funny, moving, nostalgic, romantic...it seemed his poetry touched eloquently on all the human emotions.

To say that I was taken by the songs would be an understatement. The next day, I went to Tower Records and bought all the different Brassens albums they had in stock. Returning home, I opened the first record, took out the insert that included the lyrics and was dismayed that there were no translations. And I couldn't read French! So I made a photocopy of the text and mailed (that is, snail mailed; email didn't exist back then) it to my French girlfriend (later my wife and who was living in Montreal at the time), asking her to translate. Even though she was a native speaker, she had trouble understanding some of the references and had to ask her mother, who was living with her and her brother at the time, for help. 

Inspired by a growing love of Brassens' music and poetry, I began taking French lessons at the university and found that my comprehension, vocabulary and pronunciation of the language improved rapidly, as I was spending a lot of time listening to the songs and singing along. Over time, I acquired all the numbered albums Brassens recorded under the Philips label, twelve in all. 

Many years later, in 2007, I began the project of translating the songs that were on my records, hoping to introduce other English speakers to this marvelous poetry. But as I delved into the text, I realized I had to do more than just translate; in order for my readers to more fully appreciate and enjoy the songs, I had to explain the many references Brassens makes to people, places and events that are part of French history and culture. Many of the songs were exercises in going down Alice's rabbit hole: for example, in the song Le Bistro, there is a reference to the fontaines de Wallace. What, in the name of God, are Wallace fountains? That turned into an Internet search revealing that Richard Wallace was a wealthy Englishman who had installed public drinking fountains as a way to prevent the poor and the homeless from having to drink alcohol when they were thirsty, since fresh water was in limited supply at the time; in fact, if you ask a Frenchman what those fountains are called and why, chances are they won't know. Brassens' songs abound in such arcane references, not to mention slang expressions that can be unfathomable to a non-native speaker.

I worked on the translations between 2007 and 2012, completing albums 1-9,  and then temporarily set them aside to work on other things, mostly software applications for the Android operating system. 

In 2021, the centenary year of the poet's birth, I decided it was high time to finish what I started and complete the last three albums. I hope that the celebrations of that year added visibility to my work and that non-French speakers around the world will discover Brassens' poetry and love it as I do. I moved to France in February 2019, a consequence of a series of events that began after I first heard Brassens' music; this was one of several ways that Brassens' songs have changed my life and now it's my turn to give back.