LA VIE EN ROBE

by James Lincoln Warren

The other night I selected a CD at random from my boxed set of Édith Piaf recordings and played it on the stereo. I love French cabaret music, and after Belgian chanteur Jacques Brel, Piaf is my favorite — she sang utterly without inhibition, declaiming her broken heart with pain and passion in a raw, hoarse tremolo. Piaf’s was not a lovely voice, not the soothing sexy alto of a Jacqueline Français, nor did it portray any of the suave sophistication of so many French entertainers. But 45 years after her death, she’s still considered the greatest popular singer ever to come out of France.

But the record I played was strangely disappointing. It contained many signature tunes of the cabaret style: Les feuilles mortes, Un petit homme, Miséricorde, Je n’en commais pas la fin, J’m’en fous pas mal, Du matin jusqu’au soir …

But she sang them in English.

BOR-ING … !

French cabaret music doesn’t really work in English. Let’s be honest: Frankie Laine singing “Jezebel” isn’t really very different from “Rawhide”, is it? Nat King Cole’s rendition of “Autumn Leaves” (Les feuilles mortes) is lush and gorgeous, and rightly lifted the tune into the standard American repertoire, but it has none of the melancholy poignancy, none of the aroma of spilled vin rouge de pays in Yves Montand’s Gallic original.

Why do you suppose that is?

Brel took “The Impossible Dream”, translated it into French as La quête and took complete ownership of it — Richard Kiley’s Broadway rendition, brilliant as it is, pales by comparison. But on the other hand, you can’t really imagine Piaf pulling off Peggy Lee’s “Fever” or Jacqueline Français successfully rendering Julie London’s “Cry Me a River”. 1

Some sounds just have their own language. Dressing them up in other robes, to mix my metaphors a little and borrow a Russian proverb, is like putting a saddle on a cow.

Remember what I wrote last year when I introduced Criminal Brief?

Novels are Rolls Royce limousines. Short stories are Morgan roadsters.

Novels are Christian Dior. Short stories are Cartier.

Novels are four-course state banquets. Short stories are wine and cheese.

Well, to extend the comparisons a bit further, novels are Puccini operas. Short stories are Piaf ballads.

Which means they have to sing in their own language. Our Debbie wrote here recently about authorial voice, concentrating on her perception (which I do not share) that a writer’s voice portrays certain elements of his personality. More to the point, from where I’m standing, is that a writer adopts the voice demanded by the constraints and liberties inherent in the form he writes in. That Piaf had a rough life — by the way, I have not seen Marion Cotillard’s recent Oscar-winning portrayal of Piaf in the French bio-pic La vie en rose, not being a film junkie like Our John — is beyond doubt, but how much her performance was informed by her suffering is open to interpretation. Performers are rarely the same person on stage as they are off it, after all. And when Piaf recorded all those songs in English, there was a lot lost in translation, even as she used the same vocal mannerisms to punch up the emotional impact of her songs as she applied en français. It didn’t work.

Right now I’m working on my first Treviscoe story in three years. One of the things this has required of me is to expunge Carmine Ferrari’s slangy American pop song from my head in order to fully recover Alan’s stately minuet.

Mais … non, je ne regrette rien!

1. No, I did not write this column just so I could post this smoldering cheesecake photo of Miss London. I only mostly wrote it so I could post this smoldering cheescake photo of Miss London. [↩]