L'homme à tête de chou: an original translation

What follows is an original translation of Serge Gainsbourg's song "L'homme à tête de chou," from the album of the same name. (Whose cover, somewhat unsurprisingly, has a picture of a statue of a man with a cabbage head.)

The highlight, of course, is the second line: "Half vegetable, half guy." I also like "white foam wrack." The complex silly wordplay on "chou" (cabbage) can't be captured, nor can the rhymes, but of course you can hear that in the song. I have retained much of the slang in its literal form. Rather than translate "feuille de chou" as "tabloid" or "rag," I have just left it as "cabbage leaf." This I do to inspire you and myself to develop weird personal slang. (The Toronto Sun has just become for me a "cabbage leaf.") This in its turn inspired by Wyndham Lewis's advice in "The Code of a Herdsman." (Though I am not ready just yet to say "I like a fellow with as much sperm as that.")

I am going to do more or these sorts of things, and post more songs and pictures, and less of the long Jean Brodie style posts, which I will nonetheless conclude at some point.

Serge Gainsbourg (Adam Swick tans.)

The Man with the Cabbage Head

I’m the man with the cabbage head:

Half vegetable, half guy.

For the lovely eyes of Marilou

I went off and pawned

My Remington and my ride—

I was in the depths of the hold,* on the edge

Of my nerves, I didn’t have a kopeck left.

From the day I mixed myself up with 

Her I lost almost everything—

My job at the cabbage leaf,*

Where scandals equal beefsteaks*—

I was finished, fucked, check-

Mate in the eyes of Marilou,

Who treated me like a white-beak*

And drove me half mad.

Oh no you have no idea, guy—

She needed discothèques

And dinners at the Kangaroo

Club, so I signed the cheques

Without the funds, it was nuts, nuts—

At the end I waited and waited

Like a brainless melon—a watermelon—

But how—No, I’m not just going

Spell it out for you like that, cut and dry.

What? Me? Love her still? Nails!*

Who and where am I? Cabbaged* here or

In the white foam wrack

On the beach in Malibu.

* "in the depths of the hold": (nautical image; cf. "white foam wrack"): at the end of my rope
* "cabbage leaf": pejorative slang for newspaper
* "scandals equal beefsteaks": i.e., they put food on the table
* "white-beak": "greenhorn"
* "Nails!": No way!
* "Cabbaged": stuck