Many of Jacques Brel’s lyrics are almost poetry. That is, their meaning is often dependent on imagery, association, and sound rather than logical prose narrative. You can see that in the translation of La Chanson Des Vieux Amants below. A woman is talking to her lover about their twenty-year relationship and how they have survived. It sounds like one of those stormy relationships that consists of passions, partings, and reunions. Brel uses language in a symbolist way:

And each piece of furniture has its memory,
In this room without a cot
Fragments of old storms…

The translation is drained of the meaning that comes from the sound association of the original, the end rhymes and inner rhymes. Also, a French word may have a cluster of associations and potency for which there is no equivalent in the target language. For example, the original French for ‘fragments of old storms’ is ‘des éclats des vieilles tempêtes’. The word ‘éclat’ has multiple meanings in French: a flash, a burst, a scandal, breaking into splinters. All of those are present in the French but there is no single equivalent word in English. ‘Splinters of old storms’ is probably a better translation because its proximity to furniture suggests the violence of things being broken during an explosive argument.

Some of the lines I don’t know how to translate so that they make sense in English, such as ‘Et plus le temps nous fait cortège.’ A cortège is a procession, wedding or funeral, but I am not sure what he means exactly by ‘plus le temps’. ‘And longer the time makes us our cortège’ seems nonsensical to me so if you have a better translation, please let me know.

As well as the Brel version, I heard it sung by Juliette Greco. The woman says, ‘Of course, you had your lovers’, not ‘we had our lovers’. Maybe they wouldn’t have survived for twenty-years if their affairs had been more symmetrical. That’s possibly a Gallic thing, or a Gallic cliché – I don’t know which.

La Chanson des Vieux Amants, Jacques Brel