My musical ineptitude was showing in this one. I haven't sung in decades, so to find a foreign song to translate, I went back to two French songs I learned by heart when I was in high school and read Molière's Le bourgeois gentilhomme. Unfortunately, the tune I learned them to, from the filmed version of the play I watched, turned out to be a much simplified version of Lully's music, so when I worked out a translation that fit the tune I knew, it turned out to be a very poor fit to the sheet music when I found that. I did my best to shoehorn the lyrics in, but my inability to read the sheet music correctly resulted in some gaffes, which I first understood when I heard the version Julie sang. All the same, it was fun to come up with an English version of a song I have sung to myself for years.
To answer a few of the other comments, in the first song "Iris" is not a character name, but just a name that Molière clearly chose to rhyme with "ainsi," so I didn't feel bad about changing it to "Margot" to rhyme with "so." I wanted to keep the name French to fit the rest of the play. The language of the first song is not particularly "courtly" so I tried to use straightforward language that covered the same territory, though I suppose I could avoid the contraction. In the second poem, the short lines and many rhymes made the challenge of keeping the rhyme scheme more than I could manage and still convey the content accurately. I picked "sheep" as a rhyme word because it is a naturally funny and unromantic word, and I thought talking about a sheep being "sweet" made it sound even more ridiculous than it would be if the sheep were merely gentle or docile. The inversion in the last line is a deliberate howler, meant to make the song sound inept.
Susan
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