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Unread 11-11-2015, 03:29 AM
Kyle Norwood Kyle Norwood is offline
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Location: Los Angeles, California
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This is impressive; it often handles the difficult feminine rhymes brilliantly, and it fits the melody very well. "He's got the sexual monkey on his back" nicely captures the sneering tone of "Dies ist die sexuelle Hörigkeit," even though the melody requires the singer to place undue emphasis on the word "on." (The word "Hörigkeit" may be a clinical term, but in the performances I've heard, the singer always makes the drawn out "Hööööörigkeit" sound filthy.)

In the last stanza, I take it that the speaker is indeed about to be executed but has time to think about sex, not actually to have it. His lover has betrayed him--past tense--so it seems as if the translation should follow the German and say "that in her woman's pit his grave was dug." And while the final phrase "upon her" works fairly well in the first two stanzas, it doesn't work in the last one--I'm not sure what the executed man will be lying on top of before nightfall, but I don't see how it could be a "her." The crib just says "lying on top," and I think the German allows for the likelihood that what he'll be lying atop is not a woman.

This translation may not be flawless, but it definitely captures the spirit of the original.
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