Misheard: I Love Goat Cheese! :)

What happens when the sublime meets the ridiculous? Maybe one of the things you get is goat cheese.

Carmina Burana (Songs of Beuren) is supposed to be one of the great compositions of western classical music. Written in the 13th century it was was famously set to music by the German composer, Carl Orff, in the 1930s and went on to become hugely popular as a score that set the mood for dramatic or cataclysmic situations. In India most people remember it as the background music for an advertisement featuring an aftershave lotion - Old Spice - with images of a surfer riding tumultuous waves, a pretty face, and a face splashed with a liquid that was supposed to be the 'mark of a man'.

Recently some creative genius on YouTube (or was it Tiktok?) posted a video with the title "You'll never listen to this song the same way again!". Sure enough it transforms this classic to a hilarious meme with these lyrics - 

I love goat cheese, Give me cookies!

They'll give us Gonorrhoea

This octopus, Let's give him boots!

Send him to North Korea!

As if to add to this cheerful confusion, a university choir has actually recorded  a performance  using these 'alternate' lyrics. So it takes a bit of digging to get the the original lyrics, and to figure out the specific lines that have been parodied. Perhaps these are the lines that go with the one who loves goat cheese - 

Sors salutis, et virtutis

michi nunc contraria,

est affectus, et defectus 

semper in angaria.

(English:  Fate is against me; in health and virtue, driven on and weighted down, always enslaved)

This is of course only one in a long series videos featuring misheard lyrics. There is one Russian folk song that has been doing the rounds as a Malayalam song, and Shakira's popular theme 2010 Football World Cup song, Waka-Waka, that does sound like Hindi slag for taking a bath at Charminar!

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* O'Fortuna - Misheard lyrics - https://youtu.be/pQEfxhvAy0c 

* Original - André Rieu - O'Fortuna - https://youtu.be/EJC-_j3SnXk 

* Original Lyrics + translation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Fortuna

* Story behind Carmina Burana - https://www.classicfm.com/composers/orff/guides/story-behind-orffs-carmina-burana/ 

* Russian song misheard in Kerala - https://youtu.be/_zEbRrV-flw

Books of the World

 

Every now and then the great circus of Whatsapp forwards comes up with a gem, and this is one of them. A beautifully illustrated poster on the "Most Translated Books of the World" by Preply.

A closer look at this tells you that some non-empirical method has been chosen for the selections here.  Perhaps they have excluded books of religious nature, or those that may may be categorised as 'adult literature'. How else can one explain the fact that Paramahamsa Yogananda's "The Autobiography of a Yogi" is listed as the most translated book from India over "The Bhagawad Gita" or "Kamasutra"?   

At least according to the referenced list compiled by Wikipedia, the most translated book from India is the Gita, followed by Isha Upanishad and Yogananda's book in the third place. 

The list has its surprises too. For instance I was surprised to learn that a book we studied at school, "My Name is Aram" by William Saroyan the top book from Armenia. Also Arthur Hailey's "Hotel" is listed as the most translated book from... the Bahamas! 

Minor quibbles aside this remains a beautiful piece of work. The books I have not yet read from this list should keep me busy for a while! :)

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NB: This is also the first time I am seeing a digital image presented in the <webP> format. At just over 600kB this seems to pack in a much more scalable image compared to JPEG or TIFF.  Seems to be an innovation from Google that uses a technique called predictive coding.

Farsi Friday

It's Friday today - the weekly holiday - and Farsi is on my mind.

Here is Afghanistan two languages dominate the sound-scape: Dari and Pashto. Last year, when I first landed at Kabul airport, I was amazed to hear the driver who came to pick me up, ask somebody, "Kujo ast?" - and I understood the meaning perfectly!

Then at my workplace, I heard a colleague asking for a "Kainchi" and I knew without looking up that he wanted a pair of scissors. As days went by the list of familiar words got longer and longer - Charkhi (rotate), Hal (solve), Kharid (buy), Khwaab (dream), Daan (gift), Giriftaar (arrest), Pasand (like), Mushkil (difficult), Khushi (joy)... Just about all the words I assumed to be Urdu actually belonged to Farsi!

It turns out that Dari is the same as Farsi, the language of Iran and much of the former Persian Empire which included not only Afghanistan but also Iraq, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and parts of southern Russia. It is spoken by no less than 110 million people! Countries that belonged to the former USSR stopped using the Farsi script and adopted the Russian script.

Now if the words sounded so familiar, how long would it take to make sense of the written Farsi script? The curls, dots and squiggles on banners, shops and books looked completely different from the 32 letters a friend wrote down for me. A search of lessons on YouTube followed, and I gradually learnt that the letters when written together take on completely different shapes.

I continue to be confused by letters that sound similar:
"A" can be آ or ع
"Ta" - ط  or  ت
"Se" - س or  ث
"He" - ح or ه
"Za" - 4 options (!) - ظ ض ز ذ
"Ga" - غ or  ق

It may take a while to get a hang of the written and spoken language but until then, we have music! Here is a sample of some amazing Farsi instrumentals by Mehdi Aminian -