Hey people! 🙂
If you have been reading my blog for a while, you might remember that I have been sharing some music about this Cecilia Lind girl, also by Cornelis Vreeswijk. And I have, only that time it was in Swedish, and this time, it will be in Dutch. If I know a few versions of a song in different languages, especially if it’s by the same artist or I like both of them almost equally, or even if there are two different interpretations of the same song in one language that I like equally, I like to share them both together. But I guess I must have forgotten to include the other version of this song in the post I made years ago.
Swedish “Balladen Om Herr Fredrik Ã…kare Och Den Söta Fröken Cecilia Lind” (The Ballad About Fredrik Ã…kare and The Sweet Miss Cecilia Lind) is a classic, has been covered by many artists, and it seems like pretty much every Swede knows it. In The Netherlands – not quite so. – But generally, despite Cornelis Vreeswijk was Dutch, he seems quite a lot less popular in his home country than in Sweden where he created most of his songs and poems and lived a large part of his life.
I don’t know how different the Dutch version is from the Swedish, I only have a very foggy idea of the Dutch language so far and most of what I understand of it is via my vocab from other Germanic languages, as it has a lot of common ground in terms of vocabulary both with English and with Swedish. I am sure the overall context is the same, and that some minor details have been changed, but overall I don’t really know how much they differ from each other. Given that Cornelis had written both version, and he appears to often be rather lax with translations because they were supposed to be more poetic and musical rather than literal, there could be a lot of small and maybe some not so small differences.
You can see my post about the Swedish version with the English translation of the Swedish lyrics
I don’t have a translation of the Dutch version though, but at least from the post above you can get the idea of what the song is about, if you haven’t read it before. .
I will share the link to this song on Spotify, because I’m not sure it is on YouTube at all, and below the Spotify link there will be a link to Songwhip where you can find this song on some other streaming services in case you don’t use Spotify, there is also a link to YouTube but the version in the YouTube link is actually in Swedish, so I guess there must be some mishap with tags or whatever.
My Inner MishMash 
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