Hiya people! 🙂
I thought that for today I’d like to share with you a really cool, cat-themed song. I don’t think we’d ever had a cat-themed song on here before, even though we had several songs that were either about or by various Mishas. I absolutely love this song for its lyrics, because it’s very relatable and it shows very well what an amazing thing it is to just be able to lay down next to a cat, daydream about everything and feel it purr and feel safe and cosy, lots better even than being someone super successful and having a breathtakingly adventurous life.
This song comes from Alexander’s album called Visa vid Vindens Ängar (A Song at the Wind’s Meadows), from which I have previously shared the title song and which is a collection of songs written by Swedish singer and poet Paul Matson. I have also shared several other songs by Alexander Rybak before and by looking at them you can see that he’s a very versatile singer and finds himself well in a lot of different genres and stylistics together with his violin, which is something I personally really like in musicians. Oh yeah and he’s been Sofi’s crush on and off for years. He is of Belarussian descent, but his parents emigrated to Norway shortly after his birth, so Norwegian is his native language and his Swedish on this album does sound quite Norwegian which is cool. Below is the translation of this song made by Bibielz. I’ll just add that there’s a Swedish idiom in the last verse which literally translates to “if you take the devil onto your boat, you will have to row him ashore”. The English equivalent is apparently “if you dance with the devil, you have to pay the piper”, but I thought translating it literally made more sense here because otherwise it would be rather clunky to phrase.
I wish I was a Tarzan
Who floats on a liana,
Who fights tigers and lions
In the jungle all day
I wish I were a a he-man
A Top secret agent
Who gets to taste the hardest blows
Who got to know the prettiest girls
But a cat is lying on my pillow
He is lying and purring on his back
I am keeping a hand on his tummy
It is warming, I feel safe
And the kitty he is svinging and twisting
His big fluffy tail
I am thinking how sad it would be
If we both did not exist right now
I wanted to be Casa Nova
Who could do anything in sex
Ten, twelve women a night
Without the slightest complex
A guy for the porn agencies
To invest a sum in
It would be many millions
in the bank book it would be written
But a cat is lying on my pillow,
He is lying and purring on his back
I am keeping a hand on his tummy
It is warming, I feel safe
And the kitty he is svinging and twisting
His big fluffy tail
I am thinking how sad it would be
If we both did not exist right now
I am sitting alone here and humming
and write a song sometimes.
It is this devil in my boat
That I am able to row ashore
But a cat is lying on my pillow
He is lying and purring on his back
I am keeping a hand on his tummy
It is warming, I feel safe
And the kitty he is svinging and twisting
His big fluffy tail
I am thinking how sad it would be
If we both did not exist right now
My Inner MishMash 
That whole “Paying the Piper” concept is rather devillish isn’t it?
I think of the Pied Piper of Hamelin who led the children and the rats away somewhere.
Rybak means fish in West Slavic languages, doesn’t it?
[or it would do in Belarusian and Ukrainian too].
The kitty is SWINGING.
[hard to swing out of Norwegian and Swedish into English…]
There was a message board once upon a time where many of the members were passionate about cats as well as books and about education and children.
I hope Rybak’s song-cat didn’t mind the hand on the tummy.
That refrain:
“How sad it would be
if we both didn’t exist right now”.
And the rhyme – “Who could do anything with sex/without the slightest complex”.
Those bank millions would be finished with rather quickly [except the Norwegians appear to have more money sense when it comes to investing in the future].
Matson definitely has a writerly imagination putting Alexander in these many scenarios [and touching on the other fantasies of young men].
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Oh yeah, the Piper of Hamelin, my Mum read it to me once.
Fish would be ryba (at least in Polish) and rybak is fisherman, and I’m quite sure it means the same thing in Belarussian as well. A little fish would be rybka in Polish, and Sofi calls him Alexander Rybka, because she once made a typo when writing his name and we both thought it was funny and it stuck.
Lol it’s not the kitty who’s swinging, it’s his tail that he is swinging. 😀 But I did indeed use the word swing there because that’s what the original equivalent typically means and is etymologically related to the English swing, and perhaps indeed some other word would fit here better.
Hahaha hopefully Alexander doesn’t have too heavy a hand. My Misha typically doesn’t mind when I gently lie my hand on his tummy, but it seems like this cat might mind it indeed, if he is “swinging” and twisting his tail. When my Misha moves his tail a lot it usually means either that something is irking him or he’s overwhelmed.
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