Cornelis Vreeswijk – “Fåglar” (Birds).

   Hiya people! 🙂 

   Today, I have for you a very interesting song by Cornelis Vreeswijk. I’ve always found it very interesting and have wondered what it’s trying to convey. I mean of course birds are partly a metaphor and partly a comparison for humans and various constraints of their existence, but some things here seem to have different layers of meaning and I don’t know if I get it all right. The lyrics to this song were written by Cornelis, but I’m sure that anyone who has some more interest in his music would pick up that the same could not be true about this interesting tune, and they’d be right, because it was composed by the jazz musician Björn J:son Lindh, who also plays piano here. The song comes from one of my favourite albums as a whole by Cornelis, Poem, Ballader och Lite Blues (Poems, Ballads and a Bit of Blues). One line in this song has quite an unusual grammatical structure, which I find kind of confusing so I translated it in two ways because I’m just not sure which one makes more sense, and perhaps neither is very good. 

   Birds who are old have their own forest
Birds who are sick do not sing anything
Birds who are in love do not buy a ring
Birds never sit at a bird pub
The souls of the birds never know about birds [/The birds never know about the birds’ souls]

Birds who are dead have no grave
The one who was a bird was not seen
And she who got wings immediately flew away
Birds that can remember are a rare species
No one can fly on their own when they want 
The birds’ grandfather eats raw eggs
Birds that are sad grow beards
Grandpa’s parrot is damn smart
He has always been unlucky in love
No bird understands what he desires
But something’s not quite right somewhere 
Birds who can fly, I sure love you
But I will never fly again

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