Hiya people! 🙂
Yeah, I decided that, given the fact that it was Cornelis’ death anniversary on Saturday, I want to share yet another song by him, but this time it’s his original song and vastly different from the lullaby I shared yesterday, as it’s quite rough and filled with intense yucky feelings. It always reminds me of Gustav Fröding’s poem Ett Gammalt Bergtroll (An Old Mountain Troll) which Cornelis also interpreted since I’d say it kind of deals with the same thing.
This song is featured in the soundtrack to Amir Chamdin’s 2010 movie Cornelis, with Hans-Erik Dyvik Husby aka Hank von Helvete as the main character, where Cornelis plays it live and says that this is just a song about some random guy, that this is by no means an autobiographic song because his parents, unlike the lyrical subject’s in this song, were respectable people. And indeed, I remember him saying in one interview that his childhood was “idyllic” for the most part, and if we look at these lyrics literally, then a lot of things here certainly are not true about Cornelis. But I guess it doesn’t require a particularly deep analysis if you know a bit about him, to come to the conclusion that it could still relate to him and how he saw himself in a more metaphorical way. It seems to be pretty widely known in Sweden that he struggled a lot with stuff like confidence, self-esteem and all that, also substance misuse obviously and had a rather stormy life in many ways. Plus I suppose it might also be more or less influenced by his socialist worldview. It comes from his second album Ballader ooh Grimascher (Ballads and… well Grimasches, I guess? Some people translate grimasch as grimace but grimace is grimas in Swedish as far as I’m aware, and I’ve never come across the word grimasch outside of Cornelis’ music).
The translation below is Bibiel’s, and I honestly had some vocabulary dilemmas here (the perks of translating between two non-native languages), because it has so many weird slangy words that I had totally no idea what they should be best translated as into English, because I had a more or less vague understanding of what they’re supposed to mean in Swedish, but didn’t know their exact definition, even the slusk in the title. Looking around the Internet, I found quite a few different translations of this word into English, which have some things in common yet are quite different from one another: slop, someone who’s clumsy, lout/bastard, brute, hulk, prone, someone sleazy etc. I doubt that slusk’s meaning is so wide. So eventually I looked it up in my dictionary, which says that slusk means “sloven”. Which makes sense, but I’m not sure if sloven and slusk, despite sharing the same meaning, also have the same vibe and conotations. I guess sloven is pretty dated in English and not really slangy, whereas I’m pretty sure that slusk is very slangy and more or less on the vulgar side. So it’s possible that some of the words in this translation might not be the most fortunate in this slangy context even if their meaning is similar as the original.
I am a sloven, I am a swine
I like it rough, but you are fine
You drink wine for the sake of pleasure
But I like wine ‘cause then I get drunk
People like me should be put in cages, shouldn’t they?
You like nice stuff, but I like shit
Your life is safe, mine to and fro
You drive around in those sporty cars
With those little ladies with the silly profiles
Imagine being able to sleep until late in the day, fuck me!
I am filthy, anything but hygiene
What have you done, you who are so clean?
You are refined and sophisticated
I am ruined and degenerated
What if we were to switch one day, you and I!
I am a sloven, born in a kitchen sink
Father, he was alky, mother was a whore
My father obviously died in the gutter
But your dad took a bullet to the temple
The reason was of course unrequited amour towards your mother
I am slovenly, you are a fop
I am an asshole, of course you’re right
But when you are dead I still will be standing
And writing an epitaph to be carved into the stone
Death with no cause, life with no reason, with no soul
My Inner MishMash 